Thursday, September 24, 2009

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.

7 comments:

unkleE said...

I'm convinced! : )

Obviously one can always find reasons to reject a number of the propositions, but they certainly have the ring of common sense!

One Brow said...

1.2 We can't even be sure this space-time continuum (the definiton of the universe according to point 2.) came to exist, the Big Bang does not extend quite that far back.

3. I have no idea what "greater than" is supposed to mean, and see no reason this rule shoud aply.

3.2 Not being subject to the current space-time continuum is very different from beign either eternal or immaterial.

4. The distinction between greater and lesser change seems artificial.

5.x Do not even translate intelligibly. "Infinite" seems devoid of any meaning there.

Anonymous said...

WRONG!!!!!!

There is no reason to believe the universe BEGAN to exist, so this whole arugment fails on issue #2.

Peter Pike said...

"There is no reason to believe the universe BEGAN to exist, so this whole arugment fails on issue #2."

Aside from philosophical problems of actual infinities....

Big Bang Theory owns the Steady State Theory.

So we've got physics describing the process up to Planck time before the Big Bang, we've got an expanding universe, we've got the fact that despite stars existing in every single direction away from Earth the sky is *NOT* saturated with light but instead shows a bunch of dark (implying a finite age of the Universe), the Second Law of Thermodynamics, and the fact that we know of no eternal processes at all. Seems that we have every reason to believe the universe came into being and NO reason at all to believe it has existed eternally.

One Brow said...

The issue there is that by defining the universe as 'this space-time cntinuum', the answer could easily be 'the existence continuum before ours'. We have no reason to prefer the superntural over the natural prior continuum.

Crude said...

If we agree that our universe does have a finite age, it seems that the answer to what gave rise to it is going to be 'supernatural' no matter how one slices it. At that point what's being quibbled about are particular properties of the supernatural entity in question, and which the cosmological arguments attempt to provide further data on.

Nirdala said...

"Big Bang Theory owns the Steady State Theory.

Seems that we have every reason to believe the universe came into being and NO reason at all to believe it has existed eternally."


This statement would surprise quite a lot of modern cosmologists (Veneziano, Tegmark, Turok, Bojowald, Steinhardt...)