assessment

CRAIG’S EXTENDED KALAM ARGUMENT FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD

A

1. Every being which begins has a cause for its beginning.

2. The universe is a being which begins.

3. The universe has a cause for its beginning.

10. If the universe had no beginning it would have experienced heat death already.

11. The universe has not experienced heat death already.

12. If the universe did not begin, then there have actually been infinitely many events.

13. There cannot be an actually infinite amount of anything.

14. The Big Bang occurred.

15. In the Big Bang, space and time emerged from a single point.

16. For space and time to emerge from a single point is for the universe to begin.

E F

G

4.Time is part of the universe.

5. The cause of the universe is outside of time.

B

6. The only kind of cause that can be outside of time is a conscious being with free will.

7. A conscious being with free will caused the universe.

C 8. A conscious being with free will which caused the universe would qualify as God.

D

9. God exists.

17. Something’s popping into existence without a cause is more implausible than magic.

18. Magic doesn’t exist.

H

OBJECTIONS TO CRAIG’S ARGUMENT

• Objection to Premise 17: The word “popping” here is designed to make this sound silly as is the comparison to magic. But given that we know that there must be some fundamental processes in the universe, and that these are liable to be counterintuitive, do we have grounds for being so dismissive of the idea that one of these processes might be certain things simply coming to be?

• Objection to Proposition 11: Perhaps the universe is cyclical, and expands after each Big Bang until Hear Death, at which points it contracts in a Big Crunch. If so, it may have experienced Heat Death many times (even infinitely many times) already.

• Objection to Proposition 12: Think about your walking across the room. We can think of that as one event. But we can also count each step as an event. But then each step also has parts (first you raise your foot, then you move it forward, etc.) and we can treat each of these parts as an event, and we can keep subdividing the events infinitely, so that there are an infinite number of events involved in your crossing the room. (Also think of this same example this way, to get across the room you first have to get half- way across, but to do that you have to first get ¼ of the way across, bur before you can do that you have to get 1/8th of the way, and so on, forever. So there are an infinite number of events that need to occur before you can get across the room. For this reason the Ancient philosopher Zeno concluded that motion is impossible. But something is clearly wrong here, since motion obviously is possible. Aristotle suggested that the error is that continuous activities cannot be divided into discrete countable events. If Aristotle is right the same applies for the activity that is the unfolding of the universe.

• Proposition 13 is controversial. Craig gives an argument for it (which isn’t mapped here), but there are objections to this argument (also not mapped here). In general, the idea of infinity raises many paradoxes—different paradoxes if one accepts that there can be infinite quantities and if one denies this. For a summary of some of them see Bradley Dowden’s article on infinity in the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

• “[I]f the Big Bang required a creator, then by that same logic, this creator would require its own creator. And if the creator didn’t require a creator, why would the Big Bang require one?” (Rizvi, Ali A. The Atheist Muslim. St. Martin's Press. Kindle Edition.)

• Objections to Proposition 15:

o Some cosmologists have made claims like this, but it is unclear what they mean. What would it mean for time to emerge from a point? Isn’t emerging something that happens over time?

o The known laws of physics and the observational data enable us to extrapolate back to a time when all the matter of the universe was collected densely in a very small space, and that it exploded outwards from there. But these laws do not say anything about what happened earlier than that. In particular they don’t show that once everything was contained in a single point.

o Maudlin (see below) notes that the theory that the Big Bang was the very beginning of the universe and that it began with everything emerging from a single point was popular in the 1980’s, but that more recent cosmology has taken seriously the idea that something else may have preceded the Big Bang.

• Objection to Proposition 16: Rizvi (see below) argues that words like “beginning” and “end” only apply within Time. If that’s true, and if time is within the universe, then the word “beginning” cannot be applied to the universe at all.

• Objection to Inference A: “Beginning” as that word is ordinarily understood and as it is used in Propositions 17, 18 and 1, means beginning in time—a process where at an earlier time something doesn’t exist and then at a later time it comes to exist. And then we think that something that existed at that earlier time did something to cause the new thing to begin to exist. But if we think that the world “began,” and that time is a part of the world, we must be using the word “began” in some other meaning here. But for Inference A not to be a non-sequitur, the word “begin” would have to mean the same thing in both of its premises.

• Objection to Proposition 5: o What would it even mean for a cause to be outside of time? Isn’t causation something that

happens in time? o Can we make any sense of the idea of a cause that exists outside of time? Isn’t causing

something that happens in time? • Objection to Premise 6: Do we have any reason to think this is true? What would it even mean for a

being to be conscious outside of the universe? What would it be conscious of? What would it mean for a consciousness to exercise free will if it was outside of time? After all, free will is the power to choose, and choosing (like every other action) takes time.