Sunday, September 21, 2008;
From Wiki:
Kalam Cosmological Argument
Christian philosopher and apologist William Lane Craig has recently revived the argument and formulates it as follows:
Premise 1: Everything that begins to exist has a cause.
Craig asserts that the first premise is "relatively uncontroversial". He defines "begins to exist" as "comes into being," and argues that we know from metaphysical intuition that things don't just pop into being uncaused. According to Craig, this establishes premise 1.
Premise 2: The universe began to exist.
The second premise is usually supported by the following argument:
- An actual infinite cannot exist.
- A beginningless series of events is an actual infinite.
- Therefore, the universe cannot have existed infinitely in the past, as that would be a beginningless series of events.
Conclusion 1: Therefore, the universe must have a cause.
Craig describes the impossibility of an actual infinite like an endless bookcase. For example, imagine a bookcase that extends infinitely on which there is an infinite number of books, colored green and red, green and red, and so on. Obviously there would be an infinite number of books. Imagine removing all red colored books, leaving an infinite number of green books remaining, leading to the conclusion that "infinity" divided by two is also "infinity". Craig claims that the inability to sensibly extend the standard definitions of
division on finite, nonzero numbers to include infinite numbers demonstrates the physical impossibility of actual infinities. Therefore, since the universe cannot have existed for an actually infinite amount of time, it must have (been caused to) come into existence at some finite time in the past.
In summary, the Kalam Cosmological Argument rests on the premise that the universe is not infinite in the past, but had a finite beginning which necessitates a cause for its existence. And this cause would be by definition, God, or a divine being.
Other info / My opinion:
Opponents of this argument pose the question of why this first cause is exempt from the nature of this argument in itself. Eg. Some greater being must have created this "supreme being" and so forth and so forth, leading to an infinite regression again. There are a number of issues with this reasoning that stem from the definition of God. The word God has no doubt been watered down as we use it to describe anything (eg. Fowler is God) and everything (eg. "Money is my God"). Going back to the technicalities, the definition of this being "God" entails attributes such as omniscience, omnipotence, omnipresence, omnibenovelance amongst others. Thus is such a definition, neither Fowler nor money can be accorded the term "God" appropriately as they lack these attributes.
Relating back to the new dilemma of another infinite regression of supreme or divine beings, this definition straightens certain things out.
- The Being which we describe as "God" has to be omnipresent
"Omnipresence is the ability to be present in every
place at any,
and/or every,
time; unbounded or universal presence."
Thus logically speaking, to view God as a created being would be technically impossible as such a being would not have been present at every time due to the infinite regression of numerous other "greater" beings creating and created earlier on in time. Thus if this being does not fulfill the criteria of omnipresence, it cannot qualify as God, and so do the numerous other created "lesser" beings before it in the regression, leaving only the first cause able to be defined as God.
8:59 PM