Who kares about kalam?
OP - March 22, 2015, 06:17 PM
The Kalam Cosmological Argument has always seemed so utterly unimpressive to me. To assert that "everything that begins to exist must have a cause" requires extrapolating our everyday experience of observing ex materia causation inside of a physical universe with the property of time, to be a metaphysical truth that can be applied to to the whole of our universe at an instance in which time and space do not exist. Whatever happened "before" the Big Bang (if "before" even makes sense in this context), would be something that will probably violate all of our intuitions on the nature of causation and how things work in general. However, even if one could jump through all these hoops and establish that the universe requires a first cause... who cares?
I could think of a million ways the universe could have had an uncaused cause without invoking the traditional monotheistic God of the Abrahamic traditions. The universe could be a part of an eternal multiverse in which local universes arise spontaneously. Our universe could be a simulation run by aliens or an advanced form of a civilization like ours. Lord Brahma could be the ultimate source of everything, or a council of Greek-like gods could have pressed the inflate button on our universe. The later premises of the Kalam attempt to establish that this first cause is timeless, spaceless, and transcendent. Although to a theist, this may jump out to him or her as being a good description of God, one must realize that pretty much anything beyond our observable universe will probably have these properties. It's pretty much another way of saying the cause wasn't something that exists in our universe (which applies equally to the FSM as to Jehovah). Even if you conceded the entire Kalam, its pretty much just an admission that there is more to existence than just our space- time universe. Which leaves the theist with pretty much all his work ahead of him.
And yet, if you look at the comments under a WLC vid, you will see theists saying "atheists resort to all sorts of ridiculous logic to deny the first cause because they are unwilling to stand judgment before (enter preferred god here)."
"I moreover believe that any religion that has anything in it that shocks the mind of a child, cannot be a true system."
-Thomas Paine
Topic: Who kares about kalam?