Looking at my previous posts it doesn't seem like I've brought up the Kalam Cosmological Argument before.
It's such a common retreat for the religious apologist and so widely used in debating circles both between big name philosophers and popular Youtubers, that I thought I'd put down some of my thoughts on the way it's used and whether it has any use or real value. This is not a strict logical treatment, more a flippant personal take on the bigger issues at play,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kal%C4%81m_cosmological_argument
The Argument itself is presented as:
Classical argument
1. Everything that has a beginning of its existence has a cause of its existence;
2. The universe has a beginning of its existence;
Therefore:
3. The universe has a cause of its existence.
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Of course, the conclusion that an apologist would like to draw from this line of reasoning is that God would be the only possible cause of the Universe. Lets look at the implicit assumptions in the argument and where they fall down.
Philosophically, cause can be broken down into 2 forms. First, there is the material cause, that is, the "stuff" that the effect was brought about from. So the material cause of a statue would be the stone it was carved from. And secondly, we have the efficient cause, or rather the agent or will that brings about the effect. So in the sculpture analogy, it would be the sculptor. A bit of chemistry, as is my want : in a chemical reaction, the material cause is the reactants and the efficient cause is thermodynamics (assuming it goes to completion).
So for virtual particles popping in and out of existence on the quantum scale, we have a clear example of a material cause (the quantum field) but no efficient cause (as the process is random and cannot be predicted).
Better people than I (and I mean real scientists and physicists) have never encountered, and cannot think how of the opposite situation - a way how something could occur without a material cause, but only an efficient one.
It is like "willing" something into existence out of thin air (actually, worse than that - at least air contains some molecules!). But this is exactly what the Kalam suggests, and what its proponents are assuming: that an efficient cause alone is enough to affect colossal change. They are shooting themselves in the foot by holding to the starting point of "nothing": not only is it not known to exist, but it is also not known if it is even possible for an efficient cause to be sufficient to bring about the start of the Universe without material to work with. It's a logical impossibility, that God is not supposed to be able to accomplish by the apologist's own admission.
Problems with premise 1
The premise has clear exceptions - radioactive nuclear decay and the appearance of virtual particles on a quantum scale. These events are random and cannot be predicted. They have no observable prior requisite. Apologists would argue that on some level these events are "caused" by the very existence of the quantum field (or quantum vacuum), but personally I think that's stretching "cause" a bit.
It is also clear that the use of wording "everything that has a beginning of its existence" is setting up a subgroup of things which don't have a beginning to their existence, which can then be posited at the end of the argument as the ultimate cause.
However, the inclusion of God in this subgroup is unjustified. There could be many more plausible naturalistic causes, such as a black hole in another universe, or the collision of two "branes" in multiverse theory. We don't currently have any tangible evidence of something which doesn't have a beginning actually existing, although for something naturalistic it could well be the case by the standard model, but I'll discuss that next.
Problems with premise 2
Although the steady-state theory has now been discredited and we are pretty sure that the Big Bang created the known universe about 13.7 billion years ago, there is some indication that something existed "before" that event. Indeed, the big bang required a singularity or some other similar state to act upon. I use the term "before" in scare quotes since the notion of time breaks down at the very first moments of the universe's existence - I discussed in a previous post about how entropy drives the arrow of time - well with no space for quanta of energy to occupy, there can be no entropy and no time, so I just mean causally before in some sense.
We don't know that the universe had a beginning to its entire existence, only that the expansion had a beginning - it may have always had to have been created from the available materials.
See the "BBST" below.
Problems with premise 3
Well neither premises 1 nor 2 hold, so 3 does not follow. As I've said, only an efficient cause affecting change, and not only a material cause, is the one which is in doubt, but the one which apologists cling to as the truth. As God.
Something from "nothing"
As their argument is predicated on God, an efficient cause, who must have pre-dated everything else, religious apologists insist that there was no material cause to the universe - hence creation ex nihilo. However, it's not clear if "nothing", as defined by a lack of anything, could even exist in the first place.
It's certainly not likely. There is of course only one way for it to exist -as the introduction of anything will make it no longer nothing. And anything means even one virtual particle.
This makes the existence of nothing incredibly unlikely, statistically speaking, and if mutiverse theory is correct at all, I think there may be reason to suspect that nothing is, in fact, impossible to observe as it cannot be present in the same frame of reference as any observer. It may well then be unfalsifiable - and unfalsifiability is a big red flag for any theory. The most you can say about it is that it is mathematically possible.
Lawrence Krauss presents the evidence on the creation of the Universe brilliantly in his book "A Universe from Nothing". Not though, that the physicists' definition of nothing (the closest thing we can observe to "not anything", the vacuum of space) is different from the traditional philosophical definition of nothing, "not anything" which the theists refer to.
In fact, Krauss' book has angered many theists whose most common cry is "That's not nothing!" However, as I've explained, there is "nothing" (LOL) to say that nothing could even actually exist, nor that it was the state from which the Universe arose. Theists' stubborn insistence that creation must have been ex nihilo is dogmatic, neither logically necessary nor empirically probable, and quite possibly misplaced.
The contemporary argument is often expounded by noted Christian apologist and philosopher, Dr. William Lane Craig, whose name I shall abbreviate as WLC. He applies the following additional premises.
Argument based on the impossibility of an actual infinite
1. An actual infinite cannot exist.
2. An infinite temporal regress of events is an actual infinite.
3. Therefore, an infinite temporal regress of events cannot exist.
Argument based on the impossibility of the formation of an actual infinite by successive addition
1. A collection formed by successive addition cannot be an actual infinite.
2. The temporal series of past events is a collection formed by successive addition.
3. Therefore, the temporal series of past events cannot be actually infinite.
"Problems" with Infinity
WLC seems willing to go to any length to try and deny that infinity could be real. His equivocation of "infinite properties" with "nothing" in relation to the BBST is patently absurd. It is self-contradictory: if infinite density is really synonymous with nothing, and the Universe was preceded by nothing, then it follows that the Universe was preceded by infinite density, and therefore infinity DOES exist.
In fact, it's extremely unlikely that the Universe was preceded by nothing. The current favourite theory is probably Quantum Nucleation. Feel free to look it up for more details.
He also insists the privileged reference frame, which predicates the Kalam, must exist. When faced with the demonstrable evidence of time dilation and length contraction, disproving the privileged reference frame, he asserts that these phenomena only "appear" to happen, but do not actually happen. That's obtuse in the extreme, when confronted with the empirical evidence. Metaphysically absurd, one might even say.
It can be demonstrated that an actual infinite can theoretically, or mathematically exist. But of course, it can't be physically shown. I love how religious apologists try and use this as a win for them, all the while ignoring the fact that there is the exact same problem for God. Us atheists have been waiting for quite a while for God to show up. All it would take would be for him to show up with something like this:
The Vogons
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G1WomfhjyVM
Additionally, an omniscient deity would already know what would prove it for most people. Not just inside their head, but in objective reality. For comparison, what would it take to prove to the theists that God didn't exist? In fact , we may be near the closest point we'll ever be to doing just that, (can you point to God, exactly?) and many don't, and can't even see it.
Privileged reference frames
The A and B theories of time are opposing models which differ on the point of whether time is objective, i.e. has a privileged reference frame or not. The accepted theory is B-time, as supported by special relativity: simultaneity is always relative - it may take extra plank seconds for adjacent molecules to interact, for instance. Another way of saying this is that time is not absolute: the first Planck second for particle B may be the 2nd Planck second for particle A. Since time and space are connected in the construct of Spacetime, causality spreads out from a point and cannot be instantaneous.
WLC, in his Kalam arguments, attempts to circumvent this impassable problem by invoking the Neo-Lorentzian view of Relativity, which states that the privileged reference frame does exist, and supports A-time. But hold on. Would you believe that in this archaic model, a concept as nebulous as "the ether" is postulated as central to the privileged reference frame. Make no mistake, this theory is widely discredited.
Since the ether cannot be detected in principle, is is unfalsifiable and unscientific. Well, since WLC has called the B-theory of time "Theologically objectionable" then it MUST be false... ;-)
BBST
Let's get this straight - no-one knows for sure what happened before the first quantum moment of time (the shortest length of time possible is called a Plank second, 10 -43 seconds). The Big Bang Singularity Theorem predicts infinite density, temperature etc. at this moment. However, this assumes that General Relativity holds, but it probably breaks down. Quantum mechanics would in fact gives us a better idea - specifically, quantum gravity, and how it relates to General Relativity, needs to be understood before the origins of the Universe can be modelled with more confidence. The BBST is widely discredited in the scientific community, but is the basis of the Kalam.
Furthermore, even if we did concede that the BBST was correct (which we don't) , it does NOT follow that it was preceded by nothing. As I argued above, a perpetual state of infinites which created the Universe by natural processes is more likely than BBST.
Ultimately, the Kalam is based on pseudoscientific thinking and an unfalsifiable premise, on top of the other problems noted above. But some apologists are so desperate to cling to their God belief as being "reasonable" that they are willing to be pretty unreasonable in doing so.
The presuppositionalists at least, openly admit that if faced with sound evidence that God did not create the Universe, they would still believe. That, I'm afraid, is holding to something unfalsifiable in principle, just like the Kalam Cosmological Argument's foundations.
Thanks to Counter Apologist for much of the detail in this post. Please check out his videos and subscribe to his feed on Youtube:
http://www.youtube.com/user/CounterApologist?feature=watch
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