Strange things have been happening in the Cooper household.

I walk into a room and find books mysteriously strewn across the floor.

Tissue boxes have been emptied and the contents turned into confetti.

Brightly coloured wooden blocks have been strategically placed in such a way as to make it impossible for me to get up in the night without risking severe bodily injury.

If someone were to ask you, why has all this happened? What you wouldn't say is, oh, no reason, it just happened by itself.

You would assume, because of the universal law of cause and effect that someone or something is

responsible and without wanting to point fingers you might assume that it has to do with the

existence of a certain one-year-old baby girl this universal assumption of cause and

effect is behind what philosophers have called the cosmological

argument for the existence of God. In its simplest form, the argument goes like this. Whatever

begins to exist has a cause. The universe began to exist, therefore the universe has a cause.

Thomas Aquinas, the 13th century philosopher, presented a version of this cosmological

argument called the first cause argument.

The first cause argument begins with the simple observation that there is change in the world,

and that each change must have had a cause. At one point, I didn't exist, but then in

1971, I suddenly did. That change in the world obviously had a cause, my parents. But how did they

come to exist? Well, they came to exist because of their parents.

And so on and so on and so on,

an unbroken and unavoidable chain of effect and cause that we can trace all the way back up the timeline,

each effect dependent upon a cause further up the chain,

until we finally reach a first cause,

which itself is uncaused.

...