What makes the whole flat-earth debate so eye-rollingly insufferable is that it’s just nothing but easily refutable made-up bullshit. I tire of even having to talk about it. It’s like arguing whether viruses exist or the moon is made of cheese—like, someone is actually feverishly arguing Luna is literally a quintillion-ton ball of dairy product. Why even give them a minute of your day?
The Kalam Cosmological Argument is one of those things. It is obvious bullshit. Yet people build massive, convoluted word walls and hours-long videos insisting it’s a serious argument about something. I’m just tired of this. So I am going to call it. The KCA is bullshit. It is abject crankery. It is every bit as crank as arguing the Earth is flat or the moon is cheese.
The Industrial KCA Conspiracy Theory
Paraphrasing the Stanford Encyclopedia, the Kalam Cosmological Argument goes like this:
- Everything that begins to exist has a cause other than itself.
- The universe began to exist.
- Therefore, the universe has a cause other than itself.
- All physical “laws and initial conditions” are part of “the universe.”
- The only possible causes are physical or personal.
- Therefore, the cause of the universe must be personal.
I’ll set aside the fact that this is just another example of how Syllogisms Usually Suck. They are almost always bullshit-vectors (and yes, #NotAllSyllogisms; hence my qualifier “almost”). Because human knowledge is ultimately inductive, not deductive, and all that deductive syllogisms do is extract meaning from a set of premises—what is true if those premises are true—they do not confirm those premises are true and thus cannot “prove” a resulting conclusion is “true” in any required sense. Apart from logical necessities, reliable reasoning about the world needs to be properly Bayesian. But that doesn’t get the results the theist wants. So they cheat. But never mind that. You can argue it elsewhere (follow any of my links).
I will also set aside the oft-hidden “Premise 5,” insisting that “unlike” nonpersonal causes, “personal” causes can exist without “anything” existing—in other words, that we can claim personal causes aren’t part of a “universe” or don’t require a universe to exist in. It is never plausibly explained why, if personal causes get this weird exception, nonpersonal causes can’t ever get an equivalent exception. And the whole idea of persons existing without things to realize them is inherently dubious and pervasively anti-empirical. So this idea that personal causes can exist independently of physical causes is an ill-defined and poorly argued premise. Likewise that persons can exist without worlds to exist in, or without “ever” existing “anywhere.” But that’s all just bad philosophy. Today I’m only interested in the crankery of the KCA. For other takes, see The Other Problem with Nothing.
But here, let’s just grant Premise 5. Hence I’ll grant Premise 4, too, because it is operating as kind of a definition of “universe” in Premise 2 (and thus in Conclusion 3). Indeed, Premise 4 actually destroys the entire argument. So I love that premise. It’s the big foot-shooting “oops” of the whole crankturd that is the KCA. This is why I will also not nitpick the misuse of the word “uni”-verse in Premise 2 even though that is an equivocation fallacy. Reality, including time, could predate our “uni”-verse, so the KCA is only valid if by “universe” you mean “all of reality,” inclusive of every physical thing, like “time” or “laws of physics,” and not just our one local Big Bang cosmos. Hence Premise 2 must include multiverse cosmological models, exactly as Premise 4 entails.
So that leaves Premise 1 and Premise 2.
“I’m Not Saying Its Aliens, But …”
Premise 1, “Everything that begins to exist has a cause other than itself,” is literally logically impossible. Let me repeat that so the back of the room and the slow of head can catch up:
“Everything that begins to exist has a cause other than itself” is literally logically impossible.
Why?
Because “Everything” includes all laws of physics. Causality is a law of physics. Therefore it is logically impossible for any law of causality to apply before that law of causality even exists.
The first premise is therefore logically necessarily false. Not just probably false. It is necessarily false. It can never be the case that “everything” that begins to exist has a cause, no more than you can ever be north of the North Pole. Therefore there must necessarily always be things that can begin uncaused—particularly the very need of a cause in the first place. So if that began, it can’t have required a cause to.
Nor can “physical reality” be an exception-case to “everything” here, because, oops! Premise 4 establishes that that is inclusive of all physical laws of causality. Those are part of the contents of what is beginning in “the universe began to exist” and therefore cannot exist before that so as to cause it. Causal laws cannot exist before causal laws exist.
And this holds even apart from Premise 4: you still can’t get some “metaphysical” law of causality to exist before anything exists. Because “anything” includes all laws of causality, even magical metaphysical ones—everything, in fact, that does not logically necessarily exist and thereby requires no cause to exist. And causal laws are not logically necessary. This holds even for “atemporal” causal laws, “ontological” causal laws, or any other cane-and-top-hat dance you want to pull here. Causal laws are simply a thing that cannot exist before they exist so as to cause themselves to exist.
So Premise 1 is cooked. It can never be true. It is always false. It is logically necessarily false.
And that means the KCA is as dead as a Loth Cat on Alderaan (too soon?).
Trying to rescue it at this point is just as delusional as scrambling to defend the moon being cheese. You really aren’t playing with all honesty or marbles at that point. You are just another flat-earther. And I’m tired of taking you seriously.
“… It’s Aliens”
Premise 2, that all physical reality “began to exist,” is likewise bollocks. We literally do not know whether it is true. And that’s the end of the conversation.
Literally. That’s it. We’re done here. Move on.
If you want to keep arguing that point, again I cannot take you seriously. You are then to me like someone insisting Haitians eat pets. You have no damned evidence that Haitians are eating pets—so just stop. The argument from the Big Bang is a non sequitur (rejected by all cosmological scientists the world over), while the argument from the impossibility of an infinity is literally crank. To keep refusing to accept that fact time after time after time after time is insane. And I cannot have a rational conversation with a crazy person. I’m done with that. That’s just more mooncheese.
But the problem here is worse. Because on any relevant definition of “began,” God began to exist. That’s right. “Begin to exist” means to exist a finite time into the past and not beyond—as opposed to continuing to exist an infinite amount of time into the past such that there is no “first” time a thing exists. If there is a first time when you exist, you began to exist. And that’s that. But since there is no time before time (just as there is no north of the North Pole), God cannot exist “an infinite amount of time into the past.” There is only a finite amount of time into the past during which God can exist.
Therefore there was a first time when God existed, just as there was a first time when time existed, and everything else. Therefore everything that exists began to exist. God gets swept right up in that terrible fact. The only way to get God out of this trap is to posit that God did not create time, that time is past infinite. But you just ruled that out with Premise 4. Time is a physical thing. It therefore is included in what “began” to exist in Premise 2. But that means God also began to exist. He did not exist before the first moment of time. Nothing did, in fact; nor even could have—it’s a logical impossibility. Which means not even logically necessary things can exist before time, because existing before time is logically impossible. This has other consequences for theism but you can wrangle with that elsewhere. Here the point is: either there was infinite uncaused time (and thus “something” always existed and Premise 2 is false) or everything began—because everything starts to exist at the first moment of time. And therefore nothing is exempted from Premise 1, not even personal causes; not even gods.
So God then falls on the spear of Premise 1 and therefore needs some cause external to himself. And if we need that, why can’t we just cut out the middleman and use that to explain everything else? God is an explanatory third wheel. We can chuck it. And no, we don’t need an infinite regress of causes here. Because the ultimate cause can be a logically necessary thing, which thereby requires no cause (as it is already “caused” by its being logically necessary), and sorry, but no personal cause has ever been shown to be even plausibly logically necessary (the cosmological argument thus suffers from the very same Hidden Fallacy in the Fine Tuning Argument). But there are far simpler physical realities that could be. So the theist should be glad Premise 1 is false. It gets their god out of this pickle. But that means ditching the KCA and trying something else (good luck with that).
Whereas if time is past eternal and thus uncreated, then Premise 2 is false. Because time would then simply be a universe, and could be the thing causing whatever changes or happens as time plods along, eternally transforming from one state to the other until “our” local form of it arose fourteen billion years ago. If there was always time, there could always have been some universe or another, in an endless recurring stream. Remember Premise 4? If any physical thing is past eternal, then the “universe” in Premise 2 as defined in Premise 4 has always existed and therefore never “began.” And there is no way to get any prior time to “lack” its own universe or state of existence (there is no logical necessity of that, and there is no empirical evidence for it). So you can’t opt for a past eternity of time. Because that abandons Premise 2.
Now the KCA is as dead as a bantha in the Jedha City zoo.
So the two keystone premises of the KCA are bullshit. Premise 1 can never be true. And Premise 2 is not known to be true. Therefore, the conclusion can never be obtained from these premises. It’s all just song and dance. Because everything else is just playing games with words and handwaves. More bullshit.
So can we just cut this crank shit loose now?
If the earth be a sphere with a r=3959 miles then it would be impossible to see as far as we do both on land and over water.
With all due respect Dr. Carrier you said the same thing about Jesus until you looked . 😉
Three miles is the angular distance at sea level for a six-foot-tall person.
That checks out.
Anything else is goofing the test.
Gosh … I thought he had you over a (Flat) Barrel, there, Richard!
🙂
I admittedly dont care if God created this Earth… it would be nice but i can work around that. What i cant work around is the distance over water we can see given the radius and circumference of the earth.
Ive got a loading dock on a light house id like to show you from 6 miles out if you care to blow your mind.
We all agree that the Earth’s curvature is visible.
That Premise 1 is false and Premise 2 unknowable are even more visible than that. You don’t even have to drive to a beach to see it.
Hence the analogy.
Collingwood would have asked exactly what these folks mean by causation — as in the appendix on causation in his Essay on Metaphysics (1940).
To be fair, I don’t think that’s a relevant objection, and indeed, it is playing into the crank’s game by taking this seriously, which we shouldn’t even be doing in the first place.
“Is there a definition of ’cause’ that would get the syllogism to be valid” is like asking “Is there a set of circumstances in which we’d have to admit it was true that the Earth is flat.” The answer is always yes. But then you’ve wasted hours on a question that you shouldn’t have been wasting even a minute on. We are not in those circumstances. So it does not matter if they can be conceived.
Getting us to spend time arguing this is the crank winning. Walking away with the simple mic drop of “That’s a waste of time because Premise 1 is logically impossible no matter what concept of causation you adopt” is the crank losing. They deserve to lose. So make them lose. Then go forth and prosper. Have a nice scotch over a conversation about something actually sane and worthwhile.
“So the two keystone premises of the KCM are bullshit. Premise 1 can never be true. And Premise 2 is not known to be true. Therefore, the conclusion can never be obtained from these premises.” And that’s that!
Yep.
And I realized just this week that that’s that.
All the other bickering over it has just been tail-chasing the endless word games of cranks. Just like with virus deniers, flat earthers, and every other crank on the planet.
Hi Richard. A minor query: you abbreviate a couple of times to “KCA” but mostly abbreviate to “KCM”. Is this just a keyboard slip? Your argument is, of course, sound.
That is very strange. Some sort of auto-correct changed all my KCAs to KCMs and I didn’t notice. I’ve forced them back. Thank you for catching it.
I just did a full diagnostic and it can’t (?) have been autocorrect. I must have just kept typing KCM for some reason thinking I was typing KCA, which is even stranger to contemplate. I feel like I’m gaslighting myself now!
I’ve never seen one of these “logical” theistic arguments that didn’t fall apart as soon as you tried to formalize it in a fashion that an actual logician would recognize. By this I mean expressing the argument’s premises as well-formed formulas in some formal logic and making sure that every step in your proof is valid according to the proof rules of that logic. It immediately becomes obvious that the stated premises are woefully inadequate to conclude much of anything beyond tautologies, because so much of the argument relies on hidden assumptions, undefined or ill-defined terms, and using multiple different meanings of the same word in different parts of the argument.
Just look at item 1. We might write it formally as
∀x: ∀t: is_time(t) & begins_to_exist(x, t) → (∃y: causes(y, x) & y ≠ x)
(where ∀ means “for all” and ∃ means “there exists”), and already we’re in trouble. This is clearly problematic as an axiom. We first need to be clear on what begins_to_exist(x, t) (“x begins to exist at time t”) is intended to mean, what causes(y, x) (“y causes x”) is intended to mean, and to what sort of entities x and y these apply. Then we’re going to need to axiomatize those two predicates. (We will also probably have to axiomatize our assumptions about time, but that’s already been done by others.)
AFTER we have axioms for begins_to_exist() and causes(), we MIGHT find that item 1 emerges as a THEOREM… for CERTAIN kinds of entities.
But I guarantee you that trying to axiomatize the causes() predicate is going to be problematic. If you look at, say, classical physics, you might be tempted to say that the state of the system at time t “causes” its state at a later time t’, because the later state is fully determined by the early state. But classical physics is reversible, which means that the earlier state is ALSO fully determined by the later state, so we could just as well say that the state at the later time t’ “causes” the state at the earlier time t.
Then item 2 is
∃t: is_time(t) & begins_to_exist(the_universe, t)
and that’s a contingent claim about reality which may or may not be true. There is no logical difficulty with a universe that has no beginning. Not to mention that the_universe may not be one of those entities to which a notion of being “caused” applies. And so on.
Indeed. In real cosmology (not crank cosmology), as in, the stuff in real (not bogus) peer reviewed cosmological science journals, lots of things are open questions that the KCM cannot accommodate (like time-reversed causation or nothing-state-collapse as primary cause and even primordial brute fact causation, which is essentially identical to theistic first-cause models but without all the vague unempirical woo nonsense about complex intelligences or disembodied minds being involved).
And the defects of the argument arise in the “whack-a-mole” construction of the premises.
The premises are defined in a way so as to rely on more than one equivocation fallacy (“everything” is switched between “everything” and “most everything”; word games are played with what “begin” or “cause” are supposed to mean; and so on), so the crank can jump from one island to another in motte-and-bailey fashion and never recognize that they are just arguing in circles, as they clean up one mess by making another, and when you point that out they clean up the new mess recreating the original one, and when you point that out, they clean that mess up again by making that other one again, and so on. And all the while they angrily and indignantly deny that this is happening the more you point out that it is. Just like every other crazy person.
This is part of why I think Carroll’s debate with Craig was so devastating for him. Carroll didn’t play the crank game. He made clear from the outset that even the very terminology and concepts were as fatally flawed as asking about an iPhone’s camera “But where does the film go?” He pointed out that the entire mission of the KCA is nonsense.
Indeed. There is a reason the KCA appears nowhere in professional cosmological science literature.
This is almost like astrologers arguing with astronomers. And I say almost because astrologers had better arguments than the KCA (just, still, bad arguments).
Well-said, as always. Now, can someone tell this to Dr. William Lane Craig? Makes me want to quote the Oracle in the Matrix “Everything that has a beginning has an end, Neo.” Well, Everybody in that movie (including Neo, the Oracle, the Architect, and Hugo Weaving’s “Smith” had a beginning.) The problem can be solved if someone can simply show us time’s beginning. Go ahead — sorry, nobody can do that. Even an invisible God with the power to make “something out of nothing” could still do nothing in a universe where there is no time. That means God would have to create time, and be able to stop-and-start it whenever he wants. Not only is there no Bible verse which says he can do that, but there’s no evidence of any event in history ever reversing itself, or time flowing backwards. Even Superman had the ability to do that — although making the Earth spin backwards is NOT a logical way to reverse time 🌎😆⏰ Wake up, Neo.
Craig is, IMO, a grifter. He probably already knows all this. I suspect he imagines himself as selling opium to the masses for the greater good or the bucks or something. Accordingly, he will never admit to any of this. Others (like Loke) are insane (literally clinically delusional) and thus will never admit any of this even to themselves. They are the tinfoil wordwall builders I’m tired of.
While I agree he is vastly dishonest and is grifting, I also do think that he really does need his magic. He made that very clear with his very revealing admission that he rigs the evidence to get what he wants out of a story that he likes. That revelation was vastly against his own interest, and so I think he was being sincere about it.
It’s just that, once you’re hip-deep in that sophistry, you then have inducements to make money and get status on the side.
Oh, yes. That’s worth noting. He has let the mask slip a few times.
Once was when I was in a van with him on an hour drive to the airport. Lots happened. But the pertinent thing here was his startled reaction to my stating that I didn’t do debates to win, but to educate. Because it is impossible to “win” a clocked debate in any logically meaningful sense; all one can achieve is to convince the audience to realize there are facts being kept from them that, when pursued, call the proposition into doubt. But that pursuit (running every claim to ground) requires more than an hour of your life (which is why it can’t be done in a clocked debate).
Craig ignored everything I said and just went on in complete bewilderance that I did not set winning a debate as my goal. “Why even debate if not to win?” was almost exactly a thing he said. Which I think was genuine. He really did not comprehend my education objective and really does think the only point of debating is to “win,” as if it were just a game. I think this explains a lot about the man. He is the Orwellian in the room. He thinks tricking people into believing a thing is more important than getting at the actual truth of a thing. It’s all just Plato’s Republic to him. Which is why he is willing to lie in a debate. Because winning is more important than telling the truth.
Another example is his admission in Reasonable Faith that the Holy Spirit (what the rest of us call “feelings”) trumps all evidence and logic when deciding what is true. I think that’s sincere. He really does actually despise evidence as “in the way” and to be rid of; his arguing over evidence is just “playing to win.” Though I do not know if he believes the Spirit is a real thing; I am unsure whether he really thinks that or if he just sees it as a fitting two-truths code for the requisite neocon opium, being a good little Plato’s Guardian.
Did you ever tackle Craig’s insane idea that Adam and Eve were Homines Heidelbergenses? I think that Andrew Loke believes this as well. However, Coyne takes to task Joshua Swamidas’s data such that according to Coyne it is impossible that modern humanity descended from a single pair of Homines Heidelbergenses. Craig seems to be always going about shifting Christianity’s goalposts. He said to Seán McDowell that there are always “moves we can make” to save evangelical Christianity, even if it turns out that the Genesis creation account is totally disproven as a historical event. Craig seems to me to be Evangelical Christianity’s post-hoc rationalizer in chief.
No. I haven’t written about that. It’s just too silly to require reply.
But it is remarkable for Craig abandoning literalism. His embrace of old earth and guided evolution is not new, but he did used to waffle on that, too (he used to avoid the conversation). But to abandon literalism is actually a contract violation (it violates Talbot and HCU doctrine). So I guess he gets a pass for sheer prestige.
Frankly, I think one of the very problems with the whole idea of “Plato’s Guardian” is that people actually don’t keep that bullshit separated out that well. When you craft an opium that makes other people not scared of death, well, now you know you have a belief system that if you just embrace it you are now no longer scared of death yourself. You don’t care about truth and think it’s okay to lie to convince others to do something pragmatically useful. What barrier is there left for you to do so? Your convictions that you should be truthful to yourself and to your fellow elites? How many people actually really have that conviction rather than just bullshit and lie to get power because they want power? Might as well just lie to yourself the same way you lie to your marks.
And then you get the feedback that having that sincerity, being able to say with full sincerity that you should lower your evidential standards for a pretty story that makes you feel good, makes it even easier for you to argue your point and actually establishes your credibility with your gullible flock even as it reduces your outward-facing utility. Why would we expect such a person to ever stop?
I understand. It is a hairbrained idea. It is also a possibiliter ergo possibiliter fallacy. Swamidass’s data is wrong, according to Coyne, but let us just grant Swamidass’s data, arguendo. This just means that it is just about possible that Adam and Eve could have been Homines Heidelbergenses. There is still no evidence that this is the case! It is just about possible, though. I see this in apologetics a lot: arguing towards what is just about possible, instead of arguing towards what is probable, and evidenced. Apologetics is more about, these days, explaining away the lack of evidence, rather than providing evidence. Why don’t we have the evidence that we would expect to have if the claims of Christianity are true? In steps Mr. Apologist to explain away this shortfall!
And as bizarre as Craig’s idea is, it is still the official teaching of the Catholic Church, the biggest sect of Christianity, that humanity is descended from a single pair called Adam and Eve. Most Catholics, even the priests, and arguably even the current and previous Pope do not believe in official Church teaching. However, the conservatives do. If one were to grill a Conservative Catholic on this, then he would probably default to William Lane Craig’s idea that Adam and Eve were a single pair Homines Heidelbergenses that God breathed a soul into.
Indeed the possibiliter fallacy is indeed an old standard across all apologetics. But I am more charitable in this case.
Craig and Swamidass disagree on a lot so it’s not entirely parallel. But taking Craig as the example: I don’t take him as attempting to claim science has proved his theory, but rather that science has failed to refute it, i.e. “it is possible” to reconcile the Bible with the data and “therefore” if we have some other reason to trust the Bible (enter: all standard apologetics and holy spirit epistemology here), then we can trust the Bible without claiming scientists are lying or something. It’s really just an explicit cognitive dissonance resolver.
This is silly to us (who don’t see the point in believing things you can’t prove with evidence are probably true, not just “possibly” true). But to people who believe “faith” is a valid justification for belief, it’s a sensible internal reform. It’s the same thing that happened when OECs abandoned YEC by finally allowing the Bible to be read nonliterally. To us, a waste of time (who cares what a primitive book full of armchair drunk uncling by rampant savages says?). But to them, the only way to save their religion from the universal acid of scientific evidence.
THANK YOU! Like ALL of Smooth ConMan Willy Lane Craig’s arguments, the ‘Kalam Cosmoglobogoogo Agarglement’ is just a couple of Logical Fallacies wrapped in a farrago of deceit, topped with a plastic blossom of bluster.
In young, naive, college days we might stay up late arguing:
“Yeah but if EVERYTHING was made by God; who made God?”
“Nobody made God. He always existed!” … which was greeted with well-justified, general derision.
THEN …. along comes “Dr” Craig, who — AS USUAL — attempts the ‘wool over eye trick’ and, instead of a logical argument, tries a trick with LANGUAGE and tries to reverse the Burden of Proof!
“If something not just ‘Exists’ but ‘COMES INTO existence’ then it MUST have had a “Prime Mover’ … but since “God ALWAYS existed, no ‘Prime Mover’ needed!”
I am amazed that Atheist debaters treat this with anything but scorn and contempt!
I sympathize.
“He always existed” is another crank device. Either that means time is an uncreated past eternality (refuting the KCA) or “always exists” includes everything that began to exist with time. In which case you can just as validly say the universe has always existed (refuting the KCA). This is something I pointed out twenty years ago in my debate with Wanchick.
This is one of those whack-a-mole games I just referenced. And another example of the cranks winning by getting us to talk endlessly about this crank shit that we should be wasting no more time on.
“Comes into” vs. “Begins” is another one. The phrase “comes into existence” plays on the assumption of a time before time (so that there can be a time when it didn’t exist, and thus allowing it to “come” into existence at another time). Which is illogical. And when you point that out, we get a top-hat dance about how it is conceivable to have always existed (as in, every time that exists, it exists) and still have “come” into existence, but even were that true (it’s not), then that means we have no more or less evidence of that than that God “came” into existence.
This is just the same Premise 2 nonsense: declaring things happened that you have no evidence of, and that you’ve not actually created a valid exception to for God. That ends up in the Hidden Premise vortex, where this all ends up depending on the Ontological Argument being successful, but were it, we wouldn’t need this argument. So either the KCA is useless. Or the KCA is ineffective.
There is no way out. But they’ll keep us chasing that tail with wordwalls all the same.
Just like every other crank defending any other crankery.
My problem with the entire personal cause reasoning is not just that it’s not in evidence, I think it’s visibly false, even without discussing our immense evidence for the ultimately physical nature of consciousness.
We can visibly see the personal things don’t seem to occupy everything in the universe and they also quite clearly don’t seem to go back indefinitely. And impersonal things seem to precede personal things: not just evolutionarily, but also at the individual level, with impersonal sperm and egg eventually producing persons.
And, of course, as you note, the idea that a personal “cause” is somehow qualitatively different from a physical “cause” is particularly silly. I can want to move a rock all I want, but if I’m in a coma, no rocks will be moved. Our actual causes for our external interactions are physical. I’m not using my personhood to move things, I’m using a physically instantiated body.
It’s such blatant bullshit all the way down, and I find it so telling that the lay presentations of the KCA have the front-loaded presentation of “Here’s detailed [false] reasoning that the universe must be past-finite, here’s a [false] argument for why that means it has to have a cause [rather than saying that time began with the totality of the universe and so asking for a mechanistic cause is incoherent and asking for a metaphysical root is begging the question], here’s BGV, etc.”, and then when it gets to why it must be a God, it’s so much quick handwaving. “Yeah yeah yeah and the cause is also personal and loving and magical and blah blah blah”. Any valid analysis would have to spend a lot of time here, and aside from when they’re engaging in sophistry in books, KCA advocates don’t even bother.
As far as the “universe”: I will call a “multiverse” still a “universe”, because I would argue that “universe” is a good word for “all the totality of all things that exist everywhere”.
Indeed. This is the Converse Argument from Consciousness. I referenced this (linking to my articles on the implausibility and anti-empiricism of the theist’s stance here). It’s the handwave in Premise 4. But this is, as I note, just bad philosophy. It’s not what is outright crank.
I briefed right past that, but for those who want to know, that’s an example of the dishonest handwaving that attempts to establish Premise 2 by dishonestly equivocating the word “universe” between “ours” and “all,” and disregarding what the authors of BGV have all said (which I quote or cite in my linked debates on this), which is that it does not prove Premise 2 even when Premise 2 is correctly expanded to mean “the multiverse” (as BGV entails a massive, at least serial, multiverse to account for the runout of entropy, so embracing the BGV refutes the fine tuning argument, a point they don’t want their audience to notice, which is again a dishonest game, and not serious philosophy).
As you noted, Carroll already covered this point brilliantly.
Unfortunately that’s not what people understand by the word (uni means one; multi means many; so they can’t refer to the same thing simpliciter), which makes it a great way to trick people by equivocation. So we should not allow them to do that. Take away the trick.
At one time there was a controversy in physics over whether there were hidden variables that explained what caused a quantum event, such as a radioactive atom decaying at a particular moment. I think the eventual outcome was that the side won which believes that such events are purely random and there are no hidden variables, that the events just happen, without cause.
I don’t know whether or not a more recent idea has displaced this one.
This mistakes what the word “cause” means in physics.
Cause does not “mean” determinism. Causes can have probabilistic (random) effects. That is logically compatible with any mathematical description of causation used in physics.
Thus, it is not the case that quantum events have no cause. The specific outcome (where the electron lands) might be random, but that it is random needs a cause, and the specific matrix distribution of probabilities of where it will land needs a cause, and the delimiting of this to specifically only electrons (and the very small set of fundamental particles that is the extended Standard Model), and not bulbitrons and megatrons and golf clubs and death stars and faerie dust, needs a cause.
A cause is just what makes something happen one way instead of some other.
So randomness can never entail the absence of causation. It’s the other way around: randomness itself requires a causal explanation.
As to what “causes” quantum phenomena (like probability distribution) and whether it does actually “ontologically randomize” anything is still an open debate. There are many “true randomness” interpretations, but still also many deterministic interpretations still advocated or granted as plausible.
For example, Superstring Theory explains it all deterministically (no fundamental randomness; effects are all emergent from unviewable interactions in Calabi-Yau spaces). Many Worlds theory explains it all deterministically (all possible outcomes are realized so randomness is only apparent due to viewer selection bias). Holographic cosmology explains it all deterministically (quantum events are realized by a time-symmetric block-theory whereby photons and antiparticles are functionally traveling backwards in time thus information from the future causes the specific patterns of quantum behavior we observe in the present).
But even with the “pure randomness” theories, they need causes too. So they don’t bypass or refute Premise 1. So that is not a viable objection to KCA.
These “philosophical arguments” are all garbage. And yes, it’s too soon 🙂
The KLC is simply circular reasoning. Their first premise is actually the exact conclusion they want to reach, that there is an outside cause that started everything that exists.
Here is my take on the KLC:
First, I created a stronger version of the argument. Because, as Dr. Richard Carrier noted, if we include physical laws, we get a logical contradiction. And did any number start to exist?
First, definition: God is a being that created all matter (and energy, which, for this argument, is treated as equivalent, see Einstein).
The definition implies that god is not made of matter. This aligns well with theistic assumptions. The modified argument:
(P1) Every material object that began to exist has a cause.
(P2) The universe is a material object that began to exist.
(C) The universe has a cause for its existence.
The crucial part is that of “began to exist”. Take any example of things beginning to exist: Throw a stone in the water, waves begin to exist, caused by the stone. Paint a picture, at some point in time, the painting starts to exist. And so on. Every material object we know of started to exist at some point in time. This is independent of the idea that time started to exist or not, and if that had a cause or not.
But any material object that started to exist is just … the re-arrangement of previously existing material objects. Material objects change their state all the time. If you paint a picture on a canvas, the canvas must exist before you start to paint. Otherwise, you would paint on nothing. The colors you use, you might have mixed them together shortly before you start, but the material must have existed a long time before you even have been born. The stone you throw in the water, and the water, must have existed before you throw the stone, otherwise, you won’t get waves as a result. And so on, you won’t find a counterexample.
In the theistic worldview, the universe started to exist out of nowhere. How often did humans experienced that something started to exist out of nowhere, out of nothing? Exactly zero times, as far as we know, that never happened. The matter for the colors must have existed for a very long time, no matter how you create your color. This is even true if you use digital paintings, all the matter used to display your painting existed for billion of years.
The universe, if it started to exist, is unlike all examples you can find for something that started to exist. As far as our experience goes, nothing started to exist out of nothing.
“Began to exist” is just a play on words. It sounds like we are talking about the same, but we do not:
(P1) Every material objects that starts to exist is caused by the re-arrangement of pre-existing matter.
(P2) If the universe started to exist like all we experience, the matter of the universe must have existed before it was arranged into something new.
But claiming that it came “out of nothing” is totally different. All you can argue for with the KLC is that the universe consists of matter that existed prior to the universe forming. It is a non-sequitur to conclude that a being has created all the matter, the argument tells you the exact opposite. Just because “began to exist” is used with two entirely different meanings.
The argument has the same structure as:
Strawberries taste like strawberries. This red thing over here looks like a strawberry, so it must taste the same.
Which is nonsense, of course, just like the KLC.
Theists tend to not define their terms, like god. My definition for god might be the only one monotheists can agree upon.
It gets worse, because the assumption is based on “magical thinking”. This goes as follows:
Some event happens → Poof! Magic! → something else happens because of this.
But we pretty well know how causation works. If A is the cause of B, there are the following pre-assumptions that must be made. If a single one of this is violated, there is no causation.
(1) A is a material object that must exist before the causation happens.
(2) B is a material object that must exist before the causation happens.
(3) A and B must be local in spacetime, which means, they must be near each other.
(4) Time is needed for any causation to happen.
(5) A must transfer energy to B, and because of the law of the conservation of energy, B must transfer the same amount of energy back to A.
What you think is, “Poof! Magic!” is the transfer of energy.
A changes the state of B, and B changes the state of A. There is no pure effect, only interactions. Existence is not a state, it is the pre-condition that an object can have a state of being.
Now, if god exists and is an immaterial being, condition 1. is violated. If the universe or that from which it comes does not exist, condition 2 is violated. Condition 3 is violated, because an immaterial being has no position in spacetime. If god creates by transferring energy, and energy and matter are equivalent, where does that energy comes from? It presupposes the existence of matter/energy, and that will either lead to an infinite regress of material objects with no god, or an infinite regress with god, which means, you just have doubled the infinite regresses. Because energy cannot be transferred back to an immaterial being, condition 5 is violated as well. Condition 5 might not be violated, but that would mean that material objects can change the state of an immaterial being, somehow, through some magic.
If ONE condition is not met, we cannot speak of causation. Now there are 4–5 conditions not met, so clearly, god cannot be the cause of the universe, because existence cannot be caused. There is no such thing as “cause of existence”, that there is one is based on not knowing how causation works and what it is. Plus, if god is immaterial, there is no time, and without time, god has no time to create time. All immaterial things we know — ideas, concepts, numbers etc. — are spaceless and timeless and, therefore, cannot cause anything to happen, because they are static. Time is defined by material objects in space, to have time, or space (spacetime), you have to presuppose the existence of matter.
Of course, the error is that you can make some wild assumptions, and if no one can prove that your claim is false, it is true. No, that isn’t the case because the assumption is meaningless, nonsense, and of course you can neither prove nor disprove nonsense. Not that it is necessary to disprove nonsense. I have shown you that the claim that “the existence of the universe must have a cause” is pure nonsense, and that’s all that is necessary to debunk the claim.
Theists do not know what they are talking about if they use terms like “nothing”, “random”, “cause”, “matter”, “energy” and so on.
Problems are not solved by inventing a magic cause in a non-existing realm. The issue of the existence of the universe, which is based on the arbitrary assumption that nonexistence of matter is the state of nature, might not even be a difficulty at all. If nonexistence is the natural state, why does god exist? And how does it come that he can act by creating the world? There must be some natural laws presupposed that allow god to act. If there are no logical rules that allow that god somehow (magically) can act, then there are no rules that whatever god wills to happen will happen. God cannot make these rules, because then you have an infinite regression: How is it possible that god can make the rule that whatever he wills will happen? And so on. So anyway you must presuppose that there are natural laws, independent of god, that allow god to act. Which means, that for natural laws of any kind, god is superfluous.
I think that this will lay the KLC to rest.
Indeed I discussed your take in another earlier article on this.
Although that’s true (and worth following up as you do), we should also note the other side of the problem thus created: “the universe” is here now only a subset of everything that exists. Which collapses the KCA as an argument for God.
For example, spacetime empty of mass/energy is not being included, and therefore becomes a viable first cause. Which nixes the hidden “P3” that only God remains as possible cause (e.g. “the first cause is either personal or material”). Likewise in actual cosmological science: that the first cause is simply a physical principle (some law of physics or uncollapsed wave-function or “pure potential” or an inevitable zero-point energy of any false vacuum). Neither are “material objects.” Yet also neither is a “person.” And both are being exempted from P1.
Even if we say the first cause is a dimensionless point of mindless spacetime potential—so, a spacetime empty even of spacetime as well as mass/energy, since the amount is zero even if there is necessarily a geometric “point” where this zero amount of spacetime exists, per my Argument from Non-Locality—the KCA premises and conclusion are all met and still no God results. Everything begins with a dimensionless point of mindless spacetime potential.
The “material object” insert only avoids the problem that if “begins to exist” simply means had a first time of existing before which it did not exist, then God logically necessarily began to exist, and thus falls victim to the KCA rather than gets proved by it. But that just replaces God with anything that began to exist when nothing before it existed. Which could be anything. So the KCA gets rid of the need of God altogether.
And to help you out here against the inevitable commenter who will say “but, quantum mechanics”: in QM even spontaneous particles are themselves a change of state from a prior uncollapsed quantum state. The quantum field itself causes (and thus precedes) all virtual particles, and hence even virtuals that become actuals (as in Hawking radiation), and this prior field-state does have a nonzero energy. So presumably quantum fields get included in P1.
To explain “everything” we have to explain where quantum fields and their properties come from (like, their tendency to generate particles, and only certain ones and not others, and only in certain ways and not others, etc.). So that still is subject to your formulation.
But what then of potential fields? They have no “actual” energy yet. Is a potential a “material object”? Does it require a cause? Not by this reasoning, since a mere potential does not need to be a reshaping of a prior potential. It can simply be the “buck stops here” first thing, whereas material objects (actualized things) need something to bring them about. This is really why the question comes down to “Why does the first thing have to have thoughts and feelings?”
It’s the “thoughts and feelings” part that is being illicitly smuggled in. There are plenty of “first causes” conceivable that aren’t intelligences. “God” is just a potential that theists assign thoughts and feelings to. But any potential would serve the same function. Thoughts and feelings are superfluous. This is why real cosmological science has never had any need of that idea.
Or rather, that there was a first cause that was not itself “an arrangement of matter.”
It does not get us to “it had thoughts and feelings.”
At most it gets us to “it was a potential not an already-actualized state of matter/energy.”
And it only gets there if the second premise is true (which we have no reason to believe, since it could as well have been ongoing forever: we actually do not know there was a “first ever” mass/energy arrangement) and the first premise is true (which we have no reason to believe, because the “all we’ve ever seen” argument is a category fallacy: we’ve never seen a universe start, so only seeing how a universe continues cannot tell us about how a universe starts—a self-sustaining system will behave differently than what originates that self-sustaining system, so we cannot infer things about the latter from the former, particularly when “the rule of causality itself” is the thing we are purporting to explain the origin of, which origin logically cannot be a prior “rule of causality itself”).
So the KCA is hosed at every premise and its conclusion. It can never get to “God.”
Or another way of putting it is:
If God’s own existence can be self-causing or uncaused, then so can any other first cause’s existence be self-causing or uncaused.
There is nothing about a thing (an entity or principle or potential) being self-causing or uncaused that requires it have thoughts and feelings. There is no way to get from “there must have been one uncaused thing that caused everything else” to “that uncaused thing has a mind” (much less also a litany of magical superpowers). That there must be an uncaused first cause if there was a first thing is an uninformative tautology. It just restates the premise that something was first. It does not tell you anything else about that first something. That we can’t even establish that there was a first thing is just an additional problem. Because even if we could know there was one, we cannot from that fact alone know that it had thoughts, feelings, or superpowers. So the argument goes nowhere.
This isn’t strictly true. They clearly exist at all times, not at no times. And thus they could be causing everything all the time (this is the inevitable consequence of hard Platonism that hard Platonists scramble to implausibly deny all the time: if Platonic ideas don’t cause anything, then there is no reason to believe they exist, as they then don’t do anything and aren’t needed to explain anything; whereas if we have a reason to believe they exist, they must be doing something that they are needed to explain, which is simply the same thing as saying they cause something).
I don’t think we need any of that. I’m an Aristotelian, not a Platonist: all concepts are potentials, and potentials exist everywhere at all times because the possibility of their actualization is inherent in every physical place and time. But that’s the same thing in effect: concepts are not spaceless and timeless. They are the opposite: they exist at every place and time, as a potential outcome of that place and time.
Or, they do, but keep changing what those things mean as it suits them, in order to avoid the consequences of being consistent.
Also true.
Also true.
And if God can “just exist for no reason,” so can anything less ambitious but just as sufficient to explain everything else. Thoughts and feelings (much less superpowers) are simply superfluous ad hoc epicycles we can always do without.
This is why the KCA, like the fine-tuning argument, rests on a hidden fallacy: that we are allowed to just “presume” God (exactly as defined) “logically necessarily exists” (so as to escape needing a reason, hence a cause, for his existence). But no one has ever succeeded in proving that. And if we get to just assume it instead, then we get to assume it of anything else that isn’t God. The KCA then falls to a Stalking Horse fallacy. There really just is no way to salvage it.
Indeed. And if those laws can exist uncaused and unexplained, so can any other laws. So again, no “God” is needed as the first cause. We can dump all the excess, unwarranted baggage (thoughts, feelings, superpowers) and just stick with the laws by themselves. They can do all the work ever needed.
Amen.
I’ve always wondered about the justification for the “that” in the first premise.
Based on observation, I might reasonably conclude that all crows have wings and that all crows are black. Nevertheless, I would not be justified is saying “all crows that are black have wings” rather than “all crows are black and have wings,” because the former—true though it might be—implies that I have some reason to think that a non-black crow might not have wings. In fact, I know nothing of non-black crows or wingless crows, and I have no basis to posit any particular connection between wingedness and blackness.
Even if it were reasonable for me to conclude that everything has a cause outside itself and that everything has a beginning, I don’t see how I get from there to “everything that has a beginning has a cause outside itself.” The “that” implies some knowledge of the connection between causedness and beginningness, which would require some knowledge of uncaused things and things without beginnings.
The “that” strikes me as apologetic sleight-of-hand.
You are correct. The theist of course is by that device trying to exempt God from his own assertion, by saying God has no beginning, so he doesn’t need a cause. Which is, as you note, no a secure supposition (if the universe was past eternal, wouldn’t it still need a cause—an explanation of why it exists—and so likewise God?).
But this maneuver also raises the problem that they have defined “begin” in such a way that their God does begin to exist (he does not exist before t=1 and only exists where there is t, so he is a temporal object that begins at the same time as everything else). They want to handwave this away with vague assertions of God’s “timelessness” that make no coherent sense (he still can’t exist before time, and so he exists at every time t, and if we walk back to the first t and look beyond, God does not exist before that, just like nothing else does: see The Argument from Non-Locality). So in what sense can God not “begin” to exist in exactly the same way the rest of everything does?
They will then, when cornered with this, dodge to “Oh, I mean ontological first cause, not temporal first cause” but that then exposes the game: if all they mean is that there has to be a fundamental substrate of existence (something that merely does not have any further explanation but explains everything else, like Superstring theory says of spacetime), then there is no longer any persuasive reason why it has to be a god (maybe it is, indeed, just spacetime itself, from which all laws and properties geometrically arise). “But where did spacetime come from?” then gets you to “But where did God come from?” and the argument eats itself.
The lesson is that the KCA is just a prima facie bit of bullshit that allows endless retreats into more bullshit when any part of it is challenged, such that as long as the theist can keep you on the ropes of endlessly circular labyrinths of bullshit, they can “wear you down” into just agreeing with the conclusion. Or so they think, because that’s what happened to them. They were browbeaten into just agreeing with it because, as believers, they are already pliably cognitive dissonant. Doubters are never persuaded because they see right through the schtick because they know to expect all theism is schtick.
Note: Philosophical Muser ghost-replied to this article with a nonsensical circular apologetic claiming the Kalam should say “Creation” in the second premise, which would beg the question. If you are just assuming it was Created in the premises, the conclusion cannot prove it was. You’re just circularly referencing the same assertion unproved.
They commit this fallacy again when they assert “causality is not only a physical law, it is a metaphysical proposition that’s fundamental to reality itself.” Um. Is it? That’s precisely the question being begged. If you just assume causality is “a metaphysical proposition that’s fundamental to reality itself” you are presuming a conclusion to be proved. Since causality is not logically necessary, it must be contingent. There is no third option.
But the real problem here is that it spreads the same disease I caught Premise 4 was infected with to Premise 1, which kills the entire host:
If causality exists without God (because it’s “fundamental to reality itself”) then all sorts of other things can exist without God. We then don’t need God to explain the universe. It can then be produced by any other thing that’s coincidentally just “fundamental to reality itself,” like quantum physics or the like, This is, basically, all actual cosmological science in a nutshell: proposing hypothetical fundamental physics as first cause.
The theist will cry foul and say “you can’t just declare something fundamental to reality itself!” And then we’ll hold up a mirror to them and remind them: “Then neither can you.” And this “causality is fundamental to reality” presupposition goes in the waste basket.
You cannot prove the law of causality pre-exists the universe. So its existence still has to be explained. If your hypothesis to explain it is “it just is necessarily true and therefore cannot be contingent and therefore requires no cause” then you’ve just entered the Stalking Horse fallacy: if you get to play that game, then so do we, and it’s all a wash.
That’s why the Cosmological Argument cannot survive on that tactic. Your only chance is to go all in and admit the law of causality is contingent, not necessary, and thus also needs to be explained. But then everything follows as I describe it.
The only way to escape this fate is to prove (formally prove, not handwave or assert) that the law of causality is logically necessary. Which no one has ever done. And you can’t rest an argument on a premise that doesn’t yet exist.
Like it!
This semester, in order to get a suitable timetable, I enrolled in Andrew Loke’s course. The first time I heard the KCA, I already thought it was special pleading. I see him as an enthusiast of the KCA, one who even ignores the logic of other viewpoints.
My final essay argued from Spinoza’s perspective. In response, he raised a series of questions to defend the KCA:
“Why assume that the divine must be non‑anthropomorphic?”
“Why do you think the Kalam argument commits the fallacy of special pleading?”
“Physics (such as the Big Bang expansion) shows that the universe is changing, how can you say the universe is invariant?”
“Spinoza’s definition of ‘causa sui’ is actually just ‘uncaused’, not truly ‘self‑caused’.”
…and so on.
I responded three times, but each time he simply said that I had failed to refute the KCA. But I never needed to refute the KCA. I only needed to show that my own position is logically coherent. The KCA only holds under the premises he himself has set, it is a game he plays entirely on his own terms, defended by nothing more than verbal and definitional maneuvers. The two positions are no longer even on the same level of discussion. Therefore, I stopped responding.
To waste my revision time for medical exams, just to respond to a “professor” who wants to win a debate against a student…
I think I am the only one that he think his KCA can win.
To waste time that is not worth it.
That’s all aptly said.
IMO, I don’t think Loke is sane. I think he is delusional to the point of being incapable of rational comprehension or discourse. And I base this not just one some of the very weird things in his book, but also on my own personal live salon debate with him where it was very clear he cannot understand arguments against him and will never change a belief no matter what evidence is presented him. He would not even acknowledge points made five minutes prior but would forget and have to be reminded that he is repeating himself and what he is saying was already refuted five minutes ago and not recovered in the interim.
I don’t think it is possible to have a rational conversation with him and I do not believe his philosophical judgment is at all trustworthy.