I have spent many a quiet evening reflecting on the existence and
nature of deities. Does God exist? Would there be one, many, none? And if God
did exist, how could we prove it? Apparently, I’m not alone in my musings.
W.L. Craig’s search for answers to these age-old questions
ultimately led him to revive an argument for God he called the kalām cosmological argument. To break
down the name, a cosmological argument for God is one that tries to demonstrate
God’s existence from facts about the universe’s nature; by naming it ‘kalām’ Craig is paying homage to the group of Islamic scholars the
argument was previously associated with. While there have been many attempts to
‘logic God into existence’, few have been as popular as this in recent years. But does this popularity reflect its
persuasiveness?
At its core, the kalām argues that
something cannot be caused by nothing. More specifically, the universe cannot
have been caused by nothing. This is the basis of the argument and is both intuitive and
supported by modern science. According to the
big bang theory, the universe did have a beginning at a fixed point in the
past. At this moment, all time and matter began existing at once. We do not
know, and perhaps cannot know, what, or if, anything came before the big bang.
But if we hold that everything which begins to exist is caused, something must
have caused it.
Contrary to those who view science and
theism as incompatible, Craig’s version of the kalām would seem incomplete without any reference to the big bang theory. But more than stating something
cannot be caused by nothing, the kalām also tries to
demonstrate that something non-physical, consciously and without cause, i.e.
something with free will, chose to create the universe at the point of the big
bang. Its supporters hold that, because the
laws of physics do not exist before the big bang in the scientific theory,
science will not be able to adequately explain the universe’s origin, and so
something with free will remains the best possible explanation. A being capable
of such things would be analogous to God.
Interestingly, suggesting that there
was a first historical event (such as the big bang) leaves the argument open to
attack. How? One can argue that this was not the origin of all creation, but
merely the furthest back in history we can investigate within an actually infinite past. In other words, there was no first point in history, and the past
extends backwards in time forever. But does the concept of an actually infinite past really make
sense?
While
infinities are sometimes necessary in mathematical equations, they may not
exist in reality. Davies lays out some problems with them by suggesting that
one can express an infinite past as saying, 'it is possible that every event
has a predecessor'. Put like this, he argues it could mean one of two things.
Firstly, we could assume it means that the number of things that happened in
the past could have been greater; that it is possible the past could have
included more events. Or alternatively, it could mean it is possible that we
cannot have a complete group of past events; that when we group together all of
the events of the past, there could still be earlier historical events, which
is paradoxical. If we take the first interpretation, it doesn't rule out the
idea of there being a beginning to the universe, because it is only possible
and not necessary that every event had a predecessor, so it’s not a problem for
the cosmological argument. If we take the second line of thought, it doesn't
make any sense; intuitively, it's impossible to group everything together and
still miss some things out.
If we continue to assume, rightly or
wrongly, that an infinite past is an unlikely reality, at some point there
needs to be something outside of the universe that causes the universe to
exist. We can therefore continue to engage with the kalām, which suggests that only something possessing free will is capable of
the universe’s creation, where this something is best described as God.
Asking which particular God, or whether
this God is still active in the universe today are both irrelevant to the
argument. Perhaps more surprisingly, questions about the origins of God’s
existence are similarly irrelevant to the argument. Anyone who has themselves
argued that God caused the universe to exist, may have been asked what
caused God to exist, and thus seen their argument evaporate into an endless
search for a first cause. Proponents of the kalām feel able to comfortably dismiss this problem by suggesting that for
something to be the best explanation it does not need to be explained itself.
Reichenbach analogises by using the
example of a girl raising her hand to ask a question. For us to understand that
the girl raised her hand to ask a question, we do not need to understand how
wanting to ask a question led to raising her hand. Similarly, if the kalām is correct
that God is the best explanation, we do not need to understand how God was
caused to know God was the best explanation.
With a small proportion of some key
debates considered, we are left to question whether God really is the best
explanation we have for the causation of the universe. Despite the above, Oppy
suggests a divine being is not. He says either, the universe was caused by God
(or gods) with a non-physical form and free will, or the universe was caused by
something natural. If we consider, devoid of biases, that they are both equally
likely to have been the cause of the universe, he says we should not commit to
the theistic point of view. Theism assumes both natural and supernatural,
whereas a naturalist explanation merely assumes something that indisputably
exists. On Oppy’s view, a natural explanation would require fewer assumptions,
even if we have no adequate natural explanation; therefore, it would be better
to adopt the naturalist point of view.
If it is true that the argument commits
us to believing in something that doesn’t exist, namely something supernatural,
then it would follow that the kalām cosmological argument does not work. But whether or not the kalām does commit
us to something that doesn’t exist, it seems that these age-old questions still
need answers.
©makeuthink.com 2020
References:
Craig, W.L. (2015)
‘The Kalam Cosmological Argument’, Reasonable
Faith, available at https://www.reasonablefaith.org/writings/popular-writings/existence-nature-of-god/the-kalam-cosmological-argument/, accessed 19th February 2021.
Davies, B. (2004) An Introduction to the Philosophy of
Religion: Third Edition, New York,
NY: Oxford University Press, pp. 48-54.
Reichenbach, B.
(2021) ‘Cosmological Argument’,
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy,
available at https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/cosmological-argument/#KalaCosmArgu, accessed 19th February 2021