Critique of the Cosmological Arguement

"Consider some event in the Universe. No matter what event you choose, it will be the result of some cause, or, more likely, a very complex set of causes. Each of those causes is the result of some other set of causes, which are, in turn, the results of yet other causes. Thus, there is an enormous chain of events in the Universe, with the earlier events causing the latter. Either this chain has a beginning, or it does not."

So states what is known as the cosmological argument for the existence of God. An argument that for a better part of history was particularly hard for many philosophers and people of science to overcome because of a lack of knowledge. By what we know today, though, this argument is a best a "God of the Gaps" explanation of the universe, meaning, since we do not know a particular fact now, we might as well inject God into the equation because it is the easiest explanation. With the infinite powers of reason, logic, and what is as best known to us in science, I will attempt to make this argument for the existence of God, at worst, very weak, and at best, a misnomer.

Two very well known, ancient philosophers posited the arguement before the turn of the first millenium. Plato said, in The Laws (Book X), that the motion of the worlds was imparted by some kind of self-originating force (i.e. God). This is almost something straight out of the Bible if you ask anyone. But it is not. It came from Plato years before Jesus was even given a thought. Yet, arguements for historicity have no rational value. Today, modern culture has pretty well come to the conclusion of calling every non-Abrahamic religion of yore, even current American Indigenous religions, mythology.

One of the best known theologians of all time, Thomas Aquinas, while reading the works of Plato and Aristotle, lifted the idea of the First Cause ( can anyone say Zeitgeist?), and came up with the most well-known form of the cosmological argument, the one still used today. "His conception of First Cause was the idea that the Universe must have been caused by something that was itself uncaused, which he asserted was God."

One of the main fallacies of the thinking of these three ancient men was that they thought the universe was always here, and forever would be, exactly how it was, and is. Although we can not say this was particularly their fault because they did not have the astronomical abilities we do today, we can see at least part of their argument was false. First of all, astronomers reckon that the universe is 13.7 BILLION years old, give or take a hundred million years (http://map.gsfc.nasa.gov/universe/uni_age.html). Secondly, a well-founded theory known colloquially as the Big Bang Theory, gives us insight into how exactly the Universe was set into motion. In fact, scientists have been able to calculate exactly what was happening back to a point of 10E-15 seconds after the Big Bang happened. Anything smaller than this unit of time, known as Planck time, is noncognitive.

Other comparative theories of the beginning of the universe include:

Ekpyrotic theory - http://archives.cnn.com/2001/TECH/space/04/13/big.bang.collision/

Ellipsoidal Universe - http://www.iop.org/EJ/abstract/1475-7516/2007/07/001

Since we know that the universe had a beginning, we can know discuss that argument of some other forms of the cosmological argument, including the Uncaused Cause argument. This states that the power that caused the universe does not need a beginning. But wait. Is this not completely paradoxical, doesn't the cosmological argument specifically say "No matter what event you choose, it will be the result of some cause, or, more likely, a very complex set of causes[?]" So I imagine the very arguement in question contradicts itself, which in itself, makes no logical sense. This is known as special pleading, many people using this arguement but ignoring the unfavorable details that it produces with its very existence.

Similarly, Michio Kaku flushed the arguement down the toilet, noting that gas particles require no particular moment of origin to begin movement. They just move. Hereby, the main arguement from cosmology is destroyed and laid to rest.

All questions and critiques welcome.