I've been reading books and articles and essays on the Kalam Cosmological Argument (hereafter KCA) for years, and now I want to read through the essay called The Kalam Cosmological Argument written by William Lane Craig and James Sinclair, published in the book The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology. It is very thorough and complicated, which is a beautiful thing. I want to try to put the essay in my own words to prove to myself that I understand it. When I do this I can be honest about the parts I do understand and the parts I do not. As far as helpful criticisms are concerned, they'll boil down to being either parts I don't understand (which is either my fault or the author's), parts I do understand along with a criticism that is fallacious, or parts I do understand with a criticism that is valid.
Part 1 Introduction
What strikes me here is the idea that cosmological arguments are a 'family of arguments'. This is something I sometimes forget. Leibniz had his cosmological argument from contingency (hereafter AFC), but this is entirely distinct from KCA. This is important because we want to be clear on which piece of philosophical artillery we're using. AFC seeks to prove that God is the sufficient reason for a contingent universe; KCA seeks to prove that God is the cause of the universe. Craig/Sinclair (CS, hereafter) list a veritable 'who's who' of philosophy responsible for generating varying kinds of cosmological arguments. I won't get into that or the different kinds, just for brevity.
It is important that KCA presuppose 'creation out of nothing' (CON). The first philosopher of note is John Philoponus (d. 580?). He wrote commentaries on the works of Aristotle. He was an Alexandrian. He wrote books like Against Aristotle and On the Eternity of the World against Proclus. Philoponus' main beef with Aristotle was that the latter thought the universe was eternal. Thus, the first kinds of arguments against this doctrine are philosophical: it is impossible (they argue) that there be an 'infinite temporal regress'. We'll get to why later. After Muslims took over North Africa, their theologians caught wind of this polemic and enriched it, as did the Jews. Later, Jewish/Muslim enrichments of the polemic seeped back into Christian scholasticism. The Jews took it over from Muslims in Spain, and the Jews also talked about it with the Latin west. Thus, the Jews are the progenitors of this argument for themselves and Christians.
So, where did the term 'Kalam' come from? It's the Arabic word for 'speech'. 'Kalam' later just came to mean any argument supporting a theologically relevant position having said intellectual pedigree. Later still it morphed into demarcating a whole movement called 'Islamic Scholasticism'. The term 'mutakallim' came to mean anyone who practiced 'Kalam'.
KCA itself then proceeded to hibernate for 7 centuries. Then, the 20th century came. Science began to start empirically verifying some startling hypotheses. It seemed as though the scientific evidence (which we'll dive into below) was supporting a beginning to space and time! There were also popping up here and there books by intellectuals using the philosophical parts of KCA (the philosophical arguments seeking to prove that an infinite temporal regress is impossible). William Lane Craig is the most famous here, but mathematician/cosmologist G.J. Whitrow and Stuart Hackett (who deserves to be better known) are also listed.
The first formulation of KCA came from al-Ghazali, a Muslim theologian. He wrote: "Every being which begins to exist has a cause for its beginning; now the world is a being which begins; therefore, it possesses a cause for its beginning." He offered intriguing arguments for the idea that an infinite temporal regress is impossible. In other words, the idea that the past is infinite is impossible (there are different kinds of impossibilities, but I will get to that later). Another key idea: 'the Eternal' is the 'limit at which the finite past terminates' (CS). This means that this 'finite past' must 'stop at an Eternal being', and this Eternal being is what's responsible for the 'first temporal being' - this Eternal being must have 'originated' this first temporal being (al-Ghazali).
KCA itself is this:
1. Everything that begins to exist has a cause.
2. The universe began to exist.
3. Therefore, the universe has a cause.
CS quickly warn us that the simplicity of the argument doesn't mean it isn't very complicated. Complicated arguments don't need lots and lots of premises. Lots of premises are sufficient, but not necessary, for an argument to be complicated. The complications begin when we start to give reasons for why premise 1 and 2 are true, or give rebuttals to reasons proposed for why said premises might be false. You'll see why later. The other kind of complication comes when we start trying to conceptually analyze the concept 'cause of the universe'.
In the next blog, we'll plunge into premise 2: the universe began to exist. Is this true? The next blog will present the first philosophical reason to prove that the universe began to exist by proving that an 'actual infinite' is impossible.
