Kalam Cosmological Argument

(An argument that the world had to have a beginning and that God was the cause of that beginning
developed by Medieval Arab Islamic Scholars)

•       The Kalam argument

        •       1) If something begins to exist it has a preceding cause

        •       2) The universe began to exist

        •       3) Therefore, the universe has a cause

        •       4) And that cause is a personal God

•       Support for 1) If something begins to exist it has a preceding cause

        •       Obvious, intuitively true: Something can’t come from nothing

        •       Experience shows us this

•       Support for 2) The universe began to exist

        •       First argument: Actual infinites can’t exist

        •       If the universe had always existed there would be an actual infinity of events before today and this is impossible

        •       So the universe must have a beginning

                 •       Objection: Actual infinites do exist, namely a line segment which has infinite parts

                 •       Reply: Line segment does not have actual infinite parts; one can keep dividing a line segment infinitely (½, 1/4, 1/8 etc.), but this is only a potential, not an actual infinite

        •       Second argument: Impossibility of traversing the infinite

        •       If the past is infinite, to get to today one would have to traverse an infinite number of prior events

                 •       And thus we would never have arrived at today

        •       Before any event occurs there will always be another event that had to happen first

        •       So if the past consists of infinite events, the present (events) would never occur

        •       But the present has occurred, so the past can’t be infinite

                 •       Objection: This makes the same mistake as Zeno’s paradox (which claims that Achilles can’t cross the stadium because to do so he’ have to pass through an infinite number of halfway points).

                          •       But clearly he can cross the stadium and one can traverse the infinite

                 •       Reply: Zeno’s intervals are unequal (and keep getting smaller and smaller) and add up to a finite distance

                          •       Intervals in an infinite past are equal and add up to an infinite distance/number

                          •       

        •       Two “scientific” arguments for a beginning of the universe

                 •       1) If the universe had always existed, it would have run down and died a heat death by now

                          •       2^nd law of thermodynamics claims that any closed system will eventually tend toward equilibrium–everything will spread out and heat will dissipate (is this an accurate description of this law?)

                          •       Because this is not he case with our universe, it must not have always existed

                 •       2) One interpretation of the Big Bang theory of the origin of the universe is that all matter, energy, space, and time all game into being at one moment

                          •       Thus this well respected scientific theory suggests a beginning to the universe

•       Why the cause of the universe is a personal God

        •       Any cause of space/time, must transcend space time and exist out side of time and space

        •       Such a cause is changeless, because timeless

        •       Immaterial because changeless

        •       Beginningless and uncaused

        •       Incredibly powerful (as created the universe w/o a material cause)

        •       If timeless and immaterial, it must be a mind/spirit

        •       And of the two types of causal explanations we understand 1) scientific/material/antecedent cause and 2) agents/desires/wants causing things, the cause of the universe is of the agent type