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I read the following argument for the existence of a creator. Basically, If there is no creator then a person caused his own existence or nothing caused his existence.

Both consequences of the implication are empirically false; No person caused his own existence and a person does not come to existence out of nothing (without a cause). Therefore, the premise that there is no creator is false.

Has this argument been proposed before in the literature? What are the objections to such argument?

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    The premise is flawed.
    – Lilith River
    Nov 19, 2017 at 7:56
  • This sounds essentially like the cosmological argument. Have a look at e.g. this article: plato.stanford.edu/entries/cosmological-argument
    – MarkOxford
    Nov 19, 2017 at 9:59
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    ...and who created the creator? Did the creator come out of nothing? And how can a creator create something out of nothing?
    – Swami Vishwananda
    Nov 20, 2017 at 10:16
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    @SwamiVishwananda I seriously hope that you are jesting by putting forth such questions, as much as I hope that the upvote on your comment is in recognition of your joking. Do you honestly think these are good objections? Regarding your first question, the answer depends upon how you construe a typical cosmological arguments. Construed as a deductive argument, one deduces the existence of a necessary being who doesn't derive its existence from any other source, otherwise one gets an infinite regress.
    – Eli Bashwinger
    Nov 20, 2017 at 15:40
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    @SwamiVishwananda Construed as an abductive argument (i.e., inference to the best explanation), one doesn't need an explanation of the explanation to recognize that the first explanation (i.e., god) is the best. Regarding your last question, if you find God creating from nothing troubling, then you need only consider the alternative: something coming from nothing, where there is neither a material nor sufficient cause, which is doubly absurd. With God, you at least have a sufficient cause.
    – Eli Bashwinger
    Nov 20, 2017 at 15:40

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If every person has a creator, it does not follow that there is a single creator that creates every person. Theoretically every person might have a separate, different creator. It also does not follow that if there is a single creator, that creator is God : I know you don't say that it is but the mistake is often made.

If there is a single creator, your problem simply moves up a level. Either nothing caused the creator's existence or the creator caused the creator's own existence. The latter would make the creator 'causa sui', self-created. How the creator could cause the existence of the creator is not apparent.

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  • Your are mistaken by implicitly assuming that the creator is a person. My argument applies only to persons.
    – Mohammad Al-Turkistany
    Nov 19, 2017 at 15:37
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    Allow me to play devil's advocate. You say "If every person has a creator, it does not follow that there is a single creator that creates every person." Sure, it doesn't follow logically; but a simple application of Occam's Razor would show that positing one creator suffices. As for your second objection, assuming that the argument Mohammad presented is sound, then your second objection dissolves, as what you envision would lead to an infinite regress. So, either an infinite regress, or we posit a ground of being for which there is no source of its being--it just exists necessarily or ā sē
    – Eli Bashwinger
    Nov 20, 2017 at 0:03
  • I cannot see that I state or imply that the creator is a person and I did not say or imply that the creator is God or a god, though I did refer to God in an aside. If 'self-created' has caused the problem, I was not using 'self' to refer to a self as a person. The creator could be a robot, no person, which self-assembled. Incidentally does 'self-evident' imply evidence to a self ? Hardly. 'Self' has uses which you have neglected.
    – Geoffrey Thomas ♦
    Nov 20, 2017 at 16:51
  • @GeoffreyThomas And where did I state or imply that the creator is a person? All I spoke of was a thing which is the ground of being. So I think the points I make are still relevant.
    – Eli Bashwinger
    Nov 20, 2017 at 17:40
  • Hello : I did not state or imply that you implicitly assumed that the creator is a person. I was responding to the comment that I had implicitly assumed this. If you didn't, then I didn't either. So I think we are at cross purposes. I thought your question good and took it seriously.
    – Geoffrey Thomas ♦
    Nov 21, 2017 at 9:21
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The simplest answer is that the Universe exists for reasons currently beyond our empirical understanding. The implicit suggestion for this argument is not logical, because it is merely insinuating that a lack of knowledge is evidence for one particular (biased) solution.

This is more often referred to as the God of the Gaps.

Claiming that there must be a creator because otherwise something came from nothing means that you are still claiming that something came from nothing (The creator from nothing.) and if the claim further progresses by saying that the creator simply must have always existed, then a more immediate explanation (one step further back) would be that the universe always existed, instead.

To choose one over the other for these reasons would just be up to an individuals biases, since they lack any foundation in logic.

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As MarkOxford pointed out in his comment, the argument appears that it could be classified as a cosmological argument. I can't say that I have ever come across a formulation of cosmological argument that closely resembles yours, although I am not terribly knowledgeable when it comes to them. The ones I am 'familiar' with are Aquinas' version, the Leibnizian version, the Kalām argument, the modal cosmological argument by Brian Leftow, and this cosmological argument due to Richard Gale and Alexander Pruss (a literal genius, by the way). I suspect there are many others.

As far as objections to cosmological arguments, these are extraordinarily numerous, ranging from abysmal to formidable, so I don't think it would be worth going into detail in such a short space. By the way, where did you find this argument?

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