Oh! And look what follows next -- another favorite EF debate!
The cosmological argument is an argument for the existence of God. It is also known as the first cause argument for the existence of God , or the prime mover argument.
First cause
Intrinsic to the debate concerning determinism is the issue of first cause. Deism, a philosophy articulated in the seventeenth century, holds that the universe has been deterministic since creation, but ascribes the creation to a metaphysical God or first cause outside of the chain of determinism.
God may have begun the process, Deism argues, but God has not influenced its evolution. This perspective illustrates a puzzle underlying any conception of determinism:
Assume: All events have causes, and their causes are all prior events. There is no cycle of events such that an event (possibly indirectly) causes itself.
The picture this gives us is that Event AN is preceded by AN-1, which is preceded by AN-2, and so forth.
Under these assumptions, two possibilities seem clear, and both of them question the validity of the original assumptions:
(1) There is an event A0 prior to which there was no other event that could serve as its cause.
(2) There is no event A0 prior to which there was no other event, which means that we are presented with an infinite series of causally related events, which is itself an event, and yet there is no cause for this infinite series of events.
Under this analysis the original assumption must have something wrong with it.
It can be fixed by admitting one exception, a creation event (either the creation of the original event or events, or the creation of the infinite series of events)
that is itself not a caused event in the sense of the word "caused" used in the formulation of the original assumption. Some agency, which many systems of thought call God, creates space, time, and the entities found in the universe by means of some process that is analogous to causation but is not causation as we know it.
This solution to the original difficulty has led people to question whether there is any reason for there only being one divine quasi-causal act, whether there have not been a number of events that have occurred outside the ordinary sequence of events, events that may be called miracles. The extreme philosophical position in this line of development was held by Leibniz, who held in his monistic philosophy that all seemingly causal interactions between two (or more) entities, A <-> B, are actually interactions mediated by God, A<->God<->B.
Immanuel Kant carried forth this idea of Leibniz in his idea of transcendental relations, and as a result had a profound effect on later philosophical attempts to sort these issues out. His most influential immediate successor, a strong critic whose ideas were yet strongly influenced by Kant, was Edmund Husserl, the developer of the school of philosophy called phenomenology. But the central concern of that school was to elucidate not physics but the grounding of information that physicists and others regard as empirical. In an indirect way, this train of investigation appears to have contributed much to the philosophy of science called logical positivism and particularly to the thought of members of the Vienna Circle, all of which have had much to say, at least indirectly, about ideas of determinism.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Determinism#Determinism.2C_quantum_mechanics_and_classical_physics
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