Skip to contentWillowOne's PositionsTagsWhat’s newMediaStatisticsSearch
WillowOne's Positions

Kalam Cosmological Argument

Form

  1. Whatever begins to exist has a cause.
  2. The universe began to exist.
  3. Therefore the universe has a cause.

William Lane Craig then argues further (not as part of the formal syllogism) that the cause of the universe must be:

  • Uncaused
  • Timeless
  • Spaceless
  • Immaterial
  • Changeless
  • Immensely powerful
  • Personal

My Positions

  1. The premises are only inductively supported. Premise 1 is a generalisation from our experience of things within the universe rearranging pre-existing matter. We have never observed anything "begin to exist" from nothing, so we have no basis for a rule about what such a beginning requires. The argument equivocates between "begins to exist" as rearrangement and "begins to exist" as creation ex nihilo (Equivocation).
  2. Premise 2 is not established by physics. The Big Bang describes the expansion of the universe from a hot dense state. It does not describe the universe beginning from nothing, and models in which time has no boundary (Hartle–Hawking), or in which the Big Bang is a transition (bounce, eternal inflation), remain live. "The universe began to exist" is a philosophical claim dressed as a scientific one.
  3. Infinite regress is not necessarily impossible. Craig argues that an actual infinite cannot exist, but mathematics handles actual infinities without contradiction, and the "absurdities" he cites (Hilbert's Hotel) are counter-intuitive, not incoherent. See Owens Tryptic of Ignorance: I do not understand an infinite past, but I do not understand a finite one either, and incomprehension is not evidence.
  4. The argument, in its original form, makes no claim about the nature of the cause. The capacity to generate a universe is the only property required of such a prior cause.
  5. Something that is timeless, spaceless, and immaterial is indistinguishable from something that does not exist. These are not properties; they are the absence of properties. See God.
  6. One can assert that such a thing is uncaused, but the assertion is arbitrary. Why should the universe need a cause and its cause not? If something can be uncaused, the universe is the simpler candidate (Occam's Razor - Principle of Parsimony). And again I hold to Owens Tryptic of Ignorance.
  7. That the prior cause is changeless, immensely powerful, and personal are wild non-sequiturs. Craig's argument for personhood is that only a free agent could produce a temporal effect from a timeless cause. But a timeless agent cannot decide anything, since deciding is a change, and change requires time. The argument for personhood refutes the attribute of changelessness, and vice versa.
  8. Even if all of it were granted, it would not be an argument for Christianity. A personal creator is equally consistent with Islam (which is where the argument came from), deism, or a creator who has since ceased to exist.

Notes

This is a deductive argument, but its premises are not analytic. Much of its persuasive force depends on assumptions about causality, time, and metaphysics that are themselves contested. Its modern form was popularised by William Lane Craig (The Kalām Cosmological Argument, 1979), though its roots trace back to medieval Islamic philosophy, particularly al-Kindi (9th century) and al-Ghazali (11th century), and before them to the Christian philosopher John Philoponus (6th century), who formulated it against Aristotle's eternal universe. "Kalam" is the Arabic term for Islamic scholastic theology.

Craig expands the conclusion to argue that the cause must be timeless, spaceless, immaterial, changeless, and personal, but those attributes are not part of the formal syllogism and are argued for separately, and much more weakly.

Physicists who have engaged with Craig directly include Sean Carroll (debate at the Greer-Heard Forum, 2014), who argued that "cause" is not a concept that appears in fundamental physics and that the question "what caused the universe?" may be as malformed as "what is north of the North Pole?"

Also see