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Tuesday, January 10, 2023

ABOUT THE “KALAM” COSMOLOGICAL ARGUMENT ...

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 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 contains a number of authoritative and effective refutations in addition to its statement of the argument; but I can add a few useful ideas to them, with the following objections:

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, 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 any supposed divine or supernatural cause or Creator of the universe would 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.  

The word “began” and the concept that it denotes imply the existence of time.  Indeed, it is impossible to express any idea, or even to think, without implying that time exists and that everything takes place within a dimension of time.  (To make an assertion about anything requires the use of verbs whose forms/tenses imply either past or present or future time.)  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 is dishonest, and involves an absurd contradiction. 

Another reason for the uncertainty that surrounds the beginning of the universe is 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, yet the human mind is incapable of conceiving of anythingespecially a relation of cause-and-effectwithout or outside a dimension of time.  So current cosmology, which I will discuss below, tends to infer the origin of the universe and to explain the process, the physics of it—passing over the problem of its origin in relation to time.  In addition to this, it is not impossible 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, at the level of a law of physics within our universe (and outside it if there is anything outside it) 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.  And 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 universesin 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 Hubbles 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 Einsteins 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 Hubbles calculations had already improved on Lemaîtres earlier ones.[4]…. 

“In 1931, Arthur Eddington published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society a long commentary on Lemaîtres 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 Eddingtons 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] Lemaîtres 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] Lemaîtres 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.

“Lemaîtres proposal met with skepticism from his fellow scientists. Eddington found Lemaîtres 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 Lemaîtres argument that Einsteins 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.

 

An earlier version was posted by Pier Roberto Giannelli at 10/08/2021 02:24:00 AM

 

 


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