A Critical Examination of the Kalam Cosmological Fallacy
“Ever since Plato most philosophers have considered it part of their business to produce "proofs" of immortality and the existence of God. They have found fault with the proofs of their predecessors – Saint Thomas rejected Saint Anselm's proofs, and Kant rejected Descartes' – but they have supplied new ones of their own. In order to make their proofs seem valid, they have had to falsify logic, to make mathematics mystical, and to pretend that deep-seated prejudices were heaven-sent intuitions.” (Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy, pp. 75-76)
“[The cosmological argument] does not carry very much weight nowadays, because, in the first place, cause is not quite what it used to be. The philosophers and the men of science have got going on cause, and it has not anything like the vitality it used to have. ... There is no reason why the world could not have come into being without a cause; nor, on the other hand, is there any reason why it should not have always existed. There is no reason to suppose that the world had a beginning at all. The idea that things must have a beginning is really due to the poverty of our imagination.” (Bertrand Russell, Why I Am Not a Christian, 1927)
Preliminary Point
This discussion assumes that readers are already familiarized with the Kalam. Instead of writing a detailed explanation of the argument, therefore, I'll simply present the best objections, thus showing the Kalam is fallacious.
From Nothing, Nothing Comes
The law of causation is not a necessary truth. This law is derived from observation and not a priori reasoning, and therefore, like all empirical conclusions, the law of causation could be false. Yet it is unclear what the proposition would mean if it was posed as a merely probable truth. This is all the more so since we cannot even guess at the probability of it being true when discussing a unique event like the origin of a universe. For no statistics derived from events within a universe have any categorical analogy to the universe itself, which is drastically different from its parts. For example, the origin of the universe marks the 'beginning' of time, yet we have never observed anything comparable to a 'beginning' of time. (Carrier, 2003)
But, more importantly, we don’t have any evidence that laws of causation observed to operate inside a developed universe, also operate in the absence of one. As far as we know, physical laws depend on the structure of the universe they govern, therefore, causal laws are not even likely to exist in the absence of a governing structure. (Carrier, 2019a) In the absence of anything to realize any physical laws, no physical laws will exist. Including causal laws. Because it is a logical contradiction to claim causal laws exist before causal laws exist. (Carrier, 2019b)
Causality is a well-defined physical concept in science. However the existence of causes and effects is inferred purely from the observation of physical things. But if the universe had not yet "began to exist", in what sense could causality have been said to exist? Surely it cannot be the physical, temporal concept with which we are all familiar – since by definition, nothing physical or temporal existed "before" the Big Bang. The question then is why we should assume that causality transcends the physical universe.
In response to this, Christian apologist William Lane Craig argued: "It's not just obvious that causality presupposes time and space... Why one timeless entity – say, a number – could not depend timelessly for its existence on another timeless entity? Why is that impossible? Why couldn't God timelessly sustain a number in existence? That would clearly be an asymmetric causal relation. Why is that impossible?"
Craig's first obvious mistake is assuming that naturalists are arguing that a non-temporal, non-physical causality is impossible. But that is not the case. Of course, it may be "possible", the exact same way it is "possible" that there exists beyond our universe a magical land of cheese-growing trees. But here's the problem: causality, as we know it and observe it, exists solely as phenomenon that is an outcome of the properties of the spatio-temporal universe.
Craig misses the obvious circularity of his arguments. We have observed physical causality. We know how it works and why it works. No one has ever observed any sort of "non-physical causality". We do not have any way of knowing if such a thing does exist, much less how it would work if it did exist. But in order for the argument for God being the First Cause to be valid, Craig has to make the a priori assumption that this non-physical causality exists – which is of course what the Kalam is trying to prove in the first place. When you have to grant all or part of your conclusion as an assumption within your premise, you are using circular reasoning. (Mike, 2010)
If nothing "exists", then anything can happen. Because the only way to prevent something from happening, is to have some law or force or power or object or agency, in other words some actual/existent thing, that prevents it. If you remove all obstacles, you allow all possibilities.
This is why ex nihilo nihil fit is necessarily false. For that is a law. And a law is not nothing. A law is something. To say that "from nothing comes only nothing" is to say that some law of physics (like, say, the law of conservation of energy) exists to prevent nothing from generating anything else except more nothing. But if nothing exists, then that law of physics doesn't exist. Since it is not logically necessary that nothing can only produce nothing, the law ex nihilo nihil fit doesn't exist either. Therefore, that "absolute nothing" that once existed will not have been governed by such a law. It cannot have been. Because if it were, it would then not be nothing, but the inexplicable and arbitrary existence of something: a weird law of physics with no origin or agency. Thus it is a logical contradiction to say "there once was absolutely nothing, and that absolute nothing can only have produced nothing."
It won’t do to say “but we don’t see that rule being violated anywhere now,” because we do not observe Nothing anywhere – everywhere there is something (space-time, with contents and properties, governed by now-existent laws) – so none of our observations apply to Nothing. In fact, as Nothing entails the total absence of “contents and properties and laws,” the very reason we do not observe a violation of ex nihilo nihil is that those extant properties and laws now prevent “just anything” from happening. The only nihil we observe is actually a thing: propertied space-time. And that thing, being existent, now limits what can happen.
Philosopher Younes Terrab considered an objection to this: "Oppy has responded to [the religious apologetical] objection by arguing that the explanation for why it is possible that CP [i.e., Causation Principle] could only apply inside the universe is that the universe is governed by certain physical laws [which] prevent anything from beginning to exist uncaused inside the universe. Craig replies that this argument fails because physical laws only govern that which is physical, and something is only physical once it actually exists. So, these laws would not constrain things before they exist while we are looking for an explanation for why a constrain that prevents things from beginning to exist uncaused only exists inside the universe. The point Craig made against physical laws can be raised against CP as well. Physical laws can only govern things once they actually exist, but how can CP govern them before they exist when there is only nothing before they do? How can CP constrain nothing when being able to be constrained is a property while nothing has no properties whatsoever? So, if physical laws are inadequate as an explanation because they can only constrain what exists, then every other law (including CP) is. Thus, it remains inexplicable why anything and everything doesn't just begin to exist uncaused even with CP being true." (Did God Cause the Universe to Begin to Exist?, p.29)
Furthermore, one could bite the bullet and say that, yes, it is possible that things could begin to exist without any cause right now, e.g., a tiger could pop into existence right now in a room. But if I see any object in the universe, I'd say it is highly unlikely it is an uncaused object for the simple reason that we observe that physical reality normally operates in a causal way -- which obviously wouldn't apply prior to physical reality itself. Let me give an analogy to illustrate what I mean. Suppose, for instance, that for decades you have been exchanging emails with your friend. And you know they come from your friend because you talked to him personally about them. Now, is it possible that one day a random stranger could fake a letter -- indistinguishable from your friend's -- and send it to you? Yes, it is possible! And you might even be fooled. But given that this isn't how it normally works, it would be unreasonable to suggest the letter came from a stranger. So, the mere possibility isn't relevant here.
Just one more idea. It is also possible that things do indeed begin to exist without a cause all the time, but there is some law that prevents such objects from existing for more than an extremely small amount of time, and this time is so short that their existence is literally undetectable -- they are instantaneously destroyed.
Another objection that one might raise to this line of reasoning is that if you have nothing, this will include the absence of potentials. But the universe is actual now. Hence, if it began to exist, there was the potential to exist prior to its existence.
However, since the lack of a potential entails the presence of an actual thing (the thing that blocks that potential), the absence of potentials entails the presence of actual things, which is not nothing. Therefore, a state of absolutely nothing that lacked both actual things and potentials is logically impossible. So if logical impossibilities are really impossible, then absolutely nothing does indeed contain all potentials (hence if the apologist wants to insist that nothing means even the absence of logically necessary truths, then what he means by “nothing” is impossible). Furthermore, "potential" is not a physical (or magical) substance that something possesses like particles or space-time. Potential things are by definition not actual. Having a potential simply means something can be done. So, we can see that the apologist is simply repeating the same argument (i.e., "Nothing cannot produce something") but using different (and more abstract) terms, which is, of course, false, since the apologist is applying the rules (or features, if you like) of the universe when it does not exist. Moreover, the apologist could say only actual things can actualize potentials, but this claim would be based only on our observations of actual things (i.e., an actual universe which obeys conservation and causal laws). Therefore, there is no reason to think this would apply if actual things do not exist.
A related objection is that talking about there “continuing to be nothing” or a universe “popping into existence” seems to presuppose the existence of time, and it’s not clear that time is logically necessary.
But no time is presupposed, because the decision is instantaneous. Indeed, it is existential, i.e. in the absence of anything to entail what will exist, anything can exist. Therefore, what will exist is something. This would be true even if time didn’t exist.
The apologist Timothy McCabe attempted to prove that ex nihilo nihil fit by arguing that something coming from nothing would be like 0 plus 0 equaling one, which is a necessarily false statement.
The problem with this argument is that it assumes a stable reality, i.e. that there is something that keeps a 0 a 0. Which is false.
To illustrate the problem with the objection of the apologist, consider the following situation: In the Box A, there are 20 coins. In the Box B, there are 10. If we sum both, the result will be 40 coins. That's mathematically impossible, which also entails physical impossibility. However, there is nothing mathematically impossible with the following situation: At t=0, a totally closed Box had 0 coins. At t=10, there were 10 coins in the Box. This is only physically impossible, since there is the law of conservation of energy – according to this law, coins cannot simply appear from a state of no coins. However, it is not mathematically impossible since it does not violate the laws of math or logic, given that if we sum the number of coins at t=0, plus the coins at t=10, the result will be 10. That is because 0 + 10 = 10. The same applies to the beginning of the universe, since it entails 0 {anything} + 1 {something because of the instability of nothing which is entailed by the absence of laws} = 1 {the universe}.
Craig also argues that the universe could not come from nothing because nothing has no properties and no causal powers, so it is metaphysically impossible for it to produce anything.
Philosopher Wes Morriston calls Craig’s characterization of “something coming into existence out of sheer nothingness” a “source of potential confusion” and “potentially misleading” because “it sounds rather as if Craig is equating the denial of premise 1 with the suggestion that once upon a time (‘prior to the existence of the universe’) there was a situation in which nothing at all (not even time) existed – and then, ‘out of’ that black hole of nothingness, the universe ‘popped into existence’ … but such [an] absurdity [is] not entailed by the simple denial of the proposition that the beginning of the universe has a cause.”
James Fodor elaborated upon Morriston's objection very concisely in his book Unreasonable Faith: "The issue is not whether being can ‘come from’ non-being. Such a notion is absurd. Indeed, I would go further and say it does not even make sense to say that being (or anything at all) can ‘come from’ non-being, for the use of the phrase ‘come from’ implies the existence of something out of which something else can come. Non-being is not some entity with minimal properties (e.g., it is not a cosmic vacuum); it is the complete nonexistence of anything at all. To say that the universe ‘came from’ non-being would be to say that there was a state of non-being which pertained before the universe came into being, a state which then led to (or caused) the beginning of the universe. But this is absurd because there was no state before the beginning of the universe. Considering the question in this way, it becomes much less clear to me what is so absurd about space and time beginning to exist a finite time ago with no antecedent cause. On this understanding, the universe simply ‘began’, starting off in motion. There was no space, no time, no causation. There was no prior empty or void state of non-being that the universe ‘came from'."
Dr. Eyal Mozes from Stanford University made this same point: "'Non-existence' is not the name of something. 'Existence' is our name for the totality of all that there is. 'Non-existence' is a concept that does not refer to anything; it can be validly used only as an abstraction in stating negative propositions (as in 'God does not exist'). Objectivism rejects the idea of 'existence emerging from non-existence', because it treats 'non-existence' as a kind of thing, something that can act and have consequences. This is the fallacy (also committed by Existentialist philosophers) which Ayn Rand called 'the reification of the zero' (she discusses this fallacy in chapter 6 of Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology)."
Recently I thought about two possible objections to this argument:
(1) If our view is that the law of causation is a feature/property/description of the physical world, then it only holds (i.e., governs) “inside” of the physical world. Wouldn't that mean other physical things could begin to exist without a cause “outside” of our physical spacetime?
(2) If the law of causation is a property of the physical world, then it doesn’t govern potential non-physical substances. Doesn't that imply non-physical spirits could still begin to exist without a cause inside and outside of spacetime. And some of these spirits (if sufficiently powerful) could interact with the physical world. Why haven’t any interacted with it by now? In addition, if these spirits exist, that would be a problem for naturalists who reject the existence of concrete non-material things.
In response to the first objection: If the universe is spatially infinite, there is simply “nowhere” for the law of causation to not hold. But even if it is finite, it doesn't make sense to say something exists “outside” of it. The concept of “outside” presupposes a place. But since 'place' itself is finite, then there is no place outside of place.
In response to the second objection: One possible way to get around this is to say that this law of causation is a kind of Platonic thing (or some similar object) that is connected with the physical (and thus began to exist with the physical), but has its own existence (it is not just a description of the physical). This Platonic law would not only govern the physical, but potentially the non-physical as well. Alternatively, it is possible that the physical world itself has some property that prohibits potential non-physical things from coming into existence without a cause. After all, it is widely agreed that potential non-material things can interact with (or causally influence) the physical world (e.g., Cartesian minds, angels, God). Why not the other way around?
For extensive defenses of this argument, see Ex Nihilo Onus Merdae Fit & Koons Cosmology vs. The Problem with Nothing & The Problem with Nothing & Why Nothing Remains a Problem.
Did the Universe Begin to Exist?
In many debates (e.g., Hitchens vs Craig; 2009), Craig used the following quote from physicist Paul Davies to prove the universe had a beginning:
"The coming-into-being of the universe, as discussed in modern science, is not just a matter of imposing some sort of organisation upon a previously incoherent state, but literally the coming into being of all physical things from nothing." (The Best of the Kalaam Cosmological Argument)
Because Paul Davies is a physicist, you’d think that Craig would quote one of his scholarly articles or one of his books, but instead the "professional philosopher" takes this quote from an interview which the Australian Broadcasting Company aired in 1995 (and subsequently published online in 2002). Since Craig has heavily abridged this quote, here it is in full (with the parts that Craig uses in bold):
"The mechanism of the coming-into-being of the universe, as discussed in modern science, is actually much more profound than the biblical version because it does not merely involve order emerging out of chaos. It’s not just a matter of imposing some sort of organisation or structure upon a previous incoherent state, but literally the coming-into-being of all physical things from nothing." (In Conversation with Paul Davies and Phillip Adams)
The first thing you’ll notice is that Craig leaves out the bit where Davies claims that the “coming-into-being of the universe” is “much more profound than the biblical version,” and the reason for this is pretty obvious: If Craig left that bit in during debates, it would make the Bible look inadequate or, worse yet, it might make the bible look like it is in error – a huge problem for a Biblical inerrantist like Craig.
But to be fair, Paul Davies is not a Biblical scholar. So, the argument could be made that his interpretation of the Bible is incorrect. However, he has written a lot of books involving religion, so it is absurd to think he did not research about what scholars think regarding the subject of creation.
Richard Elliott Friedman, one of the world's leading biblical scholars and the Ann and Jay Davis Professor of Jewish Studies at the University of Georgia who attended the University of Miami (BA, 1968), the Jewish Theological Seminary (MHL, 1971), and Harvard University (ThM in Hebrew Bible, 1974; ThD in Hebrew Bible and Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, 1978) explained in his Commentary on the Torah:
"[The Torah] does not say "In the beginning, God created the skies and the Earth." It rather says, "In the beginning of God's creating the skies and the earth, when the earth had been shapeless and formless." That is, there is preexisting matter, which is in a state of watery chaos. Subsequent matter – dry land, heavenly bodies, plants, animals – may be formed out of this undifferentiated fluid. In the hebrew of this verse the noun comes before the verb (in the perfect form).
This is now known to be the way of conveying the past perfect Biblical Hebrew. The point of this grammar is that this verse does not mean "the earth was shapeless and formless" - referring to the condition of the earth starting the instant after it was created. This verse rather means that "the earth had been shapeless and formless" - that is, it had already existed in this shapeless condition prior to the creation. Creation of matter in the Torah is not out of nothing (creation ex nihilo) as many have claimed. And the Torah is not claiming to be telling events from the beginning of time. Creation is the act of separating a thing from the rest of matter and then giving it a name."
For further reading about this subject, see: Genesis creation narrative; God is not the creator, claims academic; Genesis As Ancient Cosmology by Dr John Walton; Does Genesis Teach the Big Bang?; Have Jews always Believed in Creation Ex Nihilo?; The Doctrine Of Creation Ex Nihilo Was Created Out Of Nothing: A Response To Copan And Craig.
In many debates (e.g., Hitchens vs Craig; 2009), Craig used the following quote from physicist Paul Davies to prove the universe had a beginning:
"The coming-into-being of the universe, as discussed in modern science, is not just a matter of imposing some sort of organisation upon a previously incoherent state, but literally the coming into being of all physical things from nothing." (The Best of the Kalaam Cosmological Argument)
Because Paul Davies is a physicist, you’d think that Craig would quote one of his scholarly articles or one of his books, but instead the "professional philosopher" takes this quote from an interview which the Australian Broadcasting Company aired in 1995 (and subsequently published online in 2002). Since Craig has heavily abridged this quote, here it is in full (with the parts that Craig uses in bold):
"The mechanism of the coming-into-being of the universe, as discussed in modern science, is actually much more profound than the biblical version because it does not merely involve order emerging out of chaos. It’s not just a matter of imposing some sort of organisation or structure upon a previous incoherent state, but literally the coming-into-being of all physical things from nothing." (In Conversation with Paul Davies and Phillip Adams)
The first thing you’ll notice is that Craig leaves out the bit where Davies claims that the “coming-into-being of the universe” is “much more profound than the biblical version,” and the reason for this is pretty obvious: If Craig left that bit in during debates, it would make the Bible look inadequate or, worse yet, it might make the bible look like it is in error – a huge problem for a Biblical inerrantist like Craig.
But to be fair, Paul Davies is not a Biblical scholar. So, the argument could be made that his interpretation of the Bible is incorrect. However, he has written a lot of books involving religion, so it is absurd to think he did not research about what scholars think regarding the subject of creation.
Richard Elliott Friedman, one of the world's leading biblical scholars and the Ann and Jay Davis Professor of Jewish Studies at the University of Georgia who attended the University of Miami (BA, 1968), the Jewish Theological Seminary (MHL, 1971), and Harvard University (ThM in Hebrew Bible, 1974; ThD in Hebrew Bible and Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, 1978) explained in his Commentary on the Torah:
"[The Torah] does not say "In the beginning, God created the skies and the Earth." It rather says, "In the beginning of God's creating the skies and the earth, when the earth had been shapeless and formless." That is, there is preexisting matter, which is in a state of watery chaos. Subsequent matter – dry land, heavenly bodies, plants, animals – may be formed out of this undifferentiated fluid. In the hebrew of this verse the noun comes before the verb (in the perfect form).
This is now known to be the way of conveying the past perfect Biblical Hebrew. The point of this grammar is that this verse does not mean "the earth was shapeless and formless" - referring to the condition of the earth starting the instant after it was created. This verse rather means that "the earth had been shapeless and formless" - that is, it had already existed in this shapeless condition prior to the creation. Creation of matter in the Torah is not out of nothing (creation ex nihilo) as many have claimed. And the Torah is not claiming to be telling events from the beginning of time. Creation is the act of separating a thing from the rest of matter and then giving it a name."
And since then, the tide has certainly shifted against a literal beginning. In fact, in 2008 (one year before Craig debated Hitchens) Davies wrote an article for The Guardian in which he was very clear about this:
"The epoch before about a billionth of a second, however, remains murky territory, with plenty of scope for disagreement... Whatever the success of the big bang theory in explaining the key observed features of the universe, it is clearly incomplete. People always want to know what came before the big bang. Why did it happen at all? If the big bang was indeed a natural event, then presumably nothing could prevent it from happening more than once. This suggests there may be many big bangs scattered throughout space and time, each producing an expanding universe of some sort. Possibly the entire assemblage of universes - often dubbed "the multiverse" - is eternal, even though each individual universe undergoes a life cycle of birth, evolution and perhaps death. Everyone agrees, however, that many of the deepest questions about our cosmic origins cannot be answered within the framework of existing physical theory. Hopes are pinned on a final unified theory that will merge all of physics into a single superlaw."
More recently, physicist Victor Stenger criticized Craig's central assumption that cosmology supports the view that spacetime had a beginning. In the book God and the Atom (pp. 212-213), Dr. Stenger wrote: “As shown in 1970 by Stephen Hawking and Roger Penrose, Einstein's general theory of relativity implies that the universe at its first moment of existence was a singularity, that is, an infinitesimal point in space of infinite energy density. This meant that not only was matter created at that moment, but so were space and time... However, there was a fly in the ointment. General relativity is not a quantum theory and so does not apply to a region of space less than 1.616 × 10⁻³⁵ meter in diameter, called the Planck length, named for the physicist Max Planck who, as we saw in chapter 7, initiated the quantum revolution. Applying the Heisenberg uncertainty principle of quantum mechanics, it can be shown that it is fundamentally impossible to define a smaller distance or to make any measurements inside a region of that size. Basically, we can have no information about what is inside a sphere with a diameter equal to the Planck length. It is a region of maximal chaos. The uncertainty principle also mandates that no time interval shorter than 5.391 × 10⁻⁴³ second, called the Planck time, can be measured. Thus, our cosmological equations, derived from general relativity, can apply only for times greater than the Planck time and only for distances greater than the Planck length. Although their singularity proof was correct for the assumptions made, both Hawking and Penrose long ago agreed that it does not apply once quantum mechanics was taken into account, a fact most theologians, including William Lane Craig, have conveniently ignored. In short, the origin of our universe was not a singularity and need not have been the beginning of time.”
Even the highly biased theologian and astrophysicist Rodney Holder disagrees with Craig: “I think, naively, with classical general relativity, you would get a beginning at the Big Bang, but there are problems with that because general relativity breaks down as you go back to t=north if you like... I've been reluctant to [make], and indeed I simply haven't made an argument for the existence of God from the universe having a beginning... because of all these uncertainties and, indeed, the non-necessity of God to describe it; God is not really needed.”
Physicist Dominique Eckert gave his opinion about the Kalam: "I was rather unfamiliar with the [Kalam] argument until recently. I started watching shows online and found that a lot of religious people were using it. ... That was a little bit surprising when I started to see how deep people think this argument is because from the point of view of modern physics it's not compelling at all."
Here is an encouraging suggestion by Pope John Paul II to theologians like Craig: "...some theologians, at least, should be sufficiently well-versed in the sciences to make authentic and creative use of the resources that the best-established theories may offer them. Such an expertise would prevent them from making uncritical and overhasty use for apologetic purposes of such recent theories as that of the “Big Bang” in cosmology." (Physics, Philosophy, and Theology, pp. M11, M12).
Indeed, this great advice is quite old. For example, in 1960, physicist William Bowen Bonnor wrote: "[S]ome scientists have identified the singularity at the start of the expansion with God, and thought that at this moment he created the universe. ... [T]here is a danger, for those who believe in God, in identifying him with singularities in differential equations, lest the need for him disappear with improved mathematics." (“Relativistic Theories of the Universe,” in H. Bondi, W.B. Bonnor, R.A. Lyttleton)
I'll conclude this part with an excellent quote by Sean Carroll: "None of this matters to Craig. He knows what answer he wants to get – the universe had a beginning – and he'll comb through the cosmology literature looking to cherry-pick quotes that bolster this conclusion. He doesn't understand the literature at a technical level, which is why he's always quoting (necessarily imprecise) popular books by Hawking and others, rather than the original papers. That's fine; we can't all be experts in everything. But when we're not experts, it's not intellectually honest to distort the words of experts to make them sound like they fit our pre-conceived narrative. That's why engagement with people like Craig is fundamentally less interesting than engagement with open-minded people who are willing to take what the universe has to offer, rather than forcing it into their favorite boxes."
Can We Reach the Present From the Infinite Past?
"Something like the A-theory of time does seem to be operative in Craig’s analysis, since it is only on a tensed view of time that we would have a true succession (or regression) of events, which in this case would be moments of time. On the B-theory, it seems time could be infinite without worrying about these objections, because it does not become infinite by successive addition, and since we do not “move through” time, there is no temporal regress going back in time... and therefore there is no real temporal regress of events that have passed from existence... On the B-theory, every moment exists tenselessly and ontologically on par with the present moment, and the series is beginningless, endless, and exists all at once... The various moments of time simply stand in tenseless relations to all the other moments."
As Stephen Hawking explained in his book Brief Answers to the Big Questions (p.40): "The problem of whether or not the universe had a beginning was a great concern to the German philosopher Immanuel Kant. He felt there were logical contradictions, or antinomies, either way. If the universe had a beginning [in time], why did it wait an infinite time before it began? He called that the thesis. On the other hand, if the universe had existed for ever, why did it take an infinite time to reach the present stage? He called that the antithesis. Both the thesis and the antithesis depended on Kant’s assumption, along with almost everyone else, that time was absolute... However, in 1915 Einstein introduced his revolutionary general theory of relativity. In this, space and time were no longer absolute."
Common-day objects such as tables and chairs "begin to exist" in the sense that the arrangement of matter that people agree are "tables" and "chairs" begin to "exist" when someone or something arranges the matter in those precise ways. However, that's not what the premise is arguing. The matter itself didn't "begin to exist". It was just rearranged. The argument refers to first there being nothing, and then something beginning to exist.
Craig offers a variety of arguments to show that the universe cannot be infinitely old. He argues that the temporal phenomena in the world are caused by other temporal phenomena, which are caused by other temporal phenomena, and so on, ad infinitum, unless the series stops with something outside of the series of temporal phenomena. He thinks the series of temporal causes cannot run backward into infinity, so there must be a non-temporal ground of the causes. I'll focus here on his best argument (at least in my estimation). Craig writes:
"In order for us to have ‘arrived’ at today, existence has, so to speak, traversed an infinite number of prior events. But before the present event could arrive, the event immediately prior to it would have to arrive; and before that event could arrive, the event immediately prior to it would have to arrive; and so on ad infinitum. No event could ever arrive, since before it could elapse there will always be one more event that had to have happened first. Thus, if the series of past events were beginningless, the present event could not have arrived, which is absurd!" (The New Mormon Challenge, p.135)
The problem with this argument is that we are here not even concerned with traversing an actual infinite in a finite time (with a starting point), but in an infinite time, as philosopher Blake Ostler explains:
"Indeed, the scenario painted by [Craig] is absurd because it does not accurately characterize the nature of the infinite past and its relation to the present. ... Note first that [Craig] treats the past once again as a well-ordered infinity that has a first member – the first member of this set is the present event and we begin this set by counting backwards into an infinite past. We begin the thought experiment proposed by [Craig] by thinking of the present event, and then regress to the event before, and then the event before that ad infinitum. Since we begin with the present event, the infinity is merely potential and is in fact never completed. In fact, it is no infinity at all but merely an open-ended finite series. Since no matter how long we count we cannot complete the infinite past, [Craig] concludes that the past cannot be infinite. But counting backward again treats the actual past without beginning as a set that has a beginning term, i.e., the present event. ... [In other words, Craig] implicitly assumes that the series of past events has a starting point by asking us to imagine the past as a series that begins with the present event as the first term of a regress and counting backwards. [He] gives us a well-formed infinite series when [he] must give us an example of a not-well-formed series that has no beginning term and terminates in the present. ... There is a way, and perhaps only one way, to create an actual infinite by counting or marking each successive moment, and that is to have been counting in each moment of existence of the eternal past as it occurred. Thus, the argument is a non sequitur, for it does not follow from the fact that the past is infinite that it cannot “reach” the present, for there has been an infinite time in which to do it! Nor does it follow that no event could ever arrive because there will always be one more event which “had to happen first.” All that follows is that there is in fact an event that preceded the present event, and an event before that and so on." (Do Kalam Infinity Arguments Apply to the Infinite Past?)
Philosopher Wes Morriston presented the same response: "Well yes, before the present event occurred, the event immediately prior to it must have occurred; and before it occurred, the one immediately prior to it must have occurred. If, then, a series of events has no beginning, then before any given event in that series occurs, infinitely many previous ones must have occurred. That’s all perfectly correct. But it’s hard to see what the problem is supposed to be, since on the hypothesis of a beginningless past each of those infinitely many events has occurred. When the present arrives, all of its (infinitely many) predecessors are past. So what does Craig mean when he says that “one gets driven back and back into the infinite past?” And why does he think this would make it “impossible for any event to occur?” I suppose one would be “driven back and back” into the beginningless past if one were (foolishly) looking for the starting point of a series that has no starting point. One would also be “driven back and back” if one were (again foolishly) trying to enumerate all the events in a series that has no first member. Neither of these projects can succeed. But so what? From the fact that we cannot – beginning now – complete the task of enumerating all the events in a beginningless series, it does not follow that the present event cannot arrive or that a beginningless series of events that have already arrived is impossible. To suppose otherwise would be to confuse the items to be enumerated with the enumerating of them—it would be like arguing that there must be finitely many natural numbers because we can’t finish counting them. There is admittedly one way in which the possibility of a beginningless series of past events entails the possibility of an infinite count. Instead of imagining someone who is “driven back and back” ad infinitum, we must imagine someone who has always already counted out the previous item in a beginningless series." (Doubts about the Kalām Cosmological Argument)
Philosopher Arnold Guminski also discussed Craig's argument: "With respect to any set of infinitely past years terminating in the present or some past year, it is always true that there was never a time [at which] there was an infinite to be traversed in order to reach the present or any past year. In other words, up to the present or to any given past year there has already been infinitely many years that have elapsed or have been traversed before the present of any given past year, as the case may be. As so succinctly expressed by William of Ockham (in his refutation of the argument that the world necessarily had a beginning because an infinite cannot be traversed): "[I]t is true in general that an infinite that at some time was to be gone through never can be actually gone through; nor can there ever be a last [element] of such an infinite.... But an infinite that at no time was to be gone through but always had been gone through can be gone through despite its infinity. This is the reason why in virtue of the very fact that something has been gone through which at some time was to be gone through, it is finite. But if anything has been gone through which never was to be gone through, it need not be finite but can be infinite. Now, however, if the world existed from eternity, it never was the case that all past years were to be gone through, because at no temporal instant would this proposition have been true; "All these years (indicating all those [now] past) are to be gone through." Therefore, the conclusion does not follow." Ockham and the Creation, pp. 20-21. ... Responding to those who so unwisely "say that while an infinite collection cannot be formed by beginning at a point and adding members, nevertheless an infinite collection could be formed by never beginning but ending at a point after having added one member after another from eternity," Craig rhetorically exclaims: "...If one cannot count to infinity, how can one count down from infinity? If one cannot traverse the infinite by moving in one direction, how can one traverse it simply by moving in the opposite direction?" ... It suffices to remark that it is impossible to traverse an infinite past by moving in the opposite direction from now, [but that's irrelevant because] any supposed traversal to the present moment through the infinite past is not a traversal by moving in the opposite direction [from now]. ... We cannot possibly count up through an infinite [with a starting point; from now], although we do have a starting element, because the operation can never be completed in the absence of a last or ending element. We cannot possibly count down through an infinity because there is no starting member. And we obviously cannot successively count backwards through an infinite from now; since the infinite past would not have an ending moment even if now is deemed to be the starting moment. In any event, the metaphysical impossibility of an infinite temporal series is not entailed by the impossibility of counting up or down through such a series, or of any real infinite." (The Kalam Cosmological Argument Yet Again)
Philosopher Jonathan Bennett also pointed out that the argument assumes that the universe was created at a beginning and then progressed from there, which seems to assume the conclusion. A universe that simply existed and had not been created, for instance, would still be possible. Bennett quotes Strawson: "A temporal process both completed and infinite in duration appears to be impossible only on the assumption that it has a beginning. If... it is urged that we cannot conceive of a process of surveying which does not have a beginning, then we must inquire with what relevance and by what right the notion of surveying is introduced into the discussion at all." (Jonathan Bennett, The Age and Size of the World)
Philosopher Keith Yandell explained in a clearer way: "To say that the universe is beginningless is to say that, for any past time T, the universe existed at T, and at T-1 as well. For any such time T you mention, there is a finite distance between T and now. So the universe could have chugged along from T until now. There is hence no past time such that it is impossible for the universe to chug along from that time until now. What the idea of the universe being beginningless entails is that, for any past time T, the universe actually has chugged along from it until now. Since that is not impossible, it is not impossible that the universe is beginningless. What, exactly, in Craig’s argument shows that this line of reasoning is inconsistent [or absurd]?" (Does God Exist? The Craig-Flew Debate, p.106)
Philosopher Keith Parsons made a similar point: “Why would an infinite series of causal events never “get to” a particular event? Get to it from where? Willard seems to be imagining a Zeno-type paradox where we start at a given point and can never get to another point because we have to perform an infinite number of tasks to do so. But if this is his problem, what does he conceive the starting point to be? Infinity? But infinity is not a point; to say that the past is infinite is not to postulate some starting point at a time T that was infinitely long ago. Saying that the series of past events was infinite means that there was no distant T, not even one infinitely remote, that marked the beginning of the series of causal events. An infinite past has no beginning. To say that the past is infinite is to say that for every finite period of time before the present, there was time before that.” (Same Old, Same Old)
Even one of the most famous theologian and philosopher, Saint Thomas Aquinas, who was incomparably biased towards the theistic view admitted this argument is wrong: "Before getting on with these matters, there is to be considered briefly a popular argument against infinite regresses of generating-causes that Aquinas knows how to deflate. It goes like this: [“If the world always was, the consequence is that infinite days preceded this present day. But it is impossible to pass through an infinite medium. Therefore we should never have arrived at this present day; which is manifestly false.” Aquinas'] reply when elaborated is sufficient to that objection and the present one. He writes: “Passage is always understood as being from term to term. Whatever by-gone day we choose, from it to the present day there is a finite number of days which can be traversed” (ST I q46,a2 p. 455). Aquinas suggests that, for openers, the question, “If there have been infinitely many previous days, how did the world get to this day?” should be met with the question, “Get to this day from when?” When this question is answered and the initial question completed as required by the fact that ‘passage is always understood as from term to term,’ the answer to the initial question, however exactly it is completed, can be, in the manner of sportscaster-speech, “One day at a-time.” [See, Article 2, Objection 6 & Reply to Objection 6]." (Howard Sobel, Logic and Theism, p.182)
Philosopher John Mackie made a similar point: "[The argument] assumes that, even if past time were infinite, there would still have been a starting-point of time, but one infinitely remote, so that an actual infinity would have had to be traversed to reach the present from there. But to take the hypothesis of infinity seriously would be to suppose that there was no starting point, not even an infinitely remote one, and that from any specific point in past time there is only a finite stretch that needs to be traversed to reach the present." (The Miracle of Theism, p. 93).
Philosopher Felipe Leon also commented on that: "Craig's offers two main points in his rejoinder. First, he says that it’s Mackie, and not the proponent of the kalam argument, who fails to take a beginningless past seriously. For the latter construes such a past as having no beginning at all – not even one infinitely distant from the present. But if so, then this makes the problem worse, not better. For then one couldn’t even get going to make progress in traversing an infinite set of events to reach the present moment. Second, Mackie’s point that each event in a beginningless past is only finitely distant from the present is irrelevant. For the issue isn’t whether any finite segment of a beginningless past can be traversed to reach the present, but rather whether the whole infinite past can be so traversed. To think that a whole infinite set can be traversed because each finite segment can be traversed is to commit the fallacy of composition.
So much for stage-setting. What to make of this exchange? Mackie is correct, and Craig has misunderstood him – or at least he has given Mackie's reply an uncharitable gloss. First, Mackie is correct to say that proponents of the kalam argument have misconstrued a beginningless traversal. For to say that the past is beginningless is to say that some infinite set of events or other has been traversed before every point in the past. But if so, then if a beginningless past is possible – which is the very issue under dispute – there can be no hurdle of going from a state of not having to having traversed an infinite in a beginningless past. Therefore, the only way in which one could go from a finite to an infinite traversal is if you began your traversal at some point. And this is why Mackie says that Craig conflates a beginningless past (i.e., {…, -3, -2, -1}) with a past that had a beginning an infinite amount of time ago (i.e., {1, 2, 3, …} or, say, {1, …-3, -2, -1}).
Second, in light of the previous point, we see why Craig is mistaken, or at least being uncharitable, in saying that Mackie has committed the fallacy of composition. For on the more charitable and forceful construal of Mackie's reply, Mackie is not arguing that because every finite segment of a beginningless past is traversable, the whole infinite past traversable. Rather, he’s saying that if the past is beginningless – which, again, is the very issue under dispute – then an infinite set of events has already been traversed before every point of a beginningless past, and that is why there is only a finite set of subsequent events between that point and the present. I thus conclude that Craig has failed to dislodge Mackie's criticism of the kalam argument here." (On Craig's Standard Reply to Mackie on the Kalam Cosmological Argument)
Another objection to Craig's argument is that it presupposes the A-theory of time, in which temporal becoming is real, in contrast to the B-theory of time, in which all moments (past, present and future) exist simultaneously (Carrier, 2005 & 2007). As Craig explained:
"Some of the arguments for the finitude of the past seem to presuppose that temporal becoming is real. For example, the argument about [the impossibility of getting] through an infinite series of events by going one event at a time. That presupposes that these events are actually happening; that they are actually lapsing, [but] on the B-theory that idea of lapse of time is an illusion. The whole yardstick just exists and nobody is moving from the first inch to the last inch; it just is there. So, it seems to me that the A-theory does underlie the Kalam argument in several ways." (A and B Theory of Time and the Kalam Cosmological Argument)
Philospher Younes Terrab noticed this problem and commented on it:
"Craig argues that the collection of past events must have been formed by successive addition given the A-theory of time. For in the A-theory of time events occur, and they do so one-at-the-time. Since the collection is formed by events being added to the collection after they have occurred, and they can only do so one-at-the time given the nature of time, it follows that the collection is formed by successive addition. ... Even though the A-theory is more in line with the commonsensical view of time than the B-theory is, the A-theory is still regarded as the more problematic of the two by contemporary philosophers. ... This is why more contemporary philosophers accept the B-theory over the A-theory. One could, therefore, dismiss the Kalam from the get-go because it relies on the more problematic view of time." (Did God Cause the Universe to Begin to Exist?, pp. 13, 70)
"Something like the A-theory of time does seem to be operative in Craig’s analysis, since it is only on a tensed view of time that we would have a true succession (or regression) of events, which in this case would be moments of time. On the B-theory, it seems time could be infinite without worrying about these objections, because it does not become infinite by successive addition, and since we do not “move through” time, there is no temporal regress going back in time... and therefore there is no real temporal regress of events that have passed from existence... On the B-theory, every moment exists tenselessly and ontologically on par with the present moment, and the series is beginningless, endless, and exists all at once... The various moments of time simply stand in tenseless relations to all the other moments."
Nevertheless, Metcalf resisted this view and tried to reconcile the Kalam with the B-theory. In response, philosopher Daniel Linford wrote the following:
"I have read the paper by Metcalfe. Andrew Loke defends a somewhat similar view in his book God and Ultimate Origins. ... As both authors argue, there have been arguments since at least the medieval period that essentially ordered series must have a finite number of members. If time is an essentially ordered series and those medieval arguments work, then perhaps time has a beginning in this B-theoretic sense. One problem with both accounts is that they rely on the notion of an essentially ordered series. Metcalfe utilizes an essentially ordered series that happens over time and this requires fundamental time asymmetry. But, as I argued in my Mentaculus paper, according to a number of positions now popular in philosophy of physics, fundamental time asymmetry does not exist. So, the series of past times is not an essentially ordered series. Loke develops a slightly different notion of essentially ordered series where the members of the series do not have to be arranged in time. Still, Loke reaches the conclusion that the series must be finite. But, here, too, Loke runs into problems from contemporary philosophy of physics that (somehow) philosophers of religion often miss. The arguments for causal reductionism or for causal eliminativism that have been offered since at least Mach and Russell maintain that the fundamental relations we find in nature are symmetric. That’s true over time, i.e., the fundamental laws are time symmetric, but that’s also true for, e.g., Newtonian forces at a time. So, many philosophers would deny that there are the sort of essential orderings that Loke’s argument requires." (Personal Correspondence)
The B-theory is the standard view in physics today, since it is entailed by General Relativity, wherein time is relative, not absolute – whereas Craig's argument assumes an absolute time frame. Ultimately, according to relativity, the 'beginning' of something is always relative to the observer, not an absolute fact. (Carrier, 2004)
As Stephen Hawking explained in his book Brief Answers to the Big Questions (p.40): "The problem of whether or not the universe had a beginning was a great concern to the German philosopher Immanuel Kant. He felt there were logical contradictions, or antinomies, either way. If the universe had a beginning [in time], why did it wait an infinite time before it began? He called that the thesis. On the other hand, if the universe had existed for ever, why did it take an infinite time to reach the present stage? He called that the antithesis. Both the thesis and the antithesis depended on Kant’s assumption, along with almost everyone else, that time was absolute... However, in 1915 Einstein introduced his revolutionary general theory of relativity. In this, space and time were no longer absolute."
...................................................
(Also see this great science documentary presented by physicist Brian Greene where this theory was brilliantly explained: The Fabric of the Cosmos: The Illusion of Time)
It is worth noting that "Craig recognizes the devastating nature of this problem, and hence has been forced to argue for a complete reinterpretation of relativity theory – against mainstream science – in order to make sense of his own Kalam argument. I imagine [theists] will find Craig's books on cosmology and time very informative, even though Craig's 'solution' to the problem... runs explicitly counter to the current scientific consensus." (Carrier, 2004)
Now, I myself lean towards something like the A-theory of time (see, e.g., Smolin 2013 and 2014), and so I won't defend the B-theory here, but I'll leave some references in which many arguments were presented against Craig's defense of his presentist Neo-lorentzian formulation of General Relativity and presentism in general: Janssen, 2003; AAC; Joseph, 2014; CA, 2013 & 2014; Wuthrich, 2010 & 2012; Davidson, 2003 & 2013; Umbrello 2015; Romero, 2014 & 2015; Vaccaro 2018; Bihan, 2018.
For further reading on this particular argument against an infinite past, see: Morriston, 2021; Danaher, 2014; Leon, 2009 & 2011; Puryear, 2014 & 2016; McAllister, 2011. Have fun!
What does "begins to exist" Mean?
Common-day objects such as tables and chairs "begin to exist" in the sense that the arrangement of matter that people agree are "tables" and "chairs" begin to "exist" when someone or something arranges the matter in those precise ways. However, that's not what the premise is arguing. The matter itself didn't "begin to exist". It was just rearranged. The argument refers to first there being nothing, and then something beginning to exist.
Comparing concepts like "the chair began to exist when the carpenter created it" and "the universe began to exist", and considering them equivalent, would be a fallacy of equivocation. It's certainly not the same thing. (In the first case nothing actually came into existence. A more accurate assessment would be that matter was transformed from one shape to another).
Quentin Smith, a professor emeritus of philosophy at Western Michigan University who worked in the philosophy of physics and philosophy of religion, wrote: "[The] first premise [of the Kalam] is: Whatever begins to exist has a cause. Second premise: The universe began to exist. And the conclusion is: The universe had a cause. Now this argument commits the fallacy of equivocation, and what that means is that the [sentence "begins to exist"] is used in a different sense in the premise, Whatever begins to exist has a cause, than it is in the conclusion, The universe has a cause. For when we examine "things that begin to exist have causes," what we really are examining are re-arrangers of pre-existent materials. Anything we point to in our daily life that we say has a cause, say, a statue, is a rearrangement of, say, a slab of marble. And even a human being is a rearrangement ultimately of chemicals and atoms and quarks and so on. And so insofar as "Whatever begins to exist has a cause" has any support at all, it would have to mean "[Whatever is re-arranged from a prior state has an efficient cause]". Now given that, and given the second premise, the universe began to exist [out of nothing], we cannot infer that universe has a re-arranger of its pre-existent materials, for if the universe began to exist, there are no pre-existent materials, so that if "cause" has any meaning at all in the conclusion, it has to mean something that creates the materials from nothing, and we have absolutely no experience of that in any of our lives, in any of science, anywhere. It's just an idea that appears solely in theism. So I see no evidence for it based on empirical observation, scientific evidence, or anything. It seems to me a proposition of supernatural theology. So I don't think that that is an argument that a rational person should accept." (Does God Exist?)
Elsewhere, Quentin wrote something similar: "There is a decisive problem with this line of thinking. There’s absolutely no evidence that it is true. All of the observations we have are of changes in things — of something changing from one state to another. Things move, come to a rest, get larger, get smaller, combine with other things, divide in half, and so on. But we have no observation of things coming into existence. For example, we have no observations of people coming into existence. Here again, you merely have a change of things. An egg cell and a sperm cell change their state by combining together. The combination divides, enlarges, and eventually evolves into an adult human being. Therefore I conclude that we have no evidence at all that the empirical version of Craig’s statement, "Whatever begins to exist has a cause," is true. All of the causes we are aware of are changes in pre-existing materials. In Craig’s and other theist’s causal principle, "cause" means something entirely different: it means creating material from nothingness. It is pure speculation that such a strange sort of causation is even possible, let alone even supported in our observations in our daily lives." (Two Ways to Prove Atheism)
Adolf Grünbaum, who worked at the University of Pittsburgh and was considered to be one of the best philosophers of science, wrote: "Consider cases of causation which do involve the intervention of conscious fashioners or agents, such as the baking of a cake by a person. In such a case, the materials composing the cake owe their particular state of being in cake-form partly to acts of intervention by a conscious agent. But clearly, the very existence of the atoms or molecules composing the cake cannot be attributed to the causal role played by the activity of the agent. Thus, even if we were to assume that agent-causation does differ interestingly from event-causation, we must recognize that ordinary agent-causation is still only a transformation of matter (energy). ... Even for those cases of causation which involve conscious agents or fashioners, the premise does not assert that they ever create anything out of nothing; instead, conscious fashioners merely transform previously existing materials from one state to another; the baker creates a cake out of flour, milk, butter, etc., and the parents who produce an offspring do so from a sperm, an ovum, and from the food supplied by the mother’s body, which in turn comes from the soil, solar energy, etc. Similarly, when a person dies, he or she ceases to exist as a person. But the dead body does not lapse into nothingness, since the materials of the body continue in other forms of matter or energy. In other words, all sorts of organization wholes (e.g., biological organisms) do cease to exist only as such when they disintegrate and their parts are scattered. But their parts continue in some form. Since the concept of cause used in the conclusion of the argument involves creation out of nothing, we see that it is plainly different from the concept of cause in the premise. And for this reason alone, the conclusion does not follow from the premise deductively." (The Pseudo-Problem of Creation in Physical Cosmology)
The famous German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer reached the same conclusion: “The concept of causality which we are discussing here has always been comprehended far too widely by philosophers for the furtherance of their dogmatic ends... for change and causality refer only to states or conditions. It is these states which we understand by form in the wider sense; and the forms alone change; matter endures. Therefore, only the form is amenable to the law of causality. ... Therefore, the question as to the cause of a thing always concerns only its form, in other words, its condition or quality, not its matter. ... It is the forms, whose union with matter, that is to say, whose appearance in matter, by means of a change, is subject to the law of causality. Therefore, by too wide a comprehension of this concept in the abstract, crept in the misuse of extending causality to the thing absolutely, and thus to its... existence, and consequently to matter as well; and in the end it was considered justifiable to ask even about a cause of the world. This is the origin of the cosmological proof.” (The World as Will and Representation, Vol. 2, pp. 41, 42, 43)
The corrected form can be stated as follows:
P1. Whatever is rearranged from a prior state has an efficient cause.
P2. The universe was rearranged from a prior state.
C. Therefore, the universe has an efficient cause.
Obviously Craig would say the second premise is not correct. After all (so the argument goes) the Big Bang theory proves the universe did not exist prior to its existence to be rearranged (viz., there was no thing there to be rearranged). Therefore, the conclusion does not follow from the premises.
In other words, nothing begins to exist, but everything comes from a pre-existing physical state. So it is meaningless to state that they have a cause because they begin to exist.
The syllogistic formalization of the argument proceeds as follows:
P1. Physical things do not begin to exist but change from pre-existing physical states.
P2. The universe is a physical thing.
C. Therefore, the universe changed from a pre-existing physical state.
If we accept this corrected argument, then it follows that the universal series of causes and effects is infinite. Because every change – i.e., rearrangement from a prior state – had a physical cause; hence, it is logical to assume that all changes had physical causes, and illogical to assume that there could be an uncaused entity. Therefore, it is more logical to believe that the universe is comprised of an infinite series of physical causes and effects than to believe that it is the finite creation of a non-physical uncaused cause. Moreover, not only are all causes physical, but all moments we know of have temporal predecessors. So, if we follow this logic, we find out that all moments must have temporal predecessors as well – including the moment of the Big Bang and the moment before that, etc. This means the chain of causation must be temporally infinite in the past, since all moments must be preceded by other moments ad infinitum. Thus, this is positive evidence for past-eternal models that include an infinite regress of physical causes and moments (and against Craig's singularity theorems).
It can be formalized in this way:
P1. Every event has a temporal predecessor. (Follows from empirical knowledge)
P2. 'The Big Bang' was an event.
C. Therefore, 'The Big Bang' has a temporal predecessor.
P1. Whatever is rearranged from a prior state has an efficient cause.
P2. The universe was rearranged from a prior state.
C. Therefore, the universe has an efficient cause.
Obviously Craig would say the second premise is not correct. After all (so the argument goes) the Big Bang theory proves the universe did not exist prior to its existence to be rearranged (viz., there was no thing there to be rearranged). Therefore, the conclusion does not follow from the premises.
In other words, nothing begins to exist, but everything comes from a pre-existing physical state. So it is meaningless to state that they have a cause because they begin to exist.
The syllogistic formalization of the argument proceeds as follows:
P1. Physical things do not begin to exist but change from pre-existing physical states.
P2. The universe is a physical thing.
C. Therefore, the universe changed from a pre-existing physical state.
If we accept this corrected argument, then it follows that the universal series of causes and effects is infinite. Because every change – i.e., rearrangement from a prior state – had a physical cause; hence, it is logical to assume that all changes had physical causes, and illogical to assume that there could be an uncaused entity. Therefore, it is more logical to believe that the universe is comprised of an infinite series of physical causes and effects than to believe that it is the finite creation of a non-physical uncaused cause. Moreover, not only are all causes physical, but all moments we know of have temporal predecessors. So, if we follow this logic, we find out that all moments must have temporal predecessors as well – including the moment of the Big Bang and the moment before that, etc. This means the chain of causation must be temporally infinite in the past, since all moments must be preceded by other moments ad infinitum. Thus, this is positive evidence for past-eternal models that include an infinite regress of physical causes and moments (and against Craig's singularity theorems).
It can be formalized in this way:
P1. Every event has a temporal predecessor. (Follows from empirical knowledge)
P2. 'The Big Bang' was an event.
C. Therefore, 'The Big Bang' has a temporal predecessor.
Now, the religious apologist Josh Rasmussen believes he has the capacity to refute Schopenhauer, Grünbaum and Quentin, and so replied as follows:
"My third response is that this principle that whatever begins to exist has a cause is supported by a more general principle that beginnings in general have a cause. So, even if the only beginnings you see are rearrangements, still the causal order with respect to rearrangements supports the general principle that predicts this set of observations; it predicts that every beginning has a cause. That’s because the general principle successfully predicts the restricted principle. As a comparison take all the coffee mugs you know about. Probably they all have a cause. Even if they’re just rearrangements, those rearrangements of molecules are caused by prior – whoever put those cups together or whatever factory produce them. And I think that’s evidence that probably even the coffee mugs you don’t know about have a cause, so you extrapolate from the known cases into the unknown cases. The idea here is that if every arrangement you know about has a cause then unless you have some independent reason to think that there’s a relevant difference between arrangements and non-arrangements you have evidence for thinking that every beginning has a cause and that’s sort of a key point there; is that if there’s a reason to think there’s a relevant difference, then you could perhaps break the argument, but it’s not enough to point to a difference: you need some reason to think there’s a relevant difference. If somebody says “oh look all these blue things have a cause, but we’ve never seen red things have a cause.” Okay, but the difference between blue and red... Is that a relevant difference between cause? It doesn’t seem relevant and so unless you have a relevant difference you’ve got some reasons to think that difference is relevant then your observations of arrangements being caused is evidence for the general principle that any beginning has a cause it’s evidence and I think it’s evidence I think it’s good evidence.” (Causality and Kalam)
If we follow Josh's divvy argument that 'non-arrangements' must have an efficient cause of their beginning of existence because re-arrangements have efficient causes, then we should also conclude that matter will go out of existence in the future because aggregates of matter always suffer a disarrangement – we see that people, cars, trees and so on don't last forever (hence the expression "nothing lasts forever"). However, physics tells us that all aggregates of matter – including protons – will ultimately decay into elementary particles like electrons and photons which are, in turn, reduced to quantum fields, but these fields will not go out of existence (and hence will last forever). This is evidence, therefore, that we shouldn't unjustifiably generalize – as Josh wishes to do – from re-arrangements to non-arrangements or vice-versa. Consequently, we cannot be confident that the universe had a cause of its alleged beginning of existence. In addition, the standard objection to quantum mechanics is that "virtual particles" don't come out nothing, but from fields, viz., particles are waves on/of quantum fields. However, Josh's objection allows the naturalist to say: "Well, the same way it doesn't matter whether a building came from some pre-existing material (i.e., a material cause) or out of nothing to need an efficient cause, it doesn't matter whether a virtual particle came from a field (i.e., a material cause) or out of nothing to be argued it didn't have an efficient cause." Thus, the apologetical objection conflicts with another beloved objection apologists use.
Let me finish this part with a response to this quote by philosopher David Kyle Johnson who specializes in logic, metaphysics, free will, and philosophy of religion:
“I remain completely unconvinced that he has solved the problem and/or rescued the argument. First, the analogy doesn’t hold; the difference between “matter arrangement” and “creation ex nihilo” are vastly different—much more different than the difference between red and blue objects, or different kinds of coffee cups. The creation of matter is completely different than matter arrangement; and the only reason that those who give the Kalam argument put them into the same citatory (think of them both as examples of things coming into existence) is because of the equivocation I have pointed to.
Let me see if I can explain with an example. Suppose someone says “I have a right to watch Faces of Death; therefore it is right for me to watch Faces of Death.” (Faces of death is a morally objectional film of sorts that shows real people actually dying.) I note that their argument equivocates on the word “right”; the first premise is invoking a legal right, but the latter is about moral rights; when you clarify the meanings of the terms, the argument obviously doesn’t work. “There is no law against me watching Faces of Death; therefore it is morally permissible for me to watch faces of death.” This obviously doesn’t work; the argument is deductively invalid.
If he replies, but moral rights are obviously very related to legal rights, such that establishing a legal right to X strongly implies that one has a moral right to X; they are so related in fact, that it is your burden to prove that there is such a difference between the two that one does not entail the other. Until you establish that, I can just assume that one entails the other.
The obvious reply is, “No you can’t. The only reason they seem to be so related to you is that you are using the word “right” to describe them both; you have relied on your equivocation once again to try to avoid having committed the equivocation fallacy. What is morally permissible is in an entirely separate category from what is legally permissible. (It was illegal to hide Jews in your attic in 1940s Germany, but that didn’t mean it was immoral to do so). And if you think “X is legal” entails “X is moral” –which you must for your argument to work—the burden is on you to show that it does; the burden is not on me to show that it doesn’t. And until you meet that burden, your argument doesn’t work. And to meet that burden, you can’t just say “well, they seem similar to me; they are both “rights”. That argument commits the very same equivocation.”
And that’s exactly what’s going on here with Rasmussen’s argument. Matter arrangement is in a totally different category than creation ex nihilo; he is calling them both “object creation” (or invoking that concept) to make them sound similar, so that what is true of one (it must have a cause) is true of the other—but it only seems that way (to him or his audience) because of his equivocation on the idea of “objection creation.” The burden is on him to show that the fact that “matter arrangement” needs a cause entails that “creation ex nihilo” needs a cause; saying that I (or any objector to the Kalam argument) has to show what is so different about them (in order to show that he is guilty of equivocation) is an obvious attempt to unjustly shift the burden of proof. No, the argument equivocates, full stop. Those are different concepts; most certainly as different as legal and moral rights. If he wants it to work, he has to show that the fact that “When matter becomes arranged in such a way that we call it a new object, that arrangement has a cause” entails that the very existence of matter has a cause. We are dealing, after all, with a deductive argument here, where the conclusion is supposed to be guaranteed by the premises. So the burden is on him to make that connection. And “don’t they seem to be in the same category because I can use the word “object creation” to describe both?” doesn’t cut it. That move relies on the very fallacy that I am pointing to in the first place.” (Personal Correspondence)
Material and Efficient Causes
A related problem – discussed by Dr. Felipe Leon in the book Is God the Best Explanation of Things? (pp. 33-35 & 54-56), in his article titled Theism and Material Causality, in the article A Weaker Version of the Principle of Material Causality Yields the Same Conclusion, & in this discussion with Joseph Schmid – is that all the evidence suggests that nothing can begin to exist with an efficient cause, but not a material cause. A material cause is the stuff out of which something is made, and an efficient cause is that which actually brings about the effect. For example, the material cause of a chair is the wood, and the efficient cause is the carpenter. If God created the universe, it would mean that the universe came into being with an efficient cause, but no material cause. Never in our experience do we witness this sort of causation.
As a defeater to the claim there can be no efficient causation without material causation, Craig appeals to abstract objects. He writes:
"There are also many abstract objects which seem to exist contingently and noneternally, for example the equator, the center of mass of the solar system, Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, and so forth.... Now these things all began to exist: the equator, for example, did not exist before the earth did. But if they began to exist, did they have a cause or did they come into being out of just nothing?... Many philosophers would say that these objects did indeed have causes: it was Tolstoy, for example, who created Anna Karenina. So in cases such as these (and they are legion), we do, indeed, have instances of efficient causation without material causation." (The Kalam Cosmological Argument, p. 188)
For this response to work, one must adhere to Platonism, "the view that there exist such things as abstract objects – where an abstract object is an object that does not exist in space or time and which is therefore entirely non-physical and non-mental." Tolstoy's creation of Anna Karenina would only qualify as an example of efficient causation without material causation if there really is such a thing as Anna Karenina, above and apart from its physical copies, which popped into existence in some Platonic heaven when Tolstoy thought it up. If one adopts an antirealist approach to abstract objects, then this counterexample does not work, since in this view, abstract objects are thoughts, and thoughts are ontologically reduced to the arrangement – pattern of connections – of neural networks. Meaning they are identical to the physical objects (viz., the brain). So, again, the thought did not begin to exist, but instead changed – the neural pathways changed from one state to another. However, even if we accept the possibility that abstracta begin to exist, all it would prove is that abstract objects begin to exist, but it is not clear that it would apply to concrete/physical objects as well.
It is a bit disingenuous for Craig to make this appeal, given that, when talking about infinities, he denies the reality of abstract objects. Indeed, he notes that the truth of Platonism would mean the downfall of his argument that an actual infinity cannot exist, because if Platonism is true then sets such as the set of all real numbers would constitute an actual infinity. Craig has even gone so far as to criticize Platonists for being "cavalier and uncritical when it comes to embracing the sweeping metaphysical commitments of Platonism."
So how can Craig raise this defeater if he doesn't even believe that abstract objects exist? His answer is that although he believes Platonism to be false, it is at least coherent; But if coherence is all it takes for something to constitute a counterexample to a proposed principle, then a naturalist could just as easily say that it is at least coherent to suppose that things could begin to exist uncaused, and that this counts as a counterexample to premise 1.
William Lane Craig is a blackbelt in bullshit. He is crafty because he has a knowledge of some esoteric subjects that exceeds that of most laypersons, so it is easy for him to confound skeptics with an onslaught of obfuscatory exposition. But the emperor has no clothes, and the way to prove it is not by getting bogged down in the minutiae, but by paying close attention to the core assumptions underlying his prose.
The Quantum Mechanical Objection to the First Premise
Craig wrote: “For the first premiss [that whatever begins has a cause] is so intuitively obvious, especially when applied to the universe, that probably no one in his right mind really believes it to be false.” (The Kalam Cosmological Argument, p.141)
Let's see if scientists are in their right minds, then.
“In classical physics, causality dictates what happens from one moment to the next, but in quantum mechanics the behavior of physical objects is inherently unpredictable and some quantum processes have no cause at all. Take, for example, a radioactive atom. It has some probability of decaying, which is the same from this minute to the next. Eventually, it will decay, but there will be nothing that causes it to decay at that particular moment.” (Alexander Vilenkin, Many Worlds in One, p.181)
“[T]he rebounding [i.e., cyclic] universe scenario does allow the collapse of the universe to trigger the next Big Bang, which at least addresses the issue of cause-and-effect that lies at the heart of our desire to find out what came before the Big Bang. But perhaps cause-and-effect is a commonsense prejudice that should be set aside in this cosmological context. After all, the Big Bang expansion started on a miniature scale, and common sense does not really apply in this extreme realm. Instead, it is the weird rules of quantum physics that hold sway. Quantum physics is the most successful and utterly bizarre theory in the whole of physics. As Niels Bohr, one of the founders of quantum physics, famously said: ‘Anyone who is not shocked by quantum theory has not understood it.’ Although cause-and-effect is a valid principle in the everyday macroscopic world, it is the so-called uncertainty principle that rules the sub-microscopic quantum domain. This principle dictates that events can happen spontaneously, which has been shown to be the case experimentally. It also allows matter to appear from nowhere, even if only temporarily. At the everyday level the world seems deterministic..., but at the microscopic level determinism... can be violated. ... Hence, quantum cosmology offers various hypotheses that allow for the universe to have started from nothing for no reason.” (Simon Singh, Big Bang: The Origin of the Universe, pp. 491-492)
“What quantum cosmology tries to exploit is the fact that in quantum mechanics there is a real sense in which there are effects without causes. We saw this even in the simple two-slit experiment. Energy is deposited on the target screen, but in no meaningful sense can one attribute that event to a specific cause. One cannot 'find' the emitted neutron that was responsible. One cannot uncover which of the two slits it went through.” (John Barrow, The World Within the World, p.231)
“Quantum-mechanical considerations show that the causal proposition is limited in its application, if applicable at all, and consequently that a probabilistic argument for a cause of the Big Bang cannot go through. ... It might be objected that quantum acausality applies only on the microscopic level and not to macroscopic cosmological states or beginnings. This could be granted without detriment to my argument, for the physical processes constitutive of the Big Bang (which I have defined to occur during the Planck era) are... microscopic and occur at dimensions where quantum-mechanical principles unquestionably apply.” (Quentin Smith, The Uncaused Beginning of the Universe)
“[I]n quantum mechanics often things can come into existence
spontaneously. [H]ere’s a good example [since] you seem to have problems with
the [uncaused] creation of the universe. ... [T]ake a photon, take the light
that is bombarding us... [W]hat was the cause of the photon that is hitting
your eye? What’s the cause? There’s no physical cause; it was emitted
spontaneously. You can’t say that... that photon, which was emitted by an
electron, which changed energy levels in [the] atom, had a cause.” (Lawrence Krauss in Krauss & Craig, 2013)
“There’s a certain sense in which quantum systems are already known to have an element of freedom—a sense illuminated by a recent theorem invented and proved by John Conway and Simon Kochen, two Princeton mathematicians. I don’t much like the name they gave their result, but it’s catchy and has duly caught on: the free-will theorem. ... It implies that there’s no reason for what an electron chooses to do when we measure it. This is both thrilling and scary, because the idea that choices atoms make are truly free (i.e., uncaused) fails to satisfy the demand for sufficient reason—for an answer to every question we might ask of nature.” (Lee Smolin, Time Reborn, Ch. 12).
(Interestingly, Bertrand Russell made this objection in 1948 in his debate with Frederick Copleston: “As for things not having a cause, the physicists assure us that individual quantum transitions in atoms have no cause.”)
It seems these highly educated, intelligent and respected scientists (and philosopher of physics) need to visit a psychiatrist because a highly biased religious apologist (but I repeat myself) with a theology degree said they must not be in their right mind! Honestly that's pathetic.
Physicist Victor Stenger elaborated further this objection: “Even in science, where causal relationships have been built into our models for centuries, we find that events happen without cause. When an electron in an excited energy level of an atom drops down to a lower level, it emits a photon that provides the common source of light or, more generally, electromagnetic radiation, over a spectral range from X-rays to ultraviolet light. This is a quantum phenomenon that, in most interpretations of quantum mechanics, occurs spontaneously, that is, without cause. The radioactive decay of an atomic nucleus is another prime example. All the quantum theory of nuclei can do is predict the probability of an atomic transition or nuclear decay, and it does so quite accurately. But nothing in the theory enables us to predict when a particular atom will emit a photon or when a nucleus will decay. They are undetermined, uncaused. Now, there is a version of quantum mechanics, proposed by physicist David Bohm in the 1950s, in which quantum events do happen deterministically. Bohm dubbed this the “ontological interpretation of quantum mechanics.” It is also known as the hidden variables theory. Although deterministic in principle, the theory itself does no better than the other versions of quantum mechanics in being able to predict only the probability of an event and not the actual outcome in every case. ... Furthermore, the theory requires instantaneous connections across the universe that violate Lorentz invariance [viz., faster-than-light connections], and this fact alone has made it unpopular among most physicists and philosophers.” (Fallacy of Fine Tuning, Chapter 6.1)
To accept this minority view would clearly be cherry picking. But Craig likes to appeal to "scientific consensus." In fact, the overwhelming majority of interpretations are non-deterministic. So, if Craig conveniently cherry picks a deterministic one, it would be definite proof that he is extremely biased and only interested in defending the Kalam.
Unsurprisingly, that's exactly what Craig does. He said: "I'm therefore more inclined to some sort of deterministic theory of quantum mechanics, like David Bohm's quantum mechanics."
However, philosopher Daniel Linford told me the following in an email: "Most (maybe all) of the relativistic versions of Bohmian mechanics that have been offered are problematic for Craig. As you noted, Craig likes Bohmian mechanics, in part, because Bohmian mechanics is deterministic. However, trouble appears when we try to make a Bohmian version of quantum field theory. Most, perhaps all, Bohmian versions of quantum field theory that have been offered are non-deterministic. So, if one likes determinism, then Bohmian mechanics might not be the best option."
Physicists are divided between the Copenhagen (or standard view) and other interpretations. The Copenhagen, Information-based (e.g., QBism and Relational quantum mechanics), and Objective Collapse interpretations are all non-deterministic:
To see more interpretations click here.
The Everettian interpretation (or Many-worlds) is thought to be deterministic, but apologists, like Craig, don't find this option desirable at all. In a debate Craig said: “Now I know that Sean Carroll holds to Everett's Many Worlds Interpretation; but that, again, seems to me to be just fantastic...” Elsewhere, he wrote: “[This] analysis of the universe requires the Many Worlds Interpretation of quantum physics... But why should we adopt this interpretation of quantum physics with its bloated ontology and miraculous splitting of the universe?” ('What Place, Then, for a Creator?')
Craig's Second Approach to the Acausal Nature of Quantum Mechanics
Some quantum events happen without a cause, as noted above. Craig is ready with a response to this in case the first fails. He stated:
"Now, immediately people will think about quantum indeterminacy. That there seem to be events that, on at least the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, are uncaused, but... the [Kalam] argument is very carefully worded. It does not say every event has a cause; it says everything that begins to exist has a cause... Popularizers touting such theories as getting something from nothing apparently do not understand that the vacuum is not nothing but a sea of fluctuating energy endowed with a rich structure and subject to physical laws. Such models do not, therefore, involve a true origination ex nihilo... [They] say that in quantum mechanics you have theories by which the universe comes into being out of nothing and in fact that's just not the case. You have a physical state of affairs which is either a quantum vacuum – a field – of fluctuating energy or these are quantum physical fields described by physical laws and these physical states of affairs can reconfigure themselves so as to produce particles."
Or here is a quote by philosopher Graham Oppy: "A natural first thought is that the spontaneous production of subatomic particles in a vacuum fluctuation is an instance of things beginning to exist uncaused. However, while it may be true that these vacuum fluctuations lack efficient causes, it is certainly not true – as both Davies and Craig note – that they lack material causes: these processes merely involve the possibly uncaused conversion of pre-existing energy into material form." (Professor William Craig's Criticisms of Critiques of the Kalam)
It is true that, in quantum field theory, particles are just vibrations of fields, as physicist Andrei Linde observed: "According to quantum field theory, empty space is not entirely empty. It is filled with quantum fluctuations of all types of physical fields." (Linde, 2002, p.7)(Also see Carroll, 2013). However, Craig's objection contradicts his definition of "begins to exist" when applied to physical things in general. Craig claims that people and buildings begin to exist, when in reality they are just changing form. In other words, first (1) Craig claimed that quantum events are not about particles coming into being spontaneously out of nothing, rather out of quantum fields, but then (2) when discussing the meaning of "begins to exist", Craig argues that when people are born or when buildings are created (i.e., the matter is reconfigured so as to create people and buildings), they begin to exist. But here is the catch: People, in Craig's definition, are 'beginning to exist' just like the particles in a quantum field (being reconfigured or rearranged). The only difference is that there is no efficient cause (yet there is a material cause; the field) for the existence of the particle, but there are efficient and material causes for the existence of the person who was born. So, the particles are indeed 'beginning to exist' in Craig's definition, and are, therefore, counter-examples to the first premise of the Kalam (For further reading about this specific point, see Aron Lucas, 2013).
Also, one could reverse Josh's argument (which we discussed previously) to attack Craig's objection: Craig has to show there is a relevant difference between the two ideas (i.e., an object coming into existence from no material and efficient cause or only having a material cause); it is not enough to simply point to this difference and say "See, this difference shows a disanalogy". Indeed, Craig doesn't think the universe had a material cause; only an efficient cause. Therefore, by demonstrating that something probably came into existence without an efficient cause (i.e., quantum particles), one is doing away with the need for an efficient cause of the universe.
Now, perhaps Craig's argument is that the field (from which the particles come from) is a necessary condition for the event to occur – without it, no particle would appear.
While it is obviously true that for a vibration of a field to appear – regardless of whether it is efficiently caused or not –, it still requires the field to exist (by definition) for it is a vibration of the field, it is not obviously true that this is evidence a substrate is a necessary condition for any event without an efficient cause to occur. What is relevant here is that an event had no efficient cause at all. For example, if a tree suddenly and spontaneously became a chair, we would still say this change had no efficient cause even though the matter was a necessary condition for it to exist in order to change its form. But the point is that there was no efficient cause and the beginning of the universe, according to Craig, only needs an efficient cause. So, his objection is simply misguided.
Craig failed to show that the fact that a material substrate is needed for the particle to appear without an efficient cause is evidence that for anything to appear without an efficient cause it requires a substrate. What is the relevant difference? Show me the relevant difference between a particle coming from a substrate without an efficient cause and something coming into existence without an efficient cause and no substrate.
In addition, I can use the same objection to attack the Kalam: every time something comes into existence and has an efficient cause, it also has a material cause (a substrate out of which something forms). That entails that a pre-existing substrate is a necessary condition for anything to have an efficient cause. Consequently, if the universe came into existence, it had an efficient and a material cause. If Craig insists it didn't have a material cause because such and such, then equally I can say it could not have been caused at all, for a material cause is a necessary condition for something to begin with an efficient cause. If Craig denies this, then I can deny that a material cause is a necessary condition for something to come into existence without an efficient cause. And thus, the quantum objection is vindicated.
So, next time an apologist tells you, "Quantum events are not examples of things that come into existence entirely uncaused because they don't come out of nothing, but from fields (i.e., a substrate/a material cause) unlike the Big Bang", reply with, "Sure, but you forget that all the examples of things that did have efficient causes, also came from some substrate/a material cause and not out of nothing like the Big Bang. Therefore, if the fact that quantum events come from a substrate invalidades my reasoning, then your examples are also invalidated by the same reason."
Craig presented a similar response in an article with philosopher Quentin Smith. He claims that the events in question have necessary causal conditions, even if those conditions are not jointly sufficient to produce the effect:
"The appearance of a particle in a quantum vacuum may thus be said to be spontaneous, but cannot properly be said to be absolutely uncaused, since it has many physically necessary conditions. To be uncaused in the relevant sense of an absolute beginning, an existent must lack any non-logical necessary or sufficient conditions whatsoever." (Craig and Smith, Theism, Atheism, and Big Bang Cosmology)
In other words, quantum events have necessary, but not sufficient causes: the quantum vacuum contains the energy that is necessary for the event. The event then occurs in an indeterminate manner, but without the quantum vacuum, no event could occur.
This is a somewhat surprising line for Craig to take. One wonders what he thinks makes a cause out of a bunch of merely necessary conditions. Apparently not that they are jointly sufficient to produce the effect. What, then? Some explanation is surely called for. Craig will not want to settle for so little by way of a cause when he is considering the beginning of the universe. Why is he willing to do it here? But even if we accept Craig's suggestion that quantum events are not "uncaused" in the "relevant sense," this will require a fresh qualification of premise (1). It will now have to be understood in such a way that it does not entail that for every beginning there is something sufficient to produce it, but only that for every beginning there is some "non-logically necessary condition" without which it could not happen. This makes the question I am raising now about the status of premise (1) all the more pressing. (Also, as we shall see later, it considerably weakens the case Craig makes for saying that the First Cause can only be a person.)
"The appearance of a particle in a quantum vacuum may thus be said to be spontaneous, but cannot properly be said to be absolutely uncaused, since it has many physically necessary conditions. To be uncaused in the relevant sense of an absolute beginning, an existent must lack any non-logical necessary or sufficient conditions whatsoever." (Craig and Smith, Theism, Atheism, and Big Bang Cosmology)
In other words, quantum events have necessary, but not sufficient causes: the quantum vacuum contains the energy that is necessary for the event. The event then occurs in an indeterminate manner, but without the quantum vacuum, no event could occur.
This is a somewhat surprising line for Craig to take. One wonders what he thinks makes a cause out of a bunch of merely necessary conditions. Apparently not that they are jointly sufficient to produce the effect. What, then? Some explanation is surely called for. Craig will not want to settle for so little by way of a cause when he is considering the beginning of the universe. Why is he willing to do it here? But even if we accept Craig's suggestion that quantum events are not "uncaused" in the "relevant sense," this will require a fresh qualification of premise (1). It will now have to be understood in such a way that it does not entail that for every beginning there is something sufficient to produce it, but only that for every beginning there is some "non-logically necessary condition" without which it could not happen. This makes the question I am raising now about the status of premise (1) all the more pressing. (Also, as we shall see later, it considerably weakens the case Craig makes for saying that the First Cause can only be a person.)
Another way to get around the problem would be to argue causation is a metaphysical principle (i.e., broad logical necessity), and not a nomological law (i.e., a law derived from, and contingent on, the physical universe). This is very relevant because a metaphysical principle will continue being true even if science conflicts with it. Craig claims that the principle of causation, while synthetic, is knowable a priori. Graham Oppy summed up one of Craig's reasons for thinking causality is metaphysical: "Since the categories are objective features of both thought and reality, and since causality is one of these categories, the causal relation must hold in the real world, and the causal principle is a synthetic a priori proposition. It is a priori because it is universal and necessary, being a pre-condition of thought itself. But it is synthetic because the concept of an event does not entail the concept of being caused." ("Divine Causation") Oppy, then, went on to object to it: "Even if one accepts the highly controversial neo-Kantian assumption that there can be no objects of knowledge unless there are a priori categorial structures of thought, it is utterly unclear why one should suppose that, if there are a priori categorial structures of thought, then it is knowable a priori that everything that begins to exist has a cause of its beginning to exist. In particular, the claim – in itself highly controversial – that there can be rational thought only if there is a causal structure in the world that is reflected in the categorial structure of thought, supplies no evident support for the further claim that the categorial structure in question must accurately reflect the causal structure of the world at or very near to t = 0." (Arguing About Gods, pp.150-151)
Now, there are good reasons to doubt it is a metaphysical principle as philosopher Wes Morriston explained here and here, philosopher Robin Le Poidevin explained here and philosopher Younes explained here, but I'll bite the bullet and accept it for the sake of the argument. As a consequence, I also have to accept the "principle of material causality, or PMC for short. In simple terms, PMC says that all made things are made from or out of other things... [and the PMC] holds of metaphysical necessity." Theism and Material Causality, Felipe Leon.
The God of the Gaps Fallacy
The Kalam is just a God of the Gaps fallacy dressed up with fancy philosophical and scientific jargon to sound serious. But after careful examination, we can see that it is reduced to "Here is a gap in the scientific understanding where we can put god", which is one of the fallacies the whole theistic argumentation falls into. Even if there's an unknown uncaused cause to the Universe, we cannot assume that it is God.
It follows that the conclusion is inconclusive, because even if we reason that the universe has a cause, we know nothing about the nature of this cause and certainly not enough to ascribe godhood (with properties such as awareness and intelligence) to it. The cause of the universe may very well lack mind or will.
The Cause of the Universe is Spiritual
Craig certainly understands that the Kalam is a God of the Gaps and to get around it, he adds a new premise:
“P4. If the universe has a cause, then an uncaused, personal Creator of the universe exists, who sans the universe is beginningless, changeless, immaterial, timeless, spaceless, and enormously powerful.
This, as Thomas Aquinas was wont to remark, is what everybody means by God.” (The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology, p.194)
First of all, the alleged fact that the creation of the universe requires a lot of power is indication/evidence that there is more than one cause. If there are many weak causes, then a lot of power will naturally emerge, and so will be sufficient to produce a powerful effect (you don't need a single cause with a lot of power) and this fits better with what we know, hence, it is more plausible than a single powerful cause. As David Hume pointed out in his classical book Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (p.26):
"What shadow of an argument can you produce, from your hypothesis, to prove the unity of the deity? A great number of men join in building a house or ship, in rearing a city, in framing a commonwealth: Why may not several deities combine in contriving and framing a world? This is only so much greater similarity to human affairs. By sharing the work among several, we may so much farther limit the attributes of each, and get rid of that extensive power and knowledge, which must be supposed in one deity... And if such foolish, such vicious creatures as man can yet often unite in framing and executing one plan; how much more those deities or demons, whom we may suppose several degrees more perfect? To multiply causes without necessity is indeed contrary to true philosophy: But this principle applies not to the present case. Were one deity antecedently proved by your theory, who were possessed of every attribute, requisite to the production of the universe; it would be needless, I own (though not absurd) to suppose any other deity existent. But while it is still a question, whether all these attributes are united in one subject, or dispersed among several independent beings: By what phenomena in nature can we pretend to decide the controversy? Where we see a body raised in a scale, we are sure that there is in the opposite scale, however, concealed from sight, some counterpoising weight equal to it: But it is still allowed to doubt, whether that weight be an aggregate of several distinct bodies, or one uniform united mass. And if the weight requisite very much exceeds anything which we have ever seen conjoined in any single body; the former supposition becomes still more probable and natural."
Second, the cause does not have to be non-spatial, non-temporal and non-material. The alleged fact that our Lorentzian four-dimensional spacetime manifold as well as its contents (matter-energy) began to exist, does not entail all of physical reality began. For all we know, the cause could be another kind of physical universe (e.g., a Newtonian-like hyperspace) that exists separately from our manifold, as philosopher Michael Tooley, who earned his Ph.D. in philosophy at Princeton University and taught at Stanford University, explained: "Even if our present universe goes back to a singularity, it is just a complete fallacy to think that that means it had to have a non-physical cause. It is perfectly possible that our spatio-temporal world is embedded in a larger spatio-temporal world – a hyperspace – and that within that hyperspace there is a physical explanation – a material explanation – of the origins of the various subuniverses." Philosopher Wes Morriston made a similar point: "Even if we could extrapolate all the way back to a time zero, this would establish merely that the spacetime of our universe has a beginning. It would give us no reason to conclude that there is nothing on the other side of that beginning (an earlier universe operating in accordance with quite different physical laws, perhaps?), and no reason therefore to think that the whole order of nature (physical reality as a whole) has an absolute beginning." Or, as Professor of Physics Scott Oser from the University of British Columbia explained: "There are a couple of ways to get around this problem. One path is to deny that time started at the Big Bang. This requires some modification of general relativity, and we'll discuss this in more detail in a moment. The other way is to suppose that there was some precursor universe, with its own timeline and possibly different laws of physics, that gave rise to our current universe. At some time in the timeline of the precursor universe, our universe came into being, and our own time dimension began." Philosopher John Shook agrees with this objection: “William Lane Craig... reach[es] the climax of [his] essay... by saying, 'From the two premises, it follows logically that the universe has a cause. This is a staggering conclusion, for it implies that the universe was brought into existence by a transcendent reality.' … The word 'transcendent' is ambiguous. Craig... want[s] [his] readers to hear 'supernatural' but at most the conclusion warrants 'beyond this universe [or spatial manifold].' More nature could be responsible just the same. There is probably plenty more nature beyond the horizon of the observable universe, and perhaps there is more nature before our universe’s beginning. ... If the Big Bang theory continues to be a cornerstone of cosmology, scientific explanations involving more nature besides our universe may become confirmable in the future.” (Systematic Atheology, p.144) Nevertheless, since Craig doesn't just appeal to scientific arguments, but also to arguments against an infinite past, I'll concede the cause could be non-temporal for the sake of the argument; that does not mean it must be non-spatial and non-material.
In response to the claim that only God can be non-temporal, Prof. Wes Morriston wrote: "Why should we join [Craig] in supposing that God is the only being who exists outside time? Why could there not also have been a timeless “stuff” [that] “formed” the universe? ... The reason Craig doesn’t take this possibility into account is that [since] matter/energy has temporal duration, it also follows that the material cause (if any) of the universe cannot be timeless. ... Craig here assumes that matter/energy is the only possible “material substratum” for creation. ... But why suppose that matter/energy is the only possible “stuff” [that could] have made the universe? It’s true that we don’t seem to be acquainted with any timeless “stuffs” that could have played this role. But we don't encounter any timeless persons either, and Craig has no trouble with that idea. ... I do not have a candidate for the timeless material cause of the universe. The only “stuffs” with which we are familiar are this-worldly materials, all of which exist in time. But it is equally true that the only persons with which we are familiar are this-worldly persons, and all of them exist in time." (Creation Ex Nihilo and the Big Bang, pp. 29-30)
Philosopher Felipe Leon made the same point: "In any case, the existence of a first moment of time does not entail the origination of the universe ex nihilo. For as I pointed out above, a first moment of time is compatible with a timeless material “stuff” from which the temporal universe arose. Granted, we may not be acquainted with timeless material “stuff,” but by the same token, neither are we acquainted with a timeless personal efficient cause. Therefore, even if the arguments for a finite past should turn out to succeed, the preceding points, when combined with the evidence for PMC [Principle of Material Causality], would provide pressure to accept the origination of a temporal beginning from a timeless material cause." (Is God the Best Explanation of Things?, p.63)
Curiously, philosopher Philip Goff made a similar point (in another context): "It’s true that the temporal phase of the universe began to exist, but it could be that, in the absence of time, the universe exists in a timeless form. Leidenhag may object that we have no reason to think the universe could exist in a timeless form. I would respond: PSR entails we must choose between two hypotheses: a self-explaining universe which can exist in a timeless form, or a supernatural self-explainer distinct from the physical universe. The former hypothesis is more parsimonious, and therefore the one we ought to go for." (Putting Consciousness First, p.27)
(Note 1: Philosopher James Hall, in his Philosophy of Religion course, stated that even though Descartes – one of the most famous proponent and defender of mind-body dualism – postulated minds are non-spatial, they are certainly temporal. Also see, The End of the Timeless God, pp. 8, 189-190 by R. T. Mullins. And the philosopher Dean Zimmerman explained that some substance dualists – such as Bernard Bolzano – argue minds do exist in space as well.
Note 2: It might be unthoughtfully objected that our universe existing in a non-temporal state 'prior' to the Big Bang denies the second premise – that the universe began to exist – as it is not coming out of nothing. However, it is important to remember that Craig's use of "begins to exist" generally includes things like chairs and buildings, as Craig explained: "I would say an even better example would be a building like a skyscraper. When does that actually begin to exist? ... Even with respect to the chair or the building we don't need to specify time T, as an instant time T can be any interval of time. It could be 1970, for example, so that this building began to exist in 1970. If the building existed in 1970, 1970 was the first time at which it existed.")
Craig may respond that minds can be non-temporal while the physical world cannot due to its intrinsic nature – the latter is essentially temporal. In other words, while it is true that we know of no non-temporal minds, minds could still be non-temporal in the absence of the spatio-temporal world. For instance, we could imagine a situation in which there was nothing – no physical events and no thoughts – happening for such a mind to experience, thus becoming perfectly changeless. But can we come up with of a similar realistic situation for our physical manifold?
Surprisingly, the answer is yes. In some respectful models of the early universe, our manifold was non-temporal, and they seem perfectly compatible with observations as well as the laws of quantum mechanics, thus showing temporality is not an essential property: "Various approaches to formulating a quantum theory of gravity either presuppose or entail that fundamentally, there is neither space nor time. Instead, space and time emerge from the more fundamental, non-spatio-temporal structure of quantum gravity very much in the way that tables and chairs emerge from the more fundamental, non-chairtabular structure of quantum particle physics." (Wuthrich, 2018) Even though not all agree (Keizo p.6, Wuthrich, p.5, Baggott), many physicists argue that all of the mainstream proposals for quantum gravity posit that space-time is explicable in terms of some more fundamental structure. If space-time is explicable in terms of something more fundamental, then this presents the reasonable possibility that there could have been a transition in the early universe from a non-spatio-temporal phase to a spatio-temporal phase, analogous to the way that the chemical structure of water allows for water to transition between liquid and gas phases. As philosopher of science Nick Huggett explained: "spacetime might not only be composed of something non-spatio-temporal, [but] Quantum Gravity may [also] permit a ‘transition’ from a non-spatio-temporal to a spatio-temporal phase, an event maybe to be identified with the big bang, with ‘earlier’ non-spatio-temporal states of the universe. ... A scenario in which the universe makes such a phase transition from the non-spatio-temporal to the spatio-temporal has been claimed by Oriti (2014) [p.15], in his discussions of ‘geometrogenesis’." (Huggett, 2017) Christian Wuthrich confirmed this: "Quantum gravity suggests that ‘at’ or ‘near’ the big bang, we find a non-spatio-temporal ‘phase’. If this is right, then it would suggest another way in which time might emerge: as a ‘transition’ from an ‘earlier’ non-spatio-temporal to a ‘later’ spatio-temporal states of the universe." (Wuthrich, 2020)
Alternatively, we could adopt the Hartle-Hawking no-boundary proposal which postulates the universe existed in a state comprising four dimensions of space, and none of time.
In Hawking’s words: "In the early universe – when the universe was small enough to be governed by both general relativity and quantum theory – there were effectively four dimensions of space and none of time ... The realization that time can behave like another direction of space means one can get rid of the problem of time having a beginning." (Hawking and Mlodinow, The Grand Design, p.134)
In the article "Possible Origins..." (p.5), physicist Eckhard Rebhan wrote: "In Refs. [1, 2], it was assumed that the [universe] comes about by a creation from nothing, conveyed by a quantum mechanical tunneling process as introduced into cosmology by Vilenkin. At about the same time, Hartle and Hawking presented a quite different proposal, according to which the primordial condition of the universe is a timeless quantum state in four spatial dimensions on equal footing, filling essentially a 4D-sphere."
In Hawking’s words: "In the early universe – when the universe was small enough to be governed by both general relativity and quantum theory – there were effectively four dimensions of space and none of time ... The realization that time can behave like another direction of space means one can get rid of the problem of time having a beginning." (Hawking and Mlodinow, The Grand Design, p.134)
In the article "Possible Origins..." (p.5), physicist Eckhard Rebhan wrote: "In Refs. [1, 2], it was assumed that the [universe] comes about by a creation from nothing, conveyed by a quantum mechanical tunneling process as introduced into cosmology by Vilenkin. At about the same time, Hartle and Hawking presented a quite different proposal, according to which the primordial condition of the universe is a timeless quantum state in four spatial dimensions on equal footing, filling essentially a 4D-sphere."
Physicist Marcelo Gleiser made a similar comment about the model: "James Hartle and Stephen Hawking... came up with... [a] model of quantum cosmology, where the whole universe is treated like an atom, with an equation similar to the one used in quantum mechanics. In this equation, the universe would be a wave of probability that essentially links a quantum realm with no time to a classical one with time — i.e., the universe we inhabit, now expanding. ... from no time to time."
"Several models for the birth of the universe are based on a change of signature via an instanton in which a Riemannian and a Lorentzian manifold are joined across a hypersurface. While there is no time in the Euclidean region, with signature (+, +, +, +), it flips to (−, +, +, +) across this hypersurface, which may be thought of as the origin of time from the Lorentzian point of view." (Uzan, 2014)
Lawrence Krauss also commented on this model: "Hawking and his collaborator Jim Hartle proposed early on what they called a “no-boundary boundary” condition of the universe. ... [In this model] time would have emerged out of what was purely space." (Krauss, 2023)
"[In] his later theory, starting in 1983, [Hawking] said the universe doesn't go back to this abstract limit called the singularity. He said the universe goes back to a timeless 4-dimensional space that's uncreated. So we have a timeless 4-dimensional space that's uncreated on Hawking's theory. There's no need to create it, it has no beginning. And Bill's basic argument is that everything that begins to exist needs a cause. Well, a timeless space, since it's not in time, doesn't begin to exist and needs no cause." (Quentin, 2003)
“We can argue for consistency, but we have only one observation at hand: the models must lead to an appropriate inflation. [Some] models that use quantum-theoretical patterns can provide such a plausible prehistory. The space-time structure of the universe begins after a transition from a timeless state, i.e., this space-time structure characterizes a region that borders (in time) on a region without time. ... [That is], from a timeless state to the expanding state of the universe.” (Liebscher, 2005, pp. 21, 186)
Philosopher of physics Daniel Linford wrote: "In some models in which there is a non-spatiotemporal phase, the light cone structure is lost in the non-spatiotemporal phase. For example, this is true on some interpretations of the Hartle-Hawking model, where there is a non-temporal and purely geometrical phase of the early universe. The light cone structure is lost in the purely geometrical phase precisely because the metric has a Euclidean signature. But consider a time-like geodesic in the spatiotemporal phase of the universe. That time-like geodesic can be smoothly joined on to a geodesic in the non-temporal phase, so that a time-like unit vector can be parallel transported back into the non-temporal phase." (Personal Correspondence)
One might ask how a non-temporal (changeless) state could be interrupted. Hawking solved this problem by proposing the interruption is spontaneous: "The picture Jim Hartle and I developed of the spontaneous quantum creation of the universe..." (Hawking, 2005) "Thus, the no-boundary proposal predicts the spontaneous creation of an exponentially expanding universe..." (Hawking and Penrose, p.92) Dr. Gleiser wrote that "the transition from quantum to classical" in the Hawking-Hartle model "would be the literal emergence of the cosmos, what we call the Big Bang being an uncaused quantum" process similar to "radioactive decay". Further, in an email to me, physicist Suddhasattwa Brahma suggested that this spontaneous effect is called quantum tunneling: "The no-boundary [proposal] claims that a universe pops into existence from "nothing" (or a Euclidean manifold) via tunnelling." Liebscher confirmed it: "[There is] a transition from a Euclidean (and therefore timeless) state of the universe to a... state with time and expansion, through some kind of tunnel effect.” (Liebscher, 2005, pp. 19-20)
(Note: Even though Dr. Gleiser wrote the quantum process is "uncaused", at this point of the examination I'm agnostic about whether he means "non-deterministic" (or spontaneous) or really uncaused, i.e., with no cause at all. Here I'm agnostic because I'm not examining the first premise, but the nature of the cause.)
Therefore, these models directly challenge the Central philosophical assumption of the Kalam that nothing but God can exist non-temporally.
Philosopher Daniel Linford responds to a possible objection to this: "Admittedly, [these quantum gravity theories are] speculative. But I don’t see how the fact that this stuff is speculative could be a good objection for someone like Craig to make. Theistic cosmologies are also speculative. ... For example, all of the persons that are non-controversially known to exist have spatio-temporal bodies, which suggests the inductive generalization that all persons have spatio-temporal bodies. This provides us with some reason for thinking that personal explanations of the universe’s origins couldn’t be good candidate explanations for the universe’s origins. ... The inductive argument that I offered has the conclusion that all persons have spatio-temporal bodies. If that’s true and the cause of the universe is a person, then the cause of the universe has a spatio-temporal body. But the cause of the universe couldn’t have a spatio-temporal body. Consequently, if all persons have spatio-temporal bodies, then the cause of the universe couldn’t be a person. ... [Further], I think we have reason to believe that immaterial things are not necessarily changeless. ... [After all], if substance dualism is true, then we have an immaterial soul that undergoes changes. So, [we can probably infer that] immaterial substances, if there are such things, are not changeless. ... [The essential point here is that] we are contrasting hypotheses. What we want to know is not whether a naturalistic quantum cosmology is speculative (or even improbable), but rather how naturalistic quantum cosmology contrasts with theistic cosmology. So long as theistic cosmology is no less speculative than naturalistic quantum cosmology, the speculative nature of naturalistic quantum cosmology does not relevantly count against naturalistic quantum cosmology. I see no reason to think that theistic cosmology is less speculative and so no reason why the speculative nature of quantum cosmology would count against naturalistic quantum cosmology." (Personal Correspondence)
James Fodor made a similar point in his excellent book Unreasonable Faith: "Craig will doubtless describe this scenario as 'speculative', but I do not see how it is any more so than Craig’s theistic explanation. We do not have any direct evidence for either account, with both proposed causes having been inferred on the basis of the chain of reasoning Craig has outlined. Since Craig is the one who is attempting to argue that the beginning of the universe constitutes evidence for God’s existence, he therefore bears the burden of proof to show that other possibilities are either implausible or ruled out altogether."
This kind of objection is not irrelevant at all, as philosopher Erik J. Wielenberg pointed out: "Since we are considering the relative plausibility of two views, whenever we are presented with an objection to one of the views we should consider whether there is a similar objection to the other view so that the two objections cancel each other out. It seems to me that a great many of the objections to my view that Dr. Craig advanced in his opening speech are matched by corresponding objections to his view." (A Debate on God and Morality, p.40)
But, of course, all of this assumes our manifold was non-temporal prior to becoming temporal. Even if that's wrong, there's still a modified version (viz., a non-temporal version) of Tooley's hyperspace that caused our manifold to literally come into existence. In that case, Craig's simplistic response doesn't work either because it is not reasonable to make a probabilistic argument when you have just one example to back it up. To illustrate this point, suppose that after discovering that there are other planets in the universe, one person says: "If our planet has life, then, by induction, it is likely that there is life on all other planets as well." But that person would be dead wrong. The likelihood that this person is right would increase if we looked at several planets (in our solar system and many others) and found life on all of them. In that case, it would be more plausible to say that all (or most) planets contain life. The bigger the sample size the higher the likelihood that the results are precise. However, we only have one physical manifold to analyze. Thus, we are not in the epistemic position to claim that all (or most) logically possible physical manifolds are probably temporal and obey the same laws of our manifold.
At this point Craig might object that this naturalistic possibility has no explanatory power because it makes no predictions and is unfalsifiable – we could never have access to this non-temporal hyperspace, and thus, we would never confirm (or disconfirm it; falsify) this hypothesis via some direct empirical observation.
However, just because we couldn't confirm it by means of a "direct" observation, doesn't imply we can't test it indirectly. How so? If it is true that the hyperspace hypothesis (in the absence of God) is the only plausible naturalistic alternative to the hypothesis that God caused our manifold, then the evidence that the naturalistic view is true (hence, evidence that the theistic view is false) will be evidence that the hyperspace hypothesis is true. For example, let's say theism predicts that our minds are not reducible to physical matter. Then, the evidence that your mind is your brain will be evidence that naturalism is true. But for naturalism to be true, the hyperspace hypothesis must be true (this assumes there are no other naturalistic explanations of the alleged beginning of our manifold). Therefore, even though we cannot produce direct predictions to test it, we do have indirect predictions. In other words, evidence of naturalism will be evidence of the hyperspace hypothesis. And since both (theistic and naturalistic) hypotheses begin with the same probability – given that the beginning of our manifold is, prima facie, equally explained by the two – the naturalist will not stay behind the theist. An example that scientists give is that General and Special Relativity make several predictions and if there is evidence for prediction A (say, that time 'slows down' in some point relative to other point), then it increases the probability that prediction B (say, the existence of black holes) is also true and vice-versa.
In addition to all of this, there are at least three reasons why a non-temporal physical cause seems more likely than a spiritual cause:
First, a spiritual mind is fundamentally and radically different from our physical reality – it is not similar to spacetime, matter, energy or a quantum mechanical wave-function. Thus, this hypothesis is ontologically unparsimonious since it requires an entirely new layer of reality – a new ontology – to explain an event that can be explained by something more similar to our known physical world, while the physical cause hypothesis requires no such thing. To see how this is relevant, compare a scientist who postulates a wholly new and entirely different type of element with totally different properties (for no reason at all) when the evidence can be explained just as well by postulating an element reasonably similar to old types of elements. This scientist's entirely different and new-element hypothesis would and should be rejected as less simple than the old type element hypothesis. James Fodor made this point in his book Unreasonable Faith: "A major problem with Craig’s appeal to a nonphysical mind as the cause of the universe is that we have no widely-accepted examples of such a mind. If no such minds are known to exist, then Craig is appealing to nothing more than a theoretical possibility, a possibility whose plausibility is diminished to the degree that the posited entity is distinctly different from anything that is known to exist. ... Craig is postulating the existence of a wholly new type of entity that is not otherwise known to exist. This means we have no greater reason to think the cause of the universe is an immaterial mind than we do to think it is any other sort of timeless entity which we may postulate, such as [a physical one]."
Second, a very strong reason to think the above scenario is correct is simply that it is in accordance with the Principle of Material Causality, which says that whatever begins to exist has a material cause of its existence. For example, human beings don't come from nothing, but from some pre-existing material. Likewise, the universe must have come from some pre-existing substrate. The apologist might point out that a material cause (in the Aristotelian sense), simply means a stuff out of which something is made of; it doesn't specify if it is material or spiritual, despite its name. Consequently, this principle is compatible with the possibility that God derived the physical universe from a spiritual stuff (viz., the spiritual stuff became physical). That's true. So, in addition to saying that it has a material cause in the Aristotelian sense, the naturalist must say that whatever begins to exist is caused by something physical, thus strengthening the case. As philosopher Andrew Melnyk explained in his book "A Physicalist Manifesto" (pp. 288-289): "The evidence for thinking that all physical events [and physical substances] have sufficient physical causes may be found by reading physics textbooks. Not that the causal closure of the physical itself is explicitly stated in physics textbooks; but it can be inferred from things that are explicitly stated in physics textbooks. Reading such textbooks reveals that contemporary physics has found sufficient physical causes for very many kinds of physical effects and has found no physical effects at all for which it is necessary (or even likely to turn out to be necessary) to invoke nonphysical causes. The success to date of current physics in finding sufficient physical causes for physical effects therefore provides inductive evidence that all physical events, including both unexamined physical events and examined-but-as-yet-unexplained physical events, have sufficient physical causes."
Craig responds that cosmology disproves that, because some theorems are enough evidence that space-time came from nothing. However, Craig misses an important point, namely, that a scientific (empirical) case is not sufficient to refute a metaphysical principle. So, even though a material cause may be improbable (allegedly because of cosmology), this improbability would not be enough to undermine its truth. For instance, some philosophers argued quantum mechanics proved the law of non-contradiction to be false in at least some cases. (Tahko, 2009) But surely this suggests the other way around, right? The fact that standard quantum theory allegedly conflicts with the law of non-contradiction is proof that quantum mechanics must be wrong and some other interpretation is correct or philosophers are misunderstanding the theory. Likewise, the Principle of Material Causality is not proven false by Craig's theorems. If Craig argues it does, then we are also allowed to say quantum mechanics is evidence that things can come into being without efficient causes (as was discussed before).
A final reason is given by counter-apologist Richard Carrier: "The cause of lightning was once thought to be God's wrath, but turned out to be the unintelligent outcome of mindless natural forces. We once thought an intelligent being must have arranged and maintained the amazingly ordered motions of the solar system, but now we know it's all the inevitable outcome of mindless natural forces. Disease was once thought to be the mischief of supernatural demons, but now we know that tiny, unintelligent organisms are the cause, which reproduce and infect us according to mindless natural forces. In case after case, without exception, the trend has been to find that purely natural causes underlie any phenomena. Not once has the cause of anything turned out to really be God's wrath or intelligent meddling, or demonic mischief, or anything supernatural at all. The collective weight of these observations is enormous: supernaturalism has been tested at least a million times and has always lost; naturalism has been tested at least a million times and has always won. A horse that runs a million races and never loses is about to run yet another race with a horse that has lost every single one of the million races it has run. Which horse should we bet on?" (Carrier, 2006) Dr. Carrier then added: "there is no argument that makes the cause [of the universe] likely to be 'an eternal mind.' In fact, of every logically possible option, that is the least plausible. A mind is an extremely complex entity... and there is no evidence disembodied or uncaused minds are even possible, much less likely to exist... Vastly simpler fundamental causes for existence are possible; and are inherently more probable, being vastly simpler and based on known more than unknown science. An extremely simple quantum vacuum will suffice." (Carrier, 2019)
(For further objections to a non-temporal quantum cause, see this document.)
But Craig's argument that the cause is personal doesn't depend on this sub-argument we considered above to work. He offers another one:
"[Craig argues] there are two types of causal explanation: personal explanation and scientific explanation. Scientific explanations involve laws acting on initial conditions and therefore cannot explain the universe, since there were no initial conditions before the universe. So the explanation must be personal.
...
I cannot quite see the force behind [this argument]. Craig relies on Swinburne’s distinction between personal and inanimate explanations, and the reason inanimate explanations fail in this case is because, on Swinburne’s characterisation, they involve laws acting on initial conditions to bring about later conditions. That is, the action of the law necessarily involves a change in time. But Craig thinks that simultaneous causation is possible, and gives examples of inanimate causes causing a simultaneous effect to support this, which undermines Swinburne’s characterisation of inanimate explanation completely. Craig denies the very proposition which is required for inanimate explanations to fail in explaining the universe, and so I fail to be persuaded by this argument." (Calum Miller, Some Concerns About Kalam)
"This argument is fallacious for it's another false dilemma. There is a third option, but before we present the option, we need to quickly explain what the problem of demarcation is since Craig is using the word scientific. The task of distinguishing scientific explanations from non-scientific explanations is known as the demarcation problem and was a topic that was debated by philosophers of science of the last century. The famous German philosopher of science Karl Popper suggested that we can demarcate scientific explanations from non-scientific ones by a falsifiability criterion. He called the non-scientific ones for metaphysical explanations. If an explanation or theory is falsifiable, then it can be deemed to be a scientific one, if not, then it can be deemed to be a metaphysical one. We can use Popper's criterion to explain why Craig's argument fails. There is no reason why the explanation of the cause of the universe couldn't be unfalsifiable and yet non-personal. An example of such an explanation is that the universe was caused by a mechanical [hyperspace]. [Note: I replaced 'infinite past' by 'hyperspace' because it is more appropriate]. This explanation is... metaphysical, but it's non-personal. So, there is a third option besides scientific explanations and personal explanations. Metaphysical explanations show that the two-options Craig suggested are not jointly exhaustive and so his argument is based on a false dilemma and therefore fails." (Younes Terrab, Did God Cause the Universe to Begin to Exist?, pp.105-106)
Craig, then, goes on to say that only a mind could be the cause of the universe: “[The first cause] must be personal as well. Why? Because the cause must be beyond space and time, therefore it cannot be physical or material. Now, there are only two kinds of things that fit that description: either an abstract object, like numbers, or else a personal mind. But abstract objects can’t cause anything. Therefore it follows that the cause of the universe is a transcendent, intelligent mind.” (Hitchens and Craig, 2009).
The claim that abstract objects do not stand in causal relations is controversial. Many philosophers reject this claim. Theodore Sider is one of them. He wrote: “The abstract/concrete distinction behind this objection is a relic of a certain theory. According to this theory, reality divides into two realms – abstract and concrete – in a way that is significant on various fronts. ... Causal: the abstract is causally inert. ... But this is just a theory, nothing more. It’s not sacrosanct; nothing supports it other than tradition.” (Against Parthood, p.46)(Also see The Principle of Sufficient Reason, pp. 90-91 by Pruss; Dennett, 2009; Park, 2015; Erasmus, 2018; Leslie, 2013 and Friedell, 2019 and my own responses to other objections.) But even leaving that aside, his argument doesn't follow simply because we have no evidence that minds are non-material; for all we know, minds are physical [1], [2], [3], [4], [5], [6], [7], [8], [9], [10], [11], [12]. In fact, we might argue in favor of the contrary proposition: the fact that all minds we know of are physical is evidence that all minds are physical. Therefore, we have evidence against the claim that the cause of the universe is a mind – after all, according to Craig, only a non-material substance can be the cause of the universe; not physical objects. And even if that were not true, it would not follow logically that minds are the only non-material concrete (non-abstract) substances that exist (or can exist); there is a potentially infinite number of logically and metaphysically possible non-material candidates that could be the cause of the universe. Additionally, it is simply false that a mind (as described by Cartesian dualists) is the only thing that fits that description; some ancient Eastern traditions posit the existence of unconscious non-material substances: "Life is defined by Qi even though it is impossible to grasp, measure, quantify, see or isolate. Immaterial yet essential, the material world is formed by it. An invisible force known only by its effects, Qi is recognized indirectly by what it fosters, generates and protects... Qi is an invisible substance, as well as an immaterial force that manifests as movement and activity." (Between Heaven and Earth, pp. 30, 34, by Beinfield and Korngold)
In response, Craig would probably say that the confirmation of the existence of non-material substances supports the hypothesis that predicted the existence of a non-material god as well as non-material minds. In other words, the existence of such non-material substance is more likely on the theistic hypothesis because that's exactly what we should expect if such hypothesis is true. Regarding the suggestion that there are other metaphysical possibilities, Craig would say it is ad hoc; these possibilities were postulated only after the supposed discovery that the cause must be non-material (with the unique goal of saving atheism), but Christians postulated before the discovery.
However, it seems plausible that ancient thinkers reached this conclusion through logic rather than revelation (it is known that cosmological arguments are very old). Indeed, ironically, Craig is evidence of this since he argues that only something non-material could be the cause of the material world. After all, if whatever is material began to exist, then only something outside of it (that is not material) could have created it. So, isn't it possible that the early Christian/Jewish thinkers also reached this conclusion? If that's the case, then it is no mystery they postulated God is the non-material being who exists outside of the material world. If this is correct, then logic would lead you to the conclusion that something non-material caused the world. It doesn't specify what it is. Nevertheless, since the people who reached this conclusion were Christian/Jewish philosophers and theologians, then they naturally postulated this substance is God. So, now it is not just God who created the material world, but a non-material God.
For a prediction of theism to be valid/genuine, it could not have been made in a secular way at that time, that is, it should be highly improbable for a non-theistic person to predict the cause of the universe is non-material using a purely secular method (that is, without presupposing theism). However, Craig just used a secular method (without involving God) to show that the cause must be non-material – Craig used logic alone to determine the nature of the cause. To understand my point, suppose an ancient Chinese man realized the cause of the material world must be non-material and postulated this non-material substance is Qi (viz., 'energy') just because in the historical context in which he lived, it was believed by everybody that Qi exists. So, now, it would not make sense to say: "An immaterial cause is more likely on my 'Qi worldview' because it postulates the existence of immaterial substances." Obviously that is absurd! After all, the Qi worldview didn't postulate the existence of non-material substances before it discovered the cause must be non-material, but only after. Calling it 'Qi' would be the result of living in a specific historical context. Nothing more.
And the same is true of non-temporality. Many ancient thinkers presented arguments against the idea of an infinite past, so only something non-temporal could have caused time. That's logic and not revelation. So, all this would prove is that human reason is powerful enough to produce predictions. In any case, the Bible didn't describe God as being non-temporal (for a discussion about this, see The End of the Timeless God by R. T. Mullins). Rather, this conclusion was reached through logic by philosophers like Augustine (Many Worlds in One, p.186). Plus, I'm not completely convinced the Tanakh and the New Testament portrayed spirit as being non-material (see some quotes that may suggest the opposite, by Bart Ehrman).
Moreover, it is expected that people believed in non-material substances because they may be naturally wired by evolution to think like dualists (and thus posit the existence of unembodied minds).
"It isn’t just students who reify mind out of behavior. Virtually everyone does, because “mind” is a form of dualism that I shall argue in a later chapter appears to be innate to our cognition. We are natural-born dualists, which is why behaviorists and neuroscientists struggle so mightily – and frustratingly – to rein in mind-talk." (The Believing Brain, p.51. Michael Shermer).
Ergo, the idea of dualism is probably the product of our human nature rather than logic and reason. From dualism, it is just a small step to the non-materiality of the mind. After all, if the non-material substance that caused the universe is an invisible mind, then it is natural to postulate human invisible, intangible, unmeasurable and undetectable minds are also non-material. So, given these facts, should we really be surprised that theism "predicts" the existence of non-material minds? All the supposed predictions are explained by naturalism. So, these facts do not seem to be more likely on theism than on naturalism.
The Cause Has Free Will
To justify the claim that the cause is a free personal agent, Craig states that the cause of the universe must be a particularizer – a being who decides the course of an action between two likely choices.
Craig asks, "If the big bang occurred in a super dense pellet existing from eternity, then why did the big bang occur only 13,8 billion years ago? Why did the pellet of matter wait for all eternity to explode?" Craig argues that only a free agent can do that since "the agent freely brings about some events in the absence of prior determining conditions. Because the agent is free, he can initiate new effects by freely bringing about conditions which were not previously present."
If it is assumed that the past is temporally infinite and the cause is not inactive, then obviously this argument does not work. To show this, I'll use the domino effect as an analogy.
But that doesn't refute Craig's argument. After all, he is not assuming an infinite past with constant motion. His argument assumes an inactive cause. So, I'll present here the responses proposed by Wes Morriston in his two excellent articles titled Must the Beginning of the Universe Have a Personal Cause? and A Critical Evaluation of the Kalam Argument which were summarized by Dr. Felipe Leon here, here and in the book Theism and Atheism: Opposing Arguments in Philosophy (pp. 291-292) & Craig’s Contradictory Kalam: Trouble at the Moment of Creation by Erik J. Wielenberg.
Here are two representative passages in which Craig states this argument.
"In fact, I think that it can be plausibly argued that the cause of the universe must be a personal Creator. For how else could a temporal effect arise from an eternal cause? If the cause were simply a mechanically operating set of necessary and sufficient conditions existing from eternity, then why would not the effect also exist from eternity? For example, if the cause of water's being frozen is the temperature's being below zero degrees, then if the temperature were below zero degrees from eternity, then any water present would be frozen from eternity. The only way to have an eternal cause but a temporal effect would seem to be if the cause is a personal agent who freely chooses to create an effect in time. For example, a man sitting from eternity may will to stand up; hence, a temporal effect may arise from an eternally existing agent. Indeed, the agent may will from eternity to create a temporal effect, so that no change in the agent need be conceived. Thus, we are brought not merely to the first cause of the universe, but to its personal Creator." (The Existence of God and the Beginning of the Universe)
"The cause is in some sense eternal and yet the effect which it produced is not eternal, but began to exist a finite time ago. How can this be? If the necessary and sufficient conditions for the production of the effect are eternal, then why isn't the effect eternal? How can all the causal conditions sufficient for the production of the effect be changelessly existent and yet the effect not also be existent along with the cause? How can the cause exist without the effect? ... How can a first event come to exist if the cause of that event exists changelessly and eternally? Why isn't the effect as coeternal as the cause? ... It seems that there is only one way out of this dilemma, and that is to infer that the cause of the universe is a personal agent who chooses to create a universe in time." (Reasonable Faith: Christian Truth and Apologetics)
Craig seems to be thinking along the following lines. There are just two kinds of cause – personal causes and non-personal ones. Non-personal causes are causally sufficient for their effects. A temperature below freezing is Craig's example of a non-personal cause. It cannot fail to freeze whatever water happens to be around. Personal causes, on the other hand, are individual persons who freely decide to bring about this or that state of affairs. A man freely choosing to stand up at a certain time is an example of a personal cause. If the man (rather than some state of the man) is the cause of his standing up, then obviously the cause can exist without producing its effect.
Like many libertarians, Craig distinguishes between "agent" causes and "event" causes. An "agent" can exist for as long as you please without producing a particular effect that she is nevertheless able to produce at any time. The mere existence of the cause (the agent) is not sufficient for its effect. By contrast, a non-personal cause is sufficient for its effect. And a cause (the temperature being below zero centigrade, for example) that is sufficient for an effect cannot exist without producing that effect (frozen water).
If this distinction is accepted, Craig thinks he can show that the cause of the beginning of the universe must be a person. The reason is that a non-personal cause, existing from eternity, would have produced its effect from eternity. In which case, the universe would always have existed (non-temporally). Since the universe has not always existed, and since its cause is eternal, Craig thinks it follows that the cause of the universe must be personal. The argument may be outlined as follows:
a. It has been shown that the universe has not always existed.
b. The cause of the universe must be eternal. (Otherwise it, too, would have a beginning and would require a cause.)
c. The cause of the universe must be either a personal agent or a non-personal sufficient condition.
d. If a "causal condition sufficient for the production" of the universe exists "from eternity," then the universe has always existed.
e. So the cause of the universe is not a non-personal sufficient condition.
f. The cause of the universe must therefore be a person.
There are several problems here.
First, it is doubtful that Craig can consistently endorse premise (c) of this argument. When responding to the quantum indeterminacy objection to premise (1) of the Kalam argument, Craig interprets his causal principle in such a way that it requires only that there be one or more necessary conditions for any "coming to be":
"The appearance of a particle in a quantum vacuum may thus be said to be spontaneous, but cannot properly be said to be absolutely uncaused, since it has many physically necessary conditions. To be uncaused in the relevant sense of an absolute beginning, an existent must lack any non-logical necessary or sufficient conditions whatsoever." (Theism, Atheism, and Big Bang Cosmology)
Presumably Craig would have to agree that non-personal conditions that are only necessary for some effect could exist from eternity without producing that effect from eternity. So the alternatives – either an eternally sufficient condition or an eternal personal agent – are not (according to Craig's own position) the only logical possibilities.
As philosopher Paul Draper pointed out: "In short, Craig believes that a timeless cause of a temporal effect would have to be an agent-cause, because an agent-cause is not sufficient for its effect. A timeless sufficient cause could never (Craig’s word) exist without its effect and so could only have timeless effects. One problem with this argument is that it assumes that agent-causation is the only type of non-sufficient causation. But why believe this? If quantum mechanics allows for natural temporal causes that are neither sufficient nor agents, then why is Craig so sure that supernatural timeless causes must be either sufficient causes or agents? Indeed, a timeless and hence changeless person is a harder concept to swallow than a timeless, non-personal, non-sufficient cause." (Does God Exist, The Craig-Flew Debate, p.144)
Physicist Freeman Dyson seems to agree with this idea: "Atoms in the laboratory are weird stuff, behaving like active agents rather than inert substances. They make unpredictable choices between alternative possibilities according to the laws of quantum mechanics. It appears that mind, as manifested by the capacity to make choices, is to some extent inherent in every atom."
Second, God's nature is intrinsically and perfectly good. To have a nature is to have limits. The nature that restricts humans is our physical environment and our genetics. For example, no human has the free will to run a one-minute mile, without mechanical aid. Thus, we are limited by our nature. If God is maximally and perfectly good by nature, then he did not have the freedom to create our world, because God's nature requires that He must create a very good world, "for creating no world at all hardly seems preferable to creating a very good world, even if there is a better world than it that God could have created instead." (William L. Rowe, p.4) God could not have chosen not to create our world since that state of affairs would contradict God's perfectly good nature. But since "free will" requires that He could have done otherwise, then God is not really free; God was determined/forced by his own nature to create a good world. However, if God is not free, then the argument for the personal feature of the cause must be invalid. (For a defense of this argument, see Morriston, 2006). (Note: claiming God is constrained by his nature is the best response to the Euthyphro dilemma and is, therefore, essential for a coherent theology [1], [2], [3]).
Third, it is doubtful that postulating a personal cause will enable Craig to escape the conclusion that the world must be just as eternal as its cause. It will do so only if no eternal state of that agent is causally sufficient for the existence of the world. For on Craig's principles, that should be enough to make the world eternal. That much is entailed by premise (d) of my outline of Craig's argument.
Now this condition might hold in the case of "a man sitting from eternity" who decides, at some time, to exercise his power to stand. The man, we may suppose, has not always had the intention to stand up. But this easy answer will not do if the first cause is identified with God. God, after all, "knows from eternity" what God is going to do. Craig's God is omniscient. He can't arrive at decisions the way you and I do, because He always already knows what He is going to do. (You aren't arriving at a decision about what to do if you already know what you are going to do.) So, naturally Craig concludes that God's decision to create is eternal – that God must "have the intention" of creating the universe "from eternity."
It may be argued that God always knew what kind of universe He wanted to create (being omniscient, of course, he would), but that’s not necessarily the same as eternally deciding for it to come into being. This idea seems to be that God has always already known that he wanted to create a universe of this general sort, but just never got around to deciding on the particulars until the beginning of time. However, if God has always been omniscient, then he must always have known precisely what sort of universe he would create. But God could not have known what he was going to do without intending to do it, and he could not have intended to do something without (already) having decided to do it. So, God must always already have decided precisely what to create.
On standard views about God, his will is causally sufficient for the existence of the universe. So, one may well ask Craig, why doesn't it follow that the universe exists "from eternity?" Craig does not deny that God's intention to create is eternal. He explains:
"God could exist changelessly and eternally but choose to create the world in time. By "choose" one need not mean that the Creator changes his mind about the decision to create, but that He freely and eternally intends to create a world with a beginning. By exercising his causal power, he therefore brings it about that a world with a beginning comes to exist. So the cause is eternal, but the effect is not."
Craig, "Reasonable Faith: Christian Truth and Apologetics"
This is much too easy. God's eternal decision to create a universe must surely be causally sufficient for the existence of that world. So if, as Craig indicates in this passage, God's will to create is eternal, why doesn't he conclude, in line with principle (d) above, that the universe is eternal?
But doesn't Craig say that what God "eternally wills" is to create "a world with a beginning?" And doesn't this entail that the world he creates is not eternal? Indeed it does, but this merely makes me wonder whether Craig is not committed to an inconsistent set of propositions. To see why, let alpha be the world God has chosen to create. From:
(i) alpha has a beginning;
(ii) God's willing-to-create-alpha is eternal;
(iii) God's willing-to-create-alpha is causally sufficient for the existence of alpha;
(iv) if a cause is eternal and is sufficient for the existence of some thing, then that thing is also eternal [from principle (d) above ];
and
(v) if a thing is eternal then it does not have a beginning;
it follows that
(vi) alpha both does and does not have a beginning.
Something has to give. But what? (i) is a bedrock feature of Craig's position. Craig denies (iii). Craig responded the following:
"I am inclined simply to deny that God's eternally willing to create the universe, properly understood, is sufficient for the existence of the universe." (Must the Beginning of the Universe Have a Personal Cause?: A Rejoinder)
How could this be? Surely Craig doesn't think God could fail to accomplish what he "eternally wills"! Here is his explanation:
"It is insufficient to account for the origin of the universe by citing simply God, His timeless intention to create a world with a beginning, and His power to produce such a result. There must be an exercise of His causal power in order for the universe to be created. ... [We must] differentiate between God's timeless intention to create a temporal world and God's undertaking to create a temporal world."
Craig here distinguishes God's eternal will to create a world from his actually exercising the power to do what He thus wills – His eternal intention to create from His "undertaking" to carry out this intention. God's "undertaking" to create the universe is presumably sufficient for the existence of the universe, and the universe begins to exist "as soon as" God "undertakes" to create it. But this doesn't make the universe eternal because the "undertaking" (unlike the original intention) is not eternal. Since God puts Himself into time when He "undertakes" to create the universe, His "undertaking" to create occurs at the very first moment of time. It is, so to speak, the very first of the events that God causes.
But surely this only pushes the question back to the relation between God's eternal will and His undertaking" to execute His prior intention. If God's will to create is sufficient for His undertaking to create, then on Craig's principles the undertaking must be eternal, in which case, once again, the universe must be eternal. Craig must therefore deny, not only that God's eternal will is sufficient for the existence of the universe, but also that it is sufficient for His undertaking to create the universe. Is this at all plausible?
I don't think so. It is easy enough to see that the will of a merely human person is often not sufficient for his actually undertaking to do what he intends to do. There are at least two reasons for this. You and I can intend to do something at a later time, but not until that time comes will we undertake to do anything about our earlier intention. This afternoon, for example, I plan to go to a certain store to buy some vitamins. I have not – yet – undertaken to do so, because the time I have selected for this activity has not yet arrived. But even when the proper time does arrive, I may change my mind and not go. This is the second reason for saying that a human person's will is not sufficient for his actually undertaking to do what he has willed. Human beings have wills that are changeable and inconstant. Sometimes they even suffer from weakness of will, and fail to do what they (perhaps sincerely) intended to do, even when it is long past the time for action.
It is obvious that neither of these explanations of the gap between willing and undertaking can be applied to the sort of God Craig believes in – a God who is omnipotent, omniscient, and non-temporal. An omnipotent being cannot suffer from weakness of will. An omniscient being cannot change its mind (See, Barker, 1997). And a non-temporal being cannot meaningfully be said to "delay" undertaking to carry out its intentions. So it is very hard indeed to see how God's eternal will to create can fail to be sufficient for His undertaking to do so, in which case it is also sufficient for the beginning of the universe. On Craig's principles, therefore, it ought to follow that the universe is eternal.
And however we define "eternity," (v) is an uncontroversial analytic truth.
What about (ii)? Maybe it was a mistake for Craig to say that God's will to create is eternal? I don't think so. On the standard view of creation ex nihilo, God creates just by "willing." He says, "let it be so," and it is so. God's will to set time in motion by creating alpha is therefore causally prior to the existence – and thus to the beginning – of time itself. From this it is a very short step to the conclusion that God's will to create alpha is eternal. But what about (iv)?
Perhaps Craig could say that God's eternally-willing-to-create-a-world-with-a-beginning merely makes it eternally true that there "is" a world with a beginning, while denying that it makes the world eternal. There may be something to this idea, but I do not see how Craig can make use of it in the present context. The reason is that it can just as easily be deployed on behalf of an eternal but non-personal cause, whereas the main thrust of Craig's argument is that there is a clear difference between the implications of an eternal personal cause and those of an eternal non-personal cause. If an eternal state of a person can be causally sufficient for "there being a world with a beginning," why not an eternal state of a non-person? If Craig rejects (iv) on these grounds, his rationale for saying that the world would always have existed if it had been caused by an eternal non-person vanishes.
Something has gone very badly wrong. But what? Part of the answer may be that Craig's argument moves back and forth between two opposed conceptions of eternity: eternity as non-temporality, and eternity as beginningless and endless temporal duration. When he says that God is "causally prior" to the existence of time itself, he is thinking in terms of a non-temporal First Cause. But when he says that God wills from eternity to produce a world with a beginning in time, he is at least implicitly thinking in terms of beginningless and endless duration. Here's why.
A personal agent existing in time can have plans for the future. If God's existence prior to creation is a temporal priority, he can always, prior to creation, have willed that a world should come into existence at a later time. What God wills to create need not lack a beginning just because God has always intended to create it. Just as Socrates can sit for a long time, intending to stand up at a certain time, so an everlasting God can have intended "from eternity" to create the universe at a certain time.
It is just at this point that Craig sees a difference between personal causes and non-personal ones. If the temperature is below zero centigrade, that is sufficient to freeze any water that happens to be around. The temperature cannot "wait" to exercise its power to freeze. If the temperature had always been below zero, any water that existed would always have been frozen.
I am not certain how real this difference is. If God can have willed "from eternity" that there be a world with a beginning in time, why couldn't a non-personal cause have been sufficient "from eternity" for the existence of a world with a beginning in time? Must non-personal sufficient conditions always produce their effects straightaway? Is personal causation the only alternative to mechanical causation? Or might there be some other type of "eternal cause" that wouldn't necessarily produce an eternal effect? Is "action at a distance" in time more difficult to understand than "action at a distance" in space? Why should we think that non-personal causes are different in this respect from sufficient conditions involving the will of a personal agent? Craig might respond that we have never observed such strange phenomenon (i.e., causation at a distance in time), but have we ever observed genuine free agent causation? As far as neuroscience is concerned, brain states are also caused by prior determining conditions and must be, therefore, categorized as "event" causation.
Now, the standard apologetical reaction is to deny that all brain events have sufficient physical causes – perhaps by appealing to Quantum Mechanics; in this case, neural events would seem to be uncaused, but are actually non-deterministically caused by the undetectable soul. Notice, however, that Craig can't appeal to this option as he denies that QM entails a violation of causality. Additionally, uncaused quantum events outside of human brains also occur, ergo, even if quantum events are actually caused in our brains (by the soul), they must be totally uncaused in the world outside of our brains, which violates Craig's beloved causation principle.
But suppose the apologist is fine with a non-deterministic interpretation of QM. In this case, the following objection must be enough to undercut the argument:
"Malcolm Jeeves... wisely dismisses dubious arguments that quantum indeterminacy leaves room for robust free will. He points out that quantum effects are quite negligible on the level of neurons, that overall brain function is based on large networks of neurons and thus the unpredictable behavior of a single neuron would make little difference in the brain as a whole, and that the random fluctuations associated with quantum indeterminacy are minute compared to thermodynamic fluctuations or fluctuations in the blood supply to the brain. This latter point is especially poignant because even if quantum fluctuations did occur at the level of neurons their effects would be 'drowned out' by the much larger deterministic sorts of bodily fluctuations." (Keith Augustine, Whatever Happened to the Soul?)
Moreover, why should we conclude that the eternal physical cause must obey the same laws of our manifold? It seems metaphysically possible that causality could operate differently in other physical substances.
These questions are difficult enough to answer when we are thinking of eternity as beginningless duration. But when we switch over to Craig's preferred understanding of eternity, the alleged difference between a personal sufficient condition and a non-personal one disappears completely. A non-temporal personal agent non-temporally wills to create a world with a beginning, or else does not so will. There can be no temporal gap between the time at which it does the willing and the time at which the thing willed actually happens. In this respect a non-temporal personal cause is no different from a non-personal cause.
To see this, suppose that a non-temporal and non-personal cause, S, is causally sufficient for the existence of a physical universe, P, having a temporal duration of thirty billion years. Suppose further that the beginning of P coincides with the beginning of time. Craig's argument is supposed to show us that this is impossible. If S is really eternal, then P cannot have a beginning. Why not? Because no matter when P begins, S would already have produced it.
It is at just this point that Craig's argument breaks down. Since there is no time in eternity, the argument cannot get a grip on it. From the point of view of eternity, there is no time at which P does not yet exist. Consequently, there is no time at which S has failed to produce P, and no time at which S would already have produced P. In short, we have been given no reason to think that an atemporal cause – regardless of whether it involves a person – could not be sufficient for the existence of a universe with a temporal beginning.
Craig's argument that the alleged (non-temporal) cause of the universe is a person must be deemed a failure. It moves back and forth between the two conceptions of eternity – eternity as beginningless and endless temporal duration and eternity as non-temporality, helping itself to whichever one suits the needs of his argument at the moment. When Craig wants to show that the cause of the universe cannot be an eternal non-person, he conjures up an image of a cause existing throughout an infinite past and refraining from producing its effect – only a person, he says, could do that –, seemingly forgetting that eternal (atemporal) causes have no temporal duration at all, and thus no past.
These questions are difficult enough to answer when we are thinking of eternity as beginningless duration. But when we switch over to Craig's preferred understanding of eternity, the alleged difference between a personal sufficient condition and a non-personal one disappears completely. A non-temporal personal agent non-temporally wills to create a world with a beginning, or else does not so will. There can be no temporal gap between the time at which it does the willing and the time at which the thing willed actually happens. In this respect a non-temporal personal cause is no different from a non-personal cause.
To see this, suppose that a non-temporal and non-personal cause, S, is causally sufficient for the existence of a physical universe, P, having a temporal duration of thirty billion years. Suppose further that the beginning of P coincides with the beginning of time. Craig's argument is supposed to show us that this is impossible. If S is really eternal, then P cannot have a beginning. Why not? Because no matter when P begins, S would already have produced it.
It is at just this point that Craig's argument breaks down. Since there is no time in eternity, the argument cannot get a grip on it. From the point of view of eternity, there is no time at which P does not yet exist. Consequently, there is no time at which S has failed to produce P, and no time at which S would already have produced P. In short, we have been given no reason to think that an atemporal cause – regardless of whether it involves a person – could not be sufficient for the existence of a universe with a temporal beginning.
Craig's argument that the alleged (non-temporal) cause of the universe is a person must be deemed a failure. It moves back and forth between the two conceptions of eternity – eternity as beginningless and endless temporal duration and eternity as non-temporality, helping itself to whichever one suits the needs of his argument at the moment. When Craig wants to show that the cause of the universe cannot be an eternal non-person, he conjures up an image of a cause existing throughout an infinite past and refraining from producing its effect – only a person, he says, could do that –, seemingly forgetting that eternal (atemporal) causes have no temporal duration at all, and thus no past.
There are other problems, however. To see the problems with Craig’s theistic explanation for the origin of the universe, we must consider God’s act of exercising His causal power to bring about a temporal universe. This act is an instance of agent–causation, in which an agent, God, causes an event to occur. Let’s call the event that God agent–causes ‘B’. Let’s call God’s agent–causing of B ‘GA’. GA is itself an event – it is the event that consists of God causally producing B. Furthermore, as Craig says, GA is simultaneous with the universe’s coming into being. Let’s call the time at which GA occurs and the universe comes into being ‘t1’. As I noted above, Craig holds that the first cause is non-temporal: “the cause is eternal, but the effect is not”. But that is incompatible with some other claims Craig makes about God. In Craig's view, there are “two phases of God’s life, one non-temporal and one temporal, which are not related to each other as earlier and later”. Furthermore, God is “timeless without the universe and in time with the universe”.
When the universe exists, God is temporal rather than non-temporal. Since time begins with the creation of the universe, if there is some event that occurs at a given time, then the universe exists at that time, and hence God is temporal at that time. GA occurs at t1, which implies that the universe exists at t1, and hence God is temporal at t1. Therefore, when God exercises His causal power to create the universe, He is temporal rather than non-temporal, and the first cause is therefore temporal rather than non-temporal. But Craig also says that the first cause must be non-temporal; otherwise, how could it have the power to create time itself? Craig declares: “For as the cause of space and time, this entity must transcend space and time”. And Craig says that “[g]iven that time had a beginning, the cause of the beginning of time must be timeless”. God must be temporal at t1 because the universe exists at t1; yet He must be non-temporal at t1 in order to have, at t1, the power to create the universe. Craig’s various commitments therefore imply that at t1, God is both temporal and non-temporal – a contradiction.
The point can be illustrated with an image that Craig often uses to express his idea of a non-temporal God creating a temporal universe. The image is that of “a man sitting changelessly from eternity”. According to Craig, this eternally seated man “could freely will to stand up; thus, a temporal effect arises from an eternally existing agent”. One misleading aspect of the eternally sitting man image is that the transition from sitting to standing is a process that unfolds over some period of time. When the man is sitting, he causally initiates the process of standing up; as that process progresses, the sitting man gradually becomes a standing man. But now suppose that (i) the man causes the effect of standing up while he is sitting and (ii) all effects produced by the man are produced while he is fully upright. It follows from (i) and (ii) that the man is both seated and fully upright simultaneously – an impossibility. Similarly, on Craig’s view, the temporal event of the universe beginning is caused by God in His non-temporal phase but all temporal events caused by God are caused while He is in his temporal phase. Therefore, God must be in His non-temporal phase and His temporal phase at once – an impossibility.
This contradiction could be avoided by giving up the claim that God is non-temporal when GA occurs; perhaps Craig should hold that the first cause is non-temporal without GA and temporal with GA. However, that renders God in His non-temporal phase completely causally effete because all of the causal activity that brings the universe into being occurs at t1, when GA occurs. If Craig’s view is that God in His non-temporal phase makes no causal contribution to the beginning of the universe, then it is misleading for Craig to claim, for example, that God having freedom of the will “enables one to get an effect with a beginning from a permanent, timeless cause”. Similarly, it is difficult to see how to reconcile the causal inertness of God in His non-temporal phase with Craig’s claim that “God’s timeless eternity is…causally, but not temporally, prior to the origin of the universe”. Note the difference between (a) the beginning of the universe is caused by an entity in a non-temporal phase of its existence and (b) the cause of the beginning of universe is temporal when it causes the beginning of the universe and also has a non-temporal phase in which it causes nothing. Craig’s typical descriptions of the first cause suggest (a) rather than (b), and (a) generates the contradiction described above.
Additionally, if God in His non-temporal phase makes no causal contribution to the beginning of the universe, the Kalam provides no reason to believe that God exists in a non-temporal phase at all. It might be thought that we must posit a non-temporal God in order to explain where God in His temporal phase comes from, but if non-temporal God is neither temporally nor causally prior to temporal God there seems to be no meaningful sense in which the former becomes the latter or the latter comes from the former. It is therefore difficult to make sense of Craig’s claim that “God entered into time at the moment of creation”. With nothing temporally or causally prior to temporal God, we are left with a picture in which the first cause is entirely temporal.
The upshot, therefore, is that the various claims that Craig employs to reach the conclusion that the cause of the universe “must transcend space and time” together imply a contradiction – that the first cause is both non-temporal and temporal at t1. To abandon the claim that God in His non-temporal phase causally contributes to the universe beginning to exist is to abandon the Kalam.
There is a second contradiction in Craig’s theistic story about the origin of the universe. Consider GA again. As we’ve seen, GA occurs at t1, the time at which the universe begins to exist. As noted above, Craig holds that time begins when the universe begins. Therefore, another event that occurs at t1 is this one: time begins to exist. What is the relationship between GA and time beginning to exist? GA obviously cannot be temporally prior to anything else that happens at t1, but perhaps GA and time beginning to exist are entirely distinct events and the former is causally prior to the latter. The problem with that suggestion is that it makes a temporal event – GA – causally prior to the beginning of time, which is impossible, since it would make the existence of time a prerequisite for an event that is causally prior to the beginning of time and hence would require time to be causally prior to itself. On the other hand, if time beginning to exist is causally prior to GA, then time exists causally prior to God’s act of creating the universe, which conflicts with Craig’s theistic hypothesis about the origin of the universe.
A third possibility is that time beginning to exist is a proper part of GA; perhaps time beginning to exist is part of B, so God agent–causes time beginning to exist. But consider this question: does God agent–cause time beginning to exist in His non-temporal phase or His temporal phase? He cannot be in His non-temporal phase, since GA occurs at t1 and, as we’ve seen, on Craig’s view God must be temporal at t1. But God cannot be temporal either, since in that case the cause of time beginning to exist lies within time itself and, again, Craig insists that “the cause of the beginning of time must be timeless”. So it seems that God cannot be the agent–cause of time beginning to exist.
The most plausible option, therefore, is that GA and time beginning to exist are the same event; GA is the beginning of time. Accordingly, I shall suppose for the remainder of this discussion that GA = time beginning to exist.
As noted above, GA is an event with a somewhat complex structure; it is the event consisting of God agent–causing B. GA does not have a cause. It is a causing; it is not itself caused. So if GA and time beginning to exist are the same event, then time beginning to exist is uncaused. But that violates a fundamental metaphysical principle that drives the Kalam – the principle that “being cannot come from non– being; something cannot come into existence uncaused from nothing. The principle…applies to all of reality”. Time is part of reality, and so, by Craig’s principle, the beginning of time must have a cause. As Craig says, “[t]here must be an absolutely first event, before which there was no change, no previous event. We know that this first event must have been caused”. GA is that first event – it is an event that “entails…an intrinsic change on God’s part” and before which there is no change – and yet it is uncaused. Therefore, Craig’s commitments imply that the absolutely first event is both caused and uncaused – another contradiction.
It may be tempting here to deny that GA is uncaused on the grounds that God agent–causes it. But this introduces another event, God’s agent–causing of GA (call that event ‘GA*’) which now appears to be the beginning of time, and which has no cause. If we suppose that God agent–causes GA* as well, the same problem appears again, and we are headed for an actual infinite series of divine agent–causal events. Because Craig rejects the possibility of such actual infinite series, he must reject this possibility.
Another way to deny that GA is uncaused is to hold that there is some property or state of God in His non-temporal condition that causes GA; call such a state ‘S’. Craig says that God “freely and eternally intends to create a world with a beginning”. Perhaps this eternal divine intention causes GA? One problem with this suggestion is that it would require a non-temporal state, S, to bring about a temporal event, GA. Craig explains why this is implausible: “the cause is a timeless state but the effect is an event that occurred at a specific moment in the finite past. Such state/event causation doesn’t seem to make sense, since a state sufficient for the existence of its effect should have a state as its effect”. Accordingly, Craig says that God’s eternally willing to create the universe is not sufficient for the existence of the universe. On Craig’s view, we seem to be stuck with GA itself as the uncaused beginning of time – and yet we also seem to be stuck with the beginning of time having a cause.
It is worth considering one final way of evading this second contradiction. In a footnote, Craig mentions (but does not endorse) the position that an agent’s causing some effect “is not itself an event”. If GA is not an event, then the question of the relationship between the event of GA and the event of time beginning does not arise. Now, the claim that God’s act of creating the universe is not an event is puzzling on its face – this act certainly seems to be something that happens and so counts as an event in the ordinary sense of the term. More importantly, in one of his most detailed discussions of how God causes the beginning of the universe, Craig says that in order for the universe to exist there must be “a basic action on the part of [God], an undertaking or endeavoring or exercise of [God’s] causal powers…[t]hat entails…an intrinsic change on God’s part”. In that passage Craig appears to classify God’s exercise of His agent–causal power as both (i) an action performed by God and (ii) entailing an intrinsic change in God. That GA entails an intrinsic change in God suggests that it is an event. And as I noted at the outset, Craig says that God’s “free act of creation is a temporal event”. Elsewhere, Craig says that “God’s act of creating is the event cause of the universe’s coming into being”, which also suggests that God’s act of creating the universe – GA – is an event. Therefore, Craig cannot consistently hold that GA is not an event. Craig’s view appears to imply that GA is an event and it is both caused and uncaused – a contradiction.
Therefore, Craig’s explanation for the origin of the universe is logically contradictory. It entails that the first cause is both non-temporal and temporal at t1, and it entails that the beginning of time both has a cause and is an uncaused agent–causal event.
Must the Cause Still Exist?
Even if we grant an uncaused sentient being, how do we know if it is still around today? Couldn't it have simply started everything and then extinguished itself? Maybe this being was not immortal and he decided to create the universe (or become the universe), but as a consequence he had to use all his energy (or essence) and, therefore, "died" in the process. It seems conceivable that if the cosmological argument were correct, this being could be far less than omnipotent, almost completely inhuman, and even dead, as Dr. Richard Carrier explained:
"It gets worse when we consider the possibility that the creator no longer exists – imagine a lonely god who has a choice, to live alone, or to die, and in dying create a universe from his exploding "corpse" which will have populations of people who can then live the god's lost dream of knowing love and never being alone. Perhaps the god stays alive, so he can share in this love, but is powerless, having given up his body for the creation of a universe. This is plausible, coherent, logical, and actually better explains things – it perfectly explains how god can be good and yet silent and inactive, how the universe can function so cold and mechanically and deterministically, how humans can be so confused, divided, and uncertain about god's nature or thoughts, etc. Indeed, this theory explains everything, far better than any actual creationist theory proposed today. By all sense and reason, this theory should be adopted by creationists."
Philosopher Paul Edwards agreed on this point: "Nor does the argument establish the present existence of the first cause. It does not prove this, since experience clearly shows that an effect may exist long after its cause has been destroyed." (Critiques of God, p.46)