The KCA is a Sound Argument

Achtung! The Kalam Cosmological Argument One does not claim to have completed a puzzle because they poured the pieces on the floor and said “Look, I have all the pieces!”. Similarly, one cannot claim to have a full argument because they made assertions without linking them to their premises. I will wait until the next round for Pro to connect “The problem of free will” and “Aristotle’s Four Causes” with the Kalam Cosmological Argument. An audience member reading this may see it as absurd to deny the truth of the first premise. However, it’s been empirically demonstrated that the first premise is not intuitively true. The philosopher Wes Morriston conducted a survey of the philosophy faculty at Boulder, and ten out of sixteen responses stated that it was not obvious that everything which begins to exist must have a cause (http://tinyurl.com...). The philosopher Quentin Smith states that “the majority of graduate and undergraduate students I've had in my classes think this principle is false” (http://tinyurl.com...). Given these findings, it is not clear why we should believe that the first premise of the KCA is obviously true. Assume that the first premise is intuitively true. Even then, this intuition would not allow us to say that the beginning of the universe had to have a cause. Our rational faculties are bred by our experience and the experience of our evolutionary ancestors. Let’s look at the Big Bang singularity; The Big Bang singularity is a zero-dimensional point of infinite density, curvature, and temperature. Humans, at no point, have had any first-hand or evolutionary experience with a singularity of infinite density, curvature, and temperature. Our rational faculties, as something bred by experience, cannot have anything to say about a Big Bang singularity, since nobody has ever experienced something so beyond the pale as the Big Bang singularity. Therefore, there is no justification for the proposition that “The beginning of the Big Bang singularity has a cause” from its obviousness to our faculties. Suppose that the first premise of the argument is construed as a metaphysical intuition. The history of science shows that many things which were once metaphysical intuitions and thought of as necessarily true have turned out to be false. Science, specifically physics, has overthrown our intuitions about reality. For example, our intuition tells us that two events must be locally connected to have any causal effects on each other. This intuition is so strong that many take it to be metaphysically necessary. For example, we think that a shark in the Pacific Ocean cannot eat me if I am swimming in the Atlantic Ocean. However, experiments in quantum mechanics have destroyed this intuition. Experiments with photons by Alain Aspect in the 1980s (http://tinyurl.com...) demonstrated that two things can have causal influences with each other even if they are opposite sides of the universe. In the words of the physicist Brian Greene, “The outcome of what you do at one place can be linked with what happens at another place, even if nothing travels between the two locations--even if there isn’t enough time for anything to complete the journey between the two locations” (The Fabric of the Cosmos, pg 114-115). Science has shown that things which are construed as metaphysical intuition can actually end up being false given empirical data. Pro argues that if something can come from nothing, then we should expect to see things like tigers and bears popping out of nothing all of the time. We don’t see this, so something cannot come from nothing. The answer to this is that the first premise is false; if something can come from nothing, we should not expect to see things popping out of nothing all the time. The reason for this is that human beings occupy space-time and live under physical laws. If a tiger spontaneously appeared during a William Lane Craig debate, then it would have came from being. The reason we don’t see tigers and bears coming into being from non-being is that we occupy space-time, and that’s being. It’s simply impossible for us to experience a tiger coming from non-being, because everything we experience takes place in space-time (being). Furthermore, the anti-Kalamist can state that the Big Bang could have came from nothing due to the absence of physical laws, but we do not see something coming from nothing today because physical laws exist. The Big Bang singularity is an instant at which all physical laws break down (S. W. Hawking, Breakdown of Predictability in Gravitational Collapse,' Physical Review D, 14 (1976), 2460). However, our everyday life is governed by the laws of physics. We can therefore assert that the universe came from nothing because of the lack of physical laws, while explaining the fact that things don’t pop into being from nothing today by pointing out that physical laws prevent such a thing from happening. Pro states that we experience things coming into being having causes, so everything that begins to exist has a cause. This is clearly an attempt at inductively justifying the first premise. I'm shocked that he does this without noting any of the problems with this method. I can use inductive generalization to disprove the theory of relativity! In all of my experience, when an object in motion gets pushed, it travels faster. Therefore, I can make an inductive generalization that an object in motion goes faster when it’s pushed. Imagine a William Lane Craig book traveling at the speed of light. According to my inductive generalization, if I push the book, it will travel faster than the speed of light. This means that my inductive generalization has proven that an object can travel faster than the speed of light. If your warrant for P1 can be used to disprove one of the most confirmed theories in all of science, there’s something wrong with your warrant. It is logically possible for the universe to have no cause. I have already shown that the warrants Pro gives for the proposition that “everything that begins to exist has a cause” are insufficient. Therefore, it is entirely possible for the universe to have began without any cause. It is logically possible for the universe to have caused itself to come into being. This may seem absurd at first glance. As popular reasoning goes, "If something causes itself, doesn't it exist before it begins to exist?" I would agree that this type of self-causality is absurd. Something cannot cause itself to begin to exist before it begins existing. However, there is a different type of self-causality which does not fall into this absurdity. Suppose that the universe brings itself into being at an instantaneous moment; In other words, it causes itself at the same time it comes into being. One cannot object to this scenario on the basis that the universe exists before it causes itself, because there is no temporal gap in the scenario I am describing. Therefore, there is a logically possible situation where the universe brings itself into being. The universe could have been brought into being by infinite simultaneous causation of elementary particles. Simultaneous causation is the idea that "the causal order must not be the temporal order because of the possibility of cause and effect being contemporaneous." X and Y have such a relationship if X, the cause, and Y, the effect, happen at the same instantaneous moment. The possibility of simultaneous causation demonstrates how the universe could have came into being. The earliest instant of the universe was simultaneous causation of elementary particles. For example, a given quark is caused to exist by a given electron, which is caused to exist by a given quark, ad infinitum, at the earliest instant of the universe. This causation is instantaneous, so so all of these cause and effect relations happen at the same moment in time. Elementary particles therefore have an explanation with reference to other elementary particles. Since all physical things are reducible to interactions of elementary particles, an explanation of elementary particles in the first state entails an explanation of everything within the first state. This hypothesis makes predictions which are confirmed by physics. It predicts that particles are able to instantaneously effect the conditions of other particles. This is proven by the Aspect experiments mentioned before. His 1986 experiment, "Experiments on Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen-type Correlations with Pairs of Visible Photons', published in Quantum Concepts in Space and Time, found that "If a photon x is measured to be in a 'spin up' state, this simultaneously causes a spatially distant photon y to be in a 'spin down' state". The philosopher of physics Quentin Smith writes that "Alain Aspect's confirmation of Bell's theorem can plausibly be taken as confirming the existence of simultaneous or instantaneous causation across arbitrarily large spatial distances."(Ibid). It is therefore the case that particles can instantaneously change the states of other particles. It also predicts that space is infinite.This is entailed by inflationary Big Bang cosmology also entails that space is infinite. Alexander Vilenkin and Jaume Garriga published an article called 'Many worlds in one' in the journal Physics Review, and they conclude in their abstract that "generic prediction of inflation is that the thermalized region we inhabit is spatially infinite."To conclude with the words of Quentin Smith, "This world exists nonnecessarily, improbably, and causelessly. It exists for absolutely no reason at all. It is inexplicably and stunningly actual. The impact of this captivated realisation upon me is overwhelming. I am completely stunned. I take a few dazed steps in the dark meadow, and fall among the flowers. I lie stupefied, whirling without comprehension in this world through numberless worlds other than this one."