THE KALAM COSMOLOGICAL ARGUMENT FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD

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THE KALAM COSMOLOGICAL ARGUMENT FOR THE EXISTENCE
OF GOD
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The Philosophic goldfish

• What caused the bowl?
• Could it be within the bowl?

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ISLAMIC PHILOSOPHY

• The Holy Quran called Muslims to reasoning and
  to seek learning.
• Islamic philosophy had an identity separate from
  Theology and was referred to as kalam - but it
  also depended on religion.
• The SHIA, particularly the ISMAILI branch of the
  Shia, had a particular dedication to philosophy
  and its application to expanding understanding of
  religion and revelation.

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Ibn Saud and Al Ghazali

• Abu Ali Ibn Saud like Aquinas/Aristotle, but
  not all things eg Souls
• Al-Ghazali (the Sunni philosopher) went so far as
  to declare Ibn Sauds philosophy un-Islamic.
  After Al-Ghazali, Islamic orthodoxy came to
  reject Ibn Sauds approach and to insist on the
  creation of the world from nothing by God.
• Al-Ghazalis approach gave rise to the Kalam
  argument.

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THE KALAM ARGUMENT

• William Lane Craig has re-visited the Kalam
  argument which originated amongst Islamic
  philosophers. His statement of it is as follows
• 1) Whatever begins to exist has a cause
• 2) The Universe began to exist
• 3) Therefore, the universe has a cause.
• Premise (1) seems probable. The problem is with
  premise (2). It relies on rejection of the
  possibility of an infinite regress (something
  that Leibniz sought to establish by the Principle
  of Sufficient Reason think of the conversation
  earlier in the lesson).

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KALAM CONTINGENCY ARGUMENTS

• NOTE the difference between the KALAM argument
  and the argument from CONTINGENCY
• The Contingency arguments (e.g. arguments such as
  St. Thomas Aquinas Five Ways) seek to
  establish the dependence of the universe on God
  now. They seeks to show there is something DE RE
  necessary on which the contingent Universe
  depends
• The Kalam argument, by contrast, seeks to
  establish the Universe has a beginning and that
  this beginning was caused.

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PREMISES OF THE KALAM ARGUMENT (1)

• Whatever begins to exist has a cause

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PREMISES OF THE KALAM ARGUMENT (2)

• The Universe began to exist

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Craigs a priori argument against an infinite
regress

• Craig rejects the possibility of an infinite
  regress.
• Library Red/Black books

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Actual versus potential infinites

• Aristotle distinguished between
• ACTUAL INFINITES which would be an infinite at
  a given moment in time, and
• POTENTIAL INFINITES which would be an infinite
  that was not actualised but which we were moving
  towards.
• Central to Craigs argument is whether the
  Universe is an ACTUAL infinite if it had no
  beginning. If it is, then his argument seems
  cogent. If it is not, then his argument fails as
  it only applies to actual infinites.

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The Big Bang

• The Big Bang, the initial singularity, exploded
  at a rate faster than the speed of light. Nuclear
  explosions took place giving rise to
  concentrations of hydrogen and helium and some of
  the lithium found in inter-stellar space.
• After, perhaps, 300 000 years, the initial
  fireball dropped to a temperature a little below
  the present temperature of the sun allowing
  electrons to form orbits round atoms and
  releasing photons or light.
• This initial flash can today be measured as
  background radiation at microwave frequencies
  equivalent to a temperature of about 2.7 kelvin
  (The kelvin scale begins at absolute zero and
  this temperature is equivalent to -
  273.16 degrees centigrade).
• The big bang theory appears to explain a great
  deal, but recent observations also cast doubt on
  it

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Problems with the Big Bang theory

• The Hubble Space telescope has been measuring
  distances to other galaxies and these
  observations suggest that the universe is much
  younger than the big bang theory implies. This is
  because the universe is expanding much faster
  than previously assumed this implies a cosmic
  age of as little as eight billion years - about
  half the current estimate. On the other side,
  other data indicates that certain stars are at
  least 14 billion years old.
• A group of astronomers who have become known as
  The Seven Samaurai have found evidence of what
  they call The Great Attractor located near the
  southern constellations of Hydra and Cantaurus
  which draw stars towards it.
• Big Bang theorists maintain that the initial
  explosion was extremely smooth - this is based
  on the uniformity of the background radiation
  left behind. However Margaret Geller, John Huchra
  and others at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for
  Astrophy have found a great wall of galaxies
  about 500 million lights years in length across
  the northern sky. These seems difficult to
  explain based on a uniform big-bang.

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IF THE BIG BANG THEORY IS TRUE

• There are still two rival hypotheses
• The Oscillating Universe model. This holds that
  the universe goes through an infinite series of
  cycles, expanding and then contracting into a
  singularity before expanding again.
• The Infinitely expanding Universe model. This
  holds that there was an initial explosion from
  the singularity and the Universe will keep
  expanding forever from this.
• The Kalam argument depends on the second of these
  being true as on the first there need be no
  beginning.

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SCIENCE CANNOT HELP!

• There is no certainty from science on the origins
  of the Universe. The Big Bang theory still seems
  plausible but there are many alternatives.
• One theory is continuous creation - that matter
  is continually coming into existence.
• Even if the Big Bang theory is right and the
  Universe is expanding infinitely, there seems no
  way of proving that the universe might not have
  had a cause.
• One trouble with the Kalam argument is that the
  more it seems to rely on science, the more
  vulnerable it is to science offering alternative
  explanations.

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THE KEY ISSUE

• The key issue for all the Comsological arguments
  is possibly whether the world as a brute fact
  (Russell) is more self-explanatory than God
  (Copleston) as the cause of the Universe.
• Hick and Swinburne take different views on this.
  It is essential, if the argument is to succeed,
  to show why God is the better ultimate
  explanation.
• Swinburne ('The Existence of God') maintains that
  God is a SIMPLER explanation than the brute fact
  of the universe because God provides a personal
  explanation - but this is debatable. Aquinas
  considered that God was metaphysically simple
  (this is the defining characteristic of the
  Thomist God on which other features such as God's
  timelessness, immutability, spacelessness, etc.
  depend) but this is VERY different from saying
  that God provides a simple explanation.
• Also, it is one thing to say God is personal, but
  it is far from clear what this means when applied
  to the wholly simple God - it certainly cannot be
  understood univocally, it does not have a similar
  meaning to a human being who is seen as personal.

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BACK TO THE GOLDFISH

• The philosophic Goldfish may not be able to
  conclusively prove that God exists by using the
  Cosmological argument BUT his questioning may
  nevertheless be entirely valid.
• Why SHOULD there be a bowl? What caused it? Where
  did it come from? These are entirely reasonable
  questions.
• Similarly the human questions about the origin of
  the Universe, about where it came from and what
  meaning and significance it has for our lives are
  as valid today as ever in the past. There may be
  no simple answers, but that does not mean the
  search for answers is not of central importance
  for all human beings.