The Right Answer to Kalam? Gesundheit

Christian apologist/“philosopher” William Lane Craig popularized a version of the Cosmological Argument known as the Kalam Argument. It is named after a school of medieval Islamic scholars who developed it.

Recently, some theist-bros (I can’t think of a better name for them—apologisters? God’s fanboys?) have reacted strongly and badly to a black atheist woman’s critique of their favorite argument for the existence of God.

The uniformity and formulaic nature of their replies—in both content and vitriol—made me curious what was going on. It was almost universal among the commenters, and they wouldn’t let go of it even when I pushed back with good arguments.

The Kalam Argument is a version of the Cosmological Argument. It asks, what caused the whole of the cosmos to come into existence (not any one part of it)? Its answer is that there is an Uncaused Cause that brings the universe into existence, and this Uncaused Cause (aka First Cause, Unmoved Mover, etc.) is God. The God of Christianity, they assume.

Twitter’s @BeatTheCult asked, “If everything has a beginning then when did God begin?” In a subsequent tweet, she clarified that this was in response to the Kalam Cosmological Argument. (I missed this at first; I thought she was just referring to the base version of the Cosmological Argument.)

The God’s Rabid Response Team claimed that this is stupid; the worst possible response to the Kalam Argument. (They sometimes compounded their rude dismissiveness with sexism and racism. It kind of felt like a version of gamergate. The theobros have a lot of work to do on their modes of interaction and their attitudes. But let’s focus here on the theological arguments.)

Why were they all giving the same response, and why were they all treating this challenge as stupid, the worst possible response to the Kalam argument?

The answer to the mystery of this formulaic response—and its vitriol—appeared immediately in a Google search: Almost all the hits on “Objections to Kalam” are titled things like “The stupidest objections to the Kalam argument” or “Atheists’ worst objections to the Kalam argument”! There is apparently an industry, sparked by WLC himself in his debates if I’m reading the tea leaves right, of trying to undercut atheist objections to the argument with stock responses. It is a remarkable example of group think. The theobros are ready to pounce when they see the trigger words and then they parrot the same responses. The vehemence and rudeness accompanying it can only be explained by over-confidence arising from not having grappled enough with the real intellectual issues. If they had, they would know that all apologetic arguments are very susceptible to critique; in fact, most philosophers agree that they fail.

Like other versions of the Cosmological Argument, the Kalam Argument relies on applying the notion of causality to facts about the universe, especially the Principle of Sufficient Reason, and then forbidding an infinite regress of causes. (“Infinite regress” means a chain of steps that goes back and back to infinity without stopping.) These are two points at which Cosmological Arguments are especially susceptible to critique, as I have written about here.

The Kalam Argument differs from the “base model” Cosmological Argument in that it is considering the moment of the origin of the cosmos as a whole, and not a stepwise backwards walk through the chain of causes from something now to a First Cause. Rather, Kalam is focused on the whole of the order of nature coming into existence (not any specific thing that happens or exists within the order of nature).

This diagram is meant to give a rough idea of the different focus of each of the main types of Cosmological Arguments. The base version, in green, traces the chain of causes from an event now to its ultimate origin in the First Cause. The Kalam Argument, in orange, infers that the First Cause was responsible for the very first moment of the existence of the cosmos. The Argument from Contingency, in blue, considers the whole of creation as a contingent and therefore dependent being which requires a First Cause to bring it into existence. These are not the only kinds of Cosmological Arguments.

The problem with the theobros’ formulaic response to the “What caused God?” objection is that it misses the point by assuming what is to be proved. God is eternal, they say, and therefore does not fall under the Kalam’s first premise, “Of the things that come into existence, a cause brings them into existence.” God, they claim, doesn’t need a cause because God doesn’t come into existence.

This is pure bluster, of course. The aim of the Kalam, like all versions of the Cosmological Argument, is to prove the existence of God. You can’t avoid an objection to such an argument by assuming that God exists and has specific characteristics—that’s the very thing that the argument is trying to prove! Perhaps there are other arguments to support the claim that God exists and is a necessary, eternal being who caused the universe. But if those other arguments work, then we don’t need the Kalam Argument! And if those other arguments don’t work, then it is obviously a viable question to ask why we should think a First Cause exists at all.

There are other problems with the Kalam Argument, too. One it has in common with all of Aquinas’s Five Ways, namely the identification of the First Cause as God, specifically the Christian omni-God. There is nothing in any of these arguments to support the idea that the First Cause is a theistic god, let alone a specific theistic god. Many commentators would say that if these arguments were successful, all they would prove is that there is some cause of the universe—we can’t know anything else about that cause from these arguments, so they don’t support any particular religion. In some ways, these arguments seem more compatible with deism than theism. Plus, Kalam and other Cosmological Arguments assume that the universe had a beginning out of nothing, and that is something we just do not know. It is perfectly possible that the universe, or the metauniverse in which our universe arose, is eternal. It is also possible that we are simply wrong to take a concept like causation, which we learn from studying an already existing universe, and apply it to a supposed state in which there is nothing in existence.

In short, the Kalam Argument is just as susceptible to critique as the rest of the apologetic arguments, and asking what caused the thing that caused the universe, or why we should think that a First Cause exists, is a perfectly sensible thing to ask. The correct answer is, “No one knows.”

In Douglas Adams’s comic science fiction novel, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, one alien civilization believes that the universe was sneezed out of the nose of the supreme deity, whom they call the Great Green Arkleseizure. (You think it’s a universe; it’s snot.)

You say, “Kalam!”

I say, “Gesundheit!”