The Kalam Cosmological Argument Successfully Demonstrates its Conclusion.

Welcome to the debate! Response to Pro I would like to apologize for saying "had" rather than "has." This was my mistake. Pro's rephrasing of the argument- Pro argues that the universe isn't transcendent to time. However, the universe is "transcendent" to time because it, by definition, contains all time. The universe is, by definition, all space-time and its contents. Therefore, as it contains all time it can be properly said to transcend it. This new statement of the argument therefore fails. Pro's definition- Pro defines beginning in terms of human consciousness. However, obviously human consciousness didn't exist 13.7 billion years ago. This is the main problem with his definition. I will therefore focus on WLC's definition unless pro proposes something more concrete. B Theory of Time The Kalam cosmological argument is predicated on an archaic, unscientific theory of time called the "A Theory." [1] What is the A Theory of time? The A theory of time is the theory of time based on absolute tenses of past, present, and future. [1]A theorists generally believe that the present has a higher lever of objective "existence" than the past or the future. However, thanks to special relativity we know that absolute present doesn't exist. Thanks to a complicated phenomenon known as "relative simultaneity", two events which occur simultaneously to one observer don't according to another. [2] This means that each person has his own perception of "the present" and that none are "objectively" the present. This means the whole of the A theory is incorrect, and we must instead turn to the B Theory. The B theory defines time not in terms of past, present, and future but in terms of earlier, later, and simultaneous. [2] This approach understands that because the present is such a malleable thing, easily changed by accelerating the observer, we cannot use concepts such as the present to objectively describe reality. This completely discredits the idea that the present has a higher level of objective existence than the past or future because the present isn't an objective item. Therefore, according the B theory of time the past, present, and future are all equally real. In fact, the prevailing mathematical description of space-time, which most simply describes the phenomena of general and special relativity, is based on B theory. The so-called Minkowski space-time is used by almost all physicists to do calculations and is the mathematical extension of the B theory of time. [4] Modern physics has both proven B theory and developed the best model of reality based on it. What does this mean for the Kalam cosmological argument? Firstly, WLC's definition of "begins" requires that an item's existence be "a tensed fact." According to special relativity and the B theory of time, there is no such thing as a tensed fact because past, present, and future are relative to the individual observer and therefore not objective. Additionally, the Minkowski space-time model views the universe as a 4-dimensional space-time object. Time is just another dimension, albeit one with slightly different properties than space (eg the sign of dt^2 is negative in the Minkowski metric). The universe no more "began" at time=0 than a yardstick "began" at distance=0. [5] It merely has an edge in the temporal dimension. Additionally, according to WLC, for item "e" to begin there must be "no state of affairs in the actual world in which e exists timelessly". The problem is that because the universe contains all time, it does exist "timelessly." To elaborate, the universe is an object that contains all time and space. Therefore, it is impossible to select any time in which the universe doesn't exist because that time would have to not itself exist. So we can say the universe exists timelessly even if it is not past eternal. The deeper issue is that the standard justification for premise one (everything which begins to exist has a cause) falls apart when one considers the universe and WLC's definition of beginning. The justification for this principle is that we have never seen anything begin to exist without any cause. However, the whole idea of a cause is that it must precede its effect in time. By definition, nothing can precede the universe in time because there was no time "before" the universe. Therefore, the universe actually cannot have a cause in the usual sense of causality. Additionally, everything we have ever scientifically observed come into being, according to Craig's definition, has a material cause. Pro, if you have example of something scientifically demonstrated to begin to exist without a material cause than please speak now. Therefore, if it is valid to say everything has a cause because we've never scientifically observed anything come into existence without a cause, everything which begins to exist has a cause, then it is equally valid to say that everything which begins to exist has a material cause. But obviously the universe can't have a material cause because by definition all material is in the universe. This therefore disproves the "material cause" argument. But if that argument is wrong, then because it relies on the exact same logic used to justify the Kalam the Kalam is also incorrect. Finally, an claim based on inductive arguments, such as "everything which begins to exist has a cause," cannot be logically extended to all objects of that class. For example, a few years ago nobody knew for certain the Higgs Boson existed. Therefore, one could inductively make the claim "everything that exists is not a Higgs Boson" because every single item we had tested was not a Higgs Boson. The problem, of course, is that the claim "everything that exists is not a Higgs Boson" was made without considering the Higgs Boson itself. The Higgs Boson is the only exception to that claim. In the same way, the claim "everything which begins to exist has a cause" is made without considering the universe. In order for one to know that "everything which begins to exist has a cause", if the universe existed one would have to determine whether it had a cause before being certain of the statement. In other words, the justification for the Kalam commits the fallacy of begging the question. This is why scientists don't use Aristotelian-style arguments and instead develop a theory to test against the data. Good luck next round, and I look forward to some spirited debate. Sources 1. http://www.bing.com... 2. http://plato.stanford.edu... 3. http://newt.phys.unsw.edu.au... 4. http://henripoincarepapers.univ-lorraine.fr... Note: this source is highly technical. 5. http://www.atheismandthecity.com... Note: I didn't take any information from this page, just its excellent yardstick analogy.