Modern cosmology, the branch of physics that studies the origins and evolution of the universe, has recently given new punch to the old cosmological argument. This latest variation is known as the Kalam Cosmological Argument, and it draws as much from science as it does from philosophy. Its most outspoken proponent, by far, is the Christian philosopher William Lane Craig. Craig’s outline of the Kalam argument goes as follows:

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

This is a very simple outline of the basic structure of the Kalam argument. Longer variations, like the detailed formulation found in A Defense of the Cosmological Argument for the Existence of God by Craig, simply add supporting premises to the first two. Craig’s full argument, in fact, includes a second conclusion that the cause of the universe’s existence is an uncaused, personal, and intelligent agent which he feels comfortable equating to God. Craig supports his two main premises in the following way:

For the first premise, that “Whatever begins to exist has a cause of its existence,” Craig claims that this is pretty much self-evident and indisputable. “Premise (1) strikes me as relatively non-controversial. It is based on the metaphysical intuition that something cannot come out of nothing.”

For the second premise, Craig uses two lines of argumentation for support. Firstly, that an actual infinite cannot logically exist in reality – that is, an infinite series of temporal events is logically impossible. Secondly, Craig uses Big Bang cosmology, which he said provides scientific evidence that the universe did, in fact, truly begin to exist. The first class of evidence comes from the Standard Big Bang model and general relativity, which says that if you were to rewind the history of the universe back far enough you’d reach a point where all of space and time collapses into an infinitely dense singularity, which for all purposes is equivalent to nothing. The second class of evidence comes from the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which states that entropy (disorder) tends to increase over time in a closed system. Because entropy is always increasing, at some point it must have been incredibly low, and Craig argues that it could not have started out in this low state if the universe extended infinitely into the past. If it did, the universe would have already reached equilibrium.

As you might suspect, critics of the Kalam argument attack either the first or second premise, or both. You can also find arguments against Craig’s supplementary argument that the Creator is a personal agent (see either article on here by Craig to review this argument). This article by Wes Morriston questions whether or not (1) can be supported and also questions Craig’s argument for a personal Creator. Francois Tremblay calls (1) an “unsupported premise” and also argues against the idea that the Creator, if properly deduced, would be personal.Dan Barker’s article offers three critiques, in which he attempts to show that the Kalam begs the question, is self-refuting, and compares “apples to oranges.” That last description is not very clear – here’s what Barker writes, “When you say that “everything that begins to exist” has a cause, you can’t pull yourself up by your bootstraps and say that the set of all these things (the universe), even if it did have a beginning of sorts, must follow the same rules or maintain the same relationships as the items that it contains.”

A Few Objections

With respect to the first premise, it’s not entirely clear what it means for something to “begin to exist.” Within the context of the universe, nothing truly begins to exist because we have observed that matter/energy is neither created nor destroyed. In other words, to say that object X began to exist means nothing more than a particular arrangement of atoms took on the shape of object X. It does not mean that the atoms themselves that compose object X began to exist at the same moment that X began to exist. Thus, there are two ways in which we can mean that X “begins to exist”:

1. At one point the matter composing X did not exist and at another moment it did.
2. Matter took on the shape of X at some point in time.

Number (1) is never observed. Nobody has ever sat around watching nothing and observed something appear that was not there in one form or another before. Because matter doesn’t begin to exist, we cannot ask whether or not it had a cause to the beginning of its existence. Number (2) almost always involves a cause of some kind, but these kind of causes always happen within the universe – or, more precisely, within the context of space and time.

We can ask the same question, in fact, about premise (2). What does it mean for the universe to begin to exist? Does it mean that matter/energy took on the shape that our universe currently displays from a pre-existing state or did existence itself (matter/energy) appear from nothing? Craig most certainly means the latter, and he points to the Standard Big Bang model, which shows the universe arising from an initial singularity of infinite density and temperature. Such a state of infinite density would be logically equivalent to nothing and thus, the universe seemingly popped out of nothing. This singularity, however, seems to be taken by most physicists to mean that our current theoretical framework (the Standard Big Bang model is based on Classical Physics, which is incompatible with quantum mechanics with respect to gravity) is inadequate and doesn’t provide a complete picture of the universe. A unified theory, if it can be found, might eliminate the infinity that the classical equations produce. In fact, leading contenders actually do just that. Superstring theory, for example, completely eliminates the singularity altogether by restraining everything to an absolute minimum size and allowing for the probability that the universe existed prior to the big bang in a very different but finite state.

As such, modern theoretical physics does not universally support (2) and and is heading in a direction that is opposite of (2). Remember that by (2) Craig doesn’t merely mean that the current state of existence began to exist but that existence itself (all matter and energy and time) began to exist. As just stated, empirically this isn’t supported, unless one accepts the singularity from the Standard model as real (which is unlikely, especially given the lack of a real unified theory). But what reason do we have for giving non-existence priority over existence? That is, what reason do we have for assuming that non-existence was the state of things first and that existence can only follow from it? Because it doesn’t really make sense to say that existence can come from non-existence, I would conclude that existence has priority and that non-existence is simply not possible. That is, existence is a given – it cannot depend on anything else.

The articles linked to on this page go into much more depth and explore many other possible problems with the Kalam argument, including what it could possibly mean to say that God caused time itself to begin along with the universe when causal events only make sense within time and not from without. But consider this: The argument asserts as a basic, fundamental premise that something cannot come from nothing, but then goes on to conclude that the Creator does exactly that – brings forth something out of nothing!