[mlo]

"You saying it is not meaningful does not make the question inconsequential."

You ignoring the logic of my post does not make it go away. :-)

The logic doesn't rest on my say so. You can say god was the cause, but what caused god? You haven't gotten to an answer yet, you've only pushed it back an extra step.

"It seems the only viable answer is that there was a personal decision."

You have no idea what all the viable answers are. It's the height of arrogance to claim that if you can't think of an answer to a question that an answer can't exist.

Again, inserting "god" into the "why does anything exist" question achieves nothing to answer the question, because the question equally applies to god.

[Texas Songwriter]

The Law of Causality states, 'everything which comes to be has a cause'. If the Universe had a begining, it had a cause. Everything that had a begining had a cause - which is the fundamental principle of science. Without the law of Causality, science is impossible. As Francis Bacon said, "True Knowledge" is knowledge by causes. In otherwords, science is a search for causes. Simply put, scientist try to discover what caused what.

In fact to deny the Law of Causality is to deny rationality. The very process of rational thinking requires us to put together thoughts (the causes) that result in conclusions (the effects). The Law of Causality is well established and undeniable. So, we ask, "Did the universe begin?" From science, we have 5 lines of evidences which remove essential all doubt that the universe began. I won't go over those again but to enumerate: (1)General Theory of Relativity, (2)Eddington's findings confirming Einsteins theory, (3)(Hubble's findings of the red shift showing the epanding universe, (4) Wilson and Penzias findings o cosmic background radiation a(the echo of the original big bang) (5)The findings of COBE and Smoots WMAP. There are many other logical 'proofs' of a beginning from the Kalam argument, the ontological argument, the epistemological argument, the metaphsical arguement, and many, more. I won't bother you with these other logical arguments for First Cause....just the scientific explainations.

So, since the universe had a beginning (science tells us) it had to have a beginner (a Cause). So in light of all of the evidence of a beginning for the space-time universe, indicating the moment prior to the beginning the beginner must have been 'outside' of that universe which had not yet begun to exist. Here is where you come in with your question....'if the universe had to have a beginning, then what caused God?' Here is where the atheist derisively states , what caused God? They fail to understand Law of Causality....Whatever comes to be has to have a cause. Theist, of all stripes, never affirm that God came to be. He is eternal. He transends time/space/energy/matter. Remember, as Alamo-girl often says, "In the absence of space matter cannot exist. In the absence of time events cannnot take place." So as an atheist you might say, "Wait, if you can have an eternal God, I can have an eternal universe." The problem with that argument is while it may seem logically that the universe could be eternal, in reality we have given you multiple lines of scientific evidence that it is not eternal...it actually had a beginning. So, by ruling out an eternal universe, we are left with that other option which atheist find distastful...Something outside the is eternal (remember time began at the Big Bang). So, to reitterate, the universe had a beginning, so it was caused by something else - by something outside itself, according to science.

Now we take a further steps and ask what is this First Cause like? We can discover the nature of First Cause by what scientific findings tell us.

It must be self-existent, timeless (eternal) nonspacial (not extending into space), immaterial (since First Cause created time, space, and matter (in other words limitless), unimaginable powerful, to create the entire universe out of nothing, supremely intelligent with such precision (remember the Law of Uniformity despite the second Law of thermodynamics), and personal, in order to choose to convert nothingess into a time-space-matter continuum we call the Universe.

These are characteristics of First Cause, and they are exactly thecharacteristics theists ascribe to God. Again, I did not derive them from any theist, but from Einstein, Eddington, Hoyl, Wilson and Penzias, Smoot COBE, WMAP.

So when you so derisively denounce Leibnez question, I will repeat it and ask you to answer it....If God does not exist, why is there something rather than nothing?

As a sidebar, I would ask you if you are a materialist, darwinist, physicalist, naturalist in your worldview?