The Kalam Cosmological Argument is Sound

The formulation of the KCA I will defending goes like this: [1] 1. Everything that begins to exist has a cause. 2. The universe began to exist. 3. Therefore, the universe has a cause. 4. If the universe has a cause, there exists an uncaused, personal Creator of the universe who sans the universe is beginningless, immaterial, timeless, spaceless, changeless, and enormously powerful. 5. Therefore, there exists an uncaused, personal Creator of the universe who sans the universe is beginningless, immaterial, timeless, spaceless, changeless, and enormously powerful. Preliminary Definitions By "cause", I mean either an efficient cause or a material cause, or both. An efficient cause is something which brings its effect into being. A material cause is the stuff out of which something is made. For example, when a sculptor makes a mug, the sculptor is the efficient cause of the mug, and the hunk of clay from which the mug is made is the material cause. Premise (1) merely asserts that everything that begins to exist has some sort of causal conditions, either an efficient cause, a material cause, or both. Though William Lane Craig generally understands premise (1) to be talking about efficient causes, he allows my interpretation at the suggestion of Graham Oppy. (1) Everything that begins to exist has a cause There are three lines of evidence for premise (1). (1.1) Something cannot come from nothing - This seems obvious, when you think about it. The potential for something’s existence is always logged in something else. The potential for a boat is logged in previously existing wood. For something to come into being from nothing, the potentiality for its existence couldn’t be logged in anything, and therefore there is no potentiality for its existence. But if something came into being without any causal conditions, it would come from nothing. Therefore, whatever comes into being must have some sort of causal conditions. (1.2) If something could come into being out of nothing, then it becomes inexplicable why anything and everything don’t come into being out of nothing - If universes can come into being out of nothing, why can’t horses and potatoes likewise do so? If they can, then why don’t they? Why aren’t lions and tigers and bears coming into being right now, if it’s possible that they can? If you affirm that something came into being without a cause, not only can you not explain why that being exists, you cannot explain why an infinity of infinity of begins do not exist. That, at least to me, is to high a price to pay for a denial of premise (1). (1.3) Common experience confirms and never falsifies premise (1) - We constantly observe that things which come into being have causes, and never observe things beginning to exist without causes. Therefore, we can make an inductive generalization that whatever begins to exist has a cause. Now, I’m inclined to view (1.3) as mere support for premise (1), not the basis of its truth. (1.1) and (1.2) serve as the foundation for (1), and (1.3) could be thought of as a supporting beam. (2) The universe began to exist Here I will sketch two arguments for premise (2). (2.1) The Impossibility of an Actually Infinite Number of Things - An actual infinite is a collection of things who’s total number of members is infinite. It is not growing towards infinity, it is complete and actual. An example of this would be the set of all positive numbers. I will argue that an actual infinite, so defined, cannot exist because its real existence leads to absurdities. Imagine an infinite collection of marbles, numbered 1, 2, 3, and so on out to infinite. You want to give your friend some marbles because he doesn’t have any. You take away all the even numbered marbles and give them to your friend. How many marbles do you have left? An infinite amount, for you still have all the odd numbered marbles. Here infinity minus infinity equals infinity. But now rewind the scenario, so that you have all the marbles again. This time you decide to give your friend all the marbles numbered three and above. How many marbles would you have left? Well, two. Here infinity minus infinity equals two. But this contradicts the answer we got in our first thought experiment. Because the real existence of an actual infinite leads to contradictions, it cannot exist in reality. But if the universe is eternal in the past, then there have been an actually infinite number of events in the history of the universe prior to today. Because an actually infinite number of past events cannot exist, the universe cannot be eternal. Rather, it had a beginning. (2.2) Modern Big Bang Cosmology - In 1915, Albert Einstein formulated his General Theory of Relativity (GR). One of the disturbing implications of GR was that the universe could not be in a static, unchanging state. A few years later physicists Alexander Friedmann and Georges Lemaître found solutions to the equations of GR which predicted an expanding universe. In 1929, Edwin Hubble observed the light from distant galaxies was shifting towards the red end of the spectrum, which implied that the galaxies were moving away at fantastic speeds. This in turn implied the universe was expanding. This was the first of many empirical confirmations of what later became known as the Big Bang theory (BBT). Because BBT is based on the equations of GR, it doesn’t predict that galaxies are being pushed apart from a central point, but rather that space itself is expanding. As you trace the expansion backwards in time, space gets smaller and galaxies get closer together. The universe gets denser and denser, until you reach a time when everything is crushed down to a point. The density of the universe at this point is infinite. Before this, the universe did not exist. Some object that because GR breaks down at the first split-second of the universe, we cannot say what happened during this time. Perhaps the universe arose from the quantum vacuum. While this is true, it’s irrelevant. In 2003, three cosmologists crafted the BGV theorem, which shows that any universe which is on average in a state of cosmic expansion throughout its history cannot be eternal in the past. [2] The original published paper can be found here. [3] (4) If the universe has a cause, there exists an uncaused, personal Creator of the universe who sans the universe is beginningless, immaterial, timeless, spaceless, changeless, and enormously powerful. Having established the universe has a cause, we may now inquire what such a cause must be like. As a cause of space and time, this cause must be spaceless and timeless. It must therefore be immaterial and changeless. This cause must be uncaused, for as we’ve seen there cannot be an infinite regress of causes; you must get back to an Uncaused First Cause. This cause must therefore be beginningless, for anything with a beginning has a cause. But I think we can go beyond that and establish that this cause is also personal. (4.1) Abstract Objects vs. Unembodied Minds - There are only two things which could be spaceless and timeless: abstract objects, such as a number, or unembodied minds. But abstract objects can’t cause anything, let alone the universe. That’s part of what it means to be an abstract object. Therefore, the cause of the universe must be an unembodied Mind. Notes [1] William Lane Craig, and James Sinclair, “The Kalam Cosmological Argument,” in The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology. Blackwell Publishing, 2009. Print. Chapter 3. [2] Craig, W. L. “Does God Exist?”, Reasonable Faith. Web. http://www.reasonablefaith.org... (30 July 2013) [3] Arvind Borde, Alan H. Guth, and Alexander Vilenkin, “Inflation is not Past Eternal” Web. http://arxiv.org...... (18 July 2013).