Atheists Against WL Craig´s Kalam Cosmological Argument

Atheists Against WL Craig´s Kalam Cosmological Argument Posted on May 12, 2019 by Rebekah K The Kalam Cosmological Argument There are a handful of famous arguments for the existence of a god. Some have been around for centuries, and new arguments are popping up every day. One such argument is the kalam cosmological argument. A classic which has recently been re-polished and re-popularized, it has withstood the test of time in its field. The kalam cosmological argument sounds a lot more complex than it really is. There’s not much more to it than a simple, yet flawed, syllogism of three steps. They are: Everything that begins to exist has a cause. The universe began to exist. Therefore, the universe has a cause. A bit of a stretch as it is, apologists usually stretch it even further to infer that this cause is a personal god who happens to have also revealed himself in whichever holy text it is that the apologist chooses. In the early days of this argument, that holy text was the Quran. Muslim theologian al-Ghazali is known for his role in shaping the kalam argument in his work The Incoherence of the Philosophers around the year 1000 A.D. “The Philosophers” were Plato and Aristotle, who believed that the universe had existed eternally. Al-Ghazali not only believed that the universe had a cause, but that God is the cause of every event with a cause. In recent years, the argument has gained a new face: that of Christian apologist William Lane Craig. He published a book named The Kalam Cosmological Argument in 1979 which caused al-Ghazali’s old ideas to resurface. Admittedly, I have not read this book myself, so it’s not quite clear to me how it differs from al-Ghazali’s original proposition. After doing some online research as well as reading Lee Strobel’s interview with Craig in The Case for a Creator, I do know one thing: Craig is very interested in the non-existence of the infinite regress. Craig repeatedly says, and actually give a coherent argument for, the fact that time itself cannot go in any direction forever. Thus, the universe can’t have existed eternally. In his words, “The idea of an actual infinity is just conceptual; it exists only in our minds. Working within certain rules, mathematicians can deal with infinite quantities and infinite numbers in the conceptual realm. However—and here’s the point—it’s not descriptive of what can happen in the real world” (Strobel 2004). As the mathematical amateur that I am, this logic seems sound to me. It begins to break down, however, when you consider where Craig is going with it. He uses this logic (indeed, it’s what he is known for) to extrapolate the idea that there must have been some supernatural entity which caused the beginning of the universe and of time. Is his god not infinite? As a matter of fact, is not the everlasting experience of an afterlife in heaven or hell eternal? Why can his god exist infinitely before time did, when an infinite existence is logically impossible, even according to Craig himself? Asinine as it may sound at first, there’s a reason why you hear the question “Who made God?” from atheists so often, even when theists tend to always have some (however poorly) cobbled together answer ready. It’s the same reason why you’ll probably never stop hearing atheists ask, “Why does a loving God allow evil?” Because we have yet to hear a sufficient answer to these questions. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: I don’t understand how the Big Bang happened. All I know is what I’ve read about it from Stephen Hawking. Even if I don’t know what would absolutely satisfy my desire to understand the answers to this big question, I do know that “God did it” does not satisfy, and I don’t think that it ever will. I’ve seen Occam’s Razor being used by both theists and atheists in order to defend their reasons for believing one argument or explanation over another. The idea that the simplest explanation is probably correct is appealing, and most often it is true. And it is also certainly true that the simplest answers to “Where did the universe come from?” and “Where do we get our morals from?” are “God made it” and “From God.” But just because the answers are simple does not mean that they’re both correct. In fact, I find that the greatest flaws in both of these explanations are that they are too simple. These questions in both physics and psychology are incomprehensibly complex. Scientists and philosophers have literally been trying to figure both of them out since humans could think symbolically. This would not be the case if “God did it” was the answer. There have been countless times in which religious apologists have accused atheists of being close-minded because we won’t take supernatural explanations as possibilities when trying to answer questions like these, but indeed every venture in so many fields would be unnecessarily cut off if we were to accept the simplest answer just because it was the easiest. ***

Your initial praise of Craig to me seems unfounded because as you rightly point out, you can’t argue that infinity only exists in our minds, while at the same time make claims that an infinite being does objectively exist. The important part comes when we consider, what does it mean to begin to exist. The Big Bang may have occurred 13.8 billion years ago, but that only means that this current version of the universe began then. What if, the universe is oscillating…expanding and contracting…in such a situation it may have thus always been existing just at different sizes and values of entropy. Clearly there is little evidence to support the “The Big Crunch” at this point, but we simply don’t have answers for how we got to the state of the big bang. I think it’s also fair to ask, what does it really mean to begin? If time itself did not begin passing until the moment of the big bang, when we think of words like begin, before, after…we do with a conception of time that is passing. Begin might make sense for things that come into existence within spacetime…but this is quite different. Consider that, whenever you consider a human life to exist, the fact remains that all parts of that human, exist already…just in a different form. Those chemical elements already exist and the ingredients are just being put together to make a human. This is not the case necessarily for the universe in the sense that there was no passage of time initially and time did not exist as we conceive it now. This is a wholly different situation than anything we might say “began” anytime after the big bang. ***

Craig is a serious philosopher, and knows the scientific material in great detail. Your thinking that the Universe´s cause is limited by the operations of this Universe is where you make an unexamined assumption. Craig does refer to God as a Transcendent cause. You, meanwhile, default to an eternal Universe. Craig likes the Borde, Guth, Vilenkin Model of no eternal past. One commenter cites Vilenkin preferring to avoid theological speculation. And that´s just what a scientist might prefer. That is also where the theologians benefit by understanding that Science itself is in fact a form of Philosophy. Science fans are content to do their philosophizing within the confines of existing Physics, basically. Multiverses, eternal Universe with varying entropy values, and so on. And so the science fans idolatrize, uh, are entranced by the admittedly impressive qualities of the physical Universe and the dynamics of the Physics discipline. Except that, it is all nothing if not forms of Philosophy. Physics is an exciting form of it with fun astronomical pics to go with it. And diagrams Yet Physics is a subdiscipline of Philosophy. I majored in Bio Anthro in college, and I love Science. Biological Evolution, moreever, leads into stuff that isn´t just Physics Philosophy. However abiogenesis happened, it seems, it involved chemistry, which seems like just a fancy form of Physics. Sort of. And, not so much. Chemistry demonstrates emergent properties, including for example, the four types of chemical bonds. And so on in Biology, which is based on cell theory, and then to human biopsychology and sociocultural phenomena. None of these disciplines is strictly reducible to the disciplines underlying it. Gretchen Thunberg´s depression was diagnosed with a psychiatric label, but was not merely any kind of chemical imbalance. She and her parents demonstrated that inspiringly as Gretchen swayed her parents to take the environmental crisis seriously. Emergence. Each human philosophical discipline and subdiscipline has identified layers in reality, and how Philosophy can grasp it. General Systems Theory looks at how that works, as a part of Epistemology, I think it´s safe to say. Emergence. If Physics maps onto, or is “emerged from by” Chemistry (C emerges from P), and Chemistry into Bio, Bio into BioPsych-Socioculture, then, what did Physics emerge from? That´s what this is about, and why Craig is basically right.