This continues the arguments in favor of theism. If you're interested in how these arguments proceed or why I'm providing them, take a look at the first post in this series (Theism Part One) where I explain that, or post in the comments and I can seek to justify why, in an Orthodox context that generally dislikes syllogistic argumentation, I'm providing a syllogistic argument.
The following two arguments work together as a sort of super-charged version of the argument for God as "first cause." The first, the Kalam argument, is most likely the one people are familiar with. Typically, people know it in its rhetorical (rather than philosophical) form: How do we know there's a God? Well, who else could have created the universe?
In other words, there is an implied rhetorical question (called the question of "cosmology"). It goes like this: "Why is there something, rather than nothing?" Ultimately, people fall into one of two camps on this question. They either say "There just is" (sometimes called the "brute-force" or "materialist" viewpoint) or they say "Something willed that there be something rather than nothing."
Of course, if we answer the second way, people are rather proud to ask what they THINK is the nail in the coffin against belief in God: "Well, who made God then? Who willed that GOD should exist?" Put more philosophically, the theistic answer can appear to delay the question rather than answer it. The statement "Something willed that there be something rather than nothing" pre-supposes a "something" doing the creating. That just pushes the debate back one, doesn't it?
Not so. And I'll use the Kalam and Finite-Past arguments to present the reasons why after the jump:
The basic Kalam argument I'll quote directly from The Handbook of Catholic Apologetics. If you're interested in apologetics, get this book. It provides approachable, but philosophically deep, arguments on behalf of Christianity. It is intellectually rigorous (written by two philosophy professors) but very, very readible. To me, it is the best book on apologetics currently on the market. I can't recommend it highly enough.
They state the Kalam argument this way:
P1: Whatever begins to exist has a cause for its coming into being
P2: The universe began to exist.
C: Therefore the universe has a cause for its coming into being.
The conclusion follows flawlessly from the first two premises, so if someone were to object they'd have to refute one of the two premises. The first premise is awfully hard to refute. Go ahead and try! Provide ONE verifiable example of something coming into being (beginning to exist, such that it did not at all exist before) WITHOUT an evident or plausibly evident cause. Everything we know of that has begun to exist has a cause (or, presumably, we can find a cause). We, by the sheer volume of observation, see everything as caused.
Some might, then, object to premise two. Perhaps the universe is itself without beginning. This is impossible, though. First, the universe isn't a thing - its a collection of things, and these things are all caused (by evident observation - again, provide a counter-example). A really really really large number (not infinite, or the big-bang would have been a literal impossibility as infinity cannot confined the way the big-bang demands that all things were confined in one singularity) of caused things cannot add up to an uncaused thing. That's like saying a really really really large number of 1+1 additions could somehow add up to infininty. Try it. The point of infinity is that it is beyond bound - unbound.
This is the real heart of the argument. To propose that the universe is itself without a beginning is, to translate, to propose that the past is INFINITE. This is a contradiction, though, and I'll use the argument for a Finite-Past to demonstrate it.
P1: Infinity, by definition, is an unbound thing.
P2: The past is, by definition, completed.
P3: Completion is a bound.
C: The past is not infinite
Premise one is irrefutable (without committing the fallacy of equivocation by changing the operating definition of infinity). Premise two can be objected to, but only superficially. In all honesty, the definition of past is "things that have happened." In other words, things that are completed - done, no longer current. We could try and change the definition of past, but again that would be equivocation. Premise three is self-evident, and the conclusion follows. The syllogism holds. The past must be finite. As such, the universe (itself being space-time and all they contain) must have a beginning since, by the above syllogism, there can be no infinite past. There must, then, be a finite past - a beginning. And if a beginning, there must be a cause.
Some might still object, failing to understand the syllogism. Put simply, it says this: you cannot arrive at a point AFTER infinity. There really isn't any infinity PLUS ONE - that child's game doesn't work. If you could add to infininty, you wouldn't operating with real infinity (again, that's equivocation on the terminology). The FUTURE is unbound (having not yet happened) and may, therefore, be infinite. But the PAST cannot. The present is a moment AFTER the past - it is the "plus one" - and that cannot come after infinity. The past must, therefore, not be infinite or we'd literally never have been able to arrive at the present.
So there's a beginning, and therefore a cause.
This cause, by default, would have to be uncaused. Also, since time is finite in the past, this cause must be BEFORE or ABOVE (outside of) time. Conveniently, this matches perfectly with the argument from change (the idea that this creator is above and beyond all change). Change implies chronology - one is one thing, then LATER is another thing. If the creator is ABOVE time then, logically, the creator is ABOVE change.
If objections are still raised that the creator would then need a cause, remind them that this just implies the same list of impossibly-infinite causation which we just refuted. At some point, somewhere back beyond the distant reaches of observable reality, there is a First Cause. There has to be, logically speaking. Whatever that is, that's what we're referring to.
A helpful analogy: we see that our room is visible (that is, illumined) - this allows us to deduce that light is coming from somewhere as light causes illumination. If someone demanded "What illumines the light, hmmm?" we'd just blink at them: the light is utterly different from the illumination. It's a different class of "thing" - the light IS illumination in and of itself, illumining other things. The First Cause IS cause in itself - therefore it is uncaused. Its a different class of things. We know it is there because without it, nothing could exist nor could we reach the present. Just as we don't have to see the light source to know when light is illumining something, so we are able to deduce the existence of the First Cause by virtue of there BEING things that are caused - and we can deduce that there is a Beyond-Time because of the finite nature of the past.
So the arguments, so far, mesh very well and point to the same reality: a creator above change and above time, who is in turn the cause of change and the cause of time.
In Christ,
Macarius
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