The Kalam Cosmological Argument

           The word “cosmos” is a Greek word that refers to everything that exists—the universe itself and everything in it.

            The cosmological argument for the existence of God tries to show that, because anything exists, there must be a God who brought it into existence. In other words, without a God to create it, nothing could or would exist. God could exist without the universe, but the universe could not exist without God. So the goal of the cosmological argument is to show that the existence of the universe is not necessary, and therefore the universe cannot account for its own existence. The proof rests on the idea that the universe was caused by something or someone outside of the universe and that this something was not itself caused by something else.

            We will look at three variations of this argument: Kalam, Thomist, and Leibnizian.

            The Kalam cosmological argument tries to prove that the universe has not always existed; that it must have begun at some point in time. Even though this argument was actually thought up by Christian philosophers, it became popular in the Middle Ages when Muslim thinkers further developed it. The word kalam means “speaking” in Arabic, but it refers to a Muslim practice of trying to find theological principles by asking questions and answering them, similar to the philosophical method of Socrates.

            To understand the Kalam argument, we have to tackle a couple of terms. They both have to do with infinity. One is potential infinites, sometimes called abstract infinites. The other is actual infinites, or concrete infinites. The Kalam argument uses our knowledge about these infinite sets of numbers to prove that the universe had to have a beginning.

            Let’s talk about potential infinites first. Potential infinites are sets of numbers that are continually increasing by adding another number to the series. The textbook gives a stopwatch as an example. When you press the start button on a stopwatch, the number of seconds goes from 0 to 1 to 2 to 3 and so on. If you never press the stop button, the number of seconds will potentially go on forever.

            But a potential infinite is not actually infinite. It is a finite set of numbers to which another number can be added. It will never become infinite, no matter how many numbers you add to it. Let’s say that our stopwatch has gotten up to 100 seconds. It’s still potentially infinite, because numbers are going to keep being added to it. But it’s not actually infinite; the set of numbers only contains 100 numbers.

            Actual infinites are sets of numbers to which nothing can be added, because they already include all the numbers. There is nothing left to add. You might have trouble imagining this, and there’s a good reason: actual infinites do not exist in the real world. In fact, they can’t exist. If there was an infinite number of anything in our world, it would be impossible for us to exist.

            Let me give you an example of an actual infinite, so you can see why they don’t work. Imagine that you had a bookshelf that was infinitely long and had an infinite number of books on it. They books were alternating in color. First was a red book, then a green one, then a red one, then a green one and so on, down the whole length of the shelf. There are an infinite number of books on the shelf. Now, say that you removed all of the red books from the shelf. How many books were on the shelf before? An infinite number. How many books are on the shelf now? Also an infinite number. But one infinite number is smaller than the other infinite number, which is impossible.

            The textbook (from which this blog is largely taken) gives another example. A racecar driver is driving his car around and around a mile-long track. At the same time, his three-year-old son is riding his toy tricycle around in circles. The little boy is making about 12 circles for every 1 lap around the track that his father is making. But suppose they did this for an infinite amount of time. How many laps would the racecar driver make? An infinite number. How many laps would his son make? An infinite number. So that means they would make the same number of circles as each other, but we already know that this is not true.

            Confused yet? You should be, because actual infinites do not exist in the real world. This seems silly to even think about, but it’s actually important. If x=y, then x cannot also equal 12y. If someone tried to build something based on that kind of thinking, it would be a tragic mistake.

            Now that we understand that there are no actual infinites in the real world, let’s try and bring these concepts a little closer to the question we’re considering. First, let’s apply this idea to time. Time is not an actual infinite. We know this is true, because there is a “now.” If now exists, time cannot be infinite. Our textbook illustrates this with a comparison to a train station. “Now” is a destination, like a train station. Imagine that time is the train tracks and that the tracks are actually infinitely long. If we were at the train station waiting for the train to arrive, how long would we have to wait? We would have to wait forever. You can never reach the end of infinity; so there never would have been a starting-place (or time) for the train to have left from. Infinitely long train tracks can never be traveled; if they are infinitely long, there’s no place to start from and no destination to arrive at. This is what separates potential infinites from actual infinites. A potential infinite is a finite set of numbers that can never turn infinite; an actual infinite is an infinite set of numbers that can never reach the end of infinity and become finite. But there is a “now”; the train of time did arrive at our station. That means that time is not infinite. There cannot be an infinite number of moments before the present moment. Time is not an actual infinite; it had to have had a beginning.

            And time didn’t create itself; someone or something had to have begun it. This is the second thing we want to apply the idea of “no actual infinites” to—causality. There are no uncaused effects. You are the effect of the biological process caused by your parents. The words that you are hearing are caused by the vibration of my vocal cords. The earth revolving around the sun is caused by gravity and other forces. But all of these causes are also effects. Your parents are your cause, but they are also the effects of their parents, who were the effects of their parents, and so on. But we’ve just proven that there are no actual infinites in the universe, so we know that this chain of causes can’t go backwards forever. If we use the train station illustration again, the fact that we have present causes means that there can’t be an infinite number of causes before. Causes had to begin sometime in the past. There must, at some time, have been a cause that was not an effect. Philosophers have sometimes called this an “uncaused cause” or a “first cause.” Since the universe is an effect, it must have had a cause itself.

            Okay, the Kalam argument tells us that the universe had to have a beginning and that it had to be caused by an uncaused cause. That’s a sort of proof for the existence of God already. But let’s take it a step farther, by thinking about this uncaused cause. There are two options for this uncaused cause: either it was personal or impersonal. Let’s examine some of the characteristics of this cause and see if it was a person or an impersonal force. First, the cause would require the ability to create. If the uncaused cause caused the universe to exist, it must have had creative ability. Second, the uncaused cause would have had to decide to create; in other words, it would have had to have a will to begin the universe. Third, the uncaused cause would have to be a non-contingent being. That means that its existence didn’t depend on anything else; it depended only on itself for existence. And finally, it must be transcendent. That means that it existed outside of and apart from the universe, or it would not have been able to create the universe.

            So, let’s put that all together. The uncaused cause relies on nothing for its existence, has the power to create something from nothing, has the will to decide to create and exists outside of the universe. Does that seem like a personal or impersonal being? Personal, of course. So, we come to the conclusion that the universe did have a beginning, and that it was begun by a transcendent, personal being that had creative power.

            Some people would ask, “If absolute infinites don’t exist, how can God be infinitely good or loving?” When we say God is infinitely good, that’s really just a figure of speech. He doesn’t have an infinite bag of goodness somewhere. Saying that God is infinitely good just means that goodness is a fundamental part of his character and that there is no end to his goodness. This question isn’t really relevant to the discussion.

Changing money

We were about out of pesos in our personal cash today, so I made a trip to Urdaneta this morning. The first money-changer I went to cashed $300, but she wouldn’t accept the other two $100 bills. She said something about not having those serial numbers yet. I went to another money changer, and she took my money and told me to have a seat. After she finished with another customer, she called me back to the counter and told me she didn’t have any cash and that I should go back to the other money-changer. I tried a money-changer in the mall, and she also told me she had no cash.

Okay, I guess I should finally update on here. In fairness, I have posted on blogspot and myspace this week already.

Shortly before we left for the United States, we began the process of repairing some termite damage in our house. It was about a 3-week process and continued in to the time we were out of the country. When we got back, the work was done but unpainted. One of the students who helps us out around the house has spent the past couple of days trying to remedy that problem. Yesterday, though, he told me he didn’t think latex paint was working very well on the walls. So this morning I ran out to one of our local paint stores and shelled out 380 pesos for a gallon of white enamel. That was enough to get him through the morning.

I figured it was time to finally get serious about writing my syllabi, since classes begin on Monday. We still don’t have a schedule to tell us when our classes are actually meeting, but, hey, there’s plenty of time for that later, right? I quickly ascertained that I have way too much material to cover in my missions class, but I threw everything on the syllabus and I’ll weed it out later. We don’t really have anything to use for a textbook in that class and, honestly, I don’t know that there is a textbook that really covers the topics I’m trying to span. So instead they’re getting 600 pages of collateral reading, half of that from selected sources. I get frustrated by the amount of plagiarism in their papers, so I’m doing something a little different project-wise. Since most of them will be local church pastors rather than missionaries, I’m having them develop an annual plan for promoting missions in the local church, including a calendar, promotional materials, etc. It will be a little tougher to just copy that one from a book. And it will play to their creative side, which is their strong suit, in general. I’m also asking them to participate in a missions emphasis chapel. We have two of those to take charge of, the last week of November.

The apologetics class is a new one to me, although one that I’m pretty excited about. Again, there’s just a wealth of resources out there. I did pick up a few copies of an interestingly styled textbook while I was in the US, so we’ll give it a shot. I’ll list it in my “now reading” if it’s available. We do have several apologetics books in the library, so again they’re getting a bit of collateral reading assigned. The paper in that class is going to be a little more traditional, so maybe I need to get an anti-plagiarism speech ready; but they’re actually having to write a defense of a tenet of Christian orthodoxy and then having to defend that doctrine in class against the devil’s advocate, i.e. me, so they better not be too slack in their scholarship.