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"How
to Know God Exists" -
The Kalam Cosmological Argument
"The
heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament shows His
handiwork." So writes the Psalmist. Many people
when asked if they believe in the existence of God respond by
saying "Of course! I can't believe all this got here by
accident."
Arguments like this are known as
cosmological arguments, because they try to demonstrate God's
necessity by the fact of the universe's (the cosmos)
existence.
In recent years, however, that
reply has been castigated by most of the scientific
establishment. With the advent of Darwinian thought permeating
all branches of the sciences, it is important to critically
examine the ideas of creation as a proof of God's existence. Is
it logical and rational to still hold such beliefs?
St. Thomas Aquinas first used
creation to formally argue God's existence in the 13th century.
His version said that every finite being (someone who began to
exist) relied on another being for that existence. In order for
you to be conceived you had to have a mother and father. They in
turn had mothers and fathers, and so on. Ultimately, there would
have to be an Infinite Being who started out this sequence of
events, otherwise we would end up going backwards forever,
explaining nothing.
The Thomistic argument is
powerful, but it relies on a couple of assumptions that can give
skeptics some wiggle-room. Therefore I'd like to examine a
variation of the cosmological argument called the Kalam
Cosmological Argument. This argument first came from Arabic
thinkers during the middle ages and is probably one of the most
logically compelling in that it leaves no wiggle-room. Christian
philosopher William Lane Craig has done much to foster this
argument, and I'll borrow his version here.
The Kalam Cosmological Argument
is stated the following way:
P1 - Whatever begins to exist has
a cause of its existence.
P2 - The universe began to exist.
Q1 - Therefore the universe has a cause for its existence.
The way the argument lays out is
deceptively simple. However, because for each premise there is
an either/or choice, this argument really focuses the
discussion. You must accept or reject each of the premises;
there is no middle ground.
Let's look at the first premise.
Either any "thing" that begins to exist has a cause or
it does not. Those are the only two choices for the first
premise. If you deny one, you must accept the other.
However, if there is no
"thing" to cause something's existence, then how did
existence start? Some "thing" cannot come out of no
"thing". In other words, you can't get something from
nothing. Where would the raw materials for the something come
from? So, things that begin have causes for their beginning.
This is a pretty intuitive claim.
Now, let's look at premise 2.
Either the universe had a beginning or it did not. Most
scientists are reporting the data is overwhelming for a starting
point to the universe. However, if the universe did not have a
beginning, that would mean it has existed since infinity. Some
philosophers have tried to argue that the universe's beginning
just appears as such; that it really existed for an infinitely
long time.
The problem here is an infinitely
long time cannot be in the past. It is impossible for the
universe to already have crossed an infinite time. If infinity
is in the past, that would mean tomorrow would be infinity plus
one - which implies a number bigger than infinity. Now anything
bigger than infinity doesn't make sense!
Look at it another way, if you
take an infinite number of anything and divide it in half, you
would have two sets of that thing. However, how much would be in
each set? Mathematicians would answer and say that each set
would now have an infinite amount in it - which means we have
two infinite sets instead of one.
Because of all this, one can
easily show that an actual infinite cannot exist in reality. You
cannot divide something in half and end up with twice as much as
when you started. It just doesn't make sense. Therefore, there
couldn't have been an infinite number of previous moments, so
the universe must have begun to exist.
So, we have shown that the
universe must have had a beginning and because it had a
beginning, it must have had a cause. The cause of the universe,
though, is what we're really interested in. It had to be
immaterial, because matter as part of the universe had it's
beginning with the universe. It must be something not tied to
time at all, because time - as part of the universe - had to
have a beginning. And it must have exercised some
decision-making capability in order to create the universe at
all. Therefore, we have a logical proof for the existence of
God.
While the Kalam argument is
persuasive, it is limiting in the fact that it cannot tell us
which God created the universe. It does, however, give the
Christian worldview two steps up on the atheistic view. If
you're interested in reading more on this argument, write us at discussions@comereason.org
and we can refer you to more detailed articles on the
subject.
Next time, we'll look at just how
precisely the universe is designed to support human life. This
is known as the Anthropic Principle and is another evidence for
proof of a designer. God bless until then.
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