The Kalam, Time, and Causation.

Dr. William Lane Craig is arguably the most prominent philosopher promoting the Kalam cosmological argument in our day. All manner of objections have been raised against it. I’m not going to address those objections here. Many others have already done that, including Dr. Craig in his academic publications.1

I do, however, want to present one particular response that Dr. Craig shared in his debate with Dr. Massimo Pigliucci. A questioner had come forward raising an objection to Dr. Craig’s argument. Their concern was about the argument and how it relates to the impersonal or personal cause of the universe. Here is Dr. Craig’s response:

What I am arguing is that time must have a beginning. And that, therefore, the cause of the universe transcends time as it exists alone without the universe. And what I’m suggesting is that if those causal conditions that are sufficient for the existence of the universe are timelessly present, then the universe should be timelessly present as well. It would be impossible for those causal conditions to exist and yet the effect of those causal conditions not to co-exist with it. Otherwise they are not sufficient conditions. So if the causal conditions are timelessly given and they are sufficient for the effect, the effect should be co-existent with the cause. But in fact, that is not the case, what we have is a universe with a beginning—a temporal beginning.
 
How in the world can you get an effect with a temporal beginning from a cause that is timelessly present and existent? I can think of only one way out of this dilemma and that is by positing that the cause is a free agent endowed with freedom of the will and therefore able to create a new effect without any antecedent determining conditions. And thus, you can have a temporal effect arise from a timeless, personal agent cause. And I think that solves the dilemma.

The interesting contrast here, I think, is between the necessary and sufficient conditions. Just what could be the sufficient condition that brings about the beginning of time that didn’t have any antecedent determining conditions? Could this be anything else besides a timeless, personal agent?

Here’s a link to the debate. And here’s a link to quoted portion of the debate.

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Published 10/23/18

Clarifying the Argument from Contingency

The argument from contingency1 has, for some people, one particular premise that is a bit hard to swallow. Additionally, this particular premise has an aspect to it that can make things a little confusing (it was a bit confusing for me when I first delved into it and I’ve seen it confuse others as well)2. Let’s look at the whole argument and then evaluate the challenging premise in a little more detail.

1. Everything that exists has an explanation of its existence, either in the necessity of its own nature or in an external cause.
2. If the universe3 has an explanation of its existence, that explanation is God.
3. The universe exists.
4. Therefore, the universe has an explanation of its existence. (1 & 3)
5. Therefore, the explanation of the existence of the universe is God. (2 & 4)

Premise 4 follows logically from 1 and 3. This is unsurprising.
Premise 5 follows logically from 2 and 4. Again, this is unsurprising.
Premise 3 is relatively uncontroversial, so we are left with premises 1 and 2.

Premise 1 is challenged by some people, but that approach is generally an attack on the principle of sufficient reason, and that’s not the topic of this post. Perhaps it will be a topic for a future post, but we won’t be addressing that today.

This leaves us with premise 2. This premise, for a lot of people, is a bit difficult to accept. However, if we look at the premise with a bit more of a critical eye, maybe it will be easier to understand and accept. Here’s the premise again:

2. If the universe has an explanation of its existence, that explanation is God.

Let’s change the wording just a bit:

2′.4 If the universe has an explanation of its existence, then atheism is not true. 5

Without diving into the details of what atheism means6 at the philosophical and/or popular level (for the sake of keeping this post short), we are just changing the wording of the consequent 7 to read “then atheism is not true,” which is to say that God exists. This is pretty straightforward.

We need to examine the consequent of 2’ to clarify things just a bit more.

• If atheism is not true, then God exists.

Now we’ll flip the logic in the statement8:

• If atheism is true, then God does not exist.

Do you see what was done? We moved the negation to the consequent. We can do this in this particular instance because the statements are logically equivalent.9

Now that we’ve clarified the latter part of premise 2, let’s put the whole premise back together with the equivalences compared. Here’s the original premise again:

2. If the universe has an explanation of its existence, that explanation is God.

We’ll change the consequent:

2′. If the universe has an explanation of its existence, then atheism is not true.

We have to be careful with the rules of logic to make the statement logically equivalent:

2”. If atheism is true, then the universe has no explanation of its existence.

Premise 2’’ is logically equivalent to Premise 2.

It is this logical equivalence that has lead some atheists to say that the universe has no explanation. If the atheist admits to an explanation of the universe (Premise 1) then they are implicitly agreeing to Premise 2. The atheist is logically “arm twisted” into denying an explanation for the universe.

Hopefully this clears things up for some people.

Dr. William Lane Craig has a section in his book ON GUARD that expounds on this clarification and the entire argument in more detail. You can purchase his book here: Link.

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Published 8/10/18