Thomas Aquinas made this argument famous in the 13th century. This argument appeals to many because of its in depth ways of describing in which way the world and universe was formed. It seems certain that the world exists and we exist in the world. But this world is certainly the effect of some earlier cause. Just as we are living because we were born from parents, the world moves and exists because of some incident causing it to exist. It could have been a sun exploding, putting dust into the galaxy, thickening into a mass that eventually attained...
in a God in the sense that the universe is orderly and patterned, and yet these same people do not accept the anthropomorphic accounts for God. The point is that this order is something very different than the anthropomorphic God. Some of these proofs lend themselves more to the order meaning of God than to the entity one, and this seems to be the case in the cosmological argument. Whatever Aquinas intended and whatever meaning of God he hoped to confirm, this argument runs into less trouble with the "God-as-order" meaning than with the meaning of "God-as-humanlike."