Fixing the Kalam Cosmological Argument

KEVIN HARRIS: Bill, occasionally I look around to see if there are any recent responses to the kalam cosmological argument. I found two on YouTube, so I have some video clips for you to check out. You may be a little disappointed. I don’t think there is anything that new in these, but we’ll look at them. The first set of clips is from science communicator Grayson Hawk. This video has over 2,500 views. He claims he can fix the kalam so that it's more accurate, so let's check out his first clip.

Being a science communicator on YouTube who talks to a lot of theist apologists, I very often hear the kalam cosmological argument for the existence of God, except that it's not exactly an argument for the existence of God popularized by William Lane Craig, a very, very famous Christian apologist. I covered him on the channel before.

1.     All things that begin to exist have a cause.

2.     The universe began to exist.

3.     The conclusion: Therefore the universe had a cause.

Which the observant viewer may notice is actually not an argument for the existence of God. Now, there's a lot of introduction of some more assumptions, a lot of mental gymnastics to go from “the universe had a cause” to “that cause was a personal, all-knowing, all-loving, all-good God” but, yeah, that's what the Christian apologists are trying to do. The primary kalam argument just concludes with that conclusion that the universe did have a cause.

KEVIN HARRIS: He calls the conceptual analysis of the cause “mental gymnastics.” Bill?

DR. CRAIG: Yes. What he does is he presents half of the argument and then says it doesn't justify the final conclusion. Well, that is, of course, because it's incomplete as he presents it! If anything, he should accuse me of oversimplifying a much more complex argument which involves a derivation of the properties of the first cause that shows that this cause must be a first, uncaused, beginningless, timeless, changeless, spaceless, immaterial, and enormously powerful personal creator of the universe, which I think is a legitimate and sufficiently robust concept to qualify as a concept of God.

KEVIN HARRIS: Here's the next clip where he attempts to fix the first premise. Let's go to that.

But is that a good argument? No. No, it's not a good argument. I have really big issues with both premises. I think that both premises are not true, or at least not justifiably true. So I thought – you know what? – let's try to take a crack at fixing the kalam cosmological argument. Let's go into each one of these flawed premises and fix them to make them true, and let's see if that alters the conclusion at all. Shall we? Let's find out. So, premise number one: all things that begin to exist have a cause. Sometimes, alternatively worded that “whatever begins to exist has a cause for its existence.” What are some examples of things that have begun to exist? Right? Like, we could just throw out a random example like a chair – like the chair I'm sitting on right now. That's a thing. A chair is a thing. This chair is a thing, and it began to exist. Right? Somebody put together this chair or it was assembled at a factory. The wood is made primarily of carbon atoms, and those carbon atoms already existed in the air – in the carbon dioxide in the air. That's where the tree got the material to make the wood, and so on and so on and so on. You can continue to trace this chain all the way back and you will not find a verifiable instance where you can say, yes, this is when this thing began to exist. The creation of the chair was not some ex nihilo (creation out of nothing). It was just a rearrangement of previously existing parts. In fact, I would say that there are zero examples of that – zero verifiable examples of anything coming into existence from nothing.

KEVIN HARRIS: I also noticed in the comments of this video that people are saying matter is neither created nor destroyed, just transformed. The first law of thermodynamics.

DR. CRAIG: This response involves a fundamental confusion of efficient causality and material causality. An efficient cause is that which brings the effect into being. So take the chair. The chair is brought into being by a carpenter, and so the carpenter is the efficient cause of the chair which begins to exist. The chair also has a material cause; namely the wood and the carbon atoms of which it's made. The fact that the chair has a material cause in no way suggests that the chair itself doesn't begin to exist. The chair is not past eternal even if the carbon atoms that make it up pre-exist the chair. So what we're interested in is what are the causal conditions for something that begins to exist? The fact that things begin to exist all the time is evident, for example, from the fact that we ourselves begin to exist. I'd invite Grayson to ask himself: Did he begin to exist? Does he think that he existed prior to the union of his mother's egg and his father's sperm? Does he think that he is past eternal? That he has always existed? Well, of course not. He began to exist at that moment of conception. So the fact that things have material causes in addition to efficient causes is in no sense a refutation of the evident fact that things do begin to exist all around us all the time.

KEVIN HARRIS: Here's the next clip. He goes on to premise number two – he gets into the Big Bang.

Now what about premise two? Premise two was that the universe began to exist. Now, on the face of it, a lot of people might have learned about the Big Bang as being the beginning of the universe. But does the Big Bang actually make any such claim? When you get right down to it, most theoretical physicists, astrophysicists, and cosmologists agree that it does not. The Big Bang does not make any claims about where the starting energy of the universe came from. It starts at the initial condition of the universe existing in a very, very small, very, very dense, very, very hot state. In fact, the actual physics that we need to describe this state break down and we're no longer able to describe the very, very smallest hottest, densest states about what is actually physically going on. So without that more advanced physics necessary to describe what's going on you really cannot make any assertive claim about any kind of beginnings. It's only intellectually honest to be agnostic about whether or not our evidence or theories today point to a beginning of the universe. Again, most cosmologists would agree with this.

KEVIN HARRIS: So is agnosticism about the Big Bang the best option?

DR. CRAIG: I think that Grayson is simply wrong that most cosmologists agree that the universe did not begin to exist. I wonder what is his basis for saying that? Why should we believe him in this regard? I noticed that Stephen Hawking and Roger Penrose, two of the greatest physicists of all time, in their co-authored book The Nature of Space and Time, published by Princeton University Press, have the following to say, and I quote, “Almost everyone now believes that the universe, and time itself, had a beginning at the big bang.”^[1] What is especially significant about that quotation is the claim that time itself began at the Big Bang. That means that it is impossible that anything existed prior to the Big Bang. The universe cannot be past eternal; you cannot extend time past the initial state of the universe to infinity past. Now, Grayson would justify his agnosticism by saying that contemporary physics are not yet able to describe that initial state of the universe. In order to do that, we would need to have a marriage of general relativity theory and quantum mechanics, and we don't have that yet. We do not have a quantum theory of gravity that would enable us to describe that initial state. But in order to be confident that the universe began to exist you don't need to be able to describe that initial state of the universe. The great cosmologist Charles Misner once Illustrated it in the following way in a conversation with me. He said it's as though a tiny window shade were drawn across the first split second of the universe, and we don't know what's going on behind that shade. But we do know that it doesn't come out on the other side. I think that's an apt way of putting it. You don't need to have a physical description of the initial state to know that that initial state was indeed the beginning of the universe.

KEVIN HARRIS: Next Grayson talks about the Borde-Guth-Vilenkin theorem. Let's go to that clip.

Often times the Christian apologist will bring up something called the Borde-Guth-Vilenkin theorem, which is exactly what Frank Turek brought up in the video in which I spoke with him. And in that video you can see that both Guth and Vilenkin, two of the physicists that came up with that theorem, explicitly clarified that their theorem is talking about inflation. Their theorem necessitates that inflation had a beginning. It does not make any such claim about the universe. In fact, Vilenkin very clearly explains that the theorem is agnostic about the beginning of the universe as a whole. In fact, there's no evidence or reason suggesting that the universe itself had a beginning, or has to have a beginning. You can have a past-infinite universe that is logically possible. There's nothing in the actual evidence – the scientific evidence – that says that that is ruled out. Based on the currently available evidence that we have today, the only honest position is to say we don't know whether or not the universe had a beginning or not, or if a beginning was even required.

KEVIN HARRIS: More agnosticism. Is it warranted?

DR. CRAIG: The Borde-Guth-Vilenkin theorem was indeed originally developed to answer the question whether inflation (that is, a super-rapid expansion of the universe) could be projected not only into the infinite future but into the infinite past. What they discovered was that this is, in fact, impossible if the universe conforms to a single very general and plausible condition. But the Borde-Guth-Vilenkin theorem applies not only to inflationary models – that seems to be Grayson's misimpression. Any universe which is on average in a state of cosmic expansion throughout its history has to connect in a finite time to a past boundary. Far from denying the beginning of the universe, Vilenkin is very blunt about its implications. Let me simply read several quotations from him.

It is said that an argument is what convinces reasonable men and a proof is what it takes to convince even an unreasonable man. With the proof now in place, cosmologists can no longer hide behind the possibility of a past-eternal universe. There is no escape; they have to face the problem of a cosmic beginning.^[2]

That's from Vilenkin’s book Many Worlds In One. In 2012 at a conference in Cambridge celebrating the 70th birthday of Stephen Hawking, Vilenkin delivered a paper which surveyed contemporary cosmology and addressed the question: Did the universe have a beginning? And he argued, as I quote, “None of these scenarios can actually be past eternal.”^[3] He concluded, “all the evidence we have says that the universe had a beginning.” In an article in the online journal Inference published in the fall of 2015, Vilenkin strengthened that conclusion. Here's what he says in that article:

We have no viable models of an eternal universe. The BGV theorem gives us reason to believe that such models simply cannot be constructed.^[4]

So he argues that not only do we have no physically viable models of a past-eternal universe, but that his theorem gives reason to believe that such models simply cannot be constructed. Now, what about his colleague Alan Guth? In my debate with the cosmologist Sean Carroll, Carroll tried to quote Guth to the effect that the universe probably didn't begin to exist. And Carroll was bewildered. He said, “How could the author of the Borde-Guth-Vilenkin theorem deny that the universe had a beginning?” Well, the answer to that question was revealed by correspondence between Alan Guth and the philosopher Daniel Came in England in which Guth revealed that what he was talking about in that quotation was Sean Carroll's own model of the universe – the so-called Carroll-Chen model. This is a model which features a reversal of time at some point in the past. The arrow of time, instead of running forwards, flips over and runs in the backwards direction. This Carroll-Chen model is not only outrageously nonphysical (featuring such a reversal of the arrow of time) but even more fundamentally it actually implies the beginning of the universe because those two arrows of time (those two expanding universes) have a common origin point which represents the beginning of both. So far from representing a past-eternal universe, what you have is two expanding universes in different directions in time with a common point of origin. So it turns out that the model actually implies, rather than denies, the beginning of the universe.

KEVIN HARRIS: One more clip from Grayson. Here he presents the new fixed kalam cosmological argument. Let's go to that.

So, now, if we fix premise two based on the actual available evidence and most up-to-date science, premise two now reads: the universe may have begun to exist although we cannot know for sure. So now let's put it all together. What does the new, fixed, updated, and accurate version of the kalam cosmological argument tell us for its conclusion? Let's summarize. Premise number one: all things that begin to exist are created from other previously existing things. Premise two: the universe may have begun to exist, although we can't know for sure. The conclusion that logically follows from these premises is the universe may have been created from other previously existing things although we cannot know for sure. Isn't it strange how when you update the premises of the kalam cosmological argument to more accurately reflect the most current up-to-date understandings of science and philosophy, all of a sudden that conclusion is quite sensible indeed. I don't think anybody would take any issues with such a conclusion in the fields of science or philosophy. It's no small wonder that the Christians don't want to go anywhere near it because all of a sudden it's going to be pretty tough to figure out a way to smuggle your God into that conclusion.

KEVIN HARRIS: What about his fixed version? And, by the way, I noticed that he calls any further analysis “smuggling” this time.

DR. CRAIG: I was really surprised by this reformulation because he hasn't said anything to justify his reformulated premise one. His reformulated premise says “everything that begins to exist has a material cause,” and he hasn't given any reason to think that that's true. There is no conceptual reason to think that something cannot have an efficient cause but no material cause. And, in fact, I think we can even give some examples of things that have efficient causes that don't have material causes. For example, abstract objects like works of art or musical compositions or the equator are objects that plausibly have causes – their composers and artists that produced them. Or the planet Earth that comes to form and causes an equator to exist by its spherical shape. But there are no material causes of these entities. So even if they have efficient causes, there is no material cause. So he simply hasn't justified his first reformulated premise. There's no reason to think that in the case of the universe that the universe does have a material cause. In fact, the evidence is quite the contrary – that all matter and energy, space and time themselves came into being at the moment of the Big Bang and therefore the universe, while plausibly having an efficient cause, does not and cannot have a material cause.

KEVIN HARRIS: Let me run one more clip past you today. It's short and sweet. This is a short from the Deep Drinks podcast called “The Ultimate Debunking of William Lane Craig's Apologetic Tactic.” Here it is:

If you're going to make the argument that it had to come from something then so does God. Well, not God. He's outside of that. Why? And there is no why except that you want him to be the first cause because that answers your weird, creepy little apologetic tactic. And it simply doesn't work. I think they get the most attention because you can dress them up like the, you know, William Lane Craig's kalam is it's simple with its premises. But when you actually hear him explain it, he's using so many philosophical terms and really impressive language that you feel like, how do I fight this? How can I break this down? But all he is saying is my God is the one exception, and it's like, that's not an answer. That doesn't answer anything.

KEVIN HARRIS: By the way, that's another thing that I run into quite often – that is the questioning of your motives. And that's what he's doing here – claiming you're just trying to snow people with big-sounding words. That and – what? – special pleading.

DR. CRAIG: Well, he seems to think that it's special pleading. But I don't think that he understands the first premise of the argument. The first premise of the argument is that whatever begins to exist has a cause, and the reason that God doesn't need to have a cause is because God didn't begin to exist. So it's not special pleading for God. Any being that never began to exist – that is eternal – it's difficult to see how it could have a cause. It certainly couldn't have a prior cause in time. So God is not an exception to the first premise. We're not saying “here's something that began to exist, but it doesn't have a cause.” That would be special pleading. That would be making the entity an exception to the first premise. But in this case, that's not what's happening. Rather, God doesn't meet the condition laid down in the first premise for needing a cause, and that condition is that the thing began to exist.

KEVIN HARRIS: As we wrap it up, I know you'd probably like to scold these guys for not doing their due diligence. I say that because there's a lot of smirking and snickering and things like that in these videos, but maybe we can offer them some advice. I know the temptation is for them to crank out content to grow their channels, but perhaps they should devote a month or two to examining yours and others’ responses to their rebuttals before they crank out a video on the topic.

DR. CRAIG: Yes. I think that would be a good idea because these are not new objections. These are objections that have been multiply addressed before. But I think there's a lesson, too, for our listeners that I'd like to highlight here. And that is: Do you notice that these fellows (particularly Grayson) didn't give any documentation for their opinions? They just asserted them. And if there's anything that the Internet generation has learned, it is to be skeptical about things you hear or see on the Internet. Anybody can get on and make assertions. So whenever you hear people making assertions, you always need to think critically and ask: What is the documentation that he gives for that? In my responses today, I was careful to give documentation to Vilenkin’s and Hawking and Penrose's statements that our viewers can check out for themselves. So I would encourage people – when you listen to these popularizers, don’t be gullible. Don’t think that they are authorities on this matter. Ask for the documentation that supports their assertions before you buy into them too quickly.^[5]