I love this question: it cuts straight to the heart of a spiritual journey I have recently been on. The short answer (and truly I am more of a "Diest" than a theist) that (and I agree with the skeptical tone of your question...lol) is that it is something of a word trick. A word trick that dates waaaaaaaay back to the days of the ontological argument. "God is that than which nothing greater can be conceived." Meaning to say: it is so because we SAY it is so. Said yet another way: it is so DEFINITIONALLY. Even though it is really an ancient, academic word trick, I will explain why it works for me. For one, I am a lawyer (smile) and it works for me because it is stupidly legalistic. There is a second, deeper, and more important way that it works for me spiritually. That is as follows. I think that the physicists are saying now that there was a time when there was NOTHING. ZERO. NADDA. ZILCH. There was no universe. I think that to disbelieve in something extremely powerful and different from anything we know means that one...disunderstands the profundity of nothingness. Something just doesn't COME from nothing. AND IN CONCLUSION....I do not know the nature of this deistic god. I just know that since science believes that there was a time when the universe did not exist, yet came into being, that the enity which we call "God" did not (by definition) come from this universe. So then, whatever God is or is not, it is something that would appear entirely foreign to us...extraordinary even. I acknowledge too that according to string theory, that extraordinary-appearing entity might be like the atoms on the ass of a bear-like creature in one cosmos accidentaly coming into contact with the atoms of a river-like geological structure from another cosmos and explodingly creating our own cosmos.....But wouldn't that be fantastic?! Not the "God" we really think of but something that our brains still would have a hard time comprehending.

It doesn't, usually, because the person making the leap from "nothing can cause itself" to "God is the first cause" is stipulating that "God caused himself." If you provide the counterexample *inside your own proof* then you haven't proven squat.

If the pot cannot contain itself, then what contains it? tat tvam asi