The Kalam Cosmological Argument

A powerful argument for the existence of God is the Kalam cosmological argument. This argument has rich Islamic heritage dating back to medieval Muslim philosphers such as Al-Ghazali, hence the Arabic word "speech" for Kalam. what distinguishes the Kalam cosmological argument from other cosmological arguments, is that it assumes that something exists and then argues from the existence of that thing, to the existence of a transcendent first cause.

It has recently been restored to popularity by contemporary Christian philosophers. Another point to mention here, is that Dawkins in his popular book “the god delusion” avoids mentioning this particular version of the cosmological argument but focuses instead on rather cruder versions. This might possibly be due to the fact that his main counter-argument, that “they make the entirely unwarranted assumption that God himself is immune to the regress,” falls short of being a defeater to the Kalam cosmological argument.

Kalam argument formulation is simple:

1. Whatever begins to exist has a cause.
2. The universe began to exist.
3. Therefore, the universe has a cause.

Philosophical premise (1) is a first principle in metaphysics ( that branch of philosophy that deals with those questions of what exists) Aristotle described metaphysics as the study of being . This premise certainly seems more plausibly true than its denial.. The idea that things can pop into being without a cause seems rationally unjustifiable, being comes from being, from nothing, nothing comes . As Aristotle once said one should not seek to prove propositions through less obvious propositions.

Atheists have traditionally denied (2) in favour of an eternal universe. But there are good reasons, both philosophical and scientific, to believe that the universe had a beginning. Philosophically, the idea of an infinite past seems absurd. If the universe never had a beginning, then the number of past events in the history of the universe is infinite. This raises insuperable problems for the advocate of an eternal universe How could the present event ever arrive given an infinite number of prior events having to elapse first? Any arbitrary chosen event will have an infinite series of past events prior to it. Paradoxically, in this given scenario the present would infinitely never actualise. This problem is also referred to as the problem of traversing the infinite.

Moreover, a remarkable series of discoveries in astronomy and astrophysics over the last century have kindled new life into the kalam argument. We now have strong evidence that the universe is not eternal in the past, but had an absolute beginning about 13.7 billion years ago in a cataclysmic event known as the Big Bang.

Up until the 1920’s the universe was considered eternal and static in form. Now, in 1929 the American astronomer Edwin Hubble showed the light emanating from distant galaxies appears to be redder than those closest to us. The reason for this, Hubble explained, was that these distant galaxies were moving away from us. Hence, the universe is expanding. It had long been known that light waves from a receding source would be stretched, and therefore shifted towards the red end of the spectrum. Hubble found that the red shift gets bigger the further away from us a galaxy is located and this effect happens in all directions. The simplest explanation of these facts is that the galaxies are rushing away from us in a form of expansion. The expansion then implies that there must have been a more compressed universe in the past , a point in the past where the entire universe was contracted down to a single mathematical point, from which it has been expanding ever since. This suggests that the universe began with a vast explosion from a highly dense state, an event known as the big bang.

PCW Davies a British physicist describes

“If we extrapolate this prediction to its extreme, we reach a point when all distances in the universe have shrunk to zero. An initial cosmological singularity therefore forms a past temporal extremity to the universe. We cannot continue physical reasoning, or even the concept of space and time, through such an extremity. For this reason, most cosmologists think of the initial singularity as the beginning of the universe. On this view, the Big Bang represents the creation event; the creation not only of all the matter and energy in the universe, but also of space and time itself”.

P. C. W. Davies, "Space & time Singularities in Cosmology," in The Study of Time III, ed. J. T. Fraser (Berlin: Springer Verlag, 1978), pp. 78?79.

A second discovery firmly cemented the fact that the universe began to exist, the CMB ‘cosmic microwave background’. In 1967, two radio engineers Arnos Penzias and Robert Wilson, stumbled across radiation coming from space which was identified as the relic of the big bang. If the universe was once very dense, it should also have been very hot, since matter heats up when compressed. Hot matter emits thermal radiation so we can expect the heat left over from the birth of the universe to be bathing the universe today, in a faint glow of radiation. This was confirmed by the discovery of CMB.

Because the Kalam cosmological argument is logically valid, if the premises are true, then the conclusion necessarily follows as also being true. If the universe began to exist and our metaphysical knowledge confirms that things don’t just pop into existence from nothing is true , then the universe had to have a cause beyond space and time.

by Adam Deen