The valid­i­ty of the prin­ci­ple of causal­i­ty or suf­fi­cient rea­son is the base of the log­i­cal think­ing on which all sci­ences and all human knowl­edge is built. That’s why in the fol­low­ing we use it as the premise of our rea­son­ing. This is one of the four basic laws of think­ing (the law of iden­ti­ty, the law of con­tra­dic­tion, the law of the exclud­ed mid­dle and the law of suf­fi­cient rea­son) that all peo­ple use in every­day life, even if they are not aware of it.

This prin­ci­ple says that what­ev­er exists or takes place must have a sat­is­fac­to­ry rea­son either in itself or in some­thing else.

The­o­ret­i­cal­ly we could dis­tin­guish two cat­e­gories of exis­tence: the absolute nec­es­sary exis­tence which is self-explana­to­ry regard­ing its own exis­tence and con­tin­gent exis­tence which could be explained only by a pro­por­tion­ate cause exte­ri­or to it. If we try to cat­e­gorise every­thing around our­selves into these two cat­e­gories then soon­er or lat­er we must draw the con­clu­sion that in real­i­ty every­thing must be regard­ed as belong­ing to the cat­e­go­ry of con­tin­gent exis­tence. Going fur­ther with the con­clu­sion drawn we extend our prin­ci­ple to the whole uni­verse because if we claim that the ele­ments of a clus­ter are con­tin­gent, then the whole clus­ter must be con­tin­gent as well. We can­not assume that ele­ments to which we ascribe only con­tin­gent char­ac­ter­is­tics just because of their con­nec­tion to one anoth­er could give absolute fea­tures to the clus­ter they form. That’s why when some­one sup­pos­es that although all the ele­ments of the uni­verse are con­tin­gent but the uni­verse as a whole is self-explana­to­ry and self-exis­tent we must say that his state­ment is illog­i­cal because it neglects the fact that we call absolute fea­tures just those attrib­ut­es which are not con­se­quences or results of pre­ced­ing process­es or caus­es. But here the sup­posed “absolute char­ac­ter” is depen­dent on the con­nec­tion of the par­tic­u­lar con­tin­gent ele­ments. Con­se­quent­ly, the whole made of con­tin­gent ele­ments must be con­tin­gent as well, which means that we have to find a sat­is­fac­to­ry rea­son of the com­ing to exis­tence of the whole Uni­verse, exter­nal to it.

William Ock­ham, a philoso­pher from the 13th. cen­tu­ry, for­mu­lat­ed a basic prin­ci­ple of sci­en­tif­ic inves­ti­ga­tion when some­one look­ing for the answer to an unex­plained phe­nom­e­non must apply as few sup­po­si­tions as it is real­ly nec­es­sary.

Some athe­ists using this idea came to the con­clu­sion that it is base­less to sup­pose the exis­tence of God just because we can not explain the uni­verse and its com­ing into exis­tence. They think it’s more log­i­cal to believe that the cos­mos is self-explana­to­ry. How­ev­er, in real­i­ty, just because of this prin­ci­ple, it is eas­i­er and more log­i­cal to sup­pose a sin­gle tran­scen­dent being as the source of every exis­tence, which by its nature owns per­fect qual­i­ties and from this sup­po­si­tion every oth­er fea­tures would be log­i­cal­ly derived than to ascribe sep­a­rate­ly many dif­fer­ent absolute attrib­ut­es to the uni­verse that, accord­ing to our obser­va­tions, does not pos­sess these qual­i­ties. Inves­ti­gat­ing any ele­ment of the uni­verse we do not have even the least allu­sion to an absolute or self-explana­to­ry attribute of our world. Is it real­ly more child­ish to sup­pose the exis­tence of an invis­i­ble first cause than the exis­tence of invis­i­ble absolute attrib­ut­es?

Why is it not con­tra­dic­to­ry to say that every­thing must have a pre­ced­ing cause but nev­er­the­less there is an uncaused first cause?

When we say that every­thing must have a pre­ced­ing cause we think of the imma­nent ele­ments of our con­tin­gent world. Our claim about the first cause is that it is tran­scen­dent to it. The con­tra­dic­tion would stand only if we regard­ed God as an imma­nent ele­ment of the uni­verse. Con­se­quent­ly the fea­tures that we ascribe to the source of the world need­n’t be the same as the fea­tures we ascribe to the world itself.

Many peo­ple nat­u­ral­ly come to the idea by them­selves, even with­out thor­ough philo­soph­i­cal or the­o­log­i­cal rea­son­ing that the uni­verse has a final cause in its back­ground. Their only ques­tion is what we should call it and often a more exact answer is not sig­nif­i­cant for them. We fre­quent­ly hear peo­ple say it might be called: the ancient Mat­ter, the Atom, the Absolute, the Idea, the Spir­it, some­thing or some­body. Some of these pro­posed descrip­tions of the final cause could be eas­i­ly recog­nised as wrong just because of the mean­ing of these terms. For exam­ple, if we use the term “Mat­ter”, we can­not for­get about the fact that accord­ing to our expe­ri­ence every­thing that is mate­r­i­al is con­tin­gent and belongs to the ele­ments of our con­tin­gent uni­verse and that’s why we must sup­pose that the supe­ri­or exis­tence of the final cause should also have supe­ri­or char­ac­ters, not change­able or per­ish­able like mat­ter or atoms or any oth­er ele­ment of the mate­r­i­al world.

Here it must be men­tioned that some­times peo­ple expand the lim­its of the the­o­ry of evo­lu­tion too broad and mis­un­der­stand its pur­pose. The the­o­ry of evo­lu­tion can­not explain the final ori­gin of the world since its field is the devel­op­ment of the exist­ing things and not the ques­tion how exis­tence came from non-exis­tence.

Oth­ers who claim that the final cause is of spir­i­tu­al char­ac­ter, like the Absolute, the Idea, the Spir­it often deny it to be per­son­al.

We expe­ri­ence that man’s spir­i­tu­al nature is man­i­fest­ed in his intel­li­gence, free will, abil­i­ty to love, abil­i­ty to build self­less rela­tion­ships with oth­er spir­i­tu­al beings. We include all these fea­tures when using the term “per­son”. If we start from the pre­vi­ous­ly men­tioned prin­ci­ple, name­ly that the char­ac­ters of the absolute and defin­i­tive cause can not be infe­ri­or to the char­ac­ter­is­tics of the con­tin­gent ele­ments, then con­se­quent­ly we must admit that the absolute and defin­i­tive cause must also be on a high­er lev­el than the imper­son­al exis­tence.

The term per­son is mis­un­der­stand­able if we think of its dai­ly sense. This term we usu­al­ly don’t sep­a­rate from the spe­cif­ic and deter­mined lim­its of a human being. Man lives in space and time, he has a body and lim­its in com­mu­ni­ca­tion and abil­i­ty to express his love. Of course, God is not sub­ject to these lim­its, that is why using the term “per­son” we only mean some­one being able for per­son­al rela­tion­ship and dia­logue with his intel­li­gent crea­tures. For this rea­son, He must be some­one who pos­sess­es intel­li­gence, free will, self-aware­ness.

There­fore, the exis­tence of an intel­li­gent and free First Cause, a per­son­al God, dis­tinct from the mate­r­i­al uni­verse and the human mind, is an absolute neces­si­ty.

All the approach­es which miss the idea of the exis­tence of an inde­pen­dent and per­son­al Cre­ator and explain the exis­tence of the world by inte­ri­or rea­sons, ascrib­ing self-exis­tence to the mat­ter or spir­it or any­thing else from the con­tin­gent world, could be regard­ed as dif­fer­ent forms of indi­rect Pan­the­ism. This way of think­ing leads to con­tra­dic­tion in terms because it con­fus­es the cause with the effect, the con­tin­gent with the self-exis­tent, the finite with infi­nite. In the case of many peo­ple the con­se­quence of this turn of mind is a pes­simistic and hope­less atti­tude to the world because the one who believes it must regard evil­ness and every­thing bad in the world as eter­nal and unavoid­able neces­si­ties. If man sub­sti­tutes God with some­thing else, he might lose his own human val­ues like per­son­al­i­ty, respon­si­bil­i­ty and his com­mon sense con­vic­tions and might lose the right motive to good con­duct.

The one who accepts the exis­tence of a per­son­al lov­ing God has the pos­si­bil­i­ty to recog­nise the way out of this pes­simistic and hope­less think­ing, because the men­tioned neg­a­tive things don’t belong to God’s inde­pen­dent and per­fect nature. Man has the pos­si­bil­i­ty to assess also him­self con­cern­ing his con­tri­bu­tion to the devel­op­ment of the world instead of accus­ing the final cause.

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