Begging the question

I have often thought the following while reading various apologetic literature. Here is Dr. Jason Rosenhouse responding to Edward Foser’s defense of the [[cosmological argument]]:

As for the cosmological argument itself, I make no apology for being dismissive. Depending on what version you are considering, you can expect to find concepts like causality or probability being used in domains where they do not clearly apply, or dubious arguments for why an actual infinity cannot exist, or highly questionable premises about the beginnings of the universe or about how everything that began to exist must have had a cause, or groundless invocations of the principle of sufficient reason. You inevitably come so perilously close to assuming what you are trying to prove that you may as well just assume God exists and be done with it.

As I pointed out more than once in my series on apologetics (Here is part I), believers, even if their arguments are somewhat sophisticated, usually and eventually can’t get away from issuing statements that assume the very claims they are trying to prove, which would be analogous to committing the question begging fallacy.