The Cosmological Argument and the Issue of the Infinite Regress

The biggest - and admittedly most valid - objection to the Cosmological Argument is the issue of the Infinite Regress it causes. An infinite regress occurs when a sequence of reasoning never comes to an end. If everything had a cause, then what was the first cause? Christians or theists say “God”. Atheists then ask from whence came God? And where did the thing that created God come from? And so on, ad infinitum: ‘there are turtles all the way down’ so to speak (for those who get the reference).

There are multiple responses to the issue of the Infinite Regress. One is to admit that the issue exists and then to assert that there is nothing inherently incoherent about it. In this formulation, an atheist would agree that everything must have a cause, admit that the issue of the infinite regress exists, and then assert that there is nothing that makes them uneasy about it, or that it doesn’t lessen the explanatory power compared to an explanation that breaks the infinite regress (such as asserting that God created everything and God does not require a cause). Most Christian apologists including Thomas Aquinas (in the 13th Century) and William Lane Craig (in the 21st) have developed sophisticated arguments as to why infinite regresses are logically inconsistent. These arguments - as will mine - are always superseded more by trends and topics in time more than proving they are right or wrong.

Facially, I would assert that, a priori, infinite regresses are logically abhorrent. I will try and flesh this out in another post but I believe this to be more concise than I have otherwise encountered: otherwise valid deductive arguments that . I believe this to be true but to once again solicit input, for all you computer programmers out there, if I typed a code that was internally coherent but which resulted in a My analogy is that the atheistic viewpoint is that, I agree with the validity of your premises - in other words, I acknowledge the internal coherence of your programming language - and I do not object to the fact that it results in a logically unresolvable loose end: in other words, your program just crashed, your CPU burned up, and your city block lost power for an hour because the code set off a computing process with literally no end. An unadressed infinite regress as a necessary outcome to a deductive argument is not a logically sufficient or coherent way to respond to any question.