The Kalam
Argument
By: Jason Nienhaus
The Kalam Argument recently revised by William Lane Craig is a cosmological argument that connects the existence of the universe to the existence of God by saying that the only adequate explanation of the universe was that it was created by God. This argument is divided into two premises and their conclusion.
- P1.
Everything that begins to exist has a cause outside of itself.
P2. The universe has a beginning of its existence.
C. The universe had a cause outside of itself and that cause is God.
For this argument to have any validity, however, the premises need to be justified as true or else the conclusion would simply be the result of false premises. The first premise says that anything that exists has a reason for its existence. How does one prove a claim such as this that states every single thing in the universe has a cause? Craig justified this through empirical knowledge. Everything he saw in the world around him had some purpose in its existence, whether it was the pen he used to take notes or his eyes that allowed him to perceive the world around him.
To validate the second premise, Craig used the modern interpretation of the beginning of the universe, the Big Bang Theory. For hundreds of years, scientists and philosophers had assumed that the universe was eternal and had infinitely existed. Craig used a philosophical approach to justify his claim that the universe has a finite existence. The history of the universe is made up by adding all of the events that have happened since the beginning of the universe. But no matter what, another event can always be added, which means that the universe is a potential infinite, a term used to describe a set that continues on getting closer and closer to infinity but never getting there, not a completed infinity. This in turn says that the universe has had a finite existence, the first event in it being the Big Bang. (For more information explaining the differences between potential infinite and complete infinite visit this website)
William Craig speaking at a faith convention
Once
Craig had validated his premises, he came to the conclusion that the universe
has cause outside of itself. He went on to conclude that this cause was a personal God. In his essay on the Kalam Cosmological Argument, Craig said, "The only way to have an eternal cause but a
temporal effect would seem to be if the cause is a personal agent who freely
chooses to create an effect in time." This means that the reason the
universe could have a cause ultimately stems from a personal God who knowingly
created it. Some say that the Big Bang Theory disproves the notion of God
creating the universe, but when we look at Scriptural evidence we see that many
passages coincide with this argument. In Genesis, the first line we see is, In
the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. God was the first cause
of the universe, whether it truly is the Big Bang or some other theory yet to
be introduced.
Sources
Scorzo, Greg. A
Discussion of the Kalam Argument. 1999. Accessed: 12/6/07
All About Philosophy.org. Cosmological Argument-Kalam Argument. Accessed:12/6/07
Craig, William Lane