Preface: Some people associate God with that described in religious texts, others like me simply say that God is an unknown higher power.

The cosmological argument for the existence of God says that nothing exists without a cause. The universe exists; therefore, something (God) must have caused it.

Philosopher Bertrand Russell argued that if this is so, then God must have a cause because if God can exist without a cause, then the world can exist without a cause. He also said, how can God have created us deliberately if our existence has come about by such evolutionary chance? He argued that an omnipotent, immortal God who is without cause or creator is inconsistent with a universe being made by such chance events. If we were the product of a deliberate, divine act, then why would there be such randomness and circumstance behind our creation? Therefore, either there is no God, or God is subject to the same chance and circumstance as we are, i.e. not immortal. 

Maybe we have to reconsider the nature of God

As a Deist, my first thought in reply to this is that I agree, God must be subject to the same cause and effect as we are. Since I don’t subscribe to a religious tradition but do believe that a higher authority created the universe, I don’t have any issue with that. It may be that we have to reconsider the nature of God. Saying that God must have a cause does not then imply that He did not create the universe.

We are not random

Also, the argument that chance and circumstance (contingency) govern our existence is not true. Since Russell wrote his piece, we now know that a single fundamental act was the cause of the universe’s formation, which in turn led to the circumstances from which all life began. This is hardly chance or circumstance.

From chaos comes prediction

We are the product of fundamental forces, physical constants, and precise conditions. Are these random, chance events, or just ones that are too complex for us to decipher? Things that appear chaotic actually have underlying patterns and deterministic behaviour. This is Chaos Theory, and it is used to predict all manner of things from weather prediction to the behaviour of the human brain.

It is all inbuilt

Finally, Russell said that: ‘Just because every man has a mother, it does not follow that the human race must have a mother’. But evolution shows us what the ‘mothers’ of the human race were. We evolved from primates. Going back even further, the ‘mother’ of life itself, according to the latest consensus, appears to be the electromagnetic forces that created the vital spark in microbial cells. In this way, the universe is designed in such a way that all the conditions for life to emerge are inbuilt. There is no need for divine intervention along the way, because the mechanisms that create life are a fundamental part of it. 

Sources:

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Bertrand Russell