The Kalam is basically the observation that if the universe has a beginning, then something had to make that happen. And the only suitable candidate is something like God.
Now let's go through it in more detail.
The Form:
In the language of logic, it is a simple two-premise syllogism:
Premise 1: Everything that begins to exist has a cause for its origination.
Premise 2: The Universe (defined as all time, space, matter, and energy) began to exist.
Therefore: The Universe has a cause for its origination.
Supporting Premise 1:
Premise 1 is usually supported by appealing to our own experience and the assumptions made in the physical sciences.
It is simply inconceivable to most people that something would appear out of nothing with no cause whatsoever. If a bowling ball suddenly appeared in the trunk of your car, you wouldn't just say, "Oh, well these things happen." No, you'd start searching for a reason why it is there.
In addition, the physical sciences always presuppose this principle. Scientists are always looking for a greater understanding of objects and events found in nature. In the words of William Lane Craige, to deny the causal principle is "worse than believing in magic".
That's not to say some won't try...
The “Quantum Physics Something Something” Objection:
Sometimes people object to the premise by saying:
“Quantum physics! Radioactive decay something something!”The person is likely referring to how we can’t predict when radioactive decay will occur, and therefore thinking it is uncaused. A good response to that is found here. But the main point is that there is a big difference between something being unpredictable and not having a cause.
The “Cosmology Disproved This” Objection:
A critic may also claim that modern cosmology has shown how an entire universe can arrive out of nothing. This was supposedly done by cosmologist Lawrence Krauss. But this can only be done by first changing the word “nothing ” to mean “energy fluctuations in the quantum vacuum ”.
However, when you point out that "vacuum energy" isn’t “nothing”, the critic will likely stare at you and pretend to not understand what you mean by "nothing".
The word "nothing" does not refer to a thing called "nothing". It refers to the complete absence of anything. It is the same way that if you said, "There is no one in the room" it means there were no people in the room.
Anyway…:
But on the whole, if you find it reasonable to believe that things don’t just pop into existence without any cause whatsoever, Premise 1 is secure.
Supporting Premise 2:
This is done in 5 different ways. We’ll briefly describe them.
1: The Impossibility of Traversing the Infinite:
Imagine a young teenage boy asks out a pretty brunette girl. She responds by saying she'll give him a call. He asks when.
She replies, “Infinity years from now.”
(Not that this ever occurred to anyone you know…)
Now, is he ever going to get that call? Obviously not. Even if he waits a billion years, he’ll be no closer to infinite years.
Same thing goes for the age of the universe.
Imagine the universe on a timeline going from negative infinity to positive infinity. Make the present moment at zero. Now imagine yourself at negative infinity.
Starting at negative infinity years and counting forward year-by-year, will you ever be able to reach the present?
Nope.
The point is that this shows how an infinitely long past would make the present moment unreachable by sequential increments of time. It would be impossible to traverse from that moment at negative infinity to now.
Thus, the fact that we’re sitting here in the present means the past is finite.
2: The Impossibility of an Actual Discrete Infinite:
Once again, the infinite old universe would propose that an infinite number of discrete events has preceded the current moment.
The problem here is that “infinity” isn’t a real quantity. It’s just a mathematical concept. In reality there is no infinite number of discrete things.
One could reply by saying there is an infinite number of points on a line, but that’s just the same conceptual idea of infinity again.
Instead, try actually drawing an infinite number of points – one at a time – until you form a line.
3: Second-Law of Thermo:
Imagine waking up on an airplane with no knowledge of how long it has been in the air. You ask a fellow passenger how long the plane has been flying. He replies that it has always been in flight. Of course, you know this is absurd, the plane would have run out of gas at some point.
Well, a similar thing applies to the universe. The Second Law of Thermodynamics indicates that over a long enough period of time, all closed systems will progress toward thermodynamic equilibrium. This inevitable progression is commonly called an "increase in entropy”.
Due to this principle, all concentrations of energy in the universe will eventually disappear. The universe will go dark and die. This is called the "Heat Death of the Universe."
Now, if the universe had already undergone an infinite period of time… this would have already occurred. But it obviously has not. This means the universe has only undergone a finite length of time.
4: Standard-Model Big Bang Cosmology:
Following the discovery of the Theory of General Relativity by Albert Einstein, Father Georges Lemaitre proposed that all space was expanding out from a single point. This expansion became known as the "Big Bang".
Afterward, two discoveries confirmed this proposition. The first was the “red-shifting” of the light emitted from interstellar bodies as they moved away from observers on Earth. The second was the “cosmic background radiation” which is leftover energy from the initial moment of the Big Bang.
Today it is widely accepted that the universe is 13.9 billion years old.
5: The Borde-Guth-Vilenkin Theorem:
The theorem, developed in 2003, observes that the relative velocities of objects in a universe which is contracting in reverse-time … (confusing, I know) … would eventually surpass the speed of light. And since that cannot happen, any universe which is expanding (like ours) must have first moment in time.
I know that explanation was sparse, but hopefully those links may help.
The Follow-Through:
The conclusion follows. In short – if there was a beginning, you can look back at the first moment of the universe and ask, “Why did that happen? What or Who could do that?”
Now you can move onto the next step. From there one engages in a conceptual analysis of what sort of thing that cause-of-the-universe might be.
Well, one can reason that It must be:
Timeless: Since time began with the universe, the thing which made it must not be subject to it.
Immaterial: Same reason as the "timeless" quality. It brought all material into existence.
Powerful: Because it created a whole freaking universe.
And that points you vaguely to classical Theism.
The "God of the Gaps" Objection:
This is by far the most common objection. A God of the Gaps fallacy follows this format:
We don't know what caused X, therefore God caused X.So perhaps you can imagine a person saying, "I don't know what causes earthquakes, therefore God causes earthquakes." That would be invalid reasoning, but that is not what going on with the Kalam Cosmological Argument.
A God of the Gaps assertion jumps from a place of ignorance - not knowing what causes something - to an unwarranted assumption that God caused. The difference here is that we are starting from something we DO know
We know that the universe had a beginning and had a cause. Then we begin reasoning as to what that cause would have to be. And it just so happen that this cause would need to have certain divine attributes.
The “How Do you Know It’s the Christian-God?” Objection:
At this point a critic may complain that the Kalam doesn’t get you all the way to the God of Abraham who was incarnate in Jesus of Nazareth.
The response here is… “so what?”
It moves in that direction. That’s all the Kalam is meant to do.
The “What Caused God?” Objection:
Usually this objection is coupled with an inaccurate restatement of the first premise. The person will say:
“If everything has a cause, then what caused God? HAH!”One can point out that the first premise only applied to things which begin to exist. However, the conceptual analysis we did revealed that God must transcend time.
We can only really imagine things existing in time. But when you come to the case of God, you have to leave those temporal assumptions behind. Now you're dealing with something which exists timelessly. There is no before, there is no after, there just is a single timeless now.
So the answer is that God simply IS. (And that is a concept we'll return to next time)
The Spacetime Objection:
We’ll close this sketch by pointing toward one more objection.
Ordinarily a person will deny the second premise by trying to show how the universe could be eternal. However, some people may resort to a different way of denying the second premise.
A person may concede that the universe has a first moment in time, but will then make a philosophical shift that eliminates the consequences.
Namely, the person will deny that reality of the passage of time.
Let's think; if the universe really does experience the flow of time, then it can be said that T = 0 is truly the beginning of the universe – and all that implies.
However, now let’s suppose that the Past, Present, and Future are all equality real – and the passage of time is just an illusion human consciousness. In reality, the universe is a 4-Dimensional Spacetime Object.
Under this paradigm, the first moment of the universe isn’t so much the beginning of 3-dimensional space …. It’s more like the front end of a 4-dimensional object.
That point is more special than the front end of a car. That is to say, the car doesn’t come into existence at the front bumper, it’s just one end of its geometry.
In the same way, one can concede the existence of a T=0 and still deny that this constitutes a beginning.
Moving Along:
The Spacetime argument gets into a whole lot of messy details involving the philosophy of time, the interpretation of various equations in general relativity, and other things I simply don’t understand.
But think about what the person has committed himself to by taking this position. He has locked himself into a truly bizarre way of looking at reality. We normally think of ourselves as three-dimensional conscious beings who move through time moment by moment.
This view would assert that our consciousness of the passage of time is an illusion. In reality human beings would be four-dimensional objects who merely think they are experiencing a progression of events. This invites the question of....
- Why does this illusion exist?
- Why do we experience time in a way which is so contrary to reality?
One could also ask why this 4D spacetime universe exists at all. That will be the subject of our second argument.
Argument 2: The Contingency Argument
Return to Part 0
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