The Kalam Cosmological Argument
for the existence of a god 10.
Mar 2013
In this short essay I will try to show that
the KCA, the Kalam[1]
Cosmological Argument for the existence of a god is circular, dishonest and
flawed.
In the past – and I am talking about
virtually all the 200,000 years humans have existed – we humans have believed
that supernatural beings of whatever description or type exist. Whatever could not be
explained was said to be the result of one or more supernatural entities. Over the
centuries and millennia humans have developed more intricate brains and thought
patterns and have managed to find natural explanations for natural phenomena.
This has not eliminated the fond attachment
to spiritual and super-natural occurrences. While chemistry has almost
completely replaced alchemy, cosmology is still running in parallel to a huge
following of astrology, as the number of people reading about cosmology is
clearly dwarfed by the number of people determining their astrological fate for
the day in newspapers and magazines. This shows that astrology is more popular than cosmology and indicates a consistent demand for the
occult, which is decreasing but is far from eliminated. Just a few centuries
ago, when this era of enlightenment started, religions developed short sayings
to reaffirm the necessity of a divine creator and master of everything to keep
the believers believing. These sayings or arguments for the existence of a god
were repeated mantra-like and served well in the old days. Today we smile about
them, as critical and logical thinking abilities are more developed.
One such argument, however, still seems to
be used quite often, the Cosmological Argument for the existence of a god which
introduces a temporal factor linking a creator/god to the origins of our
Universe.
It is ancient old and has, to my knowledge,
been found for the first time in the writings of Plato and Aristotle, who
called it the First Mover Argument. While Aristotle still had an eternal Cosmos
in mind and did not see the god as the origin of the Universe, this was changed
over the next centuries, where the Cosmos itself was provided with a divine
origin and deemed contingent on a creator and culminated in the Kalam flavour
or version. Nobody knows precisely who formulated it or when, and it went
largely unnoticed until it was revived only a few decades ago and then picked
up by a Christian apologist, a Dr. William Craig, who used to and still uses it
to demonstrate the necessity of his favourite god. Others found it persuasive
and started copying him.
It is designed as a syllogism with two
premisses and, obviously, a conclusion.
The initial Cosmological Argument still ran
as:
1.
Everything
that exists has a cause
2.
The
Universe exists
3.
The
Universe has a cause
People quickly pointed out that this would
include the creator/god requiring a cause so a whole range of theologians and
philosophers all gave it a try. To avoid the "who created the
creator?" problem, they designed a whole lot of subsets, such as
- An actual infinite cannot exist
- An infinite temporal regress of events is an actual infinite
- Therefore, an infinite temporal regress of events cannot exist
And many more. Assuring us that the
infinite is impossible in the real world, but possible in the imaginary, make-belief
world where their god seems to reside. It’s like "an actual infinite
cannot exist, because an actual infinite cannot exist" or “an actual
infinite cannot exist because I don’t understand how it could". Yet anyone
should be able to understand how space-time has always existed since there can
be no time pre- or post-space-time itself. Logical, I think.
Craig’s particular god is infinite by his
definition but not in the same sense as the Universe might be. Craig’s god is
timeless yet decides at a specific moment in time to create the Universe,
before time existed. So, to exclude their god from premiss #1, they inserted a
little “begins to” in between the “everything that” and the “exists”, making it
more like “everything that begins to exist” and thus excluding their god.
Actually, it should be: everything - other than my god - begins to
exist….
There are hundreds if not thousands of
versions of this Cosmological Argument, all with their individual little twists
and intricacies. One of its original forms is:
- Everything that has a beginning of its existence has a cause of its existence
- The universe has a beginning of its existence
Therefore:
- The universe has a cause of its existence
- Since no scientific explanation (in terms of physical laws) can provide a causal account of the origin of the universe, the cause must be personal. A god.
What I will limit myself to is Craig's
version as well as that of his wannabe clones.
1.
Whatever
begins to exist has a cause
2.
The
universe began to exist.
3.
Therefore,
the universe has a cause.
4.
This
cause is the God of Classical Theism
The problem is that it sounds intuitively
correct. In fact, it sounds so persuasive that a listener is inclined to try
and falsify the first premiss by trying to find examples of things which do not
begin to exist or have a cause. And they have thus fallen into the trap of this
argument.
A syllogism works in the form of premisses
being unfalsifiably correct leading to a conclusion which is automatically
correct. Falsify any premiss and the entire construct fails. So, all I need to
do is look at the claims made in the premisses, which, I am told, are
unfalsifiable.
Why should this set of claims be any
different than all other claims? It is not! The claimant carries the burden of
proof. No matter whether intuition or emptions take over. Can anyone prove that
EVERYTHING has a given attribute? Has anyone examined EVERYTHING? Has anyone
been able to assess something about EVERYTHING all the way from stars to
quarks, from black holes to the smallest asteroid? Can anyone make any kind or
type of claim about EVERYTHING? No, of course not! So maybe not everything requires a cause.
So the first premiss is already faulty and
the entire argument can be dismissed as faulty unless we are happy to
extrapolate the observed data and assume it applies to the whole, in which case
we would have to add a special get-out-of-creation clause for our cause of
preference.
But let me continue and look at the rest
while I’m here. “Everything or whatever begins to exist…”
We have seen that the first word, the
“everything”, can’t be proven or demonstrated and is thus flawed. But what
about “begins to exist”? Again, it sounds intuitively correct. I do not think
that the desk I am sitting at has always existed. So in between the “always
existed” and the “existing now” must be an in-between. This is the temporal
factor which says that nothing can be infinitely old for the second premiss to
work. But if we look at it closely, this quickly breaks down into another false
claim.
When and how did the desk “begin to exist”?
Isn’t it just metal and wood atoms re-arranged to serve as a desk? If I remove
the last and final screw, does the desk cease to exist? No!
When and how did the concept of any number
such as the number 15 or “begin to exist”? When 14 got tired? Or when I
badly wanted a 16 and couldn’t quite make it?
What about a beach? Is one single grain of
sand next to the ocean on a rock sufficient to be called a beach? What about 50
or 50,000? When does the beach “begin to exist”?
When did Earth “begin to exist”? With the
first round shape? When the circumference reached 20,000 kms?
Is it even possible to compare the
formation of something with the formation of the Universe? Are they part of the
same group of anything?
A stone which was formed by tectonic plates
shifting is used in the sub-structure of a road. Through vibrations of cars it
crumbles, making the piece of road above it collapse, making a dent. This fills
with water when it rains and forms a puddle of water. When does this puddle
“begin to exist”? With the first drop of rain or the 50th?
What we realise is that this “begins to
exist” is nonsensical when scrutinised a bit more thoroughly. Things do not
poof into existence at a particular moment in time but are the result of a
gradual re-structuring of existing matter. People like Craig are unable to
comprehend this and innocently ask: did I exist before I was conceived? The
answer is: yes. The components, the atoms, the matter which constitutes Craig
has been around for billions of years, produced by dying suns which distributed
their elements throughout space. Are people like Craig unable or unwilling to
understand this?
The last part of premiss one is that
whatever begins to exist “has a cause”.
Looking at the puddle I mentioned above, is
the dent in the road or the rain filling it the cause? Or both? Or is it the
collapsing stone which caused the road to collapse and caused the dent which
caused the puddle when it rained? Or the water cycle which caused the water
droplets to evaporate and then get carried over the road where precipitation
caused the drops to fall into the dent causing the puddle? Or is the cause the
water itself, which was formed through two types of atoms which were caused by
stars which were caused by the inflation of the Universe, the Big Bang? Or
rather the crumbling stone which was caused by tectonic movement which was
caused by gravity forming Earth which was caused by matter caused by, again,
the Big Bang?
So if the cause of everything is the Big
Bang then we need to find the cause of the Big Bang – which is what we are
doing in this syllogism which turns out to be circular. Why? Because the
premiss is dependent on what we want to prove as a necessity. All this argument
says is that a god exists and is the cause for everything and thus a god which
causes everything exists. Circular.
Also, by defining what it is we are looking
for and by excluding some things, we are defining the very god the proponents
of this argument are claiming to prove through this. So it is not only
circular, but also dishonest. With this we would be back at the a priori
arguments which define everything as divinely created by contingency through a
necessary being, whose non-existence is inconceivable.
What is missing is a premiss zero, which is
required to define what is excluded in premiss one which will be needed at the
end. So if they were honest, they would have to insert some premisses before
premiss one.
Premiss 0:
0.1
a
god exists
0.2
it
is my personal, favourite god
0.3
it
is uncreated and uncaused
0.4
it
has no beginning
0.5
it
has no ending
0.6
it
is timeless, spaceless, beginningless, changeless, formless
0.7
it
did not begin to exist
0.8
it
must be a transcendental, conscious, cosmic, super-being
0.9
it
was powerful and clever enough to cause the Big Bang
All the way up to the most important one:
0.9: it must be capable of starting the Universe.
In 6 days. Or 8. Or whatever. And how these
people get from a causer or mover to a conscious being with no beginning and no
end and outside of our space and time yet causing space and time is way beyond
me. An action is incapable of happening without time. So a god in a timeless
environment could never do anything. Claiming a god existed before time existed
is a temporal claim which, without time existing, is nonsensical. I admit: in a
magic show I never spot the magic trick, but here I see flaw after flaw. And
these people assure me with their big, round, wide open eyes there is no magic
trick at all. Maybe that’s why here I spot the trick immediately.
Craig says that a syllogism has the form
1.2.3. and brings as an example everyone’s favourite:
1.
Men
are mortal
2.
Socrates
is a man
3.
Socrates
is mortal
And this is his magic trick. Craig makes it
look as though this generic form of a syllogism is the same as his form he uses
in his KCA. It is not. His form would be more like
1. God is love
2. Love is blind
3. Stevie Wonder is
blind
Applying conceptual analysis we can
conclude that Stevie Wonder is god.
So what does he do? His first statement in
his KCA is that something applies to everything, not a quantifiable group of
men as is suggested in his generic example, but everything possible. Absolutely
everything. Well, not quite everything, because it applies to everything -
except his god. So he inserts a qualifier: begins to exist, which makes it
everything -1. Why is this qualifier necessary, if this were a true syllogism?
Next he adds yet another condition, which
says that everything -1 requires a cause. By using these qualifiers he has
already defined what he needs later in what he calls the conceptual analysis.
In this analysis he magically comes up with a personal god, which has nowhere
been defined.
The second premiss, “The universe began to
exist” is sheer ignorance. Craig does not understand the difference between
inflation and the condition which caused it that he often quotes particle
physicists or cosmologists saying that the Universe had an origin, saying that
inflation could not have gone on forever in the past. Craig interprets that to
mean the entire Universe must have started at some point, which is not what the
scientists are saying at all.
Did the Universe really begin to exist? How
did it begin to exist? Did it change its form and shape or did it appear out of
nothing? Or out of a black hole of another universe? We don't know yet. And
from what moment onwards was it called Universe by what definition? What if
cosmogony finds a different reason? Will this god change along with scientific
findings?
So all we know is that inflation resulted
in today’s form of the Universe, as is described in the Big Bang models. The
Big Bang only describes what happened during inflation and not what, how or why
it started. If I were a god I would just chuck out some matter and stuff and
wait for gravity to do its thing. It’s not complicated at all. The result is a
highly chaotic and destructive Universe and that is exactly what we see.
Did the Universe begin to exist? The most
common mistake is that people don’t see contents of the Big Bang model, where
humans describe what they think happened 14 billion years ago when inflation
began. They, the proponents of the KCA, say ridiculous things like: scientists
have said the Universe had a beginning. Well, they don’t understand that
inflation having a beginning and the Universe having a beginning are two
different things. I don’t know of a single reputable cosmologist who will
comment on the origins of the Universe. It’s sheer speculation.
What is puzzling is the constant quote of a
paper by Borde, Guth, and Vilenkin on the “Past-Finite Universe”. What we are
told over and over is that this paper proves the Universe had a beginning, a
singularity. No, it does not! The authors only show that going back in time
most inflationary models of a Universe will eventually reach a boundary
sometime in the past. They do NOT specify or even suggest anywhere that this is
the equivalent of a beginning from “absolute nothingness”.
Did the Universe begin to exist? I am
pretty sure it did NOT begin to exist. Because we don't know what "begin
to exist" means. What triggered the inflation of our Universe or
Multiverse? Nobody knows.
So we see that everything about the Kalam
Cosmological Argument is smoke and mirrors, a trick and a magic show,
distracting people from what is important and directing the attention to what
is mere intuition and the rest is left to the imagination. We also see that
mixing science with religion simply does not work.
The argument is circular, dishonest and
flawed.
QED
PS: I hate it! I always try and falsify my
ideas and look for counterarguments. This time I found a huge collection on an
all-inclusive site, which allows anyone to walk through the various areas of
this argument step by step. This is no longer updated!
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