William Lane Craig’s Refutation of the Worst Objections against the Kalam Cosmological Argument

 

 

In this blog post, we delve into the Kalam Cosmological Argument, an argument for the existence of God championed by Dr. William Lane Craig. This blog post will both present what Dr. Craig considers to be the worst objections to the argument and refute them. While he refutes 10 arguments, I will only present 3 since I believe the other 7 are too erroneous to even entertain. The Kalam Cosmological Argument is as follows:

P1. Everything that begins to exist has a cause

P2. The universe began to exist

C. Therefore, the universe has a cause.

 

The first objection I would like to present is:

1. The argument commits the fallacy of equivocation. In the first premise “cause” refers to a “material cause”, while in the conclusion it does not.

An example of the fallacy of equivocation is as follows:

1. Greek is a language

2. Socrates is Greek

3. Therefore, Socrates is a language.

Craig’s Response: Michelangelo was the efficient cause of the statue of David while the material cause of David was the block of marble. The claim of the argument is that whatever beings to exist has an efficient cause and therefore the universe having begun to exist must have an efficient cause.

 

The second objection I would like to present is:

2. The first premise is based on the fallacy of composition. It fallaciously infers that because everything in the universe has a cause, therefore the whole universe has a cause.

This argument has been dealt with in my other blog post titled, “The Contingency Argument: A Case for God – A Summarization of Mohammed Hijab’s Londoniyyah Lecture”

An example of the fallacy of equivocation is as follows:

1. Every part of an elephant is light

2. Therefore, the whole elephant is light

Craig’s Response: “Now I have never argued that because every part of the universe has a cause therefore the whole universe has a cause… Rather the reasons I’ve offered for thinking that everything that begins to exist has a cause are these…”:

1. Something cannot come from nothing. It is absurd to think when a magician pulls a rabbit out of their hat that it actually comes from thin air. But at least in that case there is still a magician. To say that the universe came from nothing is analogous to saying that the rabbit came from nothing with no magician either.

2. If something can come into being from nothing, then it becomes inexplicable why just anything or everything does not come into being from nothing. Why do not bicycle or ice creams pop into being from nothing, why only universes? There cannot be anything discriminatory about nothing since nothing has no properties.

3. Common experience and scientific evidence confirm the truth of premise 1. This has been known since the times of Plato.

 

The third objection I would like to present is:

3.  Nothing ever begins to exist! For the material of which something consists precedes it. So, it is not true that the universe began to exist.

Craig’s Response: “I think this is my favorite bad objection since the assertion that nothing ever begins to exist is so patently ridiculous. Did I exist before I was conceived? If so, where was I? What was I doing during the Jurassic period?... This objection obviously confuses a thing with the matter of which it’s made. Just because the stuff of which something was made has always existed doesn’t imply that the thing itself has always existed.” The objection presupposed that everything that begins to exist has a material cause but that claim is irrelevant to the premises of the argument. “Now it is true that in our experience, material things do not begin to exist without material causes. So, we do have the same sort of inductive evidence on behalf of material causation as we have for efficient causation. But if we have good arguments and evidence that the material realm had an absolute beginning preceded by nothing, this can override the inductive evidence.” When the premises say “begins to exist” they need to understand that it means “comes into being”. This is to say x begins to exist if and only if x exists at some time t and there is no time t* prior to t at which x exists and no state of affairs in the actual world in which x exists timelessly.

 

If the first two premises are shown to be true and the conclusion accepted it proves that there exists an uncaused, beginningless, changeless, immaterial, timeless, and unimaginably powerful creator.