Kalam Cosmological Argument (Twist debate)

Thanks Con! You're traveling through another dimension, a dimension not only of sight and sound but of mind. A journey into a wondrous land whose boundaries are that of imagination. That's the signpost up ahead - your next stop, the Twilight Zone! Here, atheists defend arguments for God! The Kalam Cosmological Argument is as follows 1. Everything that begins to exist has a cause. 2. The universe began to exist. 3. Therefore, the universe has a cause. Premise 1 seems obvious. It's a simple deductive a priori statement. In modern physics, the first law of thermodynamics basically says “...energy can be neither created nor destroyed (conservation of energy). Thus power generation processes and energy sources actually involve conversion of energy from one form to another, rather than creation of energy from nothing” [1]. Premise 2 has philosophical and scientific reasons for believing it. For one, an actual infinite can't exist. What I mean by actual infinite is an eternal past series of events. If such an infinite does exist, we would have to cross and infinite amount of events to get to now. However such a thing is impossible by what an infinite means. Second, many scientists have shown the Universe had a beginning. “In the following decades this new understanding of space and time was to revolutionize our view of the universe. The old idea of an essentially unchanging universe that could have existed, and could continue to exist, forever was replaced by the notion of a dynamic, expanding universe that seemed to have begun a finite time ago, and that might end at a finite time in the future. That revolution forms the subject of the next chapter. And years later, it was also to be the starting point for my work in theoretical physics. Roger Penrose and I showed that Einstein’s general theory of relativity implied that the universe must have a beginning and,possibly, an end” - Stephen Hawking [2] “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” - Alexander Vilenkin [3] Premise 3 follows from above. Why must this cause be God? Let's look at the properties of God and why the Universe's cause must have the same properties. God is timeless, beginningless, immaterial, spaceless, uncaused, changeless, omnipotent, and personal. The Universe's cause must also be timeless, beginningless, immaterial, spaceless, uncaused, changeless omnipotent, and personal. Timeless, immaterial, spaceless. Time, space and matter were created at the Big Bang. So logically the cause must be timeless (and therefore beginingless), immaterial, and spaceless “The big bang is not like an explosion of matter in otherwise empty space; rather, space itself began with the big bang and carried matter with it as it expanded. Physicists think that even time began with the big bang.” [4] The reason why so many physicists think time began at the Big Bang, is because of Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. “However in 1915, Einstein introduced his revolutionary General Theory of Relativity. In this, space and time were no longer Absolute, no longer a fixed background to events. Instead, they were dynamical quantities that were shaped by the matter and energy in the universe. They were defined only within the universe, so it made no sense to talk of a time before the universe began” [5] Uncaused The cause must be uncaused, otherwise it wouldn't be beginningless. Changeless If the cause changes something in its nature, it would be an event, as that's what a change is. However an infinite series of events can't exist. Omnipotent The cause must be omnipotent, since it would have immense power to convert nothing into this complex Universe. Personal This one is a disputed one. The best justification I can give is, since the cause must be eternal and changeless, in order to cause the Universe, it must have a personal choice. When the question “How can a first event come to exist if the cause of that event exists changelessly and eternally?” Willliam Lane Craig and James Sinclair argue “The best way out of this dilemma is agent causation, whereby the agent freely brings about some events in the absence of prior determining conditions. Because the agent is free, he can initiate new effects by freely bringing about conditions which were not previously present. For example, a man sitting changelessly from eternity could freely will to stand up; thus, a temporal effect arises from an eternally existing agent.” [6]. KCA rule 1: One does not simply argue for the Kalam without citing William Lane Craig. Thanks Con, for this debate! [1] https://chemistry.osu.edu... [2] Hawking, Stephen. 1988. A Brief History of Time, p. 34 [3] Vilenkin, Alexander. 2006. Many Worlds in One, p.176 [4] http://www.ugcs.caltech.edu... [5] http://www.hawking.org.uk... [6] Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology