WL Craig and Kalam

William Lane Craig is a Christian who seems to make a living by debating non-Christians about the existence of God. One of Craig's favourite topics is the Kalam cosmological argument.

Here is Craig's formulation:

1. Whatever begins to exist has a cause.

2. The universe began to exist.

3. Therefore, the universe has a cause.

Whatever begins to exist has a cause

Number 1 is carefully formulated to exclude God; God did not begin to exist, so he did not have a cause. It is a bit of semantic trickery that builds in the conclusion Craig wants to reach. You might as well exclude the universe. Everything except the universe and God has a cause, and we have no particular reason to suppose the universe has a cause, do we?

The claim of number 1 is based on inductive reasoning. All the things around us have a cause, therefore it is likely that some other thing also has a cause. Inductive reasoning is not certain, but it is what we do all the time, and is often the only way to make sense of the world, right from an early age. If you see something that is person-shaped, you assume it is a person.

The issue is whether we are justified in going from those things we see around us, to make a conclusion about the universe. Is this sound reasoning?

1. Everything we know in our world has a cause
2. Therefore the universe must have had a cause

No, it is not. The universe is unlike anything else we have experience of, and such a leap is just not justified. Consider this:

1. Everything we know in our world has a cause
2. Therefore God must have had a cause

Would Craig accept that that logic is sound? Of course not! And yet it is identical to the logic upon which his argument is founded.

The difference is only that in what conclusion he wants to reach. That is just bad reasoning.

Causes and Causes

What exactly do we mean by a cause anyway? I look at my computer, and I know it has a cause. A company went to the trouble to assemble it. There was in turn a specific cause for that; they were fulfilling an order to make money. When you look around you, everything you see has a cause (or several), even if you are not clear on the details. One event that led to another. Cause and effect.

At the quantum level, that is not the case. The classic example is radioactive decay. It just happens at random, there is nothing that happens to an atom to make it fall apart. The standard response to this is that the particle exists within a framework (the laws of physics) and it is that that causes it to fall apart.

But that seems to me to be quite different to what we see at the macroscopic world in the things around us. We suppose:

1. Everything we know in our world has a specific causal event
2. Therefore the radioactive decay of an atom must have a specific causal event

The logic is the same as before (a simple inductive argument), but the conclusion reached is demonstrably false. It is very clear that you cannot use experience of our world to predict what will happen at the quantum scale.

So why suppose you can use experience of our world to predict what will happen at the universe scale?

Also, it is now apparent that the framework is important too. Is this logic sound?

1. Everything we know in our world has a cause
2. Therefore the laws of physics must have had a cause

Absolutely not. And indeed, the way Craig formulates Kalam ("Whatever begins to exist has a cause."), there is no reason to suppose so, as there is no reason to think the laws of physics had a beginning.

The universe began to exist

While is is well-established that this space-time started at the Big Bang some 14 billion years ago, it is not clear what was around before then. It has been suggested that the universe existed infinitely before that point, primed to "explode", or that it is cyclic, expanding and contracting all through time, or that it is but one in a multiverse or...

Craig makes the claim that it had to have a beginning, and he does so by citing cosmologist Alexander Vilenkin. I cannot find any examples of Craig citing Vilenkin, but this is typical, from Uncommon Descent:

But in 2003, a team including Vilenkin and Guth considered what eternal inflation would mean for the Hubble constant, which describes mathematically the expansion of the universe. They found that the equations didn’t work (Physical Review Letters, DOI: 10.1103/physrevlett.90.151301). “You can’t construct a space-time with this property,” says Vilenkin. It turns out that the constant has a lower limit that prevents inflation in both time directions. “It can’t possibly be eternal in the past,” says Vilenkin. “There must be some kind of boundary.”

What this seems to say is that the universe had a definite beginning.

So what is Vilenkin's view on whether God created the universe? This is from an interview, by the way.

Some people claim your work proves the existence of God, or at least of a divine moment of creation. What do you think?

I don’t think it proves anything one way or another.

I went to a meeting of some theologians and cosmologists. Basically, I realized these theologians have the same problem with God. What was He doing before He created the universe? Why did He suddenly decide to create the universe?

For many physicists, the beginning of the universe is uncomfortable, because it suggests that something must have caused the beginning, that there should be some cause outside the universe. In fact, we now have models where that’s not necessary—the universe spontaneously appears, quantum mechanically.

So what does Vilenkin believe? Later in that interview he say:

But this quantum creation from “nothing” seems to avoid these questions. It has a nice mathematical description, not just words. There’s an interesting thing, though; the description of the creation of the universe from nothing is given in terms of the laws of physics. That makes you wonder, where are these laws? If the laws describe the creation of the universe, that suggests they existed prior to the universe. The question that nobody has any idea how to address is where these laws come from and why these laws in particular? So there are a lot of mysteries to keep us working.

So this is like the radioactive decay of an atom. It just happens spontaneously, no cause-and-effect, although it does require the framework of the laws of physics. But that is fine, we can explain that by saying they always existed, and so are excluded from Craig's argument.

However, it is quite possible Vilenkin got it wrong - or more likely Craig is misinterpreting him (here).

The more recent theological claim that Borde, Guth, and Vilenkin have proved that the universe had to have a beginning is also in error. Again, this theorem was derived from general relativity and so is inapplicable to the issue of origins. Furthermore, it is disputed by other authors.44 I asked Vilenkin personally if his theorem required a beginning. His e-mail reply: “No. But it proves that the expansion of the universe must have had a beginning. You can evade the theorem by postulating that the universe was contracting prior to some time.” This is exactly what a number of existing models for the uncreated origin of our universe do.

Here is a paper by Vilenkin that he links to from his university web page, written in 2011. This, we must assume, represents his most recent thinking on the subject of cosmology.

In summary, I have described the new world-view that has emerged from inflationary cosmology. According to this view, inflation is a never-ending process, constantly producing new “bubble universes” with diverse properties. This multiverse picture can be tested both by direct observation of bubble collisions and indirectly, using the principle of mediocrity. The prediction for the dark energy based on this principle has already been confirmed. Here I will mention some other observational tests that have been suggested in the literature.

Craig cites Vilenkin as an authority on cosmology. Does Craig accept this theory too? No. Craig cherry-picks. He gets the quotes that are useful to him, and cites Vilenkin as an authority where it suits him, and ignores Vilenkin where his own pet theory disagrees.



A couple more web sites that address this issue:

http://debunkingwlc.wordpress.com/2010/07/14/borde-guth-vilenkin/
http://www.theaunicornist.com/2012/10/how-william-lane-craig-misrepresents.html