The proof of god based on this this argument has several forms.
Generally the argument says all things we see occur through a causal chain. A bat hits a ball. Ball flies.
Therefore the universe must have had a first causation, and that was god. Primarily because of a few lines in an ancient text.
Ok, but where did god come from? Was he, she, or it always was and always will be o? Hmmmm….if so why could the universe itself not have always existed with no beginn9ng or end?
I like to counter this bullshit from the perspective of quantum physics.
There are real events in this universe that have no apparent cause. We can observe "uncaused" events all the time. In fact, there is a whole class of observable phenomena that appear to have no driver to how they specifically resolve
Imagine you are at a table throwing craps (2d6), and suddenly time stops. The dice are not on the table. They are flying through the air at the backstop.
Does asking what number the dice are on even make sense at this point in time? No, of course it does not make sense; the dice have not settled. The number they have rolled is "no number and every number, until they settle; though mostly (1/6 probability) on 7," no more, no less.
In the quantum scale, it's even more stark: there is no spinning dice, there is no physics of settling, there is only the very moment the probability wave collapses into an answer, and only for so long as the answer must be determinate. Once the electron stops happening to be somewhere, it is everywhere and nowhere again.
What caused it to be there as opposed to somewhere else? Nothing. Nothing caused that. It is the purest definition of random that we have ever observed.
I suspect that the universe is much the same way. There is a probability cloud of possible causes, and no cause. And because the universe is isolated, I don't think the cause will exist until we actually punch through the "wall" and make a cause need to exist.
The universe is caused by everything (including "nothing") that possibly could create it, until it has to be something (or, maybe, nothing).
Another way to look at it is to look at a computer. That computer has some internal state, I could take that state, load it into a completely different (but still compatible) machine that shares the same hardware identifiers, and it would be the same environment, from the perspective of its own universe. I could even make a copy of that environment and barring hardware noise, there would be no real difference. It's still the same identity of "computing environment". They are the same universe, despite existing from different sources, run by different people, for different reasons.
I think the most important thing, from this perspective, is to focus not on what we don't observe and can't, but on what we do observe, the rules of our universe as it presents itself to us, and not care about wild speculations about last thursdayism or what "caused" it. It has no value because it has no determined qualities.
And before you ask "how can something that exists now not already have a determinate cause", time is a perspective inside this based on our own causal chain. If you look at all time from the perspective of an outside observer, you end up in "hyper-time". And we don't actually know how causality works or IF there is such a thing as causal dependence in hyper-time. Nothing can be said of it because we are not in a position to ever observe it.
And this doesn't even take into consideration the idea of "causal decay". That random events in the universe may at some point in time imply multiple causal paths to the result, and that individual causal paths could themselves become indeterminate over the course of time.
