Chapter 4
Chapter 4
Objections So Bad I Couldn't Have Made Them Up
(or, the World's 10 Worst Objections to the Kalam Cosmological Argument)
William Lane Craig
"We must in my opinion begin by distinguishing between that which always is and never becomes from that which is always becoming and never is. . . . Everything that becomes or changes must do so owing to some cause; for nothing can come to be without a cause. . . .
"As for the world—call it that or 'cosmos' or any other name acceptable to it—we must ask about it the question one is bound to ask to begin with about anything: whether it has always existed and had no beginning, or whether it has come into existence and started from some beginning. The answer is that it has come into being. . . . And what comes into being or changes must do so, we said, owing to some cause." (Plato, Timaeus 27–28)
Introduction
In my published work on the kalam cosmological argument, I always try to anticipate and respond to objections that might be raised against the argument, so that readers might be equipped to deal with them should someone bring them up in conversation.1 I figured that I'd dealt with virtually all the objections that critics might raise and that any further debate would be over the adequacy of my responses.
Alas, however, I discovered that I've been unsuccessful in covering the bases! For what I've come to realize is that some objections are so bad, indeed so off the wall, that I never could have anticipated them. These criticisms are not to be found in scholarly publications. Instead, they're put forward in popular critiques of the argument on the Internet and YouTube. Up to now, I've focused on the scholarly critiques of the argument and just ignored such popular criticisms because they were so misguided that there seemed no point in responding to them. But now I've chosen to use this opportunity to address the worst of them.
Now you might be thinking, If these objections are really that bad, then why waste time responding to them? Well, there are several reasons for doing so.
First, these objections are both widespread and influential. Infidel websites and YouTube are replete with these criticisms. They reach thousands of people and are confidently touted by many as delivering crushing refutations of the kalam cosmological argument.
Second, the average layman, not being trained in logic and philosophy, may not know how to answer these objections. I frequently receive e-mails from visitors to our website, www.ReasonableFaith.org, including a link to some video or website and asking for help in dealing with these objections. Unable to discern where the fallacy lies, people find themselves at a loss for words when confronting these objections in conversation and may even find these criticisms to be quite persuasive.
Finally, answering these objections usually yields some positive insight that is valuable. We can, for example, clarify and so come to a better understanding of certain fallacies that are alleged against the argument or gain a deeper insight into certain crucial concepts that play a role in the argument. So the time taken to answer these objections will prove to be time well spent.
Now I had thought to arrange our world's worst objections into a sort of "Top Ten" list, climaxing with the all-time worst of the worst. But the problem is that the worst of the worst is not necessarily the most entertaining, so that our list would reach something of an anticlimax. So rather than rank the objections in this way, I've decided instead to arrange them according to the steps in the argument, grouping together objections to the general form of the argument, followed by objections to each of the argument's two premises respectively, and wrapping up with objections to the argument's conclusion.
Now for those unfamiliar with the kalam cosmological argument, I'll provide a brief summary of it. The argument is a simple syllogism:
The crucial second premise is supported both by philosophical arguments against the infinitude of the past and by scientific evidence for the beginning of the universe. Having arrived at the conclusion, one may then do a conceptual analysis of what properties a cause of the universe must have. One is thereby brought to conclude that an uncaused, beginningless, changeless, timeless, spaceless, immaterial, enormously powerful, personal Creator of the universe exists. For the intriguing details see the previously noted works. With this summary of the argument in hand, let's go to our objections!
Objections to the Form of the Argument
Objection #1: Craig says that he believes in God on the basis of the self-authenticating witness of the Holy Spirit in his heart, not on the basis of the kalam cosmological argument. In fact, he says that even if the argument were refuted, he would still believe in God. This is blatant hypocrisy on Craig's part.
Response to #1: The problem with this objection is that even if I were a hypocrite, there is just no relationship between the soundness of an argument and the psychological state of the person propounding it. The objector is thus guilty of putting forward a textbook example of an argument ad hominem, that is, trying to invalidate a position by attacking the character of the person who defends it.
So what makes for a sound deductive argument? The answer is: true premises and valid logic. An argument is sound if the premises of the argument are true and the conclusion follows from the premises by the rules of logic. The soundness of the kalam cosmological argument is thus entirely independent of me. The argument was, after all, defended by the medieval Muslim theologian al-Ghazali almost 900 years before I was even born. If the argument is sound, it was sound then. It was sound during the Jurassic period, before anyone had propounded it. My alleged hypocrisy just has nothing to do with the soundness of the argument.
Now to be a good argument, an argument must, admittedly, be more than merely sound. If the premises of an argument are true, but we have no evidence for the truth of those premises, then the argument will not be a good one. It may (unbeknown to us) be sound, but in the absence of any evidence for its premises it won't, or at least shouldn't, convince anyone. The premises have to have some sort of epistemic warrant for us in order for a sound argument to be a good one. I've argued that what is needed is that the premises be not only true but more plausible than their opposites or negations. If it is more plausible that a premise is, in light of the evidence, true rather than false, then we should believe the premise.2
Now plausibility is to a certain degree person-relative. Some people may find a premise more plausible than its opposite, while others may not. In that sense the goodness of an argument is not wholly independent of persons' psychological states. In the case of the kalam cosmological argument, I do find the premises more plausible than their opposites, and so I am convinced that it is a good argument.
I just don't regard the argument as the basis for my belief in God. I've been quite candid about that. My belief in God is a properly basic belief grounded in the inner witness of God's Holy Spirit. It's odd that rather than being commended for my candor, I'm accused of hypocrisy.
I've elsewhere defended the proper basicality of belief in God on the basis of the Spirit's witness,3 but that's quite unnecessary here. For even if I were entirely mistaken about that, it would have no bearing on the worth of the kalam cosmological argument. To illustrate, suppose I believe that Abraham Lincoln was one of the greatest of American presidents, and in order to convince you of this, I present to you the testimony of expert historians along with a detailed account of Lincoln's amazing accomplishments. But suppose that the real reason I think Lincoln was so great is that he had a beard, and, having been once bearded myself, I am prejudiced in favor of bearded presidents. Obviously, my personal prejudice would have no bearing whatsoever upon the worth of the evidence for Lincoln's greatness.
Similarly, whatever reason I may have personally for believing in God, whether it's the witness of the Holy Spirit or the ontological argument or the teleological argument or divine revelation, or whatever, that just has no relation to the soundness or worth of the kalam cosmological argument. The skeptic may not like my taking belief in God as properly basic, but that's not a criticism of the kalam cosmological argument. That's at best a rejection of the proper basicality of belief in God, which has no bearing on the worth of the kalam argument.
Objection #2: The kalam cosmological argument is question-begging. For the truth of the first premise presupposes the truth of the conclusion. Therefore the argument is an example of reasoning in a circle.
Response to #2: All the objector has done is describe the nature of a deductive argument. In a deductive argument, the conclusion is implicit in the premises, waiting to be derived by the rules of logical inference. A classic illustration of a deductive argument is:
This argument has the same form as the kalam cosmological argument. The logical rule governing this form is called modus ponens. Symbolically,
p ⊃ q
p
______
∴ q
It is one of the most basic of logically valid argument forms. Incredibly, I have even seen claims by Internet critics that the classic argument above is also question-begging!
This raises the question of what it means for an argument to be question-begging. Technically, arguments don't beg the question; people do. One is guilty of begging the question if one's only reason for believing in a premise is that one already believes in the conclusion. For example, suppose you were to present the following argument for the existence of God:
This is a sound argument for God's existence: its premises are both true, and the conclusion follows from the premises by the rules of logic (specifically, disjunctive syllogism). Nevertheless, the argument is not any good because the only reason for believing the first premise to be true is that you already believe that God exists (a disjunction is true if one of the disjuncts is true). But that is the argument's conclusion! Therefore, in putting forward this argument you are reasoning in a circle or begging the question. The only reason you believe (1) is because you believe (3).
Now neither the argument for Socrates' mortality nor the kalam argument is like this. In each case reasons are given for believing the first premise that are quite independent of the argument's conclusion. Biological and medical evidence may be marshaled on behalf of the premise that all men are mortal, and I have presented arguments (to be reviewed shortly) for the truth of the premise that everything that begins to exist has a cause. Therefore, I have not begged the question. The objector has made the elementary mistake of confusing a deductive argument with a question-begging argument.
Objection #3: The argument commits the fallacy of equivocation. In the first premise "cause" means "material cause," while in the conclusion it does not.
Response to #3: This objection raises the question of what it is to commit the fallacy of equivocation. This fallacy is using a word in the same context to mean two different things. For example, suppose someone were to reason:
The untoward conclusion results from equivocating on the meaning of "Greek," using it first to denote an ethnicity or nationality and later a language.
In formulating the kalam cosmological argument, I intended to speak of what Aristotle called efficient causes. Aristotle distinguished between efficient causes and material causes. An efficient cause is what produces an effect in being, while a material cause is the stuff out of which a thing is made. For example, Michelangelo was the efficient cause of the statue David, and the material cause of David was the block of marble that Michelangelo sculpted. My claim was that whatever begins to exist has an efficient cause and therefore the universe, having begun to exist, must have an efficient cause. The charge of equivocation immediately evaporates.
These first three objections to the kalam cosmological argument, while not very scintillating, are among the very worst of the worst objections. Without challenging the truth of any of its premises, they attack what is a logically impeccable argument.
Objections to the First Premise
Objection #4: The first premise is based on the fallacy of composition. It fallaciously infers that because everything in the universe has a cause, therefore the whole universe has a cause.
Response to #4: In order to understand this objection we need to understand the fallacy of composition. This is the fallacy of reasoning that because every part of a thing has a certain property, therefore the whole thing has that same property. While wholes do sometimes possess the properties of their parts (a fence, every plank of which is green, is also green), this is not always the case. For example, every little part of an elephant may be light in weight, but that does not imply that the whole elephant is light in weight.
Now I have never argued that because every part of the universe has a cause, therefore the whole universe has a cause. That would be manifestly fallacious. Rather the reasons I have offered for thinking that everything that begins to exist has a cause are these:
1. Something cannot come from nothing. To claim that something can come into being from nothing is worse than magic. When a magician pulls a rabbit out of a hat, at least you've got the magician, not to mention the hat! But if you deny premise 1, you've got to think that the whole universe just appeared at some point in the past for no reason whatsoever. But nobody sincerely believes that things, say, a horse or an Eskimo village, can just pop into being without a cause.
2. If something can come into being from nothing, then it becomes inexplicable why just anything or everything doesn't come into being from nothing. Think about it: why don't bicycles and Beethoven and root beer just pop into being from nothing? Why is it only universes that can come into being from nothing? What makes nothingness so discriminatory? There can't be anything about nothingness that favors universes, for nothingness doesn't have any properties. Nor can anything constrain nothingness, for there isn't anything to be constrained!
3. Common experience and scientific evidence confirm the truth of premise 1. Premise 1 is constantly verified and never falsified. It's hard to understand how any atheist committed to modern science could deny that premise 1 is more plausibly true than false in light of the evidence.4
Note well that the third reason is an appeal to inductive reasoning, not reasoning from composition. It's drawing an inductive inference about all the members of a class of things based on a sample of the class. Inductive reasoning underlies all of science and is not to be confused with reasoning by composition.
So this objection is aimed at a straw man of the objector's own construction.
Objection #5: If the universe began to exist, then it must have come from nothing. That is quite plausible, since there are no constraints on nothing, and so nothing can do anything, including producing the universe.
Response to #5: This objector seems to be hopelessly confused about the use of the word "nothing." When it is rightly said that nothing preceded the universe, one doesn't mean that something preceded it, and it was nothing. We mean that it was not preceded by anything. Reifying negative terms has been the butt of jokes as old as Homer's story of the Cyclops and Odysseus. Imagine the following dialogue between two people discussing the Second World War:
"Nothing stopped the German advance from sweeping across Belgium."
"Oh, that's good. I'm glad they were stopped."
"But they weren't stopped!"
"But you said that nothing stopped them."
"That's right."
"So they were stopped."
"No, nothing stopped them."
"That's what I said. They were stopped, and it was nothing which stopped them."
"No, no, I meant they weren't stopped by anything."
"Well, why didn't you say so in the first place?"
The objector, in thinking nothing produced the universe, seems to be guilty of the same sort of mistake. Nothingness has no properties, no powers; it isn't even anything. Therefore, it is wholly misconceived to say it produced the universe.
To say the universe was caused by nothing is to say the universe had no cause; it wasn't caused by anything. That is metaphysically absurd. Out of nothing, nothing comes. As the epigram from Plato at the head of this essay illustrates, the causal principle, which is the first premise of the kalam cosmological argument, is one of the oldest and most widely recognized truths of metaphysics.
Objections to the Second Premise
Objection #6: Nothing ever begins to exist! For the material of which something consists precedes it. So it is not true that the universe began to exist.
Response to #6: I think this is my favorite bad objection, since the assertion that nothing ever begins to exist is so patently ridiculous. Did I exist before I was conceived? If so, where was I? What was I doing during the Jurassic period? Has the World Trade Center always existed? How come the Native Americans never noticed it?
This objection obviously confuses a thing with the matter or stuff of which the thing is made. Just because the stuff of which something was made has always existed doesn't imply the thing itself has always existed.
The objector could save himself from the embarrassment of having to say that he has always existed by adopting mereological nihilism, the doctrine that there are no composite objects. On this view all that exists are the fundamental particles that can be arranged in different ways. So according to this view, there literally are no chairs or tables or horses or people or palm trees. There are just fundamental particles, which may be arranged chair-wise or table-wise or people-wise and so on. The reason why chairs and other things never begin to exist is not that they have always existed but rather that they never do exist. There just are no such things.
Unfortunately for our hapless objector, in this case the cure is worse than the disease. For now the objector has to say that the reason he never began to exist is not that he has always existed but that he himself doesn't exist at all! (That might leave us wondering why we should bother responding to him, since there's nobody to whom we can respond. Indeed, on this view, nobody has ever raised the present objection; so why respond to it, since it hasn't been held by anybody?)
In any case, it is absurd to deny one's own existence. I'm reminded of the story of the first-year philosophy student who had been reading Descartes. He burst into his professor's office early one morning, bleary-eyed, unshaven—he'd obviously been up all night. "Professor, you've got to tell me," he implored. "Do I exist?" The professor looked at him a moment and then said, "Who wants to know?" If resisting the kalam cosmological argument requires that you deny your own existence, then the cost is far too high.
At any rate, all these mental machinations are ultimately of no avail, for we can simply rephrase the kalam cosmological argument to meet the scruples of the mereological nihilist:
1´. If the fundamental particles arranged universe-wise began to exist, they have a cause.
2´. The fundamental particles arranged universe-wise began to exist.
3´. Therefore, the fundamental particles arranged universe-wise have a cause.
And now we're right back to where we were before.
The serious point of this muddled objection, I think, is its presupposition that everything that begins to exist has a material cause. But that claim is irrelevant to the truth of the two premises of the kalam cosmological argument and requires proof in any case. It is true that in our experience material things do not begin to exist without material causes, so that we have the same sort of inductive evidence on behalf of material causation as we have for efficient causation. But if we have good arguments and evidence that the material realm had an absolute beginning preceded by nothing, this can override the inductive evidence. What we cannot reasonably say, I think, is that the universe sprang into being without either an efficient or a material cause, since being does not come from nonbeing. But there is no sort of metaphysical absurdity involved in something's having an efficient cause but no material cause.
Objection #7: The argument equivocates on "begins to exist." In (1) it means to begin "from a previous material state," but in (2) it means "not from a material state."
Answer to #7: In order to defeat the allegation of equivocation all one needs to do is provide a univocal meaning for the phrase in both its occurrences. That's easy to do. By "begins to exist" I mean "comes into being." Everything that comes into being has a cause, and the universe came into being. No equivocation here!
If we want, we can go further and provide an analysis of what it means to begin to exist. Here is one such analysis:
x begins to exist if and only if x exists at some time t and there is no time t* prior to t at which x exists.
This analysis is adequate for all practical purposes. It would allow even time itself to begin to exist. It would become problematic only in case someone thinks that God is timeless without creation and enters time at the first moment of creation. In such a case God would exist at a first moment of time t 0 and there would be no time t*< t 0 at which God existed. It would follow from our analysis that God began to exist at t 0, which is wrong-headed, since God did not come into being at t 0. Fortunately, this problem is easily fixed by amending our analysis:
x begins to exist if and only if x exists at some time t and there is no time t* prior to t at which x exists and no state of affairs in the actual world in which x exists timelessly.
So amended, the analysis does not imply that God began to exist at the first moment of time if He enters time from a state of timelessness at the moment of creation.
In sum, the objections to the second premise are just as bad as the objections to the first. The second premise is certainly controversial and open to debate but not for the reasons alleged here.
Objections to the Argument's Conclusion
Objection #8: The argument is logically self-contradictory. For it says that everything has a cause yet concludes that there is a first uncaused cause.
Response to #8: Man, how do people think these things up? Premise 1 states that everything that begins to exist has a cause. Something cannot come into being without a cause. This premise does not require that something that is eternal and never had a beginning has a cause (think again of Plato's distinction between that which always is and that which comes into being). The objector has been inattentive to the formulation of the first premise.
Notice that this is not special pleading for God. The atheist has typically said that the universe itself is eternal and uncaused. Matter and energy have existed from eternity past and so have no cause of their being. Problem is: that supposition has now been rendered dubious in light of the strong arguments in support of premise 2 that the universe began to exist.
Objection #9: The cause mentioned in the argument's conclusion is not different from nothing. For timelessness, changelessness, spacelessness, etc., are all purely negative attributions which are also true of nothingness. Thus, the argument might as well be taken to prove that the universe came into being from nothing.
Response to #9: You've got to be kidding. The argument concludes to a cause of the universe. That is a positive existential affirmation: there is a cause of the universe. To say that the universe was caused by nothing, by contrast, is to affirm that it was not caused by anything, or in other words, the universe is uncaused, which is the very opposite of the argument's conclusion.
Moreover, the argument's conclusion also implies the attribution of incredible causal power to this entity that brought the universe into being without any sort of material cause. It is therefore wholly different from nothing, which has no reality, no properties, and no causal powers.
Finally, the attribution of negative predicates such as timelessness, changelessness, spacelessness, and so on to this entity is enormously informative and metaphysically significant. From its timelessness and immateriality we can deduce its personhood, as I have elsewhere argued.5 This is a positive property of great significance and utterly unlike nothingness.
Objection #10: Our tenth and final bad objection comes courtesy of that enfant terrible of the New Atheism, Richard Dawkins. He doesn't dispute either premise of the kalam cosmological argument. Instead he just complains about the argument's conclusion:
Even if we allow the dubious luxury of arbitrarily conjuring up a terminator to an infinite regress and giving it a name, there is absolutely no reason to endow that terminator with any of the properties normally ascribed to God: omnipotence, omniscience, goodness, creativity of design, to say nothing of such human attributes as listening to prayers, forgiving sins and reading innermost thoughts.6
Response to #10. Apart from the opening dig,7 this is an amazingly concessionary statement. Dawkins doesn't deny that the argument successfully demonstrates the existence of an uncaused, beginningless, changeless, immaterial, timeless, spaceless, and unimaginably powerful, personal Creator of the universe. He merely complains that this cause hasn't been shown to be omnipotent, omniscient, good, creative of design, listening to prayers, forgiving sins, and reading innermost thoughts. So what? The argument doesn't aspire to prove such things. It would be a bizarre form of atheism—indeed, one not worth the name—that conceded that there exists an uncaused, beginningless, changeless, immaterial, timeless, spaceless, and unimaginably powerful, personal Creator of the universe, who may, for all we know, also possess the further properties listed by Dawkins! We needn't call the personal Creator of the universe "God" if Dawkins finds this unhelpful or misleading, but the point remains that a being such as described above must exist.8
Conclusion
So there you have them: the world's 10 all-time worst! These represent the level of discourse that pervades the Internet and YouTube. You can see how worthless they are. I hope you don't feel that I've wasted your time. For in discussing these bad objections you've gained, I hope, a better understanding of the sort of fallacies alleged against the argument along with some deeper insight into the argument itself.
1 See, e.g., William Lane Craig, On Guard: Defending Your Faith with Reason and Precision (Colorado Springs: David C. Cook, 2010), 73–104; and idem, Reasonable Faith, 3rd ed. rev. (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2008), 111–56.
2 I trust that this clears up the gross misunderstanding propagated in a YouTube video that when I say that the premises of a good argument must be more plausibly true than their negations, I am positing a range of additional truth values between true and false. No, I presume the classical Principle of Bivalence, according to which there are only two truth values, True and False. There are different degrees of plausibility, not of truth, given the varying amounts of evidence in support of one's premises. The question we must ask is: which is more plausible, that the premise is true or that it is false? Notice, too, that in a valid deductive argument like the kalam cosmological argument, if the premises are true, then it follows necessarily that the conclusion is true, period. It is logically fallacious to multiply the probabilities of the premises to try to calculate the probability of the conclusion. In a sound deductive argument the most we can say about the probability of the argument's conclusion is that it cannot be less than some lower bound, but it could be as high as 100 percent. The kid who posted these criticisms on YouTube, if he continues his study of philosophy, is going to look back someday on this smug video with real embarrassment.
3 Craig, Reasonable Faith, 43–51.
4 Craig, On Guard, 78.
5 Craig, On Guard, 99–100; and Reasonable Faith, 152–54.
6 Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (New York: Houghton-Mifflin, 2006), 77.
7 The argument's proponent doesn't arbitrarily conjure up a terminator to the infinite regress and give it a name. Rather he presents philosophical and scientific arguments that the regress must terminate in a first member, arguments that Dawkins doesn't discuss.
8 This also serves to answer what is surely one of the most ludicrous retorts to the argument which I have heard: "Couldn't you have replaced the word 'god' with 'bigfoot' or 'unicorn'?" Hmmm, let's see. . . . Bigfoot is a creature living somewhere in Washington State, right? So do you really think that someone living in the state of Washington is the timeless, spaceless, Creator of the Big Bang?