The Kalam Cosmological Argument

Good job Con! I knew you wouldn’t disappoint with your responses.Con starts his round with a series of questions. So in response I will answer them.1. Must our universe be created by a first cause?This question is common. Why is God the cause, and not another? First off, only things that have a temporal existence have a cause. Therefore God being external of time, and not being with a temporal existence, does not have a cause. So the question here that I am reading is how can we conclude that there is not some community of God like beings? There are many answers to this, like the idea that multiple omnipotent beings would be inconsistent with each other. However the most logical and simple answer can be summed up by Ockham’s Razor. This states that “entities should not be multiplied unnecessarily.”[1] So with this philosophy we only need to postulate a sufficient reason for the cause. God is a sufficient reason and other causes are not needed.2. Must the cause be all powerful?I personally don’t like the term all powerful. I use the term maximally powerful. But this is entirely a different debate. In this debate all the cause of the universe must be is sufficiently powerful in order to create the universe from nothing. One could argue though that to bridge the gap between nonexistence and existence it would take a maximally powerful being.3. Must the cause be intelligent?The Kalam argument doesn’t go fully into this question, however we can reasonably attribute intelligence from it. In order to create existence, and to create a temporal system from a being that is not temporal, shows the ability to choose, and therefore have intelligent thought. 4. Must the cause be timeless and spaceless?The creation of the universe was the creation of space and time. This shows then that God is external from space and time in that he created it. This does not say that God cannot interact within his creation, but he himself is not subject to the boundaries that we are confined to. 5. Must the cause be personal?If the cause was not personal, then it was an impersonal mechanism. This mechanism would also be timeless for the same reasons the personal cause would be. But if this impersonal mechanism were to create it would be a state to state creation. In other words only timeless events could come forth from a timeless impersonal mechanism. For example a piece of wood floating in water would be equivalent to an impersonal mechanism causing an event. No beginning is needed, but the water causes the wood to float by its given buoyancy and therefore we have the event of a floating piece of wood. So for a temporal creation to come forward from a timeless cause there must have been conscious thought that went into the creation giving us a personal cause.6. Must the cause be morally perfect and / or Omni benevolent?There could be some speculation into how these things could be concluded from the KCA, but this argument is not built to satisfy these questions. The argument simply states that the universe had a cause. I added myself the thought that the cause is most plausibly God. Even though these attributes cannot be absolutely concluded from the KCA, enough of God’s other attributes can be.7. A mind without a brain?Simply showing by inductive logic to include all observable minds being associated with a physical mind does nothing to disprove an unembodied mind. For one, we can only see our physical world, and if a singular unembodied mind were right next to me I would be unable to witness it. I could equally state that millions of people communicate with this unembodied mind verifying it’s existence. The only way we could verify it’s existence would be through personal revelation or direct communication since it is not made up of physical parts, and therefore it is up to you to believe weather or not what people say in regards to first hand witnessing these interactions to be true or not. But like I said, you have given me no reason as to why one could not exist, but shown how it hasn’t been empirically verified in our world. The main point here is that an unembodied mind is not made up of physical parts and therefore your method for inductive logic using witnessed minds does not disprove anything.Defending P1:I apologize if I was coming across as saying everything has a cause. I meant, as illustrated by P1, everything that begins to exist has a cause. The list of things I gave was all temporal things and had causes. God does not have a cause in that he never began to exist but exists eternal.You next refer to God being the only thing to be uncaused. I want to clarify that I never said that. There are other things, like numbers, that are uncaused. They exist on their own, they exist necessarily, and they do not require any cause to exist. However numbers cannot cause anything into existence whereas God can.Next you bring up the fallacy of composition. You state that individual components of the set do not necessarily apply to the set as a whole. The question here is what is the set? The set I’m referring to is all temporal things. I state that every temporal thing has a cause. The universe is a part of this set and therefore had a cause. So under this I would have to say that the fallacy of composition does not even apply as the universe is not the ultimate set whereas all temporal things are. You ask about the something from nothing. You say how do we know that there aren’t things popping into existence elsewhere that we don’t know about? This is actually when viewed properly a great defense of P1. Why don’t we see things popping into existence from nothing anywhere? Why aren’t apples raining from my ceiling? Why aren’t other planets popping into our solar system? Why is it that a new car exists suddenly from nothing on my driveway? The answer is obvious. Nothing comes from nothing! You can speculate all you want but a rational person would have to go by what is logical here. In the presence of the philosophy of nothing comes from nothing, and by unobserved physical objects coming into existence from nothing, we have good reason to believe in P1.Defending P2:You give us the argument that for something to exist there must have been a time that it did not exist. If there is time that it did not exist then there is time. Therefore the universe never began to exist. To me this just sounds like the human mind trying to understand the infinite. There was no time before the universe. Time sprang into existence with the universe. Time came from no-time, but in relation to itself has a 0 point…a beginning, a beginning of being from non-being. You are basing the scale of something existing on a time scale rather existence from non-existence. So yes the universe existed in all points of time, but the universe didn’t always exist. In fact this is implied in the standard model of the big bang. So as bizarre as the statement is, it is not contradictory. Conclusion: Therefore the universe has a cause.Through the KCA we can find certain attributes of this cause. Attributes like being an unembodied mind, timeless, sufficiently powerful, and personal. God fits this description perfectly and is why this is one of the most powerful arguments for Theists. Con I thank you for your opening argument and await your responses.Sources[1] What is Ockham’s Razor? (http://physics.ucr.edu...)