CHAPTER 2: The Kalam Cosmological Argument
CHAPTER TWO
THE KALAM COSMOLOGICAL ARGUMENT
This version of the cosmological argument has a rich Islamic heritage and is defended by such philosophers as Stuart Hackett, David Oderberg, Mark Nowacki, myself, and others.
THE KALAM COSMOLOGICAL ARGUMENT: A SIMPLE FORMULATION
Just like the previous argument, this argument is also logically airtight. If the two premises are true, then the conclusion necessarily follows; anyone who wants to deny the conclusion has to regard either premise 1 or premise 2 as false. So the question is: Is it more probable that these statements are true or that they are false? Let’s examine each premise in turn.
Premise 1: Everything that begins to exist has a cause.
The first premise seems virtually undeniable for any sincere seeker after truth. For something to come into being without any cause whatsoever would be for something to come into being from nothing—and that is surely impossible. Three reasons may be given in support of this premise:
To claim that something can come into being from nothing is worse than magic.
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! If you deny premise 1, however, 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—like a horse or an Eskimo village, for example—can just pop into being without a cause.
Sometimes, skeptics will respond to this point by saying that in physics, subatomic particles (so-called “virtual particles”) come into being from nothing. Or certain theories of the origin of the universe are sometimes described in popular magazines as getting something from nothing, so that the universe is the exception to the proverb, “There ain’t no free lunch.”
This skeptical response represents an abuse of science; the theories in question have to do with particles’ (or the universe’s) originating as a fluctuation of the energy contained in the vacuum. The vacuum in modern physics is not what the layman understands by “vacuum”—namely, nothing. Rather, in physics the vacuum is a sea of fluctuating energy governed by physical laws and having a physical structure. To tell laymen that according to such theories, something comes from nothing is a distortion of those theories.
Properly understood, “nothing” does not mean empty space. Nothing is just the absence of anything whatsoever, even space itself. As such, nothingness has literally no properties at all, since there isn’t anything to have any properties! How silly, then, for popularizers to say things like “Nothingness is unstable” or “The universe tunneled into being out of nothing”!
What a surprise, therefore, to hear atheists denying premise 1 in order to escape the argument! For example, Quentin Smith has opined that the most rational position to hold is that the universe came “from nothing, by nothing, and for nothing”—a nice close to a Gettysburg address of atheism, perhaps.
Such an opinion represents a greater leap of faith than belief in the existence of God. It is, to repeat, literally worse than magic. If this is the alternative to belief in God, then unbelievers can never accuse believers of irrationality, for what could be more evidently irrational than this?
Something that is eternal wouldn’t need a cause, since it never came into being.
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 is it only universes that can come into being from nothing? Why not bicycles, Beethoven, and root beer? Why can’t they just pop 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!
At this point the atheist is likely to retort, “All right, if everything has a cause, what is God’s cause?” I’m always amazed at the self-congratulatory attitude with which students pose this question. They imagine that they’ve said something important or profound, when all they’ve done is misunderstand the premise. Premise 1 does not say that everything has a cause; rather, it says that everything that begins to exist has a cause. Something that is eternal wouldn’t need a cause, since it never came into being.
One may, therefore, respond that God is eternal and uncaused. This is not special pleading for God. Actually, this is exactly what the atheist has traditionally said about the universe: It is eternal and uncaused. The problem is that we now have good evidence (as we’ll see below) that the universe is not eternal, but had a beginning. So the atheist is backed into the corner of saying the universe sprang into being without a cause, which is absurd.
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.
So the first premise of the kalam cosmological argument seems to be clearly true. If the price of denying the argument’s conclusion is denying premise 1, then atheism is philosophically too expensive.
Premise 2: The universe began to exist.
Now the more controversial premise in the argument is premise 2. Let’s look at two philosophical arguments and two scientific arguments in defense of this premise.
The first philosophical argument is simply this: If the universe never began to exist, then there have been an infinite number of past events prior to today. But an infinite number of things cannot exist; therefore, the series of past events must be finite. That is to say, the universe began to exist.
In order to appreciate this argument, we must understand the difference between a potentially infinite number of things and an actually infinite number of things. When we say that something is potentially infinite, infinity serves merely as an ideal limit that is never reached. For example, you could divide any finite distance in half, and then into fourths, and then into eighths, and then into sixteenths, and so on to infinity. The number of divisions is potentially infinite, in the sense that you could go on dividing endlessly. But you would never arrive at an “infinitieth” division; you would never have an actually infinite number of parts or divisions. By contrast, a collection is actually infinite if the number of members in the collection is greater than any natural number 1, 2, 3,. …
Now the argument under discussion raises no objection to the existence of merely potential infinites, for these are just ideal limits. But if an actually infinite number of things could exist, then various absurdities would result. If we’re to avoid these absurdities, then we must deny that an actually infinite number of things exist.
It’s frequently alleged that this kind of argument has been invalidated by developments in modern mathematics. In modern set theory, the use of actually infinite sets is commonplace. For example, the set of the natural numbers {0, 1, 2, …} has an actually infinite number of members in it. The number of members in this set is not merely potentially infinite, according to modern set theory; rather, the number of members is actually infinite. Many people have mistakenly inferred that these developments undermine the kalam cosmological argument.
But these developments in modern mathematics merely show that if you adopt certain axioms and rules, then you can talk about actually infinite collections in a consistent way, without contradicting yourself. All this accomplishes is showing how to set up a certain universe of discourse for talking consistently about actual infinites; it does absolutely nothing to show that such mathematical entities really exist, or that an actually infinite number of things can really exist. This universe of discourse may be regarded as just a fictional realm, like the world of Sherlock Holmes in the Conan Doyle stories, or something that exists only in your mind.
Moreover, the question is not whether the existence of an actually infinite number of things involves a logical contradiction, but whether it is really impossible. To give an analogy, the claim that something came into existence from nothing is not strictly logically contradictory, but nonetheless it is really impossible. These modern mathematical developments, far from undermining the argument, can actually strengthen it by providing us insight into the strange nature of the actual infinite.
One way to bring out the real impossibility of an actually infinite number of things is by imagining what it would be like if such a collection could exist, and then drawing out the absurd consequences.
One way to bring out the real impossibility of an actually infinite number of things is by imagining what it would be like if such a collection could exist, and then drawing out the absurd consequences. Let me share one of my favorite illustrations called “Hilbert’s Hotel,” the brainchild of the great German mathematician David Hilbert.
Hilbert first invites us to imagine an ordinary hotel with a finite number of rooms. Now suppose that all the rooms are full. If a new guest shows up at the desk asking for a room, the manager says, “Sorry, all the rooms are full,” and that’s the end of the story.
But now, says Hilbert, let’s imagine a hotel with an infinite number of rooms, and let’s suppose once again that all the rooms are full. This fact must be clearly appreciated; there is not a single vacancy throughout the entire infinite hotel—every room already has somebody in it. Now suppose a new guest shows up at the front desk, asking for a room. “No problem!” says the manager. He moves the person who was staying in room #1 into room #2, the person who was staying in room #2 into room #3, and so on, to infinity. As a result of these room changes, room #1 now becomes vacant, and the new guest gratefully checks in. But before he arrived, all the rooms were already full!
It gets worse! Let’s now suppose, Hilbert says, that an infinity of new guests shows up at the front desk, asking for rooms. “No problem, no problem!” says the manager. He moves every guest in the hotel into the room which has a number twice the number of his original room—so the person staying in room #1 goes into room #2, the person who was staying in room #2 into room #4, the person who was staying in room #3 into room #6, etc. Since any number multiplied by two is an even number, all the guests wind up in even-numbered rooms. As a result, all the odd-numbered rooms become vacant, and the infinity of new guests is easily accommodated. In fact, the manager could do this an infinite number of times and always accommodate infinitely more guests. And yet, before they arrived, all the rooms were already full!
As a student once remarked, Hilbert’s Hotel, if it could exist, would have to have a sign posted outside: “NO VACANCY (Guests Welcome!).”
But Hilbert’s Hotel is even stranger that the great German mathematician made it out to be. For just ask yourself the question: What would happen if some of the guests start to check out? Suppose all the guests in the odd-numbered rooms check out. In this case, an infinite number of people has left the hotel, as many as remained behind. And yet, there are no fewer people in the hotel—the number is still infinite! Now suppose the manager doesn’t like having a half-empty hotel (it looks bad for business). No matter; by moving the guests as before, only this time in reverse order, he converts his half-empty hotel into one that is bursting at the seams.
Now you might think that by using these maneuvers, the manager could always keep his strange hotel fully occupied; but you’d be wrong. Suppose the guests in rooms ##4, 5, 6, … on to infinity check out. At a single stroke, the hotel would be virtually emptied, the guest register reduced to just three names, and the infinite converted to finitude. And yet it would be true that the same number of guests checked out this time as when all the guests in the odd-numbered rooms checked out. Can such a hotel exist in reality?
Hilbert’s Hotel is absurd. Since nothing hangs on the illustration’s involving a hotel, the argument can be generalized to show that the existence of an actually infinite number of things is absurd.
Sometimes people react to Hilbert’s Hotel by saying that these absurdities result because the concept of infinity is beyond us and we can’t understand it. But this reaction is mistaken and naïve; infinite set theory is a highly developed and well-understood branch of modern mathematics. The absurdities result because we do understand the nature of the actual infinite. Hilbert was a smart man, and he knew how to illustrate the bizarre consequences of the existence of an actually infinite number of things.
So the only thing the critic can do at this point is to just bite the bullet and say that a Hilbert’s Hotel is not absurd. Sometimes critics will try to justify this move by saying that if an actual infinite could exist, then such situations are exactly what we should expect. This justification, however, is inadequate. Hilbert would, of course, agree that if an actual infinite could exist, the situation with his imaginary hotel is what we would expect; otherwise, it wouldn’t be a good illustration! The question, however, is whether such a hotel is really possible.
Moreover, the critics can’t just bite the bullet when it comes to situations like the guests’ checking out of the hotel. For here we have a logical contradiction: We subtract identical quantities from identical quantities and come up with non-identical results—that’s why subtraction of infinity from infinity is mathematically prohibited. But while we may slap the hand of the mathematician who tries to break the rules, we can’t stop real people from checking out of a real hotel!
This first philosophical argument seems to be a good one. It shows that the number of past events must be finite. Therefore, the universe must have had a beginning.
Now consider a second, independent, philosophical argument for the beginning of the universe. The series of past events has been formed by adding one event after another. The series of past events is like a sequence of dominoes falling one after another until the last domino, today, is reached. But no series which is formed by adding one member after another can be actually infinite. Therefore, the series of past events must be merely finite.
The key to this argument is the claim that no series that is formed by adding one member after another can be actually infinite. This is easy to see in the case of trying to count to infinity. No matter how high you count, there is always an infinity of numbers left to count.
If you can’t count to infinity, how could you count down from infinity?
But if you can’t count to infinity, how could you count down from infinity? This would be like someone’s claiming to have counted down all the negative numbers, ending at zero: …, -3, -2, -1, 0. This seems crazy; before he could count 0, he would have to count -1, and before he could count -1, he would have to count -2, and so on, back to infinity. Before any number could be counted, an infinity of numbers will have to have been counted first. You just get driven back and back into the past, so that no number could ever be counted.
But then the final domino could never fall if an infinite number of dominoes had to fall first—so today could never be reached. But obviously, here we are! This shows that the series of past events must be finite and have a beginning.
Some critics have responded to this argument by pointing out that even in a beginningless past, every event in the past is only a finite distance from the present. Compare the series of negative numbers: …, -3, -2, -1, 0. It’s beginningless; nevertheless, any number you pick, say -11 or -1,000,000, is only finitely distant from zero. The finite distance from any past event to the present is easily crossed, just as you can count down to zero from any negative number you pick.
This objection commits a logical fallacy called “the fallacy of composition.” This is the fallacy of taking a property of a part to be a property of the whole. For example, every part of an elephant may be light in weight, but that doesn’t mean the whole elephant is light in weight!
In the case at hand, just because every finite part of a series can be crossed or counted down doesn’t mean the whole infinite series can be crossed or counted. The critics have committed an elementary, logical fallacy. The question is not how any finite part of the past can be formed by adding one event after another, but how the whole, begin-ningless past could be completed by adding one event after another.
We can heighten the sense of the impossibility of forming an infinite past by giving illustrations of the absurdities that would result if it could be done. For example, suppose that for every one orbit that Saturn completes around the sun, Jupiter completes two. The longer they orbit, the further Saturn falls behind. If they continue to orbit forever, they will approach a limit at which Saturn is infinitely far behind Jupiter. (Of course, they will never actually arrive at this limit.)
Let’s now turn the story around to suppose that Jupiter and Saturn have been orbiting the sun from eternity past. Which will have completed the most orbits? The answer is that the number of their orbits is exactly the same: infinity! (Don’t let someone try to slip out of this argument by saying infinity is not a number. In modern mathematics it is a number, the number of elements in the set {0, 1, 2, 3, …}.) But it seems absurd to say that Jupiter and Saturn have completed the same number of orbits, for the longer they orbit, the greater the disparity grows. So how does the number of orbits magically become equal by making them orbit from eternity past?
Another illustration: suppose we meet someone who claims to have been counting down from eternity past and is now finishing: …, -3, -2, -1, 0. Why is he just finishing his countdown today? Why didn’t he finish yesterday, or the day before? After all, by then an infinite amount of time had already elapsed! So if the man was counting at a rate of one number per second, he’s already had an infinite number of seconds to finish his countdown—he should already be done. In fact, at any point in the past, he has already had infinite time and so should already have finished. But then at no point in the past can we find the man counting, which contradicts the hypothesis that he has been counting from eternity.
These illustrations only strengthen the claim that no series that is formed by adding one member after another can be actually infinite. Since the series of past events was formed by adding one event after another, it can’t be actually infinite; it must have had a beginning. So we have a second good argument for premise 2 of the kalam cosmological argument: that the universe began to exist.
So now we’ve covered the two philosophical arguments in support of premise 2, but there are also two scientific arguments as well. In fact, one of the most astonishing developments of modern astronomy is that we now have strong scientific evidence for the beginning of the universe.
The first scientific confirmation of the universe’s beginning comes from the expansion of the universe. All throughout history men have assumed that the universe as a whole was unchanging. Of course, things in the universe were moving about and changing, but the universe itself was just there, so to speak. This was also Albert Einstein’s assumption when he first began to apply his new theory of gravity, called the General Theory of Relativity, to the universe in 1917.
But Einstein found there was something terribly amiss. His equations described a universe which was either blowing up like a balloon or else collapsing in upon itself. Perplexed, Einstein “solved” the problem by fudging his equations, adding a new term to enable the universe to walk the tightrope between exploding and imploding.
During the 1920s, the Russian mathematician Alexander Friedman and the Belgian astronomer Georges Lemaître decided to take Einstein’s equations at face value, and as a result they came up independently with models of an expanding universe. In 1929, the American astronomer Edwin Hubble, through tireless observations at Mt. Wilson Observatory, made a startling discovery which verified Friedman and LeMaître’s theory: He found that the light from distant galaxies appeared to be redder than expected. This “red shift” in the light was most plausibly due to the stretching of the light waves as the galaxies move away from us. Wherever Hubble trained his telescope in the night sky, he observed this same red-shift in the light from the galaxies. It appeared that we are at the center of a cosmic explosion, and all of the other galaxies are flying away from us at fantastic speeds!
Now according to the Friedman-Lemaître model, we are not really at the center of the universe; in fact, there is no center to the universe. Rather, an observer in any galaxy will look out and see the other galaxies moving away from him. This is because, according to the theory, it is really space itself that is expanding. The galaxies are actually at rest in space, but they recede from one another as space itself expands.
The galaxies are actually at rest in space, but they recede from one another as space itself expands.
To get a picture of this difficult idea, imagine a balloon with buttons glued to its surface. The buttons are stuck to the surface of the balloon and therefore don’t move across the surface. But as you blow up the balloon, the buttons will grow further and further and further apart because the balloon gets bigger and bigger. Notice that there’s no center of the balloon’s surface. (There is a center point inside the balloon, but we’re focusing just on the surface of the balloon.) To an observer on any button, however, it will feel as though he were at the center of the expansion because he’ll look out and see the other buttons all moving away from him.
Now the two-dimensional surface of the balloon is an illustration of our three-dimensional space, and the buttons represent the galaxies in space. The galaxies are actually at rest in space, but they recede from one another as space itself expands. Just as there is no center of the balloon’s surface, so there is no center of the universe.
The Friedman-Lemaître model eventually came to be known as the Big Bang theory. But that name can be misleading; thinking of the expansion of the universe as a sort of explosion could mislead us into thinking that the galaxies are moving out into a pre-existing, empty space from a central point. That would be a complete misunderstanding of the model. The Big Bang did not occur at some point in a pre-existing empty space, so we mustn’t be misled into thinking of the Big Bang as the explosion of a super-dense pellet of matter into empty space. The theory is much more radical than that.
As you trace the expansion of the universe back in time, everything gets closer and closer together. If our balloon had no minimum size, but could just keep shrinking and shrinking, eventually the distance between any two points on the balloon’s surface would shrink to zero. According to the Friedman-Lemaître model, that’s what happens to space as you go back in time. Eventually, the distance between any two points in space becomes zero. You can’t get any closer than that! So at that point, you’ve reached the boundary of space and time, and it cannot be extended any further back than that. It is literally the beginning of space and time.
To get a picture of this we can portray our three-dimensional space as a two-dimensional surface that shrinks as you go back in time (Fig. 1).
Fig. 1. Geometrical representation of space-time. The two-dimensional disc represents our three-dimensional space. The vertical dimension represents time. As one goes back in time, space shrinks until the distance between any two points is zero. Space-time, therefore, has the geometry of a cone. The point of the cone is the boundary of space and time.
Eventually, the distance between any two points in space becomes zero. So space-time can be represented geometrically as a cone. What’s significant about this is that while a cone can be extended indefinitely in one direction, it has a boundary point in the other direction. Because this direction represents time and the boundary point lies in the past, the model implies that past time is finite and had a beginning.
Because space-time is the arena in which all matter and energy exist, the beginning of space-time is also the beginning of all matter and energy—it’s the beginning of the universe.
Notice that there’s simply nothing prior to the initial boundary of space-time. Now, let’s not be misled by words; scientists do not mean that there is some state of affairs prior to it, and that is a state of nothingness. That would be to treat nothing as though it were something! Rather, they mean that at the boundary point, it is false that “There is something prior to this point.”
The standard Big Bang model thus predicts an absolute beginning of the universe. If this model is correct, then we have amazing scientific confirmation of the second premise of the kalam cosmological argument.
So is the model correct, or, more importantly, is it correct in predicting a beginning of the universe? We’ve already seen that the red-shift in the light from distant galaxies provides powerful evidence for the Big Bang. In addition, the best explanation for the abundance of certain light elements, like helium, in the universe is that they were formed in the hot, dense Big Bang. Finally, the discovery in 1965 of a cosmic background of microwave radiation is best explained as a vestige of the Big Bang.
Nevertheless, the standard Big Bang model will need to be modified in various ways. The model is based, as we’ve seen, on Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity. Einstein’s theory breaks down, however, when space is shrunk down to subatomic proportions. We’ll need to introduce quantum physics (subatomic physics) at that point, and no one is sure how this is to be done. Because we don’t yet have a quantum theory of gravity, this brief moment has been fertile ground for speculations. Moreover, the expansion of the universe is probably not constant, as in the standard model. It’s probably accelerating, and may have had a brief moment of super-rapid expansion in the past.
But none of these adjustments need affect the fundamental prediction of the absolute beginning of the universe. Indeed, physicists have proposed scores of alternative models over the decades since Friedman and Lemaître’s work, and those that do not have an absolute beginning have been repeatedly shown to be unworkable. Put more positively, the only viable non-standard models are those that involve an absolute beginning to the universe. That beginning may or may not involve a beginning point. But on theories (such as Stephen Hawking’s “no boundary” proposal) that do not have a point-like beginning, the past is still finite, not infinite. The universe has not existed forever according to such theories, but instead came into existence, even if it didn’t do so at a sharply defined point.
The history of twentieth-century cosmology can be seen as a series of one failed attempt after another to avoid the absolute beginning predicted by the standard Big Bang model.
In a sense, the history of twentieth-century cosmology can be seen as a series of one failed attempt after another to avoid the absolute beginning predicted by the standard Big Bang model. Unfortunately, the impression arises in the minds of laymen that the field of cosmology is in constant turnover, with no lasting results. What the layman doesn’t understand is that this parade of failed theories only serves to confirm the prediction of the standard model that the universe began to exist. That prediction has now stood for nearly one hundred years throughout a period of enormous advances in observational astronomy and creative theoretical work in astrophysics.
Meanwhile, a series of remarkable singularity theorems has increasingly tightened the loop around empirically tenable models by showing that under more and more generalized conditions, a beginning is inevitable. In 2003 Arvind Borde, Alan Guth, and Alexander Vilenkin were able to show that any universe which is, on average, in a state of cosmic expansion throughout its history cannot be infinite in the past but must have a beginning. In 2012 Vilenkin showed that models which do not meet this one condition still fail for other reasons to avert the beginning of the universe. Vilenkin concluded, “None of these scenarios can actually be past-eternal.”2 “All the evidence we have says that the universe had a beginning.”3
The Borde-Guth-Vilenkin theorem proves that classical space-time, under a single, very general condition, cannot be extended to past infinity but must reach a boundary at some time in the finite past. Now either there was something on the other side of that boundary or not. If not, then that boundary just is the beginning of the universe. If there was something on the other side, then it will be a quantum region described by the yet-to-be-discovered theory of quantum gravity. In that case, Vilenkin says, it will be the beginning of the universe. Either way, the universe began to exist.
We can fully expect that new theories will be proposed, attempting to avoid the universe’s beginning. Such proposals are to be welcomed, and we have no reason to think that they will be any more successful than their failed predecessors. Of course, scientific results are always provisional; nevertheless, it’s pretty clear which way the evidence points. Today, the proponent of the kalam cosmological argument stands comfortably within the scientific mainstream in holding that the universe began to exist.
Now as if this weren’t enough, there is actually a second scientific confirmation of the beginning of the universe, this one from the Second Law of Thermodynamics. According to the Second Law, unless energy is being fed into a system, that system will become increasingly disorderly. For example, if you had a bottle that was a closed vacuum inside and you injected into it some molecules of gas, the gas would spread itself evenly throughout the bottle. The chances that the molecules would all huddle together in one corner of the bottle are practically nil. This is because there are many more ways in which the molecules could exist in a disorderly state than in an orderly state.
If, given enough time, the universe will inevitably stagnate in a state of heat death, then why, if it has existed forever, is it not now in a state of heat death?
Now already by the nineteenth century scientists realized that the Second Law implied a grim prediction for the future of the universe. Given enough time, all the energy in the universe will spread itself out evenly throughout the universe, just as the gas spreads itself out evenly throughout the bottle. The universe will become a featureless soup in which no life is possible. Once the universe reaches such a state, no significant further change is possible; it is a state of equilibrium. Scientists called this the “heat death” of the universe.
But this unwelcome prediction raised a further puzzle: If, given enough time, the universe will inevitably stagnate in a state of heat death, then why, if it has existed forever, is it not now in a state of heat death? If in a finite amount of time, the universe will reach equilibrium, then, given infinite past time, it should by now already be in a state of equilibrium. But it’s not; we’re in a state of disequilibrium, where energy is still available to be used and the universe has an orderly structure.
The nineteenth-century German physicist Ludwig Boltzmann proposed a daring solution to this problem. Boltzmann suggested that perhaps the universe is, in fact, in a state of overall equilibrium. Nevertheless, by chance alone, there will arise more orderly pockets of disequilibrium here and there. Boltzmann refers to these isolated regions of disequilibrium as “worlds,” and our universe just happens to be one of these worlds. Eventually, in accord with the Second Law, it will revert to the overall state of equilibrium.
Contemporary physicists have universally rejected Boltzmann’s daring Many Worlds Hypothesis as an explanation of the observed disequilibrium of the universe. Its fatal flaw is that if our world is just a chance fluctuation from a state of overall equilibrium, then we ought to be observing a much smaller orderly universe. Why? Because a small fluctuation from equilibrium is vastly more probable than the huge, sustained fluctuation necessary to create the orderly universe we see, and yet a small fluctuation would be sufficient for our existence. For example, a fluctuation that formed a world no bigger than our solar system would be enough for us to be alive and would be incomprehensibly more likely to occur than a fluctuation that formed the whole universe we see!
The discovery of the expansion of the universe in the 1920s modified the sort of heat death predicted on the basis of the Second Law, but it didn’t alter the fundamental question.
In fact, Boltzmann’s hypothesis, if consistently carried out, would lead to a strange sort of illusionism: In all probability we really do inhabit a smaller world, and the stars and the planets we observe are just illusions, mere images on the heavens. For that sort of world is much more probable than a universe which has, in defiance of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, moved away from equilibrium for billions of years to form the universe we observe.
The discovery of the expansion of the universe in the 1920s modified the sort of heat death predicted on the basis of the Second Law, but it didn’t alter the fundamental question. If the universe will expand forever, then it will never actually arrive at equilibrium. Because the volume of space is constantly growing, the matter and energy always have more room to spread out. Nevertheless, as the universe expands, its available energy is used up, and it becomes increasingly cold, dark, dilute, and dead. It will eventually become a thin gas of subatomic particles endlessly expanding in absolute darkness.
By contrast, if the universe is not expanding fast enough, the expansion will slow down, come to a halt, and then gravity will begin to pull everything together again in a catastrophic Big Crunch. Eventually, everything in the universe will coalesce into a gigantic black hole, from which the universe will never rebound.
Whether its end will be in fire or ice, the fundamental question remains the same: Given sufficient time, if the universe will reach such a state, why is it not now in such a condition, if it has existed forever?
Recent discoveries in observational astronomy indicate that the cosmic expansion is actually speeding up. Because the volume of space is increasing so rapidly, the universe actually becomes farther and farther from an equilibrium state in which matter and energy are evenly distributed. But the acceleration of the universe’s expansion only hastens its demise. For now, the different regions of the universe become increasingly isolated from one another in space, and each marooned region becomes dark, cold, dilute, and dead. So again, why isn’t our region in such a state if the universe has already existed for infinite time?
The obvious implication of all this is that the question is based on a false assumption, namely, that the universe has existed for infinite time. Today, most physicists would say that the matter and energy were simply put into the universe as an initial condition, and the universe has been following the path plotted by the Second Law ever since its beginning a finite time ago.
Skeptics might hope that quantum cosmology might serve to avert the implications of the Second Law of Thermodynamics. But in 2013, the cosmologist Aron Wall of the University of California was able to formulate a new singularity theorem which seems to close the door on that possibility. Wall shows that, given the validity of the generalized Second Law of Thermodynamics in quantum cosmology, the universe must have begun to exist, unless one postulates a reversal of the arrow of time (time runs backwards!) at some point in the past, which, he rightly observes, involves a thermodynamic beginning in time which “would seem to raise the same sorts of philosophical questions that any other sort of beginning in time would.”4 Wall reports that his results require only certain basic concepts, so that “it is reasonable to believe that the results will hold in a complete theory of quantum gravity.”5
So once again, scientific evidence confirms the truth of the second premise of the kalam cosmological argument. This evidence is especially impressive, because thermodynamics is so well understood by physicists that it is practically a completed field of science. This makes it highly unlikely that these findings will be reversed.
Conclusion
On the basis, therefore, of both philosophical and scientific evidence, we have good grounds for believing that the universe began to exist. Since whatever begins to exist has a cause, it follows that the universe has a cause.
The prominent atheist philosopher Daniel Dennett agrees that the universe has a cause, but he thinks that the cause of the universe is … itself! Yes, he’s serious! In what he calls “the ultimate boot-strapping trick,” he claims that the universe created itself.
Dennett’s view is nonsense. Notice that he’s not saying that the universe just came into being from nothing. No, he’s saying that the universe brought itself into being. But this is impossible, for in order to create itself, the universe would have to already exist. It would have to exist before it existed. Dennett’s view is logically incoherent.
The cause of the universe must therefore be a transcendent cause beyond the universe. This cause must be itself uncaused because we’ve seen that an infinite series of causes is impossible. It is therefore the Uncaused First Cause. It must transcend space and time, since it created space and time. Therefore, it must be immaterial and non-physical. It must be unimaginably powerful, since it created all matter and energy.
Finally, it must be a personal being. We’ve already seen one reason for this conclusion in our discussion of the cosmological argument. Only a Mind could fit the description just given.
But here is another reason why the First Cause must be personal: It’s the only way to explain how a timeless cause can produce a temporal effect with a beginning like the universe.
Here’s the problem: If a cause is sufficient to produce its effect, then if the cause is there, the effect must be there, too. For example, the cause of water’s freezing is the temperature’s being below 0 degrees Celsius. If the temperature has always been below 0 degrees, then any water around would be frozen from eternity. It would be impossible for the water to begin to freeze just a finite time ago. Now the cause of the universe is permanently there, since it is timeless. So why isn’t the universe permanently there as well? Why did the universe come into being only 13.7 billion years ago? Why isn’t it as permanent as its cause?
The only answer to this problem is that the cause must be a personal being with freedom of the will. His creating the universe is a free act that is independent of any prior conditions. So his act of creating can be something spontaneous and new. Thus, we are brought not merely to a transcendent cause of the universe but to its Personal Creator.
The Creator is timeless without the universe and in time with the universe.
So the Creator, existing alone without the universe, is changeless and timeless. His free act of creation is simultaneous with the universe’s coming into being. He thus enters into time when He creates the universe. So the Creator is timeless without the universe and in time with the universe.
The kalam cosmological argument thus gives us powerful grounds for believing in the existence of a beginningless, uncaused, timeless, spaceless, changeless, immaterial, enormously powerful, Personal Creator of the universe.