At the end of Paragraph 3 of the essay “On
Human Suffering and the Concept of God,” I suggested that the so-called “Kalam”
argument for the existence of a creator god is nugatory. What follows is my explanation.
It is generally conceded that the modern
“Kalam” argument for the existence of a creator god consists of syllogistic
reasoning ultimately based on Aristotle’s philosophy of causes, on early Judaeo-Christian myths and theology, on innate
ideas (Archetypes), and on dismissals of quantum physics, among other things. My immediate source is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalam_cosmological_argument
, quoted in part below in italics:
The most prominent form of the argument,
as defended by
[the fundamentalist Christian apologist] William Lane Craig, states the
Kalam cosmological argument as the following syllogism:[4]
Everything that begins to exist has a cause.
The universe began to exist.
Therefore, the universe has a cause.
Given the conclusion, Craig appends a
further premise and conclusion based upon a conceptual analysis [sic] of the
properties of the cause of the universe:[5]
The universe has a cause.
If the universe has a cause, then an uncaused, personal Creator of the
universe exists who sans (without) the universe is beginningless, changeless,
immaterial, timeless, spaceless and enormously powerful.
Therefore, an uncaused, personal Creator of the universe exists, who
sans the universe is beginningless, changeless, immaterial, timeless, spaceless
and enormously powerful.
This reasoning has crippling
flaws, and the Wikipedia article includes a number of effective refutations, to which following may be added:
The first objection to this double syllogism is that the causal relation between any two things is not incontrovertible; that the concept of cause-and-effect is a construct of the human brain, the expression of the innate compulsion to ask (and to answer) the question “Why?” in response to challenging or surprising events or situations. This is a concomitant—both a factor and a product—of the survival and evolution of the human species; and its uncertain relation to reality is demonstrated by the fact that so many attributions of causes, both in the historical record and in our daily lives, are eventually revealed to be erroneous. (For example, the Ptolemaic universe, astrological influences, “spontaneous generation,” phlogiston, “animal magnetism,” and witchcraft.) In fact, the objective reality of the causal relationship was shown to be open to question by David Hume and others in the 18th century; and they have never been conclusively refuted. We simply can never be sure.
Nevertheless, the belief in the existence of causal relations among things seems almost universal among human beings, and
so the “Kalam” argument must be dealt with. We will begin with the major premise of the
first syllogism:
“Everything that begins to exist has a
cause.”
This statement is an assertion based on
common observations of experience, not all of them scientific, and most of them
casual or random. It is ordinary induction. Induction is very useful, but it has
limitations. For one, it is always
incomplete; no one can observe all the events of a particular kind, especially
not future events.
More important, all of these observations are contained within the universe that we perceive, and cannot necessarily apply to anything outside it—such as the supposed divine or supernatural cause or Creator of the universe is claimed to be.
The minor premise of the first syllogism states:
“The universe began to exist.”
This
assertion is equally impossible to demonstrate.
It seems obvious that the universe exists; it is not so certain that the
universe did not exist and then began to exist as the result of a cause.
The
word “began” and the concept that it denotes imply the existence of time. To make an assertion about anything requires
the use of verbs whose forms/tenses imply either past or present or future
time. In fact, it is impossible for anything to happen, for there to be any occurrence, any change—especially a relation of
cause-and-effect—outside or unrelated to a dimension of time. (That is why we have the
almost universal tendency to think of causes and effects in terms of “post hoc,
propter hoc.”)
Yet
Christian and other Abrahamic theologies explain the universe by their myth of
a Creation that occurred “outside” or “without” time, as if to say that it took
place before there could be a “before.”
The use of words that refer to spatial relations in order to avoid the
problem of the temporal relations of events involves an
absurdity, and is dishonest.
Complicating
the uncertainty that surrounds the cause of the universe is the fact that
cosmologists (astronomers, physicists, astrophysicists, mathematicians)
describe time as a characteristic or property/attribute of the universe, not as
a condition necessary for its existence, a fact that would seem to be congruent with the Creation myth. But current cosmology, which I will discuss briefly below, tends to infer
the origin of the universe and to explain the process, the physics of
its development—passing over the problem of an initial time or a cause.
In
addition to this, it is entirely possible that the universe may be one in an
infinite series of universes that would preclude the singular and unique
beginning promulgated by the “Kalam” cosmological argument.
In any case, since the major premise is an
undemonstrated and undemonstrable assertion, the conclusion that proceeds from
it (“Therefore, the universe has a cause” ) may be syllogistically
valid, but is not necessarily true.
To amplify: If the universe as we know it has a cause,
that cause must exist either within the universe or outside it. But a cause (or agent of cause) is by definition
always outside and other than its effect (or the entity affected). If
the cause exists within the universe, then the universe causes itself,
which is the same as having no cause.
If the cause exists outside the universe,
then we have to deal with the question of infinite regression. There is no
rational basis, no logical or metaphysical or philosophical principle, that dictates that
there be a limit to causation, and there is no evidence that such a limit exists. To
postulate a cause for anything is to postulate that causation exists
without limitation, as much outside our universe as within it at the
level of a law of physics, as an operation of real things acting upon
real things; and even if causation
exists as much beyond this universe as within
it, as the Kalam argument claims, this causation outside the universe provides no basis for denying
an infinite regression of causes.
Indeed, it is axiomatic that if any one thing has a cause, then
every thing (everything) has a cause; or rather, an infinite number of causes, whether material, formal, efficient, or final. For if
everything has a cause, then the infinite regression of causes cannot be
denied. Therefore the “causeless” or “uncaused
... cause” of Kalam apologetics cannot be regarded as having any basis in
reality.
But that is not all.
The conclusion of the first syllogism is repeated as the major premise of the second syllogism: “[T]he universe has a cause.”
Then the minor premise of the second syllogism states the following:
“If the universe has a cause, then an uncaused, personal Creator of the universe exists who sans (without) the universe is beginningless, changeless, immaterial, timeless, spaceless and enormously powerful.”
And this is simply repeated as the conclusion.
This statement contains a number of undemonstrated,
unjustified claims. The worst of them is
the claim that a cause must be a “personal Creator,” that is, a
personality/ character distinct (separate) from, but similar to, what we conceive
human persons and personalities to be.
This falls neatly within the Abrahamic myth, but otherwise has no value,
except possibly as an example of how the human mind instinctively personifies/
anthropomorphizes everything. Or
perhaps as an example of the intellectual dishonesty required by Abrahamic
monotheistic apologetics: If the appeals
to pre-scientific (mythic, theological) authorities are stripped away, the preponderance of Abrahamic
apologetics boils down to the fact that the polemicist simply
cannot
imagine that reality could be anything other than the notion, partly
innate and partly inculcated, that he is committed to defend.
The universe no more requires a person
as a cause than does an earthquake or a volcano, or a mantis, or a
mouse.
Besides this, the possibility of infinite
regression, never disproved, precludes the idea that the supposed Creator must
necessarily be uncaused, as well as the idea that it must be singular (one, unique) and beginningless.
The other qualities, “changeless … and
enormously powerful,” are simply
fantasies of the polemicist; there is no need for the supposed Creator to have
those attributes in order to create the universe as we know it, and we have no
evidence that they exist. As for being changeless,
in fact, in the Hebrew Bible and the Abrahamic scriptures based on it, the
creator-god “Yaweh” or “Allah” can be manipulated by the prayers of believers and the
saints in Heaven to change his mind, as he did concerning certain inhabitants
of Sodom and Gomorrah; and he even repents of having created the human
race, causing the Flood associated with Noah, after which he changes his mind
again, as demonstrated by the rainbow.
And (if we accept
Athanasian Trinitarian theology) an even greater change is demonstrated by the bloody sacrifice of his
only begotten son, the Second Person of the Christian Trinity. No
matter how, or even whether, the decision or determination was made, the
Incarnation and the Crucifixion (occurring in real earthly time, with a before
and an after) realized substantial changes in the supposed godhead.
As for this supposed Creator’s power,
there is the analogy of a simple wooden match, which remains inert until some
external force ignites it, and which can be extinguished easily, yet can start
devastating forest fires and other conflagrations. No one would claim that the match itself is “enormously
powerful.”
To summarize: Given that the major premise
of the first syllogism is an unsupported assertion, and that the conclusion is
therefore not necessarily true; and that in the second syllogism what takes the
place of the minor premise (“If … then … ” ) is an accumulation of
assertions that are unjustified, and that they are simply repeated as the
conclusion; we must admit that neither conclusion has been demonstrated, and
that the “Kalam” cosmological argument for a creator god is without value.
The
question can also be approached from
the point of view of modern quantum physics, a factor that the apologist
carefully evades, claiming that it is irrelevant
(https://www.reasonablefaith.org/images/uploads/The_Kalam_Cosmological_
Argument.pdf, p. 2). For most of us who were nurtured in the
Western tradition, “Creation” and the “Big Bang” are almost
synonymous—two
contrasting ways of conceptualizing the same event. And the “Kalam” theory can be refuted in
terms of the “Big Bang,” the current generally accepted scientific theory of
the origin/beginning of the universe, based on the work of the Belgian
theoretical physicist, mathematician, and astronomer Georges Lemaître.
The following is taken from https://world-of-humanism.blog/2020/05/23/georges-lemaitre-and-the-hypothesis-of-the-primeval-atom/
. [Square brackets enclose my additions,
made for clarity.]:
“… [Lemaître] proposed that due to the
neighbouring galaxies moving away from us in different directions, then an
obvious conclusion would be a massive cosmic force and he proposed the Big Bang
theory using ‘Albert Einstein’s’ [sic] theory of general relativity ...
published 11 years prior. Georges [Lemaître]
never actually referred to the cosmic event as the Big Bang ...[;] he named it
‘hypothesis of the primeval atom’.… His
theory was in simple terms that to explain why the universe was expanding, [we are led to infer that] it
must have had a point of origin where everything within the universe was packed
within an object of infinite density. This object of infinite density is what
he described as the primeval atom.”
And the article continues with a quotation
from Lemaître:
“ ‘The radius of space began at zero; the first stages of the expansion
consisted of a rapid expansion determined by the mass of the initial atom,
almost equal to the present mass of the universe. If this mass is sufficient,
and the estimates which we can make indicate that this is indeed so, the
initial expansion was able to permit the radius to exceed the value of the
equilibrium radius. The expansion thus took place in three phases: a first
period of rapid expansion in which the atom-universe was broken into atomic
stars, a period of slowing-down, followed by a third period of accelerated expansion.
It is doubtless in this third period that we find ourselves today, and the
acceleration of space which followed the period of slow expansion could well be
responsible for the separation of stars into extra-galactic nebulae.’ – Georges
Lemaître”
Obviously, the “primeval atom” must have been as extremely small as it was extremely dense. And according to the description of the material world given by quantum mechanics, causation does not exist at this “nano” level of the subatomic quantum particle/wave. Instead of causal relationships, there is only probability. The Big Bang was a phenomenon of the extremely small (Georges Lemaître’s “primeval atom,” in which “The radius of space began at zero”) and therefore no causal relationship was involved in it. The Big Bang had no cause, and therefore the universe had no cause.
But the question remains: Where did the “primeval atom” come from? As a Catholic priest working within his community, Lemaître
of course believed that it came from the supposed Creator.
Nevertheless, quantum physics allows for the possibility of no cause.
Support for this idea may be found in an
article in Nautilus (“The Remarkable Emptiness of Existence,” 4 January
2023) written by Dr. Paul M. Sutter, research professor in astrophysics at the
Institute for Advanced Computational Science at Stony Brook University and a
guest researcher at the Flatiron Institute in New York City (https://nautil.us/the-remarkable-emptiness-of-existence-256323/):
“We live in a quantum universe; a universe where you can never be quite sure about anything. At the tiniest of scales, subatomic particles fizz and pop into existence, briefly experiencing the world of the living before returning back from where they came, disappearing from reality before they have a chance to meaningfully interact with anything else.”
The foregoing considerations suggest a conjecture: Given that our current universe may itself be only a subatomic quantum particle/wave within one of an infinite series of possible universes—in fact, at the coincidence of one infinite series, extending from the infinitely small to the infinitely large that contains it, with another infinite series extending from the infinite past to the infinite future—this may well be the way that our universe came into existence, and also the way that it will end.For readers who desire references and
greater detail, I append an excerpt from an article from Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georges_Lema%C3%AEtre
“… [In] 1925, he became a part-time
lecturer at the Catholic University of Louvain and began the report that was
published in 1927 in the Annales de la Société Scientifique de Bruxelles
(Annals of the Scientific Society of Brussels) under the title “Un
Univers homogène de masse constante et de rayon croissant rendant compte de la
vitesse radiale des nébuleuses extragalactiques” (“A homogeneous Universe of
constant mass and growing radius accounting for the radial velocity of
extragalactic nebulae”), that was later to bring him international fame.[2] In
this report, he presented the new idea that the universe is expanding, which he
derived from General Relativity. This later became known as Hubble’s law, even
though Lemaître was the first to provide an observational estimate of the
Hubble constant.[16] The initial state he proposed was taken to be Einstein’s
own model of a finitely sized static universe. The paper had little impact
because the journal in which it was published was not widely read by
astronomers outside Belgium. Arthur Eddington reportedly helped translate the
article into English in 1931, but the part of it pertaining to the estimation
of the “Hubble constant” was not included in the translation for reasons that
remained unknown for a long time.[17] This issue was clarified in 2011 by Mario
Livio: Lemaître omitted those paragraphs himself when translating the paper for
the Royal Astronomical Society, in favour of reports of newer work on the subject,
since by that time Hubble’s calculations had already improved on Lemaître’s
earlier ones.[4]….
“In 1931, Arthur Eddington published in
the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society a long commentary
on Lemaître’s 1927 article, which Eddington described as a “brilliant solution”
to the outstanding problems of cosmology.[20] The original paper was published
in an abbreviated English translation later on in 1931, along with a sequel by
Lemaître responding to Eddington’s comments.[21] Lemaître was then invited to
London to participate in a meeting of the British Association on the relation
between the physical universe and spirituality. There he proposed that the
universe expanded from an initial point, which he called the “Primeval Atom”. He
developed this idea in a report published in Nature.[10] Lemaître’s
theory appeared for the first time in an article for the general reader on
science and technology subjects in the December 1932 issue of Popular
Science.[22] Lemaître’s theory became better known as the “Big Bang theory,”
a picturesque term playfully coined during a 1949 BBC radio broadcast by the
astronomer Fred Hoyle,[23][24] who was a proponent of the steady state universe
and remained so until his death in 2001.
“Lemaître’s proposal met with skepticism from his fellow scientists. Eddington found Lemaître’s notion unpleasant.[25] Einstein thought it unjustifiable from a physical point of view, although he encouraged Lemaître to look into the possibility of models of non-isotropic expansion, so it is clear he was not altogether dismissive of the concept. Einstein also appreciated Lemaître’s argument that Einstein’s model of a static universe could not be sustained into the infinite past.”
Ironically, the Creationist Faithful may be consoled by the fact that this has an Augustinian perspective: Augustine claimed that without the Creation, time did not exist—it came into being with the Creation. Apparently it did not occur to him that causation as we conceive of it cannot exist independently of time, any more than it can exist independently of space. Therefore, for the Creation itself, there was no cause: the universe had no cause.
A final note: Given the nature of human
language, the creationist argument might be less problematic if it were
reframed in terms of the source or origin of the universe, rather
than of its cause. This shift
might give the Abrahamic theologians something more amenable to their
anthropomorphic tendencies to work with, and it might divert them from
pseudoscientific metaphysical explanations based ultimately on Aristotelian
philosophy.
