Kalam Cosmological non-debate analysis

[_RockSlider]

Two brilliant minds, non argumentative analysis. William Lane Craig has always annoyed me in listening to his formal debates with various atheists. This podcast has changed my view of him. And Alex O'Connor, how would it be to be so young and brilliant? A new release on the Cosmicskeptic's youtube channel came up for me tonight:

I can barely/partially conceive and follow this, but do think I caught alex's conclusion
This is a very good interchange.

William Lane Craig and CosmicSkeptic
Discuss the Kalam Cosmological Argument

[_Stem]

Thanks. I like Alex and find him thoughtful for such a youngster, well, true if he were more aged as well.

I've heard and read Craig's reliance on the Kalam Cosmological argument. I'm not sure how to connect it to God. I do believe Sean Carroll's debate with him said it best--there is no reason to assume a beginning.

Also, it seems Craig's use of that argument dismantles LDS thought on God since Craig's case assumes a nothing, previous to the beginning of the Universe. Without that the argument falls apart.

[_moksha]

The Kalam cosmological argument in simple form:

Whatever begins to exist has a cause of its existence.
The universe began to exist.
Therefore, the universe has a cause of its existence.

An example in another form:

Diamonds began to exist
due to great pressure from the earth
therefore, the earth forgot to take Valium.

Hope that helps.

[_Chap]

The Kalam cosmological argument in simple form:

Whatever begins to exist has a cause of its existence.
The universe began to exist.
Therefore, the universe has a cause of its existence.

An example in another form:

Diamonds began to exist
due to great pressure from the earth
therefore, the earth forgot to take Valium.

Hope that helps.

I have to say that the Kalam argument strikes me as about as faulty as this one:

In a program written in the BASIC programming language, every quantity calculated by the program is the result of an operation involving the '=' sign.
Therefore the BASIC programming language is the result of an operation involving the "=" sign.

[_Physics Guy]

I'm not familiar with this argument under this name. I have a hard time connecting medieval Islam with cosmology since the cosmology I know only began in the 1920s. As far as I understand what is getting called "the Kalam cosmological argument", though, I guess I actually believe it, but I wouldn't call either of its premises self-evident.

The major premise is pretty hard to doubt, though, I think. I mean, you can say that something could begin, yet without being caused by anything else; but I'm not sure that that statement would actually mean anything. And even if there were some way to wiggle out of the major premise, I just have no interest in doing that. I'm a scientist, and science is all about believing that events have causes. So even if the major premise does count as an assumption, it's one I'm happy to make.

The minor premise—that the universe had a beginning—doesn't make sense to me as an assumption. It's not at all obvious to me a priori that the universe couldn't just have always been there. An eternal universe seems like a logical possibility. Popular astronomy books that I found in libraries as a kid used to mention the "Steady State" model of the universe as a potentially viable alternative to the Big Bang model, even though now the only reason I can see for anyone ever to have taken that old Steady State cosmology seriously is ideological, because it just discards basic laws of nature in order to avoid an uncomfortable conclusion. Physically plausible it wasn't, but logically possible, sure.

The universe having had a beginning, at which even time itself as we know it began, is also a logical possibility, however—and there's actually a lot of empirical evidence in its favor. One sometimes hears about "the Big Bang" having been discarded as a theory, but this is a less drastic change than it sounds. Cosmologists today often mean "the Big Bang" to refer only to the first and simplest version of the theory, which has since been refined in some significant ways. Those refinements don't change the basic scenario of a beginning to all space and time, a finite time ago. Indeed the main refinement—so-called "inflation"—is essentially just to make the Big Bang bigger.

It's not a completely clear picture, because data from fourteen-odd billion years ago is fuzzy and the theory which we would need to interpret that data is dubious. So there are still lots of speculative alternative theories that are nothing like the old Steady State model, since they look just like the Big Bang after the first tiny fractions of a second, but which replace the actual beginning of time itself with a brief episode of extreme conditions within an eternally ongoing story. These theories are viable, in the sense that they haven't all been ruled out yet by observations, and they are popular among cosmologists because they offer the opportunity of writing new papers, but so far none of them has won general acceptance. Every couple of years some new speculation gets puffed by popular science writers as a radical breakthrough; one should take these reports about as seriously as the stories about miracle foods.

So at this point it's not really certain but it does look rather as though the universe may have had a beginning. That's not an assumption; it's a somewhat ambiguous but straightforward interpretation of empirical observations. Since those medieval Muslims didn't have radio telescopes or General Relativity, I don't see how any of their theological speculations can really have anything to do with modern observational cosmology. So there might be a cosmological argument for some kind of First Cause but I really don't get the "Kalam" part.

[_Gadianton]

I think he assumes for the sake of the argument the universe had a beginning, but he's open to it being otherwise. Not saying it's self-evident. The big bang as a data point says the universe had a beginning, and so let's say it had a beginning. If you want to say the big bang is wrong, then you get out of it.

But if you believe the big bang, then bam, you're stuck believing it was caused. A standard atheist response that I think goes back to the 80s was to reject the term "causation" for whatever happens beyond t=0. But Discovery Channel gives plenty of other options. For instance, behind everything is a steady-state of D-branes lined up like slices of bread. If two bread slices clash together, then bam, a universe is created. Without knowing much about D-branes, I'm inclined to say that's at least as reasonable as Craig's conclusion, that t=0 happens when an ineffable God wills about creation through his un-caused libertarian free will. The 'personal' link between God and us, per the video, is apparently the common property of free-will.

While Carl Sagan ruled out God by the triumph of steady-state theory, Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas both had steady state models, and so God as a part of a steady state is certainly a possible assertion of God, and I'm pretty sure if the big-bang is falsified, then Craig isn't going to lose his faith. Likewise, atheism isn't tied to one or the other, at least in my opinion, although surely taking down Carl Sagan is a point for the Christian scorecard. It's too bad the old-school Mopologists can't claim an equivalent win on any point they've ever made.

As one who identifies both as atheist and Mormon, I really can't conceive of what atheism means beyond rejecting the Gods of scripture. The word "God" is just too nebulous. On the one hand, if God is subtle, if he's behind the x which is behind the D-branes, and there is really no connection to scripture and faith or an afterlife or any of the main things religious people hold over the rest of us, then if there is such a God then great, it would be nice to know in the same way it would be nice to know more about D-branes but no more. But on the other hand, if God is too much like us, such as in Mormonism, where you have some galactic dude out on a space adventure creating worlds and giving people rules to follow and then rewarding them with afterlives for their faith, then this also misses the mark of intrinsic meaning and purpose, if those things are fundamental to what it means to be God. On one extreme, purpose is too alien and tacit in material reality, on the other it's to obvious.

[_huckelberry]

First I have never been able to find a way to think I know whether the universe had a beginning or not. Second I have been unsure how Gods freewill escapes the problem. Third freewill is at best a murky proposition.(what caused God to decide to create?)

Perhaps relatedly I find the Kalam argument aesthetically unappealing. In that all arguments for Gods existence leave room to doubt I favor aesthetically appealing ones or practically useful ones.

[_huckelberry]

Idle thoughts. I am sure that there is a potential for the universe to exist otherwise there would not be one. I do not see how there could be a time when no such potential exited becuause if it did not exist there would not be a universe.But what caused the transition. God of the gaps could do this. Or perhaps the potentiality goes through a cycle and starts over again and again. For some reason (perhaps a quirk in neuron arrangements) infinite past time laid out in a line seems more contradictory than infinite time laid out in repeating cycles.

[_Physics Guy]

A standard atheist response that I think goes back to the 80s was to reject the term "causation" for whatever happens beyond t=0. But Discovery Channel gives plenty of other options. For instance, behind everything is a steady-state of D-branes lined up like slices of bread. If two bread slices clash together, then bam, a universe is created. Without knowing much about D-branes, I'm inclined to say that's at least as reasonable as Craig's conclusion, that t=0 happens when an ineffable God wills about creation through his un-caused libertarian free will. The 'personal' link between God and us, per the video, is apparently the common property of free-will.

I don't know that I see much point in quibbling over the term "causation". I think it should be obvious that we must be using the term rather dimly for events before time, but at the end of the day I think a scientist is still going to ask, "Well, anyway, though, what caused the universe?" "For certain values of 'caused'" is implicit but I don't think we want to give up the faith that there will still be some meaningful value of "caused" that could be correctly inserted.

I also wouldn't want to trust my life to Discovery Channel on such arcane topics, but as I said it's certainly true that there are lots of hypothetical alternatives to a hard Big Bang, alternatives in which there actually is some kind of "before" before the early phase of expansion, and that earlier time is still governed by some kind of natural law. Cyclic models with alternating Bangs and Crunches have been popular, I think just for huckelberry's aesthetic reasons, but they look unlikely today not because of anything we've learned about the early universe but because of things we've learned about the present. The expansion of the universe really seems to be accelerating, not slowing towards an eventual re-contraction. So nowadays the most likely alternative to a beginning is not a cycle but a Big Bounce scenario, in which the universe contracted for the first half of eternity and we are now in the second half.

My summary is that after about a century of modern cosmology, the "beginning of time" scenario in which all natural law began after a singularity is still an annoyingly perverse simple answer that fits the evidence well. That could all change in the coming century, but for now, if the question of whether nature had a beginning were an ordinary scientific question then I think the "Yes" hypothesis would be considered the current default, just for being the simplest answer that has continued to fit the evidence for several decades. Of course this question isn't an ordinary scientific question, and merely being a simple answer that fits the evidence is by no means a compelling case in a case like this. It's not as though you have to believe in a hard Big Bang to be an honorable scientist. Cosmology is not an experimental science.

Did Carl Sagan really believe in Hoyle's Steady State theory? If so, yikes. It was a really kludgy theory in which natural law was just fudged to ensure an ideologically acceptable conclusion. To point it out as a logical possibility was fine, as an encouragement to gather more data in order to rule it out, but to take it seriously as a theory was bizarre.

As one who identifies both as atheist and Mormon, I really can't conceive of what atheism means beyond rejecting the Gods of scripture. The word "God" is just too nebulous. On the one hand, if God is subtle, if he's behind the x which is behind the D-branes, and there is really no connection to scripture and faith or an afterlife or any of the main things religious people hold over the rest of us, then if there is such a God then great, it would be nice to know in the same way it would be nice to know more about D-branes but no more. But on the other hand, if God is too much like us, such as in Mormonism, where you have some galactic dude out on a space adventure creating worlds and giving people rules to follow and then rewarding them with afterlives for their faith, then this also misses the mark of intrinsic meaning and purpose, if those things are fundamental to what it means to be God. On one extreme, purpose is too alien and tacit in material reality, on the other it's to obvious.

I quite agree that a really transcendent God might be important but unimaginable like D-branes, while Mormonism's cosmic codger hardly counts as a God. Just because we can envision both these extremes, though, why should we rule out anything in between? Why could there not be a God who extended well off into the unimaginable but who also understood creatures like us in detail, having orchestrated creation in part so that we might emerge? If an unimaginable transcendent being made a universe, might we not be features of the project rather than bugs?

[_Stem]

I listened to part of the video now so I wanted to comment on something Craig said. But, I wanted to also add the comments in this thread to this point are very fascinating, and beyond my pay grade, so there's plenty I'm missing in all of this.

Craig suggested it's universally accepted by theists that God is not composed in parts. To bring this into the Mormon context, that is not true. For Mormons God was just like us, a materially composed spirit combined with a materially composed other body. I don't see how that really means anything eternally, but for Mormons it means everything somehow. If God is both spirit and body, then it is obviously best if we too end up both spirit and body...but the spirit is body too....ah well. If Mormons can fit reality into their religion, then before the Big Bang, if we go with that as the point of time start, then what was there besides other universes with other beings and other gods, plus us in some molecularly scattered state? If Mormonism then Craig argument which seems to be nothing more than an argument made to conclude an assumption, is simply nonsense anyway because all we have is an eternal regress of cause.

Anyway, back to his argument, he states two premises and then concludes a cause. Even if we grant the first two premises, there's no reason other than religious assumption, to think God. Of course God is such the nebulous concept, as mentioned above, that even if it were God, it hardly means Craig's Christian personal God.