The Kalam Cosmological Argument

>[…] Now the cause of the universe is permanently there, since it is timeless. So why isn’t the universe permanently there as well? Why did the universe come into being only 14 billion years ago? Why isn’t it as permanent as its cause?

>Ghazali maintained that the answer to this problem is that the First Cause must be a personal being endowed with freedom of the will. His creating the universe is a free act which is independent of any prior determining conditions. So his act of creating can be something spontaneous and new. Freedom of the will enables one to get an effect with a beginning from a permanent, timeless cause. Thus, we are brought not merely to a transcendent cause of the universe but to its Personal Creator.

>This is admittedly hard for us to imagine. But one way to think about it is to envision God existing alone without the universe as changeless and timeless. His free act of creation is a temporal event simultaneous with the universe’s coming into being. Therefore, God enters into time when He creates the universe. God is thus timeless without the universe and in time with the universe.

I wouldn’t go as far as to say the implications of this particular syllogism are trivial, but the place of this argument in Christian apologetics is seriously undeserved. It doesn’t follow from KCA that there is God/a god, or some other kind of personal creator(s). The reasons are numerous - why one, why personal, why did they have will, why is will a required condition of their creating, what is the action of creation … the biggest one being, why is the creator somehow exempt from the properties of having come into existence, which is at best awfully convenient for the apologist.

None of the standard theological content follows from the argument that the existence of the universe was caused. The scope of KCA is so profoundly limited that I really don’t know what all the fuss is about. It is also pretty disappointing in this particular lecture to see the extensive discussion about a lay-person’s infinite sets - it’s so irrelevant and ill informed, why did he think he needed to invoke Hilbert’s Hotel to make the point he wanted here?

I have a lot of time for Craig and believe he engages in genuine philosophical work and exploration, but the evangelist comes out strong in this piece.

The argument that there must be a cause for something from nothing is predicated on the quite unproven notion that nothing is a physical possibility to begin with.

Separately, some of the most interesting philosophy around this stuff was in the first century or two CE when Hellenistic philosophy connects to the oddity in Judaism that there's two creation stories back to back.

With Philio you end up with an embracing of Plato's forms where the idea of a perfect spiritual archetype of man existing first before a lesser physically embodied incarnation (i.e. us).

But the coolest is in the Gospel of Thomas and components of the Naassenes following it later on, where they incorporate ideas from Epicurean atomism and naturalism, positioning a model of a spontaneous naturally arising physical cosmos first, and then claim that there's a second non-physical copy of that original (and that we're the copy).

You don't tend to expect to see quotes being attributed to Jesus that considers the greater wonder to be evolution over intelligent design, such as "If the flesh came into being because of spirit, that is a marvel, but if spirit came into being because of the body, that is a marvel of marvels. Yet I marvel at how this great wealth has come to dwell in this poverty."

Given the Epicureans were convinced the soul's material dependence on the body meant death was certain, this was a rather clever addition to those philosophical foundations, lamenting physicality ("How miserable is the body that depends on a body, and how miserable is the soul that depends on these two") while emphasizing that the copies won't die and are thus preferable ("Congratulations to the one who came into being before coming into being").

It was a sort of simulation theory sans computers in antiquity (down to claiming the creator of the copy was brought forth by the original spontaneously existing man), which you tend not to expect to see.

My problem with this argument is that it assumes a time before the universe existed, but time is a property of the universe, which means that there can't be a time before the universe existed.

Oh god. Not this again.

Even if we were to grant that.a "prime mover" started the big ball rolling, this argument does NOTHING to tell us the nature of that being(s).

Was the creation act intentional? Was it done by one good or many? Is that god(s) still with us today? Is that god(s) even worth worshipping? (i.e. are they benevolent?)

Don't be fooled by this highschool-level "argument". It presumed and asserts more than it purportedly sets out to demonstrate.

Fail.