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- [00:04]
A
Welcome to Defenders, the teaching class of Dr. William Lane Craig. Today an excursus on Natural Theology, Part 8. For more resources from Dr. Craig, go to reasonablefaith.org Today we turn to a new argument for God's existence, the so called Kalam cosmological argument. As a boy I wondered at the existence of the universe. I wondered where it came from. Did it have a beginning or has it always existed? I can remember lying in bed at night trying to think of a beginningless universe. Every event would be preceded by another event, back and back and back, with no stopping point or more accurately, no starting point. My mind just reeled at the concept. It seemed to me inconceivable. There must have been a beginning at some point, I thought, in order for everything to get started well. Little did I realize that for centuries men had grappled with the idea of an infinite past and whether the universe had had a beginning. Ancient Greek philosophers like Aristotle believed that matter was necessary and uncreated and therefore eternal in the past. God may be responsible for introducing order into the cosmos, but he did not create the universe itself. This Greek view was in contrast to the even more ancient Jewish view on the subject. Hebrew writers held that the universe has not always existed, but had a beginning point at some time in the past at which it was created by God. As the first verse of the Hebrew Bible states, in the beginning, God created the the heavens and the earth. Genesis 1:1. Now, eventually these two traditions, Greek and Jewish, began to interact and there arose within Western philosophy an ongoing debate that lasted for well over 1,000 years about whether or not the universe had a beginning. This debate played itself out among Jews and Muslims and as well as Christians, both Catholic and Protestant. It finally sputtered to something of an inconclusive end in the thought of the great 18th century German philosopher Immanuel Kant. Kant held, ironically enough, that there are rationally compelling arguments for both sides, thereby exposing the bankruptcy of reason itself. Now, I first became aware of this debate only after graduating from college. One week before graduation, I was browsing the clearance tables at college bookstore and came across this book by one of my former professors, Stuart Hackett, entitled the Resurrection of Of Theism. And I had heard that this was an important book, and since it was on clearance, I decided to buy it and then after graduation, began to read it that summer. And I was blown away by its contents. You see, I had been taught in college that there are no good arguments for God's existence, that all of these arguments have been refuted by modern philosophers and that therefore there really aren't any good arguments per se for God. And although that seemed to me counterintuitive, nevertheless I had great respect for my learned professors and thought, well, if they said there aren't any good arguments for God's existence, they must surely be right. And then here I discovered in Hackett's book a defense of argument after argument for the existence of God, along with detailed refutations of every conceivable objection that might be raised against these arguments. And I was absolutely overwhelmed wanting to come to grips with Hackett's case. I went on to do master's degree work in philosophy, and in preparing for the graduate record exams, discovered that the centerpiece of Hackett's book, the so called Kalam cosmological argument, actually had this long history in Jewish, Muslim and Christian thought, reaching all the way back to the early centuries after Christ. And I wanted to settle my mind on this argument. So when I applied to do doctoral work at the University of Birmingham in England, I proposed writing my doctoral thesis or dissertation on the cosmological argument for God's existence. And I did write on that argument. I was able to explore the historical roots of this argument as well as deepen the analysis of the argument, and also discovered amazing connections with contemporary astronomy and astrophysics because of its roots in medieval Islamic theology. I dubbed this argument the Kalam Cosmological Argument to differentiate it from other versions of the cosmological argument, like Leibniz's argument from Contingency, which we've studied. Kalam is the Arabic word for medieval theology, and it was medieval Islamic theology that developed this argument to a great degree of sophistication. This argument, the Kalam cosmological Argument, largely forgotten since the time of Kant, is now back at center stage in philosophical discussion. The Cambridge Companion to atheism, published in 2007, reports and I quote, account of the articles in the philosophy journals shows that more articles have been published about the Kalam argument that have been published about any other contemporary formulation of an argument for God's existence. Theists and atheists alike cannot leave the Kalam argument alone. End quote. Well, what is the argument which has stirred such interest? Let's let one of its greatest medieval Muslim proponents speak for himself. Al ghazali was a 12th century theologian from Persia or modern day Iran, and he was concerned that Muslim philosophers of his day were being influenced by ancient Greek philosophy to deny God's creation of the universe. So after thoroughly studying the works and teachings of these philosophers, Ghazali wrote a withering critique of their views in the book called the Incoherence of the Philosophers, or in Arabic, Tahafud al Falasifa, Incoherence of the Philosophers. This is a fascinating book which is still worth reading today. And if you were here last week, you know where you can get a copy of this book, right? Where can you find it? Interlibrary Loan that's right. So if you're interested in reading Ghazali's book, just go and get it on Interlibrary Loan and it is a fascinating read. In this book, Hazali argues that the idea of a beginningless universe is absurd. He argues that the universe must have had a beginning, and since nothing can begin to exist without a cause, there must be a transcendence. Creator of the Universe. Ghazali formulates his argument very simply. Let me quote from him directly. He wrote, every being which begins has a cause for its beginning. Now, the world is a being which begins. Therefore it possesses a cause for its beginning. So Ghazali's rapid reasoning involves three very simple steps. Premise 1 Whatever begins to exist has a cause of its beginning. Premise 2 the universe began to exist. 3 Therefore, the universe has a cause of its beginning. Now, this is a logically valid argument, so the only question is whether the premises are more plausibly true than than false. So let's look at each of the two premises first. Premise 1 that whatever begins to exist has a cause of its beginning. Now, notice that Al Ghazali does not really need a premise which is so strong as Premise one that whatever begins to exist has a cause. His argument can be more modestly formulated as follows. Premise 1 Prime if the universe began to exist, then the universe has a cause of its beginning. This more modest premise doesn't state that everything that begins to exist has a cause of its beginning, but simply that if the universe began to exist, then the universe has a cause of its beginning. And this more modest version of Premise one will enable us to avoid all of these distractions about whether or not subatomic particles, which are the result of quantum decay processes, come into being without a cause. We can just leave that issue aside as irrelevant to Premise one Prime. And this alleged exception to Premise one Whatever begins to exist has a cause is not relevant to one prime. Why? Well, because the universe comprises all of contiguous space, time, reality, all of physical reality, and therefore for the entire universe to come into being without a cause would come into being from nothing, which is absurd. In quantum decay events, the particles do not come into being out of nothing. As Christopher Isham, who is Great Britain's premier quantum cosmologist, explains, and I quote, care is needed when using the word creation in a physical context. One familiar example is the creation of elementary particles in an accelerator. However, he says, what occurs in this situation is the conversion of one type of matter into another, with the total amount of energy being preserved in the process. So in these quantum decay events, the particles don't come into being out of nothing. And so the alleged exception to premise one isn't an exception to premise one, prime as I have formulated it, which would require the universe to come into being out of nothing. Now, let me give three reasons in support of this premise. One, Prime. First, something cannot come out of nothing. Something cannot come out of nothing. Think about it. To claim that something can come into being from nothing is worse than magic. When a magician pulls a rabbit out of the hat, at least you've got the magician right, not to mention the hat. But to say that the universe came into being without any sort of a cause would be simply to come into being from sheer non being. It would be nothing. And that's literally worse than magic. You would have to believe that the entire universe just appeared at some point in the past for no reason whatsoever. But nobody, I think, sincerely believes that things, say a horse or an Eskimo village, can just pop into being without a cause. Now, sometimes skeptics will respond to this point by saying that in physics, subatomic particles, or so called virtual particles, come into being from nothing. Or on certain theories of the origin of the universe, these are described in popular magazines as getting something from nothing. And so that the universe is supposed to be the exception to the proverb there ain't no free lunch. But I think this skeptical response represents a deliberate abuse of science. As I've already hinted, the theories in question have to do with particles or the universes originating as a fluctuation of a physical system, such as the vacuum or quantum fields. And the vacuum, for example, in modern physics is not what the layperson understands by the word vacuum, namely, nothing. Rather, in physics, the vacuum is a sea of roiling energy governed by physical laws and having a physical structure. And to tell laypeople that on such theories and something comes from nothing, I think represents a deliberate misrepresentation of those theories. Properly speaking, the word nothing is a term of universal negation. It means not anything. The word nothing is a term of universal negation, meaning nothing, anything. So, for example, if I say I had nothing for breakfast today, I mean, I Didn't have anything for breakfast today. If you read an account of World War II and the text says that nothing stopped the German advance from sweeping across Belgium, that means that the German advance was not stopped by anything. If a theologian tells you that God created the universe out of nothing, he means that God's creation of the universe was not out of anything. The word nothing, to repeat, is simply a term of universal negation, meaning not anything. And there's a whole series of words like this in the English language. Terms of universal negation. Nobody means not anybody. None means not one. Nowhere means not anywhere. Now, because the word nothing is grammatically a pronoun, you can use it as the subject of a sentence or as a direct object of a sentence. And by using these terms of universal negation as words supposedly referring to something, you can generate all sorts of funny situations. For example, if you say, I saw nobody in the hall, the wiseacre says, yeah, he's been hanging around there a lot lately. Or if you say, I had nothing for lunch today, he says, really? How did it taste? You see, it's misusing these terms of universal negation as though they were referring to something. And these kinds of word tricks are as old as literature itself. For example, do you remember in Homer's Odyssey, Odysseus introduces himself to the cyclops as no man or nobody. And one night Odysseus puts out the cyclops eye, and his fellow Cyclops hear him screaming, and they yell to him, what's the matter with you, making so much noise that we can't sleep? And the cyclops answers, nobody is killing me. Nobody is killing me. And they reply, well, if nobody is attacking you, then you must be sick, and there's nothing we can do about it. In Euripides version of this same story, he composes a sort of Abbott and Costello who's on first routine. Here's how it goes in. Why are you crying out, Cyclops? Nobody has undone me. Then there is no one hurting you after all. Nobody is blinding me. Then you're not blind? As blind as you. Well, how could nobody have made you blind? You're mocking me. Where is this nobody? Nowhere, Cyclops. The use of these terms of negation as substantive words referring to something is a joke. It's a joke. And then it's so astonishing to find contemporary popularizers of science, whose mother tongue is English, using these terms precisely as substantive terms of reference. For example, Lawrence Krauss, a fine physicist, has told us, with a straight face, for example, and I quote, there are a variety of forms of nothing, and they all have physical definitions. Or again, the laws of quantum mechanics tell us that nothing is unstable. 70% of the dominant stuff in the universe is is nothing. There's nothing there, but it has energy. Nothing weighs something, or nothing is almost everything. All of these claims take the word nothing to be a substantive term referring to something, for example the quantum vacuum or quantum physical fields. And these are physical realities and therefore clearly not nothing. They are something. And to call these realities nothing is at best misleading, guaranteed to confuse laypeople, and at worst, it is, as I say, a deliberate misrepresentation of the science involved. Second reason in support of premise 1. If something can come into being from nothing, then it becomes inexplicable. Why just anything and everything doesn't come into being from nothing? If something can come into being from nothing, then it's inexplicable. Why just anything and everything doesn't come into being from nothing? Think about it. Why don't bicycles and Beethoven and root beer come into being from nothing? Why is it only universes that that can come into being from nothing? What makes nothingness so discriminatory? Now, obviously I'm being facetious here, because nothingness isn't anything. It has no properties. It's just a term of universal negation. There isn't anything to be constrained. Nothing means not anything. So if things can just come into being out of nothing without a cause, then all kinds of things ought to be doing doing this all the time. Now, at this point the atheist is very likely to retort, all right, if everything has a cause, then what is God's cause? And I'm always amazed at the self congratulatory attitude with which students pose this question. They imagine that they've said something really important or profound when all they've done is just misunderstand the premise and premise. One doesn't say that everything has a cause. It says that everything that begins to exist has a cause. Or that if the universe began to exist, it has a cause. But something that is eternal wouldn't need a cause because it never came into being. So Al Ghazali would respond to this question by saying that God is eternal and uncaused. And notice this isn't special pleading for God, because this is exactly what the atheist has traditionally said about the universe. The universe is eternal and uncaused. But the problem is, I think we've got good evidence that the universe is not eternal in the past, but had a beginning evidence that we'll look at during our coming weeks. But that then backs the atheist into the corner of having to say that the universe sprang into being without a cause, which to my mind is absurd. Finally, the third reason is that common experience and scientific evidence confirm the truth of Premise 1. Premise 1 is always verified and never falsified. It is hard to understand how anyone committed to modern science could deny that premise one is more plausibly true than false in light of the evidence. Now, I've heard some Internet skeptics respond to this third point by saying it commits the fallacy of composition. The fallacy of composition. Now what's that? Well, the fallacy of composition involves inferring that because every part of a thing has a certain property, therefore the whole thing has that property. For example, somebody might say, because every part of an elephant is light in weight, therefore the whole elephant is light in weight, and that would obviously be fallacious. That commits the fallacy of composition. But this third point that I'm making, that common experience and scientific evidence support the truth of premise one doesn't reason by composition. It doesn't infer, because every part of the universe has a cause, therefore the whole universe has a cause. It doesn't even refer to parts of the universe. Rather, this third point is a case of what's called inductive reasoning, which underlies all of science. One infers from a random sample of items, some property which is shared by items of that sort. And in this case, the sort in question is things that begin to exist. When we look at things that begin to exist, scientific evidence and common experience is that they always exist, have causes. So the generalization, whatever begins to exist has a cause of its beginning, is a very powerful inductive inference. You infer this general truth based upon a random sample of typical cases. So this objection is, I think, just based on a confusion between inductive reasoning, which is sound reasoning, and reasoning by composition, which is fallacious reasoning. And this third argument is not an instance of reasoning by composition. So to my mind, I think this first premise has very good claim to being true, that if the universe began to exist, then the universe had a cause of. Of its beginning. Any discussion about that first premise or any of the arguments that I've given in support of it?
- [25:26]
B
Ben, under the Christian worldview, is it accurate to say God brought the universe into existence out of nothing? Or do we believe that as a Christian, we, there is no concept of nothingness for us because there is never a state in which God did nothing, Wasn't there? So, in other words, There was never a time where nothing was. It was true that nothing was there. Does that make sense? I mean, does it make sense? Can we say God brought the universe out of nothing? Or does nothing have no meaning because God was always there?
- [26:00]
A
The Christian view of creation is called creatio ex nihilo, which is Latin for creation out of nothing. But as I explained in my examples, when the theologian says that God has created the universe out of nothing, what he means is he did not create it out of anything. God created the universe, but he didn't create it out of anything. Here's a way to think about it. Aristotle distinguished between different kinds of causality, such as efficient causality and material causality. Michelangelo is the efficient cause of the statue. David, he sculpted it, he produced it. He is the efficient cause of that statue. The material cause of the statue is the block of marble that he used. That's the material cause. Michelangelo is the efficient cause in creation ex nihilo. God is the efficient cause of the universe and there is no material cause. So that's the way to think about it. It isn't as though there was something called nothing and God made the universe out of it that commits this fallacy of using the word nothing as a referential term. Rather, it means not anything. There was no material cause.
- [27:24]
C
Yes, I was hoping you would bring up the Aristotelian causes. I don't know. I'm not like an expert on this stuff. Do we have any examples of credio ex nihilo other than the universe? I mean, you give the example of Michelangelo, but that's efficient and material cause.
- [27:52]
A
I have a question of the week on our website, reasonablefaith.org where I discuss this from a Christian point of view. Creation out of nothing is unique to God alone. So that there is nothing else that has the power to create something without a material cause. One great medieval theologian, Scotus, said that the distance between being and non being is infinite. So it would take a being of infinite power to create from nothing. So that this is not a power that creatures have. Only God has the power to create ex nihilo. We have the ability to reshape material things so that a carpenter can create, say, a chair using the lumber, but he can't create ex nihilo. Now, if you're willing to run with me a little bit on this, though, one can furnish some possible examples, though they're very unusual. In this class, we've often talked about abstract objects like numbers and sets and properties and so forth. Well, now, in philosophy of aesthetics, there is a similar debate over the existence of things like musical compositions and literary productions. Tolstoy's War and Peace, many would say, can't be identified with any physical exemplar of that, because otherwise, if it were destroyed, then the novel War and Peace wouldn't exist. Or Beethoven's Fifth Symphony can't be identified with any particular series of ink marks on a piece of paper. Rather, these are abstract objects that have instances or exemplars in the world. These physical books and physical scores are exemplars of an abstract object, which is the Fifth Symphony or War and Peace. That's what some aestheticians believe, but they also believe that Beethoven created the Fifth Symphony, and they think that Leo Tolstoy created War and Peace, that these things are not eternally existing abstract objects. These are contingent and had a beginning and were created by their composers and authors. Now, if that's true, that would be an example of something being created without a material cause, because these things don't have any material. They're not made out of things, out of stuff. So if you can entertain that idea, this would be an example of creation where you would have an efficient cause, but no material cause. Here's one more example for you that's provocative, suggested to me by the physicist Jim Sinclair. In contemporary cosmology, space is expanding. It's not that the galaxies are moving away from each other in a pre existing empty space, like particles in a big empty box. Rather, space itself is expanding, and space is a physical thing that has physical properties. So where does the new space come from? As the universe expands, you're getting more and more and more space as time goes on. It doesn't come out of anything. It would be another example of something that's created ex nihilo. So that would be a possible illustration of something where you would have an efficient cause, but you wouldn't have a material cause. Now, I'm not suggesting by any means that these are knockdown examples, but I think they're thought experiments. They're illustrations that can help to provoke us to think about the idea of creation ex nihilo, and can make it more intelligible and more understandable.
- [31:51]
C
Thank you.
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A
Aha. All right. I think we've got time for one more question. In the back there, along the wall.
- [31:57]
C
It's interesting you associated contingency with the beginning of the universe. Immanuel Kant said that if something is assumed to be contingent, we have to. It's just an analytical truth to say that it has a cause. So couldn't we say, cut to the chase and just say that this premise is analytically true? That if it is.
- [32:17]
A
Okay, now let's be careful here. An analytic truth means it's true by definition. Like a bachelor is an unmarried man. And Kant did not think this causal premise is true by definition. On the contrary, he said it is a synthetic truth, not an analytic truth. He called it a synthetic a priori proposition. That is to say, it is a universal, necessary truth. But it's not true by definition. It. It's an informative truth. So the idea that whatever begins to exist has a cause. Or more modestly, if the universe began to exist, the universe has a cause that is not true by definition. That is an informative truth for which we would look for evidence in order to believe it. All right, I will be back next Sunday, and we will then move to the defense of the really key premise in this argument, which is that the universe began to exist. Let's close with a word of benediction, please. Therefore, my beloved brethren, be steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, knowing that in the Lord your labor is not in vain. The grace of the Lord Jesus be with you all. Amen. The copyright for the content of this recording is held by Dr. William Lane Craig. For more go to reasonablefaith.org.