 The First Cause (or Cosmological) Argument is the argument that since everything has a cause, there must have been a first cause, and it is to this first cause that we give the name God. In response to this argument, Russell notes the obvious: If everything must have a cause, then God must have a cause. If everything must have a creator, then God must have a creator. Alternatively, if God can exist without a cause, then it is just as likely that the world can exist without a cause. In fact, this is even more likely than the existence of an uncaused, hypothetical, supernatural creator who manufactures and then intervenes in the world, since there “is no reason to suppose that the world had a beginning at all” (A1957, 4). To those who suggest that unlike God, since every part of the world has a cause, it follows that the world itself must have a cause, Russell notes that just because every man has a mother it does not follow that the human race must have a mother (A1957, 152). Put in more formal language, although causation connects each contingent stage of the world to the next, it need not follow that there is an “extramundane” creator of the world as a whole (1900, sec. 109, p. 176). To those who claim that without such a creator, there can never be sufficient reason for “why there are any states at all,” Russell points out that the traditional view of God as being uncaused because he exists necessarily is simply inconsistent with God's creation of a contingent universe. No series of contingent states may have come about by the necessity that accompanies God’s actions, since the contingency of existential propositions rests on the assertion that God acts, not from necessity but contingently (1900, sec. 110, p. 177). Thus, either the world itself has no supernatural cause or the supernatural cause itself will act and exist contingently, and so it, too, cannot be necessary and must require a creator.