[u]Kalam is nonsense: a novel linguistic refutation of the Kalam Cosmological Argument for the existence of God from naturalist principles[/u]
Abstract: In this essay, we show by careful linguistic analysis that William Craig’s formulation of the Kalam Cosmological Argument for the existence of God is either unsound or nonsensical from a naturalist perspective. The argument falls upon examination of its first premise. This premise, while intuitively plausible, is in fact infected with nonsense from a naturalist point of view. To my knowledge, this is a novel refutation of the Kalam argument, as the premise I attack is typically agreed to be “relatively uncontroversial”. Perhaps most importantly, this refutation demonstrates that there is no reason for naturalists to be wary of a universe with a finite timeline and a beginning.
The Kalam argument for the existence of God is traditionally formulated as follows:
- Whatever began to exist has a cause of its existence.
- The universe began to exist.
- Therefore the universe has a cause of its existence.
The cause of the universe’s existence is then argued to have divine attributes, and therefore may be justly referred to as God. This argument is traditionally attacked by objecting to premise (2), denying that the universe began to exist. However, this method is scientifically weak, as Big Bang cosmology provides some scientific support for (2). In addition, this method of attack wrongly suggests that the atheist should be wary of the idea that the universe began some finite number of years ago; atheists should be comfortable with this possibility. Another method of attack on Kalam is to accept the argument and conclusion (3) but attack the post-argument analysis which identifies the universe’s cause as God. In my opinion this line of attack successfully shuts down the Kalam argument, but that is not the subject of this essay. In fact, the naturalist can and should shut down the Kalam argument at its very first premise.
In this essay I will analyze the Kalam argument’s premise (1) from a naturalist point of view. To my knowledge, premise (1) has never been seriously questioned. In this post and appended below I offer a proof (the “BC argument”) that the naturalist should deny premise (1) if he believes that the universe is the metaphysical beginning and cause of everything in existence. Since naturalism can be neatly summed up as the metaphysical position that “the universe (that is, nature) is all there is”, it would seem to follow from my proof that naturalists should be piling on to attack premise (1). But this has not been the case. Here I will describe why premise (1) traps even naturalist minds so forcefully, and I will explain the linguistic-philosophical ambiguity that should lead naturalists to deny it.
Let us begin by examining premise (1): “whatever began to exist has a cause of its existence.” William Lane Craig, one of the main defenders of the Kalam argument, defends this proposition as follows:
In this paragraph, Craig implicitly equates his premise (1) with the rather unclear assertion that “something cannot come out of nothing”; what would it even mean to “come out of nothing”, such that Craig can make a statement about whether “something” can do it? Craig then equates (1) with the somewhat clearer statement that “something [which begins] cannot come into existence without a cause.” It is this latter phrasing of Craig’s premise (1) that we will subject to linguistic analysis.
Premise (1), fully unpacked, states that “if any thing X began to exist, then X did not come into existence without a cause.” We know from the next premise that Craig will take X to be “the universe”; so let’s ask what happens when we do that. In particular, what does it mean for the universe to (a) “begin to exist” and (b) “come into existence”?
The notion (a) that the universe “began to exist” suggests that the universe simply has a finite timeline with boundary points on both sides. The “right” boundary point of this timeline would be the present, and the “left” boundary point would be the time of the universe’s beginning. This notion is supported by the Big Bang cosmological theory, which says that the universe’s timeline began when the universe was a point of singularity and ends at the state where we see it today. Craig also argues that the universe cannot have existed forever on philosophical grounds, again concluding that the universe has a finite timeline. I am more convinced by the Big Bang theory than by Craig’s argument; in either case, let us take it for granted that the universe began to exist and affirm (a). However, the BC argument previously mentioned demonstrates that (1) is false from the naturalist perspective, since it shows that for the naturalist, the universe itself began to exist but did not have a cause.
The assertion (b) that the universe “came into existence” suggests that the universe “came” from a state of not-being “into” a sort of background or framework called “existence”. Intuitively, (b) appears to be equivalent to (a); for in our ordinary experience, the beginning of something’s existence is identical to its coming into being. For example, we would be comfortable asserting that a car “begins to exist” once it is constructed, and its construction causes it to “come into being”. The beginning of the car’s existence and its coming into being are one and the same.
However, we will show that (b) is NOT equivalent to (a) when applied to the universe as a whole. In fact, from the naturalist’s perspective, (b) is nonsense when applied to the universe. According to the naturalist, the universe, or nature, is all that there is. That is, the universe is the entire content of existence itself. To the naturalist, therefore, it is absurd to assert that the universe “came into existence”. The universe could not possibly come into some background or framework of existence, for the universe is itself the entire metaphysical background and framework of existence. For the naturalist, to say that the universe came into existence would be equivalent to asserting that a room came into itself – a metaphysical and linguistic absurdity. Thus from the naturalist’s point of view, the assertion (b) that “the universe came into existence” with or without a cause is nonsensical.
To summarize: in the fully expanded premise (1), Craig asserts the relatively uncontroversial premise (a) but then slips it under the table, pulls out (b), and claims that it is identical. The naturalist should not be convinced. More formally, we have argued that premise (1) is false because when its defense is fully unpacked it is revealed that the underlying syllogism does not depend on (1) at all, but on two different formulations of (1) which are claimed to be equivalent but are not. Depending on which formulation is chosen, the Kalam argument is either unsound (if (a) is chosen, we reject premise (1) by the BC argument) or nonsensical (if (b) is chosen, we reject (1) as nonsense).
We have described a novel analysis and refutation of the Kalam argument from the naturalist perspective based on careful linguistic analysis. We have shown that the argument depends on the intuitive equivalence of statements about existence and becoming which upon closer examination are not equivalent from a naturalist point of view. For the naturalist, the nonequivalence of these statements is the juncture at which the Kalam argument fails. Since Kalam fails on grounds having nothing to do with whether or not the universe actually has a beginning, naturalists need not be wary of this possibility. On the contrary, they are free to believe whatever scientific evidence suggests about the world’s timeline.
Appendix
The BC argument
Not everything that begins has to have a cause (contra the Kalam argument). In fact, there is a specific thing which, if it exists, begins but does not have a cause (except possibly itself, depending on how you feel about self-causation). Namely, it is that thing which is itself the cause of everything. Here is a proof.
Definition: “X is the cause of Y” or “X causes Y” means that X is responsible for bringing Y into existence. [This is the cosmological definition of cause.]
Proposition: That thing which begins and is itself the cause of everything (call it B) either (1) does not have any cause C, or (2) its cause C is B itself: C = B.
Proof: Suppose the following sentence is true.
(*) B does have a cause C.
If so, then since B is the cause of everything, C must be among the things B causes. Therefore B caused C which caused B. Now if C and B were different, then by the definition of cause, B was brought into existence by C, which did not exist until B already existed. This is absurd. Therefore we must have C = B.
If on the other hand our supposition (*) is false, that is equivalent to saying that B does not have any cause. QED