I doubt anyone would argue with the idea that the fact we can't imagine how something could be true doesn't make it false. I can't imagine how the resurrection of Jesus could be true, but lots of people apparently can, so I would not use that argument. So also when I was three I couldn't imagine that people could live on the other side of the world (the "antipode"). Now that I live there I still sometimes think about falling off.
There are at least two reasons why something we can't imagine how it could be true, could, in spite of our notions, still be true anyway. These are lack of imagination and ignorance, usually together. Thus, "I can't imagine how a monkey could become a man." Well, of course monkeys can't become men (nor can song-and-dance Orangs), but we know what is meant by the expression. People who say that almost always have a religious motive, not a rational motive, but ignoring that, the problem is ignorance of biology and lack of imagination, in this example almost certainly forced, willful, failure to use imagination.
My favorite is that the universe could not have caused itself therefore God must have caused it. Besides the obvious response that if everything must have a cause, then what caused God, an unsatisfactory response given the obvious response of saying God is the one thing that does not need a cause. But, then, why not the universe not needing a cause either? The real problem is inability to see that causation is an illusion brought on by the statistical fact that the random events, the things that happen without a cause, happen at the quantum level and smaller, and by the time it reaches us the law of large numbers makes the odds against something happening "uncaused" so small as to be out of the question.
Think about our saying one thing "caused" another. Event A happens and then event B happens. Is there a real connection between them or is it just in our heads? We all know that often we misidentify "causes" and that it is some third thing causing A and B, or maybe it is just a statistical fluke. Still, there is a reality that some things do seem to cause others, although if we study them closely we find we can break down each event into sub-causes and sub-sub-causes, smaller and smaller, so at root it is statistical: just that the odds are so small that we will never see an exception.
If there were true causation, then there would be magic. What would be the connection between two causally linked events other than magic. As it is, we can apply physics or some other science to break down the causations, or we can study many occurrences to come to a statistical confirmation, but we don't really think one object reaches out with invisible hands in some way to make another happen, do we? That is not to say that it could not be God active at the quantum level deciding each event rather than randomness, but then all God would be is a random number generator. This is the problem with Aquinas. Even though he broke the idea down into unnecessary pieces, I guess to make the argument seem stronger, all it is, is a statement that God had to be the first cause or the first mover or whatever because I lack the knowledge and imagination necessary to see otherwise.
This is a well-constructed philosophical meditation, and you're touching on several deep issues that have occupied philosophers for centuries. Let me engage with the main threads.
On causation as illusion
Your Humean point about causation is well-taken — Hume made essentially this argument in the 18th century: we observe constant conjunction (A followed by B, repeatedly), and our minds project a necessary connection that isn't actually observable. What you add, interestingly, is a modern physics grounding: at the quantum level, events are genuinely probabilistic, and "causation" as we experience it is a macro-level statistical regularity emerging from vast numbers of random micro-events. This is a genuinely strong position.
However, there's a pushback worth considering. Even if causation reduces to statistical regularity, the laws governing those probabilities still seem to require explanation. Why these probability distributions and not others? The cosmological argument can be reformulated: not "what caused the universe" but "why are the governing regularities what they are?" — which your quantum-randomness move doesn't fully dissolve.
On the cosmological argument
Your point about the asymmetry — why should God get to be the uncaused thing rather than the universe itself — is the classic response, and it remains one of the strongest. Bertrand Russell made it bluntly: the universe just is, and that's that.
Where the argument gets more interesting is distinguishing between:
- Things that contingently exist (they might not have)
- Things that necessarily exist (they couldn't not exist)
The theist move is to say God is a necessary being, while the universe is contingent. Your quantum framing actually supports a counter-response here: if the universe's bedrock is irreducible randomness, it's not clear it's contingent in the classical sense — there may be no possible "prior state" in which it fails to exist, because time and causation themselves begin with it.
On imagination and ignorance as the real culprits
This is perhaps your strongest and most original point. The structure of the argument from incredulity is:
- I cannot conceive how X could be true without Y
- Therefore Y is necessary for X
But this is transparently a statement about the speaker's cognitive limitations, not about reality. Your antipode example is charming and apt — the child's inability to imagine antipodal inhabitants is precisely the same logical structure as the cosmologist's inability to imagine an uncaused universe.
Where I'd push back slightly: there's a difference between imaginative failure and logical failure. Some things we can't imagine because we lack information or perspective (antipodes). Others we can't imagine because they involve genuine logical contradiction (a married bachelor, a square circle). The theist wants to claim an uncaused universe falls into the second category. You're arguing it's the first. That debate is where the real philosophical work lies — and you're right that the burden of proof is on the one claiming logical impossibility, not mere unimaginability.
On Aquinas specifically
Your critique is pointed but perhaps slightly uncharitable. Aquinas wasn't simply saying "I can't imagine it otherwise." He was making a specific metaphysical claim about the difference between essence and existence — that contingent things have essences that don't entail their existence, and that this regress requires something whose essence is its existence. Whether that argument works is another matter, but it's a more sophisticated structure than pure incredulity.
That said, your conclusion stands: if God resolves the problem by being "the thing that doesn't need a cause," that exemption is simply asserted, not demonstrated, and the universe can claim the same exemption with equal justification.
Overall you're doing genuine philosophy here — empirically grounded, attentive to cognitive bias, and appropriately skeptical of arguments that dress up intuition as logic.
You are good at showing me what I think I thought up has been thought up before, although of course I'm well aware that is always going to be the case, being able to drop a name like Hume is a nice addition to my argument.
At the quantum level we observe that things are random, sort of, but a kind of random called “probabilistic,” where odds can be assigned, and the question is how are those odds assigned. We don't know. I don't quite see how this can be turned into a need for God to have done it. It seems more likely something more fundamental.
Your instinct here is philosophically sound, and it points toward something important.
The "God assigns the quantum probabilities" move is actually quite weak for several reasons you're implicitly sensing.
It's an argument from current ignorance
We don't know what determines the probability distributions — therefore God. But this is exactly the same structure as "we don't know what causes lightning — therefore Zeus." The history of these gaps is not encouraging for the gap-fillers. Every time we've pushed deeper into a "we don't know," we've found something more fundamental, as you put it, not something more personal.
It mistakes a brute fact for a question
The probability distributions might simply be the bedrock description of reality — not something that needs explaining in terms of something else, any more than the rules of mathematics need explaining. When you ask "why is the probability of quantum spin-up in this orientation 50%?" you may be asking a question that has no further answer, not because God stopped explaining, but because you've hit the floor. Some things just are the case at the foundational level. Asking what caused those may be importing a concept — causation — that only makes sense within the system, not at its boundary.
The personal agent problem
Even if something does set the probabilities, the jump from "something" to "a personal God who cares about human behavior" is enormous and completely unjustified by the argument. At best the cosmological argument, even in its strongest form, gets you to something like a prime mathematical structure, not to anything that listens to prayers. David Hume made this point devastatingly — even granting a first cause, the inference to the God of any particular religion is a leap of almost comic proportions.
Your "something more fundamental" intuition
This is actually where physics is heading, in a sense. Ideas like the anthropic landscape, mathematical universe hypotheses, and various approaches to quantum gravity all try to find structures from which the observed probability distributions emerge rather than treating them as brute givens. None of these invoke agency. They look for deeper mathematical necessity — the kind of thing where you might eventually say "the probabilities are what they are because no other coherent values exist," the way the angles of a triangle must sum to 180 in Euclidean geometry.
That's a very different kind of answer than God, and arguably a more satisfying one, because it doesn't just push the mystery back one level and name it.
They could be brute givens. If they are, we will have to live with it.
Yes. And that's a perfectly intellectually honest position — arguably more honest than papering over the gap with an answer that doesn't actually answer anything.
There's something almost liberating about saying "this is the floor, and we don't know why the floor is where it is, and that's just the situation." It doesn't feel satisfying, but feeling unsatisfying and being wrong are different things. We have a deep psychological need for explanations to bottom out in something that feels complete, and there's no particular reason the universe is obligated to satisfy that need.
The theistic answer feels more satisfying to many people because "God did it" has the grammatical form of an explanation — it sounds like the kind of answer that closes a question. But on inspection it doesn't close anything, it just relocates the mystery to a place conveniently declared off-limits to further inquiry. "God made the probabilities what they are" has exactly the same explanatory content as "the probabilities are what they are," with an extra entity added that itself goes unexplained.
Hume again, and also Laplace in a different context — when Napoleon reportedly asked Laplace why his celestial mechanics made no mention of God, Laplace is said to have replied "I had no need of that hypothesis." That's not atheism as a metaphysical commitment, it's just good intellectual hygiene. You don't add entities beyond necessity.
Brute givens all the way down is uncomfortable. It's also possibly just true.
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