My Kalām Krash

1. Everything that begins to exist has a cause of its existence.
2. The Universe began to exist.
3. Therefore the Universe has a cause of its existence.

This is the Kalām Cosmological Argument for the existence of God — the favourite argument of William Lane Craig. It boils down to "The Universe had to be created by something, ergo, God." The KCA is also related to the argument that out of nothing, nothing comes. So let's look at the KCA a bit more (don't worry, this won't take long, and it doesn't involve any multiverses).

The current cosmological consensus is that the Universe began with the Big Bang, at which both space and time came into being. The essential part of the KCA is the notion of "cause". We know that causes always come before effects, because if cause and effect are simultaneous it's impossible to distinguish between the two. To put this another way, both the cause and the effect, if simultaneous, can be said to have come about spontaneously.

The notion of "before" is dependent on the notion of "time". At the Big Bang there was no time, therefore the common understanding of cause and effect cannot hold. Where the traditional relationship between cause and effect does not apply, the claim that effects depend on causes is no longer supportable. One cannot, therefore, rule out the possibility of the Big Bang arising from nothing, spontaneously — without a cause.

The first premise of the KCA needs to be revised:

1. Everything that begins to exist (except the Universe) has a cause of its existence.

Fixed.

Creationism's lack of Wonders

When I watched the first episode of Brian Cox's new TV series Wonders of Life I was struck by the uncompromisingly naturalistic assumptions behind his explanation of how life began on Earth. Never before have I heard such a godless approach on prime-time mainstream TV in Britain. Maybe, I thought, the tide is turning and the BBC is forsaking — albeit temporarily — its habit of "balancing" anything remotely atheistic with something necessarily faith-based. Well, maybe. But nevertheless I expected protests, especially from creationists, and I was relishing the prospect.

So I was more than a little disappointed with this lack-lustre response from my local creationist organisation, the Creation Science Movement.

On Sunday 27th January, the BBC TV aired the first of a new series called Wonders of Life, presented by Professor Brian Cox. In this first episode he wondered what life was and how it began. Like all science writers for the Beeb, Cox is a fully paid up atheist, and he set out to establish a sequence from inanimate matter to simple living cells, and so on to ourselves. He informed us that at the beginning there was energy. The First Law of Thermodynamics says that energy can neither be created nor destroyed, though it can change from one form to another. He demonstrated this with a waterfall where potential energy at the top of the fall is changed into kinetic energy of movement, heat and noise as the water descends. But the total amount of energy remains unchanged. All correct! He then argued that if energy cannot be added to or lost, then energy is eternal! He does not conclude that if energy has always existed, so too must matter be everlasting. Thus he dodges the problem of how matter and energy could have been created from nothing in the first place.

But Einstein showed that matter and energy are equivalent (E=mc²). And of course we have the old chestnut about creating something from nothing. Who says there was nothing in the first place? If the current spacetime continuum came into existence at the Big Bang, so too did cause and effect — because cause and effect have no meaning in any atemporal or aspacial sense. We can have no concept of existence in the absence of time and space, so to talk about "something" and "nothing" in a realm that lacks a coherent concept of existence is mere speculation.

He continued by saying that all processes involve a change whereby the energy becomes less able to do work, this being the Second Law. He doesn’t draw the obvious conclusion that if the universe has always existed, all the energy would have lost its potential to do work long ago and would have degenerated into heat at a very low temperature. Our universe is brimming over with energy at a high potential, so it isn’t eternal at all, but had a beginning. How could it have started at a high potential, that is, a highly ordered state? Well, not on its own!

Despite this unidentified blogger's exclamation mark, the idea that the universe came into existence spontaneously as a necessary result of a random event seems to me entirely plausible. Also I don't think many cosmologists believe that the universe as we know it has existed eternally, so I'm not sure what point is being made here.

Dr Cox told us that all living things that have ever been derive their energy from a flow of hydrogen ions in their mitochondria. Quite true! He demonstrated a simple battery made from two bottles of water with different acidities. He then wired them up to a miniature fan, which sprang into life, while gases bubbled from the electrodes. So, he argued, a flow of hydrogen ions creates life – QED. He didn’t take into account the glaring fact that the current needed a motor to make use of this energy as a fan. In the same way, in every living thing, the hydrogen ion potential in the mitochondrion requires a miniature protein motor called ATP Synthase to produce usable energy for the living cell. Someone must have designed and manufactured the fan. How much more is a Creator required for the ATP Synthase with its 31 precise components?

The reason why someone had to design and manufacture the electric fan is that electric fans don't reproduce by themselves. Why creationists appear to overlook this obvious distinction baffles me.

From then on, the professor told us, living things progressed from simple to more complex living things by mistakes in copying genes that are then selected by the environment – Darwinian evolution. Yet we know that mutations scramble the information in those genes. Moreover, how can precise genetic information come about by chance?

Anyone who seriously asks this question obviously hasn't grasped the implications of natural selection.

Now that he has told us how life began, the series should become more credible as he celebrates the wonders of life. It could hardly get less believable! 

An odd, muted conclusion — exclamation mark notwithstanding. We get the first thorough explication of current thinking on abiogenesis on mainstream TV — something of a landmark, in my opinion — but of course creationists are going to dismiss it, as this one has. That it's such a half-hearted dismissal may indicate (let's hope so) the creationist bandwagon is running out of steam.

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Shame. I had hoped for something more meaty to celebrate my 700th blogpost!

Kalām: a semantic game of tag

As arguments for the existence of God go, the Kalām Cosmological Argument is a favourite of Christian apologetics:

1. Whatever begins to exist has a cause.
2. The universe began to exist.
3. Therefore, the universe has a cause.
4. This cause is the God of Classical Theism, and is a personal being, because He chose to create the universe.

This, according to Wikipedia, is William Lane Craig's version. You have to admit that 4. is a remarkable show of confidence — brazenly stating that the cause is the God of Classical Theism. Why is the cause the God of Classical Theism? Because the God of Classical Theism chose to create the universe. So there!

But the main problem with the Kalām, as I see it, is premise 2. "The universe began to exist." What do we mean by "universe"? Do we mean everything, ever? If so, then "everything" must include all the supernatural entities that might possibly exist — in which case God began to exist, and therefore must, according to this argument, have a cause himself.

That's what the Kalām is designed to avoid, by claiming that everything — or "whatever" to use Craig's phrasing — that began to exist has a cause. It's only things that had a beginning that need to have a cause. It doesn't apply to God, because God has always been there, despite Craig's frequent claim that there's a problem with an infinite past. (Basically his argument goes like this: if there's an infinite past, then there must have been an infinite number of past events, so anything that existed in an infinite past must have undergone an infinite series of past events to get to the present day, which is impossible. Except for God, naturally, because he lives "outside time" in the land of special pleading.)

Clearly a definition of "universe" that encompasses everything, ever (including any gods), is incoherent when talking about causes, because the causes must be included in "everything" as well. If our definition is instead the whole of material reality that originated in the Big Bang, we're on firmer ground. But to say that the universe originated in the Big Bang does not necessarily imply that there was nothing "before" it. In as much as "before" can mean anything at all at the point of time and space coming into being, we have a problem: if there's no concept of time, the notion of causality is indeterminate, because causes necessarily precede effects. It's because of our concept of time that we're able to distinguish between effects and their causes. Without time, cause and effect are at best interchangeable, at worst nonsensical.

The Big Bang — the origin of the universe — can be better conceptualized as a point of transition. A transition from what, we have no way of knowing. Another universe in the Multiverse perhaps, or in one of those other dimensions postulated by string theory, or even from some similarly unknown realm of cyclic reversal. What we can say, however, is that the universe as we know it did not necessarily have a beginning before which there was nothing. Indeed the concept of "nothing" may itself be incoherent (which would, incidentally, make redundant the question of why there is something rather than nothing).

So the Kalām is no more than a disingenuous rephrasing of the premises in such a way as to counter the obvious response. What caused the universe? God did. So what caused God? Ah, God doesn't need a cause because (despite the aforementioned paradox of infinities) he never began. Well, the universe as we currently understand it doesn't need a cause either, because it too doesn't need to have had a beginning.

When I was a teenager the Steady State theory still held ground against the more controversial Big Bang theory. I remember Arthur C. Clarke being questioned about this on a radio phone-in show. His response was delightfully equivocal: "I favour the Steady Bang theory, which I give to you for free."

What would it take to convince you that you're mistaken?

A critical test of anyone who appears to hold fundamental - or indeed fundamentalist - beliefs, is to ask the question, "What would it take to convince you that you're mistaken?" Someone who is convinced beyond reason that their beliefs are true will always reply to the effect that nothing would convince them. This is a sure sign of unreasonable fixed belief, and it's not worth anyone's time trying to argue them out of their position.

It's a question often asked of atheists, but Michael Shermer's flippant response, "A deposit of ten million dollars in a Swiss bank account under my name," doesn't count*.

For myself, the idea of a personal God who listens to your thoughts, answers your prayers, obsesses over what you do with your sexual organs and demands worship on pain of eternal banishment to some undefined unpleasantness, is absurd in the extreme and not worthy of consideration. I therefore find it hard to imagine anything that could convince me that such a God exists. Nevertheless, just because I can't imagine it, doesn't mean it's not a possibility, however remote. There's a chance I could be convinced of God's existence, but only if He convinced me Himself, in person, in a manner congruent with my reasonable standards for evidence. I will not, however, accept his petition from any third party.

The probability of such a petition is highly unlikely, I believe, but (as I've already indicated) not completely out of the question.

There is, however, an area where I would be more likely to accept the existence of some kind of intelligent creator - though this intelligence would bear little resemblance to the God of scripture.

If scientific analysis were to reveal that the Big Bang could not have been instigated by anything other than the creative will of some kind of intelligence, science might have to concede that the universe came about by other than natural processes. But speculation about what happened at, during, just before or just after the Big Bang appears to be mired in philosophy rather than science, with doubts about whether you can meaningfully say anything temporal or spacial about an event that brought both space and time into existence. (You might also question your definition of 'natural processes'.)

Similarly, if science were to show that the presence of information in DNA could not have originated naturally, the existence of some agency that inserted the information would have to be postulated. But we would have no reason to call that agent 'God'. Just because such an agent would likely be beyond our comprehension, we are not barred from speculating on its origins.

What applies to DNA also applies to the Big Bang. Calling the originator of the Big Bang 'God', or the originator of the information present in DNA 'God', simply stops all further speculation. It's an abdication of intellectual responsibility, not worthy of science, and should be deplored.

Science has yet to explain these things, but that doesn't mean the answer is "Goddidit."

There are many arguments for the existence of God, and the Argument from Design (also known as the teleological argument) is the least weak.

(*During a recent debate in Australia between John Lennox and Michael Shermer, the moderator asked Shermer, "What piece of evidence, formula, piece of reasoning, whatever ... what would cause you to believe in God?")