More from Steve Cornell:

Yet, ironically, the atheist has to believe in miracles without believing in God. Why? Well, one law that nature seems to obey is this: whatever begins to exist is caused to exist. The atheist knows that the universe began to exist and since the universe is, according to the atheist, all there is, the very existence of the universe seems to be a colossal violation of the laws of nature (i.e., a miracle). It's hard to believe in miracles without God.

Setting aside the question of how a Christian knows what an Atheist believes, or thinks, or knows, we’ll assume that Mr. Cornell is correct for the sake of argument.

We will grant him that somewhere out there, there is an atheist who believes that the universe has a beginning, and that the beginning required the action of some outside entity, but doesn’t believe in the existence of the entity that he believes is necessary for the existence of all things.

We will grant the assumption that it is a law of nature that anything that exists must have been caused to exist (although they seemed to have missed that one in my physics, biology, and chemistry classes).

And we’ll just go on to ask the logical next question, and Mr. Cornell (being such a crack wiz at “logic”) will be swift to answer it I am sure:

“OK, Mr. Cornell, if God exists, and if everything that exists must be caused to exist, what caused God?”

*yawn*

NEXT!

I’m so glad I started this.  It is so fun to devolve into third-grade playground philosophy once in a while.  I believe that the last time I engaged in this argument, I was on the other side of it.  I was in my parent’s basement with several other grade-school girls.  It was three in the morning, I was having a sleep-over, and we were all juiced up on Kool-aid and Oreos.

I believe the most intelligent summary of it would be:

“Oh yeah, and what came before THAT?  Yeah? And what came before THAT?  Uh huh, OK, what came before THAT?  No, YOU have another Twinkie and shut up.  I KNOW you are but what am I?...”

Update:

Ben has pointed out that my snark at Mr. Cornell has the appearance of ridiculing the first cause argument.  That is, that God caused the universe to exist, and continues to exist outside the universe, independent of its rules and therefore does not need a cause.

This was not my intent.  My intent was to show the absurdity of the Rev. Cornell’s actual argument, which is that since everything must have a cause, that cause must be God.  And not just any God, but HIS god, and because the first cause argument cannot be disproved, that is proof which the atheist must somehow struggle to reject.

This sort of childish having-it-both-ways could only result in one outcome if the argument were to proceed on that foundation.  I just jumped to the inevitable end with the intent of illustrating to ultimate outcome of the argument as framed by MR. Cornell, and never intended for my entry to be a refutation of the first cause argument.

That it appears to be so was careless of me.

I can’t promise that it won’t happen again, but I imagine Ben will still be here to call me on it when it does.