The End of the Kalam Cosmological Argument?

KEVIN HARRIS: Bill, we’ve been hearing a whole lot about Matt Dillahunty. Probably because he is the most popular atheist popularizer out there these days. He is kind of the go-to guy in many secular communities. He hosted a television call-in show in the Austin area for a long time. He is a very outspoken atheist. Mike Licona has debated him. What got our attention on this is he put out a video called, “The end of the kalam cosmological argument.”^[1] I thought, “Uh-oh. Those decades of work that Bill has done are about to go down the drain.” At least that's what the title seems to be saying when you first look at it.

DR. CRAIG: Yes. He claims that the kalam cosmological argument has now been pronounced dead. I just want to alert our listeners to the fact that when a popular critic says that an argument which has been debated for centuries by some of the greatest intellectuals in Western world history and which is still a matter of debate and is defended by prominent philosophers and physicists today – when somebody says it's dead and that it's come to an end you can be pretty much assured that he's just bloviating or that he doesn't really understand the argument. The fact is this argument is going to continue to be discussed long after you and I and Matt Dillahunty have passed off the scene.

KEVIN HARRIS: Let's look at a few clips from this video. We've got these divided down in short clips to get to the crux of what he's saying. Let's go to the first clip now and get you to comment on it.

MATT DILLAHUNTY: You have everything that begins to exist has a cause. The universe began to exist. Therefore the universe has a cause. It's an undeniably valid syllogism. So why am I saying the kalam is dead? What's the end of the kalam? It should have been dead from the beginning as an argument for the existence of God because what is also undeniable about the kalam is that it never mentions God – not the word and not the concept, though some people would like to weasel that concept in.

KEVIN HARRIS: Well, he's clarifying a little bit there. He's saying the reason he's saying it is dead is because it's not an argument for God.

DR. CRAIG: Right. The funny thing about that is that that's exactly what I've said. This is an argument which proves that there is a personal creator of the universe that has many of the properties of God, but if you don't want to call this being “God” that's just fine with me. That has no effect upon the soundness of the argument.

KEVIN HARRIS: You've said it over and over and over again. You've specified that. Some of the parameters there. Let's go to the second clip then.

MATT DILLAHUNTY: The conclusion of the kalam is that the universe must have had a cause for its existence. Now, I'm not necessarily convinced of the soundness of the early premises but let's grant that. Let's just say that, yep, if something begins to exist it has a cause, and the universe began to exist, therefore the universe had a cause. What do we know about the cause of the universe? Assuming that the cause exists, what do we know about it? I don't know. I don't have any way to investigate it. Oh, we can definitely know that the universe isn't the cause of itself. Well, I'm not convinced that we can definitely know that because causality is necessarily temporal and temporal causality breaks down at t=0 which would be the origin of the universe.

KEVIN HARRIS: OK. Is he understanding anything here?

DR. CRAIG: Well, what's very significant about this clip is that he actually grants the truth of the premises for the sake of argument. So the argument as such isn't dead at all! He's quite willing to grant that it's sound. But his complaint is that there's no way to investigate the nature of the first cause. What Matt fails to realize is that the arguments that I present in support of the two premises which he's been willing to grant have certain implications for the nature of the first cause. On the basis of these arguments we can infer that there is a first uncaused, timeless, spaceless, immaterial, enormously powerful, personal creator of the universe. Now, it would be a bizarre form of atheism that admitted that there does exist a being like that with those properties. So it's not at all true that there's no way to investigate the nature of the first cause. Now, Matt finally complains that causality is necessarily temporal and that therefore it breaks down at the moment t=0. I don't think that that's true that causality is necessarily temporal but even if it were, why not then say that the first cause causes the universe at t=0? You can say that God is timeless sans creation (or without creation) and that he is temporal since the first moment of creation and that God creates the universe at the first moment of time or coincidentally with the first moment of time.

KEVIN HARRIS: Here's clip number three.

MATT DILLAHUNTY: But also we're sloppy with language because if everything that is in our local presentation of the universe existed as essentially a singularity and it expanded then what you're talking about is not the cause of the universe but the cause of the expansion of the universe. I don't know what would or could cause that, and I don't know that anybody else does either. And yet they will argue on behalf of a God.

DR. CRAIG: He argues here that the argument does not prove the cause of the universe but the cause of the expansion of the universe, and I think that's simply incorrect. The truth of the two premises (Whatever begins to exist has a cause, and the universe began to exist) entails that there is a cause of the universe. So it logically and necessarily follows from the premises that there is a cause of the universe. The question of why the universe that came into being is expanding rather than, say, contracting or steady state is a question to be answered by physics.

KEVIN HARRIS: OK. Let's go to the next clip.

MATT DILLAHUNTY: But even if you were able to list the characteristics of the cause of the expansion of the universe or the cause of the local presentation of the universe or however you want to word it, even if those characteristics were similar to the proposed characteristics of an unproven God that still doesn't make them identical. Oh, well, it had to be something timeless because time didn't exist before the Big Bang. OK. Well, it doesn't even make sense to talk about before the Big Bang and maybe that cosmology is not correct but it has to be timeless. OK. But really in that context all it means is that it's not bound by the time within the local presentation of the universe. It doesn't mean that it's not bound by any time. It doesn't mean that it's not bound by metatime in a metaverse or anything like that. It just means that x is not bound by the time constraints of the local presentation the universe. But that's obvious and true for anything that would be this change since our local presentation of time began then.

DR. CRAIG: Now here he argues that the inference to the timelessness of the first cause is unjustified because all it shows is that the first cause is not bound by the time constraints of our universe – what he calls the local presentation of time. The interesting thing is that in my work I have insisted over against naturalists and physicalists that time itself cannot be identified with physical time – the time of our universe. But the arguments that I present against the infinitude of the past show that the temporal series of events must have a beginning and that therefore the cause of the universe exists changelessly sans creation. Therefore, on a relational view of time, time cannot exist in the absence of events or change. Therefore I think it is very plausible that the cause of the universe doesn't simply transcend our physical time in this universe but more metaphysically that the cause of the universe exists timelessly because it exists changelessly alone.

KEVIN HARRIS: OK. Next clip from Matt.

MATT DILLAHUNTY: Well, it's spaceless. You can do exactly the same thing with it. It’s not made up of the stuff of this particular universe if it was something external to it that caused it and not something internal to it that we haven't identified yet. You can keep going through those, but eventually you get to, “and it's a mind.” Hang on. How did we determine that it's a mind? There's nothing in the kalam that tells us it's a being, that it's an entity. There’s nothing in the kalam that tells us it's even necessarily timeless, spaceless. Nothing. And yet they're using the kalam to reach that because if they can make it sound like, and I've heard them say almost word for word, “therefore the universe had a cause for its existence and that cause must be timeless, spaceless, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and that sounds an awful lot like God.” And that sounds nothing at all like a valid and sound syllogism. That sounds like propaganda. You've used a seemingly obvious and yet still questionable syllogism to determine the universe must have had a cause, and then you go and put on a smile and say that cause must be God because it sounds a lot like God. Well, why is that cause not a multiverse? Why is it not a physical process that's beyond our current ken? Why is it a mind? And why is it in particular a mind that's absent a physical form with power over everything which provides no clear evidence of its existence and yet somehow inspires people to different conclusions about reality. It's got to be the most confused and confusing agent thing ever.

KEVIN HARRIS: Bill?

DR. CRAIG: Here he raises quite a number of questions. First he wants to know why should we think that this cause is spaceless. And the answer is simply because it created time and space and therefore it must transcend both time and space. The Big Bang represents not merely the origin of all matter and energy in the universe but the origin of space itself, and therefore this cause must be transcendent and spaceless. He says, “Why couldn't it be a multiverse?” Philosophically, it can't be a multiverse because there cannot be an infinite temporal regress of past events. Scientifically, the multiverse models cannot be successfully extrapolated to the infinite past. This was the lesson of inflationary cosmology. Certain cosmologists tried to extrapolate inflation to past eternity and they found that the models failed so that in fact any empirically tenable model including multiverse models has to begin to exist. That's why the multiverse explanation is insufficient. Then Matt says, “Why is it a mind?” In my published work I present three independent arguments for thinking that the cause of the universe is a mind. First because the only two things that could be accurately described as timeless, spaceless, and immaterial are either an unembodied mind or consciousness or else an abstract object like a number. But abstract objects don't stand in causal relationships – that's part of the definition of what it means to be abstract. Therefore it follows logically that the cause of the universe must be an unembodied mind. Secondly, because only a personal free agent can explain the origin of a temporal effect with a beginning from a permanent and timeless cause. A mechanically operating set of necessary and sufficient conditions would either produce the effect from eternity past or not at all. The only way to get a temporal effect with a beginning from a permanent changeless cause is if that cause is an agent endowed with freedom of the will who can therefore freely produce a new effect without any antecedent determining conditions. Then the third reason is because there are basically two types of causal explanation: either scientific explanations in terms of initial conditions and natural laws or else personal explanations in terms of personal agents and their volitions. But the first state of the universe cannot be explained in terms of natural laws and initial conditions because it is precisely those initial conditions that are crying out for explanation. Therefore the causal explanation of the universe must be a personal cause – a cause in terms of a personal agent and its volition. On the basis of those three arguments I'm persuaded that the first cause of the origin of the universe must be a personal, unembodied mind endowed with freedom of the will. Now, he also asked, “Why would it have power over all reality?” and the reason is quite simply because it created the entire universe. Therefore, as I say, this first cause must be a being of unimaginable power in order to create this entire universe.

KEVIN HARRIS: It’s gratifying because apparently people are calling in and using the kalam, discussing the kalam, with him. They'll call into the television show. Matt and his co-host. They're kind of on the hot seat there. They have to defend naturalism, atheism, and all this. But people are calling in and saying it must be timeless, spaceless, and immaterial. He's hearing that. But then his complaint seems to be but you're getting outside of the syllogism when you get to this other stuff. You're adding stuff.

DR. CRAIG: It's very clear that he's never read my published work in which I argue at length for each of these attributes that I ascribe to the first cause. I think one of the attractive features of the argument is its modesty. It doesn't try to prove any of the moral properties of the first cause of the universe. It doesn't try to prove that this cause is morally good, for example. In that sense it doesn't prove the existence of God if we think of God's goodness as an essential property of God. But it does give us this first uncaused, timeless, spaceless, immaterial, enormously powerful, personal creator of the universe which I think no atheist would be willing to affirm.

KEVIN HARRIS: I believe this is the final clip from Matt Dillahunty.

MATT DILLAHUNTY: The kalam cosmological argument is deader than a dead thing when it comes to demonstrating that a God exists. But it's very, very, very much alive in convincing apologists and people who already believe that they're on really firm footing because it just seems so intuitive. Of course the universe must have had an explanation. Something can't come from nothing. You hear these things all the time, and they're asserted and they're accepted. And yet there's no demonstration that they're actually correct and that they necessarily lead to a God. So I'm pretty much done with the kalam cosmological argument. Now, if somebody calls into the show and presents it, I'll give some shortened version of this as I've been doing a little bit. But there were people who were confused as to how can you dismiss something that's so prevalent? I mean, William Lane Craig of all people. This is like his favorite argument. Yes. It is. Because then it looks like he's accomplished something when he's accomplished absolutely nothing.

KEVIN HARRIS: Well, Bill?

DR. CRAIG: In this clip I take it that Matt's main complaint is that this argument only convinces apologists, and by calling its proponents “apologists” rather than “philosophers” what Matt is doing is attempting to dismiss these people in a very condescending way. I think our listeners probably can recognize that this is nothing but bluster on his part. The fact is that this argument and its premises are defended today by a constellation of very prominent philosophers and physicists. Let me just read to you from The Cambridge Companion to Atheism published by Cambridge University Press. This is a book on atheism. In the chapter written by Quentin Smith, this is what Smith has to say. He writes,

A count of the articles in the philosophy journals shows that more articles have been published about Craig’s defense of the Kalam argument than have been published about any other philosopher’s contemporary formulation of an argument for God’s existence. Surprisingly, this even holds for Plantinga’s arguments for the rational acceptability of the ontological argument and Plantinga’s argument that theism is a rationally acceptable basic belief. The fact that atheists and theists alike cannot leave Craig's Kalam argument alone suggests that it may be an argument of unusual philosophical interest or else has an attractive core of plausibility that keeps philosophers turning back to it and examining it once again.

In 2018 Paul Copan and I collected an anthology of these articles in this two-volume work entitled The Kalam Cosmological Argument which is published by Bloomsbury Press in England. The first volume concerns the philosophical arguments in support and against the kalam cosmological argument, and the second volume has papers pro and con on the scientific case for the beginning of the universe and a personal creator. Those anthologies, I think, show how live the debate is on the contemporary scene and very sophisticated philosophers continue to publish on this. For example, this is Alexander Pruss' book published in 2018 entitled Infinity, Causation, and Paradox. This is doubtless the most sophisticated defense of kalam cosmological arguments that has ever been published. Pruss is a mathematician as well as a philosopher, and much of this book consists of dense mathematics that is incomprehensible to someone who is not a trained mathematician. So the idea that the kalam cosmological argument is dead is simply baseless posturing on Matt's part, and anyone who is really serious I think needs to engage with this sort of ongoing work. My final reflection on this video would be this. In these clips Matt Dillahunty raises a number of very fascinating questions about the origin of time, whether a first cause of the universe would be a mind, whether it would be timeless and spaceless, and so forth. These are fascinating questions that merit exploration. What's so sad about his dismissive attitude to this is that he exhibits absolutely no intellectual curiosity about these questions at all. He doesn't care a bit about the truth of these matters. He’s just looking for loopholes to try to escape an argument. And I think that’s really sad because these are questions that engage top philosophers today and merit hard thinking and thorough exploration.^[2]