The Kalam Cosmological Argument is Sound

(1) Whatever begins to exist has a cause You’ll recall that I offered three reasons for accepting premise (1): i. Something cannot come from nothing. ii. If something could come into being without a cause, then it becomes inexplicable why just anything and everything do not come into being without a cause. iii. Common experience confirms and never falsifies premise (1). With regard to (i), my opponent says that if I accept this, I cannot hold that God created the universe out of nothing. This is false, for in the latter statement, “nothing” is meant as the absence of preexisting material, and in (i) “nothing” means “non-being.” In the case of the universe, being (the universe) comes from being (God). He also complains that I cannot make up rules about nothing. Here, and throughout his response, he’s using “nothing” to mean “something”, which is just incoherent. Thus he says things like “…nothing has no rules…it has no rule against something coming from nothing.” He’s talking about “nothing” as if it were something! Premise (1) is a binding rule on all reality, not “nothing”, which is the absence of reality. Concerning (ii), my opponent says that I believe nothing exists now. I have no idea what this means, none whatsoever. Clearly I exist, and therefore it is false that nothing exists. He continues to use the word “nothing” to mean “something” when he says, “Nothing cannot continue creating…pocket universes…” That’s an incoherent statement and I don’t see what relevance it has to (ii). There just is no reason why lions and tigers and bears (and pocket universes, for that matter) are not coming into being without a cause right now, if premise (1) is false. As for (iii), my opponent says that common experience “does not distinguish between the begun and the unbegun.” I take that to mean that common experience would also establish the casual principle: (1’) Whatever exists has a cause. But (1’) is plausibly false, because something which is beginningless cannot have a cause, because it never came into being and therefore cannot be brought into being by something else. Therefore, we can only affirm premise (1). God never began to exists and therefore cannot have a cause. He also raises the objection to (iii) that virtual particles begin to exist uncaused, but this is mistaken. Virtual particles fluctuate into existence from the quantum vacuum, which is a sea of roiling energy. It is indeed something. The quantum vacuum functions as the efficient cause of these virtual particles. This is the case even on the standard Copenhagen interpretation. (2) The universe began to exist. The cosmologist my opponent interviewed sounds like a bit of a nut-case! I’m kidding of course. Notice, he does not deny that the universe began to exist, only that we don’t know what happened before the beginning. I offered three reasons to think that (2) the universe began to exist: 1. The Impossibility of an Actually Infinite Number of Things Regarding the reasons an actually infinite number of things cannot exist, my opponent complains that I take infinity (technically aleph-zero) to be the highest number. This is incorrect. Rather, infinity stands outside the set of numbers, so to speak, and is the number of members in set of natural numbers. He caricatures my argument as one that says because infinite numbers do not behave like finite numbers, they therefore cannot exist. This is emphatically not my argument. What I’m claiming is that because the existence of an actually infinite number of things leads to contradictions, an actual infinite cannot exist in realty. Contra Wiploc, a consensus of the experts is rarely reached, and this fact needn’t deter us from drawing conclusions about the worth of an argument. As for the three physicists he discussed this argument with, I wouldn’t expect physicists to hold that actual infinities cannot exist. Asking a scientist about the worth of a philosophical argument is like asking a golfer his opinion about the war in Iraq. It just doesn’t matter. But for the purposes of debate, here is the following quote from physicists Ellis, Kirchner, and Stoeger: “Can there be an infinite set of really existing universes? We suggest that, on the basis of well-known philosophical arguments, the answer is No.” [1] 1. The Big Bang Theory The professional paper about the BVG Theorem can be found here [2], and I did supply a quote from Vilenkin’s very own book validating the BVG Theorem. I have no idea where my opponent’s charge of plagiarism comes from. It seems to me that he's just trying to score debate points. I can’t make much sense of his comments about pre-big bang contraction. He needs to develop these comments into a model which evades the BVG Theorem. My statement, “any universe which is on average in a state of comic expansion cannot be past-eternal” was not a quote from William Lane Craig. It was a summary of the BVG Theorem. My opponent fails to cite the source of his quote from Vilenkin, so I cannot see the full context of it. Nevertheless, William Lane Craig gives the full quote in his debate with Peter Milican, and Vilenkin is talking about whether the BVG Theorem proves that the universe began to exist, not whether the universe began to exist. See the difference? Either way, he goes on to say that all models that evade the BVG Theorem cannot restore an eternal universe, so for all practical purposes, the BVG Theorem proves the universe had a beginning. (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. [3] Giving a premise of an argument without citing where it was originally formulated is not plagiarizing. You might as well argue I’m plagiarizing when I say (2) the universe began to exist, or (2.1) an actually infinite number of things cannot exist. Such a charge is patently absurd. My opponent claims that if something doesn’t exist in space and time, it doesn’t exist. He gives no argument for this assertion. Indeed, his claim assumes that atheism is true, and therefore begs the question! His statement that we’ve never investigated spaceless places or timeless times is logically incoherent. We haven’t investigated these things for the same reason that there are no married bachelors. Non-dimensional unicorns are incoherent and therefore cannot be a cause of the universe. My opponent cannot simply assert his lack of understanding regarding an unembodied Mind. He needs to give some argument for thinking that such a mind is impossible. He does muse that timeless minds cannot think, but that needn’t bother us. A timeless mind can have a single, changeless state of consciousness (that is, a thought). Again, we’ve seen no argument to the contrary. As for whether an unembodied Mind can cause something, I maintain that without the universe, God is timeless. But with the universe in existence, He is temporal. Because He exercises His causal power in creating the universe, He changes, and is therefore temporal. So long as God is not essentially timeless and unchanging, there’s no problem in Him creating the universe. Conclusion It seems to me that most of my opponent’s objections were based on confusion, and I’ve sufficiently answered all of them. I don’t appreciate being called a plagiarizer. If my opponent seriously thought I was plagiarizing, he should have messaged me privately, not accused me publicly. Notes [1] G. F. R. Ellis, U. Kirchner, and W. R. Stoeger, “Multiverses and Physical Cosmology,” http://arxiv.org... (18 July 2013), 14. Emphasis mine. [2] Arvind Borde, Alan H. Guth, and Alexander Vilenkin1, “Inflation is not Past Eternal” http://arxiv.org... (18 July 2013). [3] William Lane Craig, and James Sinclair, “The Kalam Cosmological Argument,” http://commonsenseatheism.com... (18 July 2013), 94.