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Now, with respect to premise (1), whatever begins to exist has a cause of its existence, I'm not going to say very much in defense of this premise this evening. I really don't think that it's necessary because the premise that whatever begins to exist must have a cause of its existence I think is so intuitively obvious that scarcely anybody could sincerely deny that it is false. In fact, David Hume himself agreed that this principle is true. In a letter to John Stewart dated February, 1754, Hume wrote, "But allow me to tell you that I never asserted so absurd a Proposition as that anything might arise without cause: I only maintain’d, that our Certainty of the Falshood of that Proposition proceeded neither from Intuition nor Demonstration; but from another Source."{3} Hume didn't think that you could prove the causal principle, but he certainly believed in it. Similarly, as is well known, Kant held the principle "Every event has a cause" to be a synthetic a priori principle; that is, it's an informative proposition characterized by both universality and necessity.{4} So, as I say, it seems to me that this first premise is intuitively obvious...

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