Beck also places particular emphasis on the fact that Hume discusses the first principle solely in the Treatise, Book 1, part 3, section 3 as the "general maxim in philosophy, that whatever begins to exist, must have a cause of existence" (T 1.3.3.1; SBN 78).
Indeed, according to Avicenna, in metaphysics the efficient cause is a cause of existence (Ilāhiyyāt, VI, 1, 257, 13 16).
Premise 2 invokes a version of the Principle of Causation or the Principle of Sufficient Reason; if something is contingent, there must be a cause of its existence or a reason or explanation why it exists rather than not exists.
Since such a series of temporal phenomena cannot continue to infinity, the world must have had a beginning and a cause of its existence, namely, God (Craig 1979, part 1).
These facts suggest that, besides environmental factors, the regional species pool is important as a cause of the existence of an emergent layer (Koike and Hotta, 1996).
In the latter sense, every existence can be a cause of all existences except itself.
Genetic, gestational, and caregiving relationships contribute to the child's existence or development, and, in the cases that some intentionalists appeal to, the commissioning couple are a cause of the child's existence.
They contend that we have no reason to think that just because something is finite it must have a cause of its coming into existence.
To avoid such Deistic threats, the notion of bringing about in question must be clarified so that it involves some activity on the part of God that is an immediate, even if only partial, cause of existence.
It is illogical to suggest that existence was caused because in order for something to cause something to exist it would have to exist prior to it thus disqualifying it as the cause of existence.
Indeed, it is not clear what it is in the method (as distinct from the content of the premises) that differentiates a metaphysical proof (e.g., of God's existence) from a scientific argument establishing the existence of a cause of a natural object.
