I. Introduction:
A cosmological argument is an argument that claims that the existence of God can be inferred from facts concerning causation, explanation, change, motion, contingency, dependency, or finitude concerning the universe. Many important and famous thinkers throughout history have pondered these facts and have given arguments of this type, such as Plato, Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, Gottfried Leibniz, Al-Ghazali, and many others. In this post, we will focus on the kalam Cosmological Argument (KCA) which originated with Al-Ghazali. In recent years, the philosopher and theologian William Lane Craig (WLC) enhanced this argument by giving supporting arguments to the premises of the KCA that are rooted in modern scientific discoveries, namely General Relativity and Big Bang Cosmology.
This enhancement of the argument has thrusted the KCA into the mainstream where it is to this day seriously discussed and debated in academia and popular writings. This argument, as you will soon see, is not to be blindly dismissed, but to be seriously considered and analyzed.
II. Overview and Explanation:
In this post, we will use a formalization of the KCA that has been popularized by WLC, which takes the following form:
P1: Everything that began to exist has a cause.
P2: The universe began to exist.
C1: Therefore, the universe has a cause.
A common knee-jerk response from many people is “well if God caused the universe, what caused God”? Notice that premise P1 does not say everything has a cause, but actually says that everything that BEGAN to exist has a cause. It will later be argued in Section VI that the cause of the universe is necessarily beginningless. Another complaint is that this argument is not an argument for Christianity or any other particular god, and that is correct! This argument endeavors to show that it is more reasonable to believe that there is a transcendent cause of the universe rather than there not being one. Additional arguments are deployed to argue for Christianity, but for now, this argument is what we will focus on, and will give us good reason to believe in a class of religions, namely the Abrahamic ones (i.e., Christianity, Islam, and Judaism).
III. Logical Validity and Soundness:
The argument given in the previous section is a logically valid syllogism, which uses deductive reasoning. A syllogism is constructed with a major premise (P1), a minor premise (P2), and a conclusion (C1). A syllogistic argument is said to be valid if and only if whenever the premises are all true, then the conclusion is necessarily true. This can be validated through an elementary logical analysis, where the KCA is expressed in its logical form as
which is found to be logically valid by modus ponens. Following this, an argument is considered to be sound if the premises are found to be true. The forthcoming sections will give additional arguments in support of premises P1 and P2. If the reader finds that P1 and P2 are more probably true than not, and wishes to maintain the state of being a rational and reasonable person, he would have to accept the conclusion C1 since the argument is logically valid (the conclusion necessarily follows from the premises).
IV. Premise 1 Support:
Premise P1 ought to be taken as obviously true from our observations of the world, but a discussion of this premise will be given anyways. If one was to deny the first premise he would have to also reject the well-established metaphysical principle of ex nihilio nihil fit (Latin for out of nothing, nothing comes), and make the radical claim that things could just pop into existence, out of nothing, and from nothing. To paraphrase WLC, this is to quit doing serious and resort to magic, but even then, it is worse than magic since magic at least has a magician! In addition, if things could pop into existence from nothing, why doesn't anything just abruptly pop into existence, why just the universe? What makes nothing so discriminatory? This idea that nothing is discriminatory is an absurdity, nothing is neither discriminatory nor not, it is nothing! Given this, it seems that there is good reason to take premise P1 as true. But how does this contrast with the Christian doctrine of creatio ex nihilio (Latin for creation out of nothing)? This doctrine states that matter is not eternal but had to be created by some divine creative act. This creative act would bring matter from nonbeing to being, where the causal actor (God) would be the efficient cause (see Aristotle’s four types of causation) of matter to come into being. However, this cause would have to be necessarily immaterial to cause matter to come into being (more on this in Section IV). So, if someone was to reject premise P1 but affirm premise P2, he would have to say that the universe came into being without any cause, whereas the person that affirms both premises can more reasonably claim that the universe came into being due to an immaterial, but an efficient cause, rather than no cause at all.
V. Premise 2 Support:
Now that we have established that there is good reason to believe that premise P1 is true rather than not, we will turn our attention to the minor premise P2. Here, this premise enjoys both deductive philosophical arguments and inductive scientific arguments.
V.1. Philosophical Arguments:
In this post, we present two deductive philosophical arguments: firstly it will be argued that it is impossible for there to be an actual infinite number of things, and secondly it will be argued that it is impossible to form an actually infinite collection of things by adding one member after another. Before we investigate these arguments we must first define what we mean by an absolute infinite. An actual infinite is a collection of definite and discrete members whose number is greater than any natural number 1,2,3,…. This is the type of infinite found in Cantorian set theory. By contrast, a potential infinite is a collection that is increasing toward infinity as a limit but never gets there. With this established, the following logically valid deductive argument is given
PA1: An actually infinite number of things cannot exist.
PA2: A beginningless series of events in time entails an actually infinite number of things.
CA1: Therefore, a beginningless series of events in time cannot exist.
Premise PA2 is obviously true, so we will focus on premise PA1 to establish the soundness of this argument. To this end, we will not only point out that there is no known example of an actually infinite number of things in existence, but we will also investigate the absurdities and paradoxes that arise if an actually infinite number of things were to exist. In the 20th century, the famous mathematician David Hilbert declared that the
Infinite is nowhere to be found in reality. It neither exists in nature nor provides a legitimate basis for rational thought… the role that remains for the infinite to play is solely that of an idea.
He illustrated his anti-realist views of an actual infinite in his famous story of the Paradox of the Grand Hotel. So not to reinvent the wheel, I will share this story by taking the following passage from WLC’s book Reasonable Faith (pg 118-119):
First, imagine a hotel with a finite number of rooms. Suppose, furthermore, that all the rooms are occupied. When a new guest arrives asking for a room, the proprietor apologizes, “Sorry, all the rooms are full,” and that’s the end of the story. But now let us imagine a hotel with an infinite number of rooms and suppose once more that all the rooms are occupied. There is not a single vacant room throughout the entire infinite hotel. Now suppose a new guest shows up, asking for a room. “But of course!” says the proprietor, and he immediately shifts the person in room #1 into room #2, the person in room #2 into room #3, the person in room #3 into room #4, and so on, out to infinity. As a result of these room changes, room #1 now becomes vacant and the new guest gratefully checks in. But remember, before he arrived, all the rooms were already occupied! But the situation becomes even stranger. For suppose an infinity of new guests shows up at the desk, each asking for a room. “Of course, of course!” says the proprietor, and he proceeds to shift the person in room #l into room #2, the person in room #2 into room #4, the person in room #3 into room #6, and so on out to infinity, always putting each former occupant into the room with a number twice his own. Because any natural number multiplied by two always equals an even number, all the guests wind up in even-numbered rooms. As a result, all the odd-numbered rooms become vacant, and the infinity of new guests is easily accommodated. And yet, before they came, all the rooms were already occupied! In fact, the proprietor could repeat this process infinitely many times and so always accommodate new guests, despite the fact that the hotel is completely full! As one student remarked to me, if Hilbert’s Hotel could exist, it would have to have a sign posted outside: No Vacancy—Guests Welcome. But Hilbert’s Hotel is even stranger than the great German mathematician made it out to be. Just ask yourself the question: what happens if some of the guests start to check out? Suppose the guests in rooms # l, #3, #5 . . . check out. In this case, an infinite number of people have left the hotel, and half the rooms are now empty. Now suppose the proprietor doesn’t like having a half-empty hotel (it looks bad for business). No matter! By shifting occupants as before, but in reverse order, he transforms his half-vacant hotel into one that is jammed to the gills! You might think that by such maneuvers the proprietor could always keep this strange hotel fully occupied. But you would be wrong. For suppose that the persons in rooms #4, #5, #6 . . . checked out. At a single stroke, the hotel would be virtually emptied, the guest register reduced to but three names and the infinite converted to finitude. And yet it would remain true that the same number of guests checked out this time as when the guests in rooms # l, #3, #5 . . . check out! In both cases we subtracted the identical number of guests from the identical number of guests and yet did not arrive at an identical result. In fact, one can subtract equal quantities from equal quantities and get any quantity between zero and infinity as the remainder. Can anyone believe that such a hotel could exist in reality?
This is not the only paradox that arises when an actually infinite number of things are considered to exist (see the Grim Reaper paradox and Thomson’s Lamp for additional examples). With the absurdities and paradoxes that arise if an actually infinite number of things were to exist, I think we have good reason to believe in the soundness of this argument and the validity of premise P2. It is also very important to note that we are not rejecting the mathematical validity of an infinite, we are only adopting an anti-realist position of the infinite, that being that they don’t exist in reality but are only useful tools in mathematical analysis. Now that we have established that an actually infinite number of things cannot exist, we will now argue that it is impossible to form an actually infinite collection of things by adding one number after another. We can establish this with the following logically valid deductive argument:
PB1: The series of events in time is a collection formed by adding one member after another.
PB2: A collection formed by adding one member after another cannot be actually infinite.
CB1: Therefore, the series of events in time cannot be actually infinite.
For brevity, I will not defend this argument here, but rather just bring it to your attention. For a detailed analysis of this argument see WLC’s book, Reasonable Faith (pgs 120-124).
V.2. Scientific Arguments:
Not only do we have good philosophical arguments in support of premise P2, but we also have good inductive arguments from scientific theories and observations. Namely, the standard model of cosmology, that being the Friedman-LataÎtre model, popularly known as the Big Bang model. The standard model is a cosmological model that comes as a consequence of Albert Einstein's theory of General Relativity. This model describes a universe that is not eternal in the past but rather one that has a beginning a finite time ago, as a consequence of the expansion of spacetime. It posits that there was an absolute origin of the universe that arose out of nothing, ex nihilio. Physicists John Barrow and Frank Tipler make this very clear in their paper, The Anthropic Cosmological Principle, where they state that “at this singularity, space and time came into existence; literally nothing existed before the singularity, so, if the Universe originated at such a singularity, we would truly have a creation ex nihilio.” The prediction of an expanding Universe has enjoyed much observational verification, namely the observational data from the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP), which was designed to measure the microwave background radiation and to test the Big Bang model and the cosmic inflation theory. The experimental results from WMAP had tremendous success as it was able to calculate the expansion rate of the Universe, and also give us the necessary data to estimate the age of the universe. In addition to this, in 2003, the physicists Arvind Borde, Alan Guth, and Alexander Vilenkin published their famous singularity theorem, which simply states that any universe that has been on average in a state of cosmic inflation, has a spacetime boundary a finite time ago. With the data collected from WMAP, we have observational data to support the theorem’s assumption that our universe has been in a state of cosmic inflation. In the words of Alexander Vilenkin, “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.”
The scientific evidence doesn’t stop here, we also have good reason to believe premise P2 to be true based on the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics. The 2nd law states that processes taking place in a closed system always tend toward a state of equilibrium. When this law is applied to cosmology, we arrive at the frightening consequence known as the heat death of the Universe. The heat death of the Universe is what happens when you apply the 2nd law to cosmology, what you find is that the universe will eventually reach a state of equilibrium since, on atheism, the Universe is a massive closed system, since the Universe is everything and there is nothing else. The conclusion is that if given enough time, the Universe will eventually come to a state of equilibrium, a heat death. Once the universe reaches this state, no further change is possible, it is effectively dead. However, a problem arises if you believe that the universe is eternal, since if an infinite amount of time has already elapsed, why aren’t we now in a state of heat death? If only a finite amount of time is required to achieve this state of equilibrium (heat death), it is absurd to think that an infinite amount of time has already elapsed since we are clearly not in a state of heat death. In other words, we again have another reason to believe that premise P2 is true.
VI. Conceptual Analysis:
Now that we have established two philosophical deductive arguments and two inductive scientific arguments, it seems that we have good reason to believe that premise P2 is true, and therefore, the conclusion C1 is true, thus making the argument sound. So cool, we have established that the universe began to exist and must have a necessary cause for its existence, so what, where is God? To make an argument for God, we will continue with the following addition to the Kalam:
P3: The universe has a cause.
P4: If the universe has a cause, then an uncaused, personal Creator of the universe exists who sans (without) the universe is beginningless, changeless, immaterial, timeless, spaceless, and enormously powerful.
C2: Therefore, an uncaused, personal Creator of the universe exists, who sans the universe is beginningless, changeless, immaterial, timeless, spaceless, and enormously powerful.
This is once again a logically valid argument where the conclusion necessarily follows from the premises if they are found to be true. So, given the soundness of the first part of the KCA, premise P3 is true, but what about premise P4? Well through a simple conceptual analysis of the necessary characteristics of the cause of the universe we can arrive at premise P4.
To be the cause of the universe is to also be the cause of space and time since the universe is by definition inclusive of space and time. To cause space and time to come into existence, the cause would have to exist spacelessly and timelessly (i.e., transcend space and time), absent of the universe, therefore, the cause is necessarily spaceless and timeless sans the universe. Since timelessness, implies changelessness, and changelessness implies the immateriality of the cause, we can therefore conclude that the cause is changless and immaterial. We can also conclude that the cause is beginningless since an infinite regress of events is impossible, and Ockham’s Razor will shave away any further causes. We can also claim that the cause must be unimaginably powerful since it causes the universe to begin to exist. But most significantly, we can also claim that the cause must be personal. The personhood of this cause is implied by its timeless and immaterial nature. The only entities we know of which can possess such properties are either abstract objects or unembodied minds, but since abstract objects have no causal power (e.g., the number 7 can’t cause anything), we conclude that the cause must be an unembodied mind. Therefore, we can conclude that the transcendent cause of the universe is an uncaused personal Creator of the universe exists, who sans the universe is beginningless, changeless, immaterial, timeless, spaceless, and enormously powerful. Given these characteristics of the cause, what else could it be other than God!
VII. Conclusion:
It has been shown that the KCA is an argument that is taken seriously in academia, and with good reason, that being the formidable array of supporting arguments for the KCA’s premises. In this post, we looked at two deductive philosophical arguments and two deductive scientific arguments to arrive at the sound conclusion that the universe has a cause, but there are others! From there, we conducted a conceptual analysis of the cause to establish that an uncaused, personal Creator of the universe exists, who sans the universe is beginningless, changeless, immaterial, timeless, spaceless, and enormously powerful, and who else can this be other than God. This argument, therefore, gives us a good reason to believe that God exists.
VIII. Additional Resources and Final Thoughts:
To learn more about this argument and other arguments for God and Christian truth, I recommend reading WLC’s book On Guard, followed by his more rigorous book on the topic, Reasonable Faith. In addition to this, I suggest going to his website reasonablefaith.org and his YouTube page Reasonable Faith to see detailed discussions on this topic and debates between WLC and other prominent philosophers and scientists. He also has a podcast every Monday and posts his Sunday teachings on YouTube as well. For a rigorous analysis of the philosophical arguments about infinities, I recommend looking at the work of the philosopher of mathematics, Alexander Pruss. You can visit his blog alexanderpruss.blogspot.com, and pick up his book Infinity, Causation, and Paradox. Also, if you have any questions, comments, or concerns, please leave a comment below and I will try to answer them myself, or I will at least point you in the right direction.