A Cosmological Argument for the Existence of God
May 7th, 2010 § Leave a Comment
About Causes, Consequences and Conclusions
Many will raise their eyebrows when they hear about a ‘cosmological proof’ for the existence of God. A cosmowhat?! Yes, it is a rather technical sounding word indeed. But that’s how things go with jargon, isn’t it. Apologetics too makes use of its own specialist vocabulary to describe and use important concepts. An additional issue here is that ‘cosmological argument’ is not only a technical term, it is in fact a rather complex argument, to be honest. That is to say, if we want to discuss the version as developed by Christian philosopher, William Lane Craig. And that is exactly what I want to do here. I have good reasons to do so too. Craig’s cosmological argument is rather promising as far as the defense of the belief in the Biblical God goes.
How the Cosmological Argument was ’caused’
Let’s first do a bit of history. There’s nothing more fun than that in my opinion. Aristotle, the great Greek philosopher, had already come to the conclusion that there had to be a ‘First Mover’ that stands at the beginning of all ‘moving things.’ He observed that all things that exist have been caused by something else: every consequence or effect has its cause, just as much as each cause is an effect of another cause. He reasoned however that this cannot go back indefinitely. Therefore there has to be an absolute beginning that itself was not set in motion by something else: The so-called Unmoved First Mover. This Mover did not look like the God of the Bible by a long shot, but nonetheless a fundamental truth had been discovered.
For Thomas Aquinas, the great medieval theologian, Aristotle was a great example. He integrated much of Aristotle’s thinking in his theological system. You can see that very clearly in Aquinas’ so-called ‘Five Ways.’ These are five arguments for the existence of God in which you can find a similar ‘cosmological’ argument for an absolute first cause. Of course philosophy and science have not been sitting idle since the Middle Ages and though the argument is still valid, much more is needed now by way of argumentation to convince people that it works. Enter the Kalam Cosmological Argument.
The Big Bang and its explosive consequences
In the Middle Ages there was yet another variant of the cosmological argument, the Kalam Cosmological Argument, developed by Al-Ghazali, a moslem scholar who lived from 1058 to 1111. William Lane Craig has recently taken up the cause of this argument with very interesting results. The argument goes as follows:
1. Everything that begins to exist has a cause
2. The universe began to exist
3. Therefore the universe has a cause
Any observant reader will immediately notice that this argument does not make any reference to God. Of what use is it then? Well, quite a lot actually. When believers together with non-believers can agree on the conclusion of the above argument, a lot of fascinating consequences follow from it as we shall see later.
But we’re going too fast. Let’s first look at the first two propositions of the argument. Everything that begins to exist has a cause. This seems to be pretty generally accepted by most people. Though there are skeptical philosophers who would like to deny this, we can generally say that this proposition is doubted by only a few. We feel intuitively that it is true; we actually cannot think in any other way. Even those thinkers who would like to assert that everything popped into existence out of nothing tend to describe that ‘nothing’ as a ‘something’ that ‘does something.’
When we look at proposition two, The universe began to exist, things get a little more complicated (but fun too). Who knows, maybe the universe has existed for ever; maybe matter is eternal after all. Aquinas thought it was. Craig, the man behind our Kalam Argument, points out two roads that one can take to argue that the cosmos (the universe) has a beginning. And we really should take both. The first road is the one of cumulative scientific proofs for the Big Bang. Since Le Maître, Einstein and Hubble jointly discovered that the universe originally came from an infinitesimal small point (and this has nothing to do with the evolution theory by the way), proofs have abounded that matter, time and space literally have an absolute beginning. That is to say, there was a ‘time’ when matter, time and space simply did not exist. Initially many scientists were not very excited with this conclusion as it seemed to point to the existence of God. The second road is that of philosophy. Mathematical insights in performing calculations with the imaginary number infinity are key here. You run into all sorts of problems with infinity. For instance if you would subtract all odd numbers from an infinite range, you are still left with an infinite range of even numbers. In other words, the number, though halved, would still be as big as before the subtraction. Calculations become impossible. Besides that, if the universe were indeed infinitely old, the present could never be reached since there wold be an inifitie amount of time to traverse to the present. But we are in fact here, at the present. In other words, an eternal universe (in philosophical parlance: an universe with an infinite number of states of affairs in the past) does not seem to work well within the rules of logic that we know to exist. Therefore logic tells us one simple thing: the universe is not eternal. So the the two roads of scientific and philosophical proof end at the same spot: the universe had a beginning.
The beginning that never began
So, there! The cosmos has a beginning. Then what? What difference does that make? What does that have to do with God? Well, a lot actually. The universe had a beginning and since whatever begins to exist has a cause (remember?) we conclude that the universe was caused. Caused by something or someone! That’s remarkable. What could the characteristics of such a cause be? Is there anything that we can conclude here? The answer is a resounding ‘yes.’ For starters this cause must possess a lot of power in order to have brought about the universe. But there is much more. This cause, being not part of the universe itself of course, has to be immaterial and exist outside of time and space. Now that is amazing! We might as well say that this cause is spiritual and eternal. But when you think about it this cause needs to possess free will as well. Why? Well, suppose the cause did not have free will, then it would be static and always cause the universe to come into existence. However, we know that the universe was not always there. So this is not going to work. A cause with free will at one point decided to create the universe. We need to take this one step further. As far as we know only persons can have free will. So the cause of the universe must be a person.
When we put all of these characteristics together we cannot fail to notice that this eternal, spiritual and very powerful person has a remarkable amount of things in common with the God of the Bible. Maybe not all characteristics, but that isn’t necessary. No single argument for God’s existence tries to prove everything about God that can be known. Every small aspect of God, when argued for well, is enough to make people think. The Kalam Cosmological Argument seems to work!
This the translated and expanded version of the text for a Dutch newspaper article May 22nd 2010.
