The Kalam Cosmological Argument from Philoponus to Prokop

A redated post

To preface this, Bob Prokop, a sometime commentator here, is an friend of mine from undergraduate days at ASU, whom I met in a History of the Middle Ages class in 1973. I remember Bob explaining a theistic argument to me in a classroom at ASU in 1975, some four years before William Lane Craig published his first work on the Kalam Cosmological argument. I later discovered that the argument had been used by the Scholastics during the Medieval period. Little did I know that Bob's argument would become the most discussed theistic argument of the last 25 years. I got back in touch with Bob after a long time out of touch, and he wanted to see what I thought of this argument he invented when he was an undergrad.

The reason I wanted to e-mail you is that I would like you to try and find a flaw in what I believe is an iron-clad proof that the universe must have been created, and cannot possibly have always existed.


As prelude to my argument, I have to confess that for myself, my very existence has always been evidence enough for a Creator (read: God). My mind simply can not and will not accept the idea that the universe "just is". So for me, the existence of God is Case Closed, and I generally find debates on the subject to be rather pointless. BUT, I am fully aware that existence itself is not considered to be sufficient proof of a Creator by the hard-core atheist, who generally respond with two objections which they think are fatal flaws in the "Argument for Existence".


First Objection: "Then where did God come from?" This one is simple. The question is semantically null - without meaning. The Creator is by definition the Creator, and not a creation. To ask who created the creator is to string words together to no purpose.


Second Objection: Now this one is worth refuting. The argument runs thus. Existence does not require a Creator, because the universe has always been here from eternity, and therefore "just is".


I respond to that proposition with a simple thought experiment. Call this a sub-set of the "Argument from Existence" - maybe a good name for it would be the "Argument from there being a Now". Thus:


1. Imagine a time a billion years in the future. You know that in a billion years from now, that time will be the present. The same works for any finite number you can name, no matter how large. At some point, we'll get there, and some future person will be able to experience that point in time as "Now".


2. Now, imagine a point in time an infinite number of years in the future. In this case, no matter how long you wait, we'll NEVER arrive at that point. It will never be the present, but always and forever an infinite time in the future, and no one will ever experience that time as "Now".


3. Now let's go in the other direction. Imagine 14 billion years ago (the current rough estimate of the age of the universe, give or take a billion years or so). Starting from that point, we eventually get to where (when?) we are today - the present time.


4. Finally, imagine a point in time an infinite number of years in the past. Just as in step 2, we would never, ever get to today. Our present existence becomes an impossibility. It would always be an infinite time in the future, and never arrived at.


THEREFORE: The universe (Creation) requires a beginning, before which there was nothing. It cannot have always been here, or we would not be here "Now". Creation Ex Nihilo


So my challenge to you - where is the flaw in this argument? I cannot find one. Also, as an aside, has anyone else ever used this argument. I don't recall ever seeing it anywhere. (Here's where you get your chance to show how uneducated I am, and point out that it dates back to Augustine, or something like that!)


Bob

I gave a couple of replies to Bob: I remember you came up with an argument for theism which had not been discussed much by the early 70s, but a Christian philosopher named William Lane Craig developed it, and his book, the Kalam Cosmological Argument, was his first major publication, tracing it back to Islamic thinkers of the early Middle Ages.



Here is some Craig stuff on the argument:

http://www.leaderu.com/offices/billcraig/menus/existence.html

And this is the response of who I think is his best critic, Wes Morriston.

There is also the move that says that the beginning of the universe just doesn't need a cause, that a cause is required only if there is a time prior to the beginning.

Whenever you see the phrase, "Kalam Cosmological Argument," that's the argument this is talking about.

Thomas Aquinas didn't use this argument.  I think Joe Sheffer (another friend of ours from undergrad days, and a big-time Aquinas aficianado who, tragically, passed away in 1989) criticized the argument also, but my photographic memory fails me as to just how that discussion went. Here is a discussion on Aquinas's understanding of the infinite, which provides the reason why he rejected the argument, and made the claim that the universe had a temporal beginning (and therefore a temporal first cause), an article of faith known through revelation, rather than something established by natural reason alone.

When Bob asked me my own view of the argument, I replied (well, mostly):

Well, you have to realize that, thanks to William Lane Craig, this argument has gone from being an obscure argument dating back to golden age of Islam, and used by some scholastics (but NOT Aquinas), to being the most discussed argument for the existence of God in the past 30 years. A large body of papers have been written about it, I've only read a fraction of them. The very latest is a paper by William Lane Craig and James Sinclair in Craig and Moreland, ed. The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology.

The argument basically says that, when it comes to counting anything, infinity can't be real. More precisely, a completed infinite set of past moments is impossible. Yet there is an infinite set of integers. All these numbers do exist, yet there is an infinite number of them. There is a set, but I suppose there is the question of whether it can be traversed. Hence there had to be a beginning, because if there wasn't, there would be no now. Mathematicians make a distinction between an actual infinite and a potential infinite, and say that an actual infinite is impossible.

One question might be to ask you how many moments are there in our heavenly future? If there can be an infinite number of future moments in which we praise God, (we've no less days to sing God's praise than when we first begun), then can't there have always been an infinite number of past moments prior to this one?

I haven't worked through what are considered to be the strongest objections to the argument against an infinite number of past moments, and I haven't worked my way through the question of why Aquinas rejected the argument, concluding that the claim that the universe had a temporal beginning was an article of faith, rather than provably false, which is what your argument shows if it works. (If it had made it into the Five Ways, it would have been extensively discussed by philosophers).

An interesting sidelight to this whole argument has to do with Big Bang cosmology. Is cosmology trending in the direction of accepting a beginning of the universe, as attempts to get rid of an absolute beginning at the Big Bang keep going down the tubes. Is science showing that there was a beginning?

The argument seems right to me, but I have some questions about it.

Bob replied:

I followed your link to Aquinas's take on the subject, and was somewhat startled to find myself disagreeing with him. The issue of future moments is not relevant. We will never arrive at a point an infinite number of years in the future. there is no requirement to traverse that interval, as there is, were there an infinite amount of time in the past (i.e., it has to have happened in actuality, not conceptually).

I had been mistaken, however, in attributing the argument to Islamic sources. Craig and Sinclair wrote:

The kalam cosmological argument traces its roots to the efforts of early Christian theologians who, out of their commitment to the biblical teaching of creatio ex nihilo, sought to rebut the Aristotltelian doctrine of the eternity of the universe. Iin his works Against Aristotle and On the Eternity of the World Against Proclus, The Alexandrian Aristotelian commentator John Philoponus (d. 580?), the last great champion of creatio ex nihilo prior to the advent of Islam, initiated a tradition of argumentation in support of the doctrine of creation based on the impossibility of an infinite temporal regression of events (Philoponus, 1987, Philoponus and Simplicius 1991). Following the Muslim conquest of North Africa, this tradition was taken up and subsequently enriched by medieval Muslim and Jewish theologians before being transmitted back again to Christian scholastic theology.

Who Made God and the Kalam Cosmological Argument

The argument doesn't say everything has a cause. What it says is whatever begins to exist must have a cause of its existence. Scientific evidence says that the universe began to exist, and so it needs a cause of its existence. God by definition did not begin to exist, therefore, he needs no cause of his existence.

The problem of prior time

Here is Graham Oppys response to some Craig's claims about the Kalam argument.

Grünbaum (1990) (1991) worries about the propriety of the claim, that the universe began to exist, in the context of classical Big Bang models of the origins of the universe. In particular, he considers two cases: (i) models which are closed at the Big Bang instant t=0, in which t=0 is the location of a singular, temporally first event in the history of the universe; and (ii) models which are open at the Big Bang instant t=0, in which there is no singular, temporally first event in the history of the universe.
In connection with the first type of model, Grünbaum observes that it is misleading to say that in these models the universe began because this suggests that there were moments of time before t=0. Craig (1992:237f.) objects that "x begins to exist" should not be analysed as "x exists at time t and there are times immediately prior to t at which x does not exist", but rather as "x exists at t and there is no time immediately prior to t at which x exists." Of course, this analysis would commit Craig to the unwanted claim that God began to exist--since, on the theistic version of this model, there is no time immediately prior to t=0 at which God exists--so Craig further suggests that, within a theistic context, the analysis should be amended to "x exists at t; there is no time immediately prior to t at which x exists; and the actual world contains no state of affairs involving x's timeless existence." But this amended suggestion invokes the extremely puzzling notion of "(God's) timeless existence." Moreover, even the unamended analysis naturally provokes the question whether anything which begins to exist in this sense must have a cause.

Here's a key issue that comes up in Kalam debates. Does the idea that everything that begins to exist must have a cause of its existence hold up if there is, as standard BBT postulates, that there is no time prior to the first event.

Was the beginning of the universe uncaused?

Quentin Smith thinks so.

Aquinas's Critique of the Argument from the Actual Infinite

This post, from Siris, argues that St. Thomas Aquinas provided the basis for rejecting versions of the Kalam Cosmological Argument that appeal to an actual infinite, beating Wes Morriston to the punch by eight and a half centuries.

Three arguments for the finitude of the past

An Infidels Critique of the Kalam Cosmological Argument

Carbonman's Critique of Craig's Kalam Argument

In ordinary contexts, pretty clearly, we don't countenance the possibility that something could come into existence without a cause. For example, if you and I were eating lunch, and a bunny rabbit were suddenly to appear munching on your salad, you would rightly dismiss the possibility that it popped into existence without a cause. So we need some justification for why, in this instance, we are going to want to admit a causeless beginning of the universe.




Craig does offer arguments that a personal agent was the cause of the beginning of the universe, but he doesn't say his argument proves that it is the Christian God. He got the argument from Islamic philosophers to begin with, so he knows better than that. He admits that he needs other arguments to get to Christian theism. Something powerful enough to bring a universe into existence caused the universe to exist, assuming you accept a caused beginning of the universe.



Now people have offered reasons for why an uncaused beginning is acceptable while an uncaused bunny rabbit is not, and that has to do with the fact that the BBT says there was no time before the beginning, and that Craig's causal principle need only apply if there was a prior time. So, the bunny rabbit needs a cause, since there was a time when it was not in existence and then it began to exist. But when there was no time prior to the existence of the universe, the causal requirement doesn't apply. This is a more serious objection than that which you have provided, however.



You should also note that plenty of people have challenged Craig, and he has responded to those objections. People like J. L. Mackie, Quentin Smith, Keith Parsons, Douglas Jesseph, and Wes Morriston have written objections, and these objection have been countered by Craig and his defenders, and you can't really get a sense of where the whole discussion is unless you look at how the debate has proceeded. Your responses, I am afraid, are re-inventions of the wheel.

An expanded version of the Kalam Cosmological Argument

This High School Apologetics site has a lot of interesting stuff!

1 Everything which begins to exist must have a cause for its existence.
1.2 The universe began to exist
1.3 Therefore the universe had a cause for its existence
2 The universe is primarily the expansion of time, space and matter
2.1 Therefore time, space and matter were caused.
3 An effect may be no greater than its proper cause
3.1 A thing may not cause itself to exist
3.2 Therefore the cause of the universe is eternal and immaterial.
4 Only a free-agent is able to produce real change (greater change) either through time, space and matter, in its creation, or in its annihilation. All other changes are merely natural and deterministic processes (lesser change)
4.1 In the absence of the universe (time, space and matter) there could be no change of the lesser sort
4.2 Therefore the immaterial, and eternal cause of the universe was not an inanimate thing, but a free-agent, a mind.
5 The difference between nonbeing “in reality” and being “in reality”, is an infinite difference
5.1 The difference between nonbeing “in the mind” and being “in the mind” is an infinite difference
5.2 The free-agent in question created something from nothing, and it follows that it conceived something from nothing
5.3 To create something from nothing is an infinite power, and to conceive something from nothing is an infinite act of conception or knowledge.
5.4 Therefore the cause of the universe is an eternal, transcendent, omniscient, omnipotent mind, which can properly be called God.

Craig replies to Quentin Smith on the initial singularity

Flew on God and the Big Bang

Jim Lazarus' resource page on the Kalam cosmological argument

This is a internet resource page for the Kalam Cosmological Argument, posted on iidb by Jim Lazarus. A lot of stuff both pro and con.

HT: Oystein

DeWeese and Rasmussen on a principle of sufficient reason

In the book In Defense of Natural Theology (IVP, 2005), Garrett DeWeese and Joshua Rasmussen wrote an essay entitled “Hume and the Kalam Cosmological Argument.” defend a version of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, which they call PSR3:

PSR3: There is a sufficient reason why some concrete objects exist rather than none at all.

However, they say that PSR3 is rejected by William Rowe on the grounds that it is not self-evident nor a required presumption of scientific inquiry.

However, they think that PSR3 follows from a weaker, modalized version of PSR:

PSR3’: Possibly, there is a sufficient reason why some contingent concrete objects exist as rather than none at all.

They prove this with this argument:

There is a possible world W in which q is true and q explains p.
p is contingently true and there is no explanation of p. (Assumption for indirect proof).
There is a possible world W in which (p and “there is no explanation of p”) is true, and there in which q is true and q explains (p and “there is no explanation of p). (from 1 and 2)
In W, q explains p, (from 3 and the distributivity of explanation over conjunction).
Therefore in W, p both has, and does not have an explanation.
It is not the case that p is contingently true and there is no explanation of p.
Therefore, it is not the case that, for any proposition p, p is contingently true and there is no explanation of p. (from 6)

Craig defends the causal principle of his argument

The Myth of the Beginning of Time

The Kalam Cosmological Argument goes:

1. Whatever begins to exist, must have a cause of its existence.
2. The Universe began to exist.
Therefore, the Universe has a cause of its existence.

A lot of debate on the KCA has concerned whether 1 can be applied to the universe itself. But 2 seems strongly supported by Big Bang theory. But do developments in string theory suggest that premise 2 is vulnerable? String Theorist Veneziano seems to think so. What do you think?

Keith Parsons on the cosmological argument

The Secular Outpost: Atheist Manifesto

When asked for reasons for thinking that God exists, most people reply with amateur versions of the first cause or design arguments. For most people, even philosophers like William Lane Craig, the idea that the universe "came into existence out of nothing" is just absurd. After all, in our ordinary experience things don't just pop into existence or spontaneously disappear (except socks in the washer and car keys). As Craig puts it somewhere nobody would expect a full-grown Bengal tiger to just materialize out of thin air. In short, from nothing comes nothing. However, this reasoning is fatally flawed. Our common-sense expectations about things coming into or going out of existence are based entirely upon our experience within the space/time universe with all its conservation laws in force. We have no experience at all of the beginning of space/time itself, and there is no reason whatsoever to think that our everyday intuitions would apply to such a situation. If the physics of the last century has taught us anything, it is that our common-sense intuitions simply might not apply to the realities studied by fundamental physics. You and I cannot be in two places at once; an electron can. I have no intuitions at all about the beginning of space/time, and if I did I would not trust them.

While not necessarily giving a full and complete endorsement to the Kalam Cosmological Argument, surely everyone accepts some version of the causal principle. We think there need to be causes for things. We want to know why. This search for an answer to why questions doesn’t stop when the ordinary methods of naturalistic science offer no more answers. To then turn our curiosity off and say we shouldn’t look for any more answers because certain methods are not available to us seems question-begging.

While some versions of the causal principle are too strong, others seem presupposed by the success of human inquiry. See the following

http://dangerousidea.blogspot.com/2007/07/some-discussion-of-kca.html

Further, if we restrict the use of common-sense principle to what goes on within the physical universe, what other principles do we have to similarly restrict. How about Ockham’s razor. Why should superior success of simpler theories to more complex ones within the physical universe make someone think that this sort of principle can be extended beyond the physical world. If the causal principle has to be restricted, then this one does too. If the atheist wants us to accept an Ockham’s Razor argument for atheism (which Parsons does appeal to in his reply to Moreland), but also insists that we restrict the causal principle to a naturalistic framework, then he or she needs to explain why she can make both moves. I think there’s an inconsistency here.

Some discussion of the KCA

In a previous discussion of the Kalam cosmological argument an anonymous interlocutor wrote that physicists really don't use the idea of cause and effect, and then presented this explanation.

(To avoid confusion I should clarify again that "cause and effect" is a term used in physics as a synonym for "determinism". Classical physics is deterministic, quantum physics is not. So "cause and effect" is routinely mentioned (as a metaphor) in the context of classical physics, but has dropped out of quantum physics. "Causes" and "effects", however, play no role in the equations of classical or quantum physics. And for good reason: it is notoriously difficult to define "causes" and "effects" in any given situation.)

OK, that may be. But I would think that even in physics physicists would be committed to some version of the causal principle; that is, at least believe in some weakened version of the principle of sufficient reason. Let me quote myself from an old post on PSRs.:

We need explanatory principles, or what in philosophy are called principles of sufficient reason, in order to justify the claim that the universe needs something other than itself to explain it.PSR1: For every contingent fact F some other fact F' obtains such that, given F', F must obtain.This principle is incompatible with classical theism, for reasons which are similar to the ones Steven mentioned. It is a contingent fact that God freely chose to create a universe, according to classical theism. Or, if God had chosen to exist alone, that would be contingent.So PSR needs to be revised. Wainwright offers some alternatives:PSR2: There is a sufficient reason for the existence of every contingent being.This doesn't entail tha there has to be an explanation of every property of that being, just the existence of the being. So, for example, that being freely choosing to do something can be fully nd completely contingent.PSR3: Every contingent fact that requires a sufficient reason has one.A contingent fact "requires" a sufficient reason if and only if 1) it is logically possible for it to have a sufficient reason and 2) it is unintelligible if it doesn't have one.PSR4: There is at least some reason for every contingent fact.I have seen this referred to as the principle of necessary reason, for every contingent fact there are necessary conditions for it.Wainwright goes on:"The weaker principles are strong enough to generate the conclusion that contingent being is caused by a self-exisent being."The upshot of Wainwright's subsequent discussion is that at least PSR4 is supported by the success of human inquiry, and that therefore the weaker forms of PSR are more plausible than their denials. Hence, he does find some legitimacy in forms of the cosmological argument that use some of the weaker versions of PSR4, and he thinks they do lend significant support to the claim that the physical universe depends on something other than itself, which is self-existent.

Now it looks like any of these principles will do the work necessary to support the causal principle of the KCA. Therefore a denial of the very strong sense of "cause and effect" that physicists might have in mind doesn't mean that they don't believe in, say, Wainwright's PSR4. And PSR4 is all William Lane Craig needs.

More on the Kalam Cosmologicla Argument

From the Prosblogion.

More Wes Morriston

Actually, Morriston has said rather a lot against the Kalam argument

Some arguments for the finitude of the past

The first of William Lane Craig's arguments for the existence of God is the Kalam Cosmological Argument. It goes:

1. Whatever begins to exist, must have a cause of its existence.
2. The universe began to exist.
3. Therefore, the universe has a cause of its existence.

The first premise of the argument seems intuitive, at least at first. Suppose you and I are eating lunch. You turn your head away from the table, only to discover that a bunny rabbit is munching on your salad. You ask "how did that rabbit get there?" and I say "Funny thing. It just popped into existence. No cause or anything, it just happened." You wouldn't take me seriously, right? Well, what goes for bunny rabbits should go for universes. To say that the universe began without a cause doesn't make sense.

Or does it? Opponents have argued that in Big Bang theory the time begins when the universe begins. So there never was a time before the Big Bang in which time existed but the universe did not.

Somehow, this doesn't in my mind alleviate the need for a cause. It seems to me that something that doesn't exist contingently should have existed through an infinite duration. if it doesn't have a cause, similarly, it should exist through an infinite time, or be outside of time.

But why believe that the universe had a temporal beginning? The most prominent theory in cosmology seems to still be the Big Bang theory, a theory that says that there was a beginning. But Craig also endorses arguments that there can't be an infinite number of past moments.

Think about this. Suppose I ask you to loan me some money. I offer you 100% interest compounded daily. But you, quite rationally, want to know the term of the loan. I reply that even though it may take an infinite length of time to pay it back, you'll get your money. This somehow doesn't satisfy you. But if the past is infinite, that means that there are an infinite number of moments in time that have ALREADY HAPPENED. How is that possible?

I have a link to a presentation of three arguments in favor of the claim that the past must be finite and not infinite.