[Johnny B.]

I don't care about proving either.

But it sure requires a leap of faith to me to believe that the universe "just happened".

OK.

One of the problems I have with theism is the argument that nothing can exist without being created, so therefore there must be a God, who wasn't created, who created everything else.

"One may bask at the warm fire of faith or choose to live in the bleak uncertainty of reason-but one cannot have both." -"Dr. Hartley Baldwin" in Robert Heinlein's Friday

[what's up]

One of the problems I have with theism is the argument that nothing can exist without being created

There doesn't seem to me to be any other argument for why the universe exists other than it "just happened".

I see the law of cause of effect in operation all around me. "Just happened", especially on such a grand scale, just doesn't cut it for me.

[Claud]

One of the problems I have with theism is the argument that nothing can exist without being created, so therefore there must be a God, who wasn't created, who created everything else.

You're thinking of God as if existence were simply one of His properties. But He IS existence. His very nature is to be: "I am who am". It is impossible for Him not to exist, for then existence itself would not exist.

[St_Thomas_Aquinas]

——One of the problems I have with theism is the argument that nothing can exist without being created, so therefore there must be a God, who wasn’t created, who created everything else.-——

The opposite is impossible, because it would mean that an infinite series of causal events, or moments in time, would have had to have been realized for us to exist now.

And an infinite series cannot exist in actuality, because any actual series must be finite.