If a detective lets pain, chaos, or unfairness stop an investigation, they’d never solve a single case. Many cases are painful, tragic, and unfair. But if a detective shut down every time a case was difficult or emotional, cases would never get solved. Similarly, if one rejects the investigation into God because life is painful or unfair, they will never find out whether He exists — or whether He’s spoken to us about that pain. If we demand objectivity, courage, and perseverance to solve human cases — why wouldn’t we demand at least that much in our own search for the Creator of everything? Isn’t the question of God’s existence the most important “case” anyone could investigate? Emotions don’t solve cases — evidence does. Feelings are real, but they can’t change the facts. In every case, no matter how heartbreaking, we have to follow the evidence — not our emotions.
Think about everything around you — people, animals, planets, even time itself. None of these things exist on their own. They all depend on something else for their existence. Your phone depends on electricity. A plant depends on sunlight and water. Even you depend(ed) on your parents and the world around you.
Now, imagine if everything that began to exist depended on something else, and that something else also depended on another thing, and so on, forever — a never-ending chain with no starting point. Could anything actually exist right now?
No. Because if there were no starting point — no one who doesn’t need anything else to exist — then nothing would be here at all.
To explain why anything exists at all, we need to recognize there must be something that exists by its own nature, that does not depend on anything else, and that holds everything else up.
This is who we call God — the necessary being, the uncaused cause.
This isn’t just a guess — it’s a logical necessity. The very fact that you and I are here, that the universe exists right now, points to the reality of a necessary being who is the ultimate cause.
Why Can’t the Universe Be the Necessary Being?
Because the universe has parts that it needs to exist. Atoms, matter, molecules, energy, space, time, gravity, its forces and laws, etc etc. If the universe didn’t have none of these things, it would cease to exist.
Saying the universe “just is” without cause or explanation is unwittingly accepting the core insight of the Vertical Cosmological Argument (VCA): that something must exist necessarily and independently to ground everything else. Whether you label that entity “God” or use another term, the concept remains the same—an uncaused, necessary foundation that explains why anything exists at all.
Thus, the universe is dependent, contingent upon those things to exist, but what then caused those things to exist? None of those things can explain their own existence, they had a beginning—so they are not eternal, and they are not a necessary being—must exist by their own nature, cannot not exist. They exist, but could have not existed at all.
In order for there to be a cause that is not dependent, the cause has no starting or ending point, the ultimate cause for the existence of us and the world, there must be what Philosophers call a necessary being—a being who must exist by its own nature, and cannot not exist.
In order for the cause to not be dependent upon space, time, nature and matter to exist, then the cause itself would have to be beyond space, time, matter, and nature. And to create space, time, matter and nature the cause must be spaceless, timeless, supernatural, and immaterial.
In other words, the ultimate cause..the ultimate first cause whose existence is necessary and beyond space, time, matter and nature, is a spaceless, timeless, immaterial, all powerful, supernatural being who we know as God.
