THE KALAM COSMOLOGICAL
ARGUMENT FOR THE
EXISTENCE OF GOD
 This Powerpoint presentation is
prepared by Dr. Peter Vardy, VicePrincipal of Heythrop College,
University of London for
Heythrop College,
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University of London, is
the specialist theology and
Philosophy College of the
University. It offers
undergraduate and
postgraduate courses in
Theology, Philosophy,
Philosophy of Religion and
Ethics. www.heythrop.ac.uk
The Philosophic goldfish
 Imagine you are a goldfish swimming happily in a
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goldfish pond.
Imagine you are a philosophic goldfish who is not
just interested in enjoying yourself, mating and
eating, eating, mating and enjoying yourself, but
instead wishes to work out what caused the pond.
You might conclude that whatever caused the pond
would not be like anything within the pond – it
would not be wet and fishy.
Similarly, whatever caused the Universe would not
be something within the Universe. Whatever
caused the Universe would have to be nontemporal and non-spatial: Timeless and Spaceless.
It is the existence of this ‘something’ that the
Cosmological arguments try to establish.
ISLAMIC PHILOSOPHY
 The Holy Qu’ran called Muslims to reasoning and to seek
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learning. This led to philosophy being taken seriously and
ancient Greek philosophic texts being made available in
Arabic.
Patronage by key figures led to the establishment of
centres of learning in Cairo and Baghdad.
Islamic philosophy had an identity separate from Theology
and was referred to as kalam - but it also depended on
religion.
The SHIA, particularly the ISMAILI branch of the Shia, had
a particular dedication to philosophy and its application to
expanding understanding of religion and revelation.
In the 12th Century, many of the Arabic philosophic works
were translated into Latin and, to an extent, into Hebrew.
ESSENCE AND EXISTENCE
– Philo (the Jewish philosopher strongly influenced by Plato),
– Kalam philosophers after Al-Ghazali, and
– The Thomist tradition
all affirmed that, in God, essence and existence are not
distinct.
 However they claimed that in the case of all created
things (including the Universe as a whole) essence and
existence are distinct. This meant that the existence of
the Universe had to depend on God and the Universe
had to be brought into existence.
 Again this pointed to the Kalam argument as the world
had to begin to exist (something Aristotle had denied).
THE KALAM ARGUMENT
 William Lane Craig has re-visited the Kalam
argument which originated amongst Islamic
philosophers. His statement of it is as follows:
 1) Whatever begins to exist has a cause
 2) The Universe began to exist
 3) Therefore, the universe has a cause.
 Premise (1) seems probable. The problem is with
premise (2). It relies on rejection of the possibility
of an infinite regress (something that Leibniz sought
to establish by the Principle of Sufficient Reason – cf
the Cosmological argument notes and slides).
KALAM &
 NOTE the difference between the
CONTINGENCY KALAM argument and the argument
from CONTINGENCY
ARGUMENTS  The Contingency arguments (e.g.
arguments such as St. Thomas
Aquinas’ ‘Five Ways’) seek to
establish the dependence of the
universe on God now. They seeks to
show there is something DE RE
necessary on which the contingent
Universe depends
 The Kalam argument, by contrast,
seeks to establish the Universe has a
beginning and that this beginning was
caused.
 (THE PICTURE ON THE LEFT IS
THEREFORE WRONG!! This is the
Kalam not Aquinas’ argument)!
PREMISES OF THE KALAM
ARGUMENT (1)
 ‘Whatever begins to exist has a cause’
 This is debatable now – there is some
evidence at the quantum level that there are
uncaused causes. Once one uncaused
cause can be established, then the
argument collapses.
 Even if the Big Bang did occur, then some
scientists have indicated that it is uncaused
– a bubble formed in nothing and the total
amount of positive and negative energy in
the universe is zero.
PREMISES OF THE
KALAM ARGUMENT (2)
‘The Universe began to exist’
The Big Bang theory seems to support the Kalam
Argument. The Big Bang has NOT yet been
proved, but it remains a plausible hypothesis.
Some hold that there was no beginning as there
was a preceding state that would explain the
Big Bang….
However talk of a ‘preceding state’ may not
make sense as matter AND time are held to
have come into existence immediately after the
singularity from which the Universe is held to
have developed.
Craig’s a priori argument
against an infinite regress
 Craig rejects the possibility of an infinite
regress.
 Imagine a library with an infinite number of red
and an infinite number of black books.
 The number of red and black books together
would then equal the number of red books.
 So a subset of the total library would contain
half the volumes and yet this would equal all the
volumes.
Actual versus potential infinites
 Aristotle distinguished between:
 ACTUAL INFINITES – which would be an
infinite at a given moment in time, and
 POTENTIAL INFINITES – which would be an
infinite that was not actualised but which we
were moving towards.
 Central to Craig’s argument is whether the
Universe is an ACTUAL infinite if it had no
beginning. If it is, then his argument seems
cogent. If it is not, then his argument fails as it
only applies to actual infinites.
The Big Bang
 The Big Bang, the initial singularity, exploded at a rate
faster than the speed of light. Nuclear explosions took
place giving rise to concentrations of hydrogen and
helium and some of the lithium found in inter-stellar
space.
 After, perhaps, 300 000 years, the initial fireball dropped
to a temperature a little below the present temperature of
the sun allowing electrons to form orbits round atoms and
releasing photons or light.
 This initial flash can today be measured as background
radiation at microwave frequencies equivalent to a
temperature of about 2.7 kelvin (The kelvin scale begins at
absolute zero and this temperature is equivalent to
273.16 degrees centigrade).
 The big bang theory appears to explain a great deal, but
Problems with the Big Bang
theory
 The Hubble Space telescope has been measuring distances to other
galaxies and these observations suggest that the universe is much
younger than the big bang theory implies. This is because the
universe is expanding much faster than previously assumed – this
implies a cosmic age of as little as eight billion years - about half
the current estimate. On the other side, other data indicates that
certain stars are at least 14 billion years old.
 A group of astronomers who have become known as ‘The Seven
Samaurai’ have found evidence of what they call ‘The Great
Attractor’ located near the southern constellations of Hydra and
Cantaurus which draw stars towards it.
 Big Bang theorists maintain that the initial explosion was extremely
smooth - this is based on the uniformity of the background
radiation left behind. However Margaret Geller, John Huchra and
others at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophy’ have found
a great wall of galaxies about 500 million lights years in length
across the northern sky. These seems difficult to explain based on a
uniform big-bang.
IF THE BIG BANG THEORY IS TRUE
There are still two rival hypotheses:
 The Oscillating Universe model. This holds that
the universe goes through an infinite series of
cycles, expanding and then contracting into a
singularity before expanding again.
 The Infinitely expanding Universe model. This
holds that there was an initial explosion from
the singularity and the Universe will keep
expanding forever from this.
 The Kalam argument depends on the
second of these being true as on the first
there need be no beginning.
SCIENCE CANNOT HELP!
 There is no certainty from science on the origins of the
Universe. The Big Bang theory still seems plausible but
there are many alternatives.
 One theory is ‘continuous creation’ - that matter is
continually coming into existence.
 Even if the Big Bang theory is right and the Universe is
expanding infinitely, there seems no way of proving that
the universe might not have had a cause.
 One trouble with the Kalam argument is that the more it
seems to rely on science, the more vulnerable it is to
science offering alternative explanations.
THE KEY ISSUE
 The key issue for all the Comsological arguments is possibly whether
the world as a brute fact (Russell) is more self-explanatory than
God (Copleston) as the cause of the Universe.
 Hick and Swinburne take different views on this. It is essential, if
the argument is to succeed, to show why God is the better ultimate
explanation.
 Swinburne ('The Existence of God') maintains that God is a
SIMPLER explanation than the brute fact of the universe because
God provides a personal explanation - but this is debatable.
Aquinas considered that God was metaphysically simple (this is the
defining characteristic of the Thomist God on which other features
such as God's timelessness, immutability, spacelessness, etc.
depend) but this is VERY different from saying that God provides a
simple explanation.
 Also, it is one thing to say God is personal, but it is far from clear
what this means when applied to the wholly simple God - it certainly
cannot be understood univocally, it does not have a similar meaning
to a human being who is seen as personal.
BACK TO THE GOLDFISH
 The philosophic Goldfish may not be able to conclusively
prove that God exists by using the Cosmological
argument BUT his questioning may nevertheless be
entirely valid.
 Why SHOULD there be a pond? What caused it? Where
did it come from? These are entirely reasonable
questions.
 Similarly the human questions about the origin of the
Universe, about where it came from and what meaning
and significance it has for our lives are as valid today as
ever in the past. There may be no simple answers, but
that does not mean the search for answers is not of
central importance for all human beings.