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.

It's that man again — the Craig "itch"

Regular readers of this blog (and listeners to Skepticule Extra) will know that I have an oscillating attitude to William Lane Craig. No sooner have I concluded that he has nothing new to tell me and therefore I can forthwith ignore him, than I find myself irresistibly scratching at something he's said, knowing that it's wrong without being able to put my finger on precisely why. But I think Thunderf00t has nailed it:

http://youtu.be/4u6Mz21jTaA


Being a confident speaker will go a long, long way towards convincing people that what you say is true. If you behave in a way that says loudly and clearly that of course what you say is true, many people will believe you by default. But with Craig there is always that niggling doubt that his approach to his various arguments for the existence of God rests on something not just unsound but profoundly silly. This video exposes that doubt and parades it for all to see.

Grill the world's foremost Christian apologist — Unbelievable?

Last Saturday's Unbelievable? radio programme was a departure from its regular format — which usually aims to get "...Christians and non-believers talking to each other." In advance of William Lane Craig's visit to the UK in October Justin Brierley had him responding to questions sent in by listeners. Peter May, one of the organisers of the Reasonable Faith Tour, was also on the programme.

I wasn't expecting much from this, as the last time Craig was on Unbelievable? he took the opportunity to bad-mouth Richard Dawkins in an unforgivable manner.

But there were some good questions. I've only heard the show once, but here are some thoughts that occurred to me while listening:

When asked by Justin what he thought of Dawkins' refusal to debate him, Craig said Dawkins might be afraid of being humiliated — as he was in his debate with John Lennox. This seems to me a very odd interpretation of events. Dawkins gave up debating theists one-on-one after his encounter with Lennox because Lennox misrepresented the debate afterwards:

http://youtu.be/24vWUeMnXBg


Small wonder that Dawkins refuses to debate Craig, when Craig himself echoes Lennox in misrepresenting what actually happened. (The whole of Dawkins' talk is available here: http://youtu.be/xbza-UtseE0 — well worth watching.)

Concerning Polly Toynbee's withdrawal from debating with him, Craig suggested that atheists seem to have got together and agreed to boycott "this type of event". It seems more likely that they got together and agreed not to debate William Lane Craig, as they know he's not interested in dialogue, only point-scoring.

Then Craig answered some listener questions. After some preliminary exposition of the Kalām Cosmological Argument he attempted to rebut Justin Schieber's excellent point about temporal causality — that one can't really say anything about cause and effect when time doesn't exist — and in doing so produced a real howler. He resorted to "simultaneity", claiming that intentions can be simultaneous with actions and therefore not temporal. But "simultaneous" means "at the same time". In what way is simultaneity non-temporal?

Fine-tuning was next up, and as usual Craig, like other theists, simply takes fine-tuning as a given. But look at the size of the universe. No, really, look at its SIZE.

"Space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is."¹

Intelligent life (that stuff the universe is supposedly fine-tuned to support) is as far as we know an infinitesimally insignificant part of the universe. One could characterise intelligent life as a "homeopathically tiny" concentration in the unfathomably vast cosmos. Statistically speaking, therefore, there is no intelligent life at all in the universe. How can the nominal non-existence of any such thing be described as the result of "fine tuning"?

A. C. Grayling's comment that he'd sooner debate the existence of leprechauns and fairies than the existence of God was described by Craig as "condescending". This is symptomatic of the false importance theists ascribe to their wacky beliefs. They complain they're not being taken seriously, yet cannot provide any reason why they should be. We have, of course, heard this before. During a debate in 2009 Richard Harries objected to Richard Dawkins' similar characterisation:

"You can't let Richard get away with that. That's a ridiculous remark. You cannot confuse the God of classical theism, which has animated the whole of western philosophy, with a leprechaun."²

But like Craig, Harries provided no sound reason not to.

Another question was about the moral argument for God, and as expected Craig trotted out his usual claim that it's logically impossible for God to be immoral because it's part of God's nature to be moral. But he merely asserts that this is so. The only justification for such an assertion is that God is defined to be moral. This isn't really a justification, it's nothing more than an arbitrary definition.

And this man is supposedly the world's foremost Christian apologist.

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1. Douglas Adams, The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy — the original radio scripts. London 1985, Pan Books.
2. Lord Richard Harries, during a debate at Wellington College, Crowthorne, on the motion "Atheism is the New Fundamentalism", November 2009.

Oh Kalamity — a cosmological debunking

The Kalām Cosmological Argument is a favourite of William Lane Craig. It's formulated in such a way as to preempt objections, though as I've previously mentioned on numerous blogposts this disingenuous wordplay — an attempt to insulate the argument from criticism — fails.

This great video is as comprehensive a take-down of the Kalām's flawed logic as we're likely to see for some time — at least until some new cosmological theory emerges from legitimate science. The analysis and arguments presented here are thorough, properly referenced and in many cases from the very mouths of the cosmologists themselves.

http://youtu.be/baZUCc5m8sE


Here's the info on the video, copied from YouTube:

We hope this is the definitive take down of the Kalam Cosmological Argument. We show how it is contradictory and that the physics being used to support it doesn't do so. We also had this video reviewed by Marcus, one of the Cosmology Advisers on Physics Forums to make sure there were no errors, his words
"I think it is excellent.Your narrator comes across as really smart and personable....I don't see any glaring errors, really amazingly good
it's charming, intelligent, visually engaging, sporadically really beautiful like the brief cut of the Hubble telescope and the volcano etc. Well-made!"

And here's what P. Z. Myers says in his Pharyngula post (credited to Skepchick) that alerted me to it:

This is a wonderful video debunking the Kalam Cosmological Argument. What I really like about it is that it takes the tortured rationales of theologians like William Lane Craig, who love to babble mangled pseudoscience in their arguments, and shows with direct quotes from the physicists referenced that the Christian and Muslim apologists are full of shit.

Watch and enjoy.

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."