Expert: Jeffrey Eldred - 8/19/2010

Question
QUESTION: Dear expert,


The theist philosopher William Lane Craig make up the famous Kalam Argument:

(1) Anything that begins to exist has a cause
(2) But the Universe begins to exist as well
(3) So it has a cause which transcends space-time, which is atemporal, non-material


It can be argued that causality is only consistent with
time, because the effect occur temporaly AFTER its cause.

=> But Craig answers that a simultaneous causation (where
effect occurs at the "same time" as its cause, without any delay between) is consistent in atemporality.

The atemporal God caused our Universe and exactly at the same time our Universe began to exists


What do your think about it? Is his defence coherent?


         Sincerely

ANSWER: Here is an extended version of the Kalam Argument by William Lane Craig[1] which I will use for reference[1]. It is worth noting that he needs the first three points to establish the fourth point and without the fourth point he doesn't have a God but an abstract property of the universe. I think his defense has a lot of problems – ambiguity in terminology, unnecessary assumptions, and incorrect statements about math or science. One thing to keep in mind is that Craig makes use of a lot of dichotomies which makes him vulnerable to the false dichotomy fallacy[2] - if I can come up with any plausible alternative to what he says than suddenly his task is a lot harder – he suddenly has to explain why his explanation is more plausible rather than just asserting it is the only explanation possible.

Craig establishes well that his notions of 'beginning to exist' and 'causing' trace back to notions human intuition, Aristotelian metaphysics, and Hume's empiricism, but that still does not excuse him from having to properly define terms to avoid equivocation errors. So lets be clear about what this means. What causes a flame on the top of a candle to “begin to exist”? Well the atoms aren't coming into existence (as particles are in the alleged about the origin of the universe), it's just that they snap into the chemical state of combustion. The atoms themselves are in their bound chemical states as a consequence of the orbital states that the electrons are in – in turn a consequence of the wavefunction of the potential of every particle (that includes every force) in the universe. So the 'cause' of a change in state is something like “the immediately prior conditions of the universe which bring about the change of state” and 'begin to exist' means something “move into the state of associated with the thing said to exist” - from this definition it is clear that “existence states” are just ordinary quantum mechanical states and indeed the mathematical treatment of a system particles treats all configurations the same way without any qualitative difference between something “beginning to exist” and any other initial change in states. So now the image we have for causes is a chain of universes each relating to the previous one and I believe this is the concept of causation that Craig is attempting to use.

But physics actually has information loss over time, which means that a complete description of the universe at one point in time is not actually sufficient to describe what happens at the next point of time (“next point in time” is actually a coherent concept[3]), and neither is the complete description of the universe at one point in time sufficient to piece together what happened at the previous point in time. So what are to make of the portion of things that happen that are “indeterminate”? If you think about it they are in the same category as the “cause” of the universe. If Craig can convince me that a free agent is the only thing that could be responsible for the universe, the same logic would apply to these indeterminate events, and similarly if it is sufficient to call these indeterminate events uncaused physical events than the universe would just be another example (In addition to the philosophical similarity, in physics the “Big Bang” is an indeterminate quantum mechanical change in state so it would be unsurprising if they were the same thing). To me just phrasing the question this way makes it apparent what sort of unnecessary assumptions Craig is making when he posits a Creator to start it all – but I'll drag it all out a little later.

Notice that our definition of a cause references the universe at a previous point in time, but when we are talking about the very first moment of the universe it is unclear how this definition might apply. Stephen Hawking makes a similar point in an interview with Richard Darwkins[4]: “However Newton's theory was superceded by Einstein's General Theory of Relativity. In this, time and space were combined to form a curved [ball of] spacetime. This allowed the beginning of the universe to be like the South pole, with degrees of latitude laid for all of time. Asking for a time before the beginning would be like asking for a point South of the South pole.” While you may be tempted to call my (re)definition of cause unfair, my point is that Craig is trying to appeal to our everyday experience to describe something which is outside our everyday experience.

To the describe the origin of the universe (the South pole) in terms of it's cause (a tight circle around the South pole) could involve only points later in time (North). So in other words to get at the description of the South pole is to get outside of the notion of time in this universe. One could talk about what happened earlier in time being retroactively determined – in that case the Big Bang doesn't look any stranger than any hypothetical end of the universe. Or one could talk about objects existing not only in space but also in time – so what it means for their to be anything right now is the same thing as what it means for their to have been something which “caused it” and something that will be “caused by it” but only a finite extent in both directions (imagine laying a string on a piece of paper where one axis of the piece of paper is space and the other time – it isn't a matter of cutting up the string in bits and arranging them in sequence of a line but just placing the string on the paper). No matter which way you pose it the real question is not “Why is the Big Bang like this?” but “Why is the whole of space and time like this?”. I actually prefer when people make these sorts of arguments for God, because it removes the incentive to misrepresent (or misunderstand) scientific facts about biology and cosmology . The question “Why is there anything at all?” (and why God is a lousy answer to that question) is a question that I have attempted to address in a previous AllExperts post[5]

If you've noticed what I did by describing the universe as inclusive of both space and time is that I've made a distinction between time as we perceive it and time as it is “determined”, “calculated”, or “created”. As I have described in detail previously[6], the rules of physics dictate that we perceive things in a certain order, but there is no reason to think that future events are any less “certain” than past ones. Imagine you spent your whole life walking backwards – it would be unreasonable to assume that things only came into existence when you saw them – even if you could never say for sure one way or another. I can see why it may not have occurred to Craig that the universe is not being actively set up – given that he already believes in a interventionist God and probably things an ill-defined notion of “free will” somehow invalidates that – but this is all things that he has assumed that are not only unnecessary but I think likely incorrect.

Once we've gotten the notion of events in time being “calculated” in any order, Craig is also assuming the universe cannot be an infinite set just because it is bounded [7] and closed [8] [9] – the universe could take an number of infinite steps back in time and it may even do this while never actually reaching it's destination (like in Zeno's paradoxes[10]). This describes a situation that puts an “infinite temporal regress of events” more in the category of a “potential infinite” that Craig permits than an “actual infinite” that Craig does not permit[1] (actually I actually don't think Craig's argument against actual infinites works, i.e. “I find the math unintuitive therefore it does not exist”, and this is another reason why he ought to take a course in real analysis[9] which describes set theory and the mathematical meaning of infinity). Again, the right question is not “what is the first element in the set?” but “what is the set?”

So far I have been able to attack Craig's first three premises in the following ways:
A) Craig can't appeal to our experience of sequences of events to attempt to describe the origin of the universe, because the first event universe doesn't have a prior event in the universe.
B) If Craig attempts to appeal to indeterminate quantum mechanical events as an (appropriate) analogy for the origin of the universe, he will find that there is nothing further to say (no need for God).
C) Craig is unduly focusing on the origin of the universe, which may not even exist in the sense he wants, when he should be focusing on the notion of the universe as a whole object in space and time – this is a separate argument that renders his 4 premise largely useless and I attempt to address here[5].

The various points in his fourth premise has problems as well, let me go through my thoughts briefly. In 4.1, Craig sets up a dichotomy which I believe is false in that 4.12 seems to be knocking down a strawman[11] or an unestablished claim while 4.13 seems to be an ill-defined, possibly incoherent concept. Notice also that 4.1 attempts to establish a creator which is “personal” which means free acting (whatever that means), but there is the danger of equivocating if he uses it to imply a being that interventionist, emotional, or concerned about human individuals. 4.21, 4.22, 4.23, and 4.25 attempt to describe being as a God who does not need an explanation, but he has described cause in terms of sequences of events, not in terms of “needs to be justified”. Furthermore those same statements could be applied instead to the universe as a whole and used to exclude God. Still more, the changeless nature of God seems to be at odds with the notion of causing something else to be – why isn't He constantly cranking out universes or always in the act of creating the one universe? In 4.27, bringing the universe into creation may indeed imply that God is a powerful cause, but we have to be careful not to think this use of the term “powerful” means that God necessarily has control over this power in any capacity (Got could be say, a copy of our universe which has the property of dividing like an amoeba and producing extra universes). In 4.28 and 4.281, Craig makes a fine-tuning argument which is a premise that I don't give him in the least. I don't think I've written a lot on the fine-tuning argument on AllExperts yet, so feel free to do a follow-up if you feel it is necessary, but suffice to say that cosmologists and particle physicists alike tend to scoff at the notion of God being necessary to explain the parameters of the universe.

Links and Footnotes:
[1] http://www.leaderu.com/offices/billcraig/docs/craig-smith1.html
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_dichotomy
[3] (modern theories of quantum mechanics theories call for discrete units space-time. In this respect the universe is something like a flip-book animation where many related pictures in rapid succession create the illusion of continuous motion.)
[4] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CMJFfaKZXRs
[5] http://en.allexperts.com/q/Atheism-2724/2009/9/x-17.htm
[6] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shape_of_the_Universe#Open_or_closed
[7] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bounded_set (The set {(1, 2, 3 } is finite, bounded, and closed[8]; the set {1/n}, where 'n' is a natural number (1,2,3,4...), is infinite, bounded, and not closed; the set {1/n} U {0} is infinite, bounded, and closed)
[8] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closed_set
[9] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_analysis
[10] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeno%27s_paradoxes#The_dichotomy_paradox
[11] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strawman

---------- FOLLOW-UP ----------

QUESTION: Thank you for your reply.

What bothers me the most is when Craig thinks that
even a timeless entity can "a priori" have thoughts and volition.

But thinking and will both require some change, so require time, no?

To Craig, since timeless God doesn't loose his thoughts nor gain ones more and is aware of all his thoughts, positing a thinking "entity" in tenseless realm doesn't produce contradictions.


What do you think about this?


         Sincerely

Answer
Yes, I think this is a very big problem for Craig's conception of God.

To me the only truly timeless, omnipresent God would be one who is simultaneously in all parts of space and time in the universe - From God's point of view he is performing miracles in the deserts of Bronze Age Israel, while listening to a child's prayer in the 21st century, while overseeing the formation of stars. In this scheme it is only humans that see an apparent change as they only glimpse one time of the universe. This means that God knows what we are going to do before we do it, and that is why believers typically have an aversion to the idea. Probably because it makes the logic problem of evil[12] much harder because one is not to be able to claim "free will" fixes it all (even though I don't think there is a coherent concept of "free will" that does fix it). From the rhetoric of Craig, I suspect he is a believer who thinks it is necessary for God not to know the future but be constantly involved in it.

That leaves two choices:
1) God does not learn and does not remember. This means His actions (however complex) can be described only as a consequence of how the universe is. Essentially this reduces him to another rule of physics (or if one prefers, all the rules of physics). Not being able to wait to create a universe and not constantly creating universes, it makes God an event that only makes sense when they universe exists.
2) God learns, but I don't think that means he can be changeless. For one thing, it means the way that he interacts with the world is changed. If we hold God to the same standard we hold other beings, we judge Him by his actions, and if His actions change than He does.

If one is attempting to connect this hypothetical deity to the Judeo-Christian God, than there are many times in the Bible that God appears to learn new information or change his mind[13]. But here is a Bible Studies AllExperts answer[14] to that question by someone named  Pastor Don Carpenter, who gives what seems to me to be a flatly contradictory answer in which God does not change but his mind does. If I were to be a little more charitable, the analogy for "God versus God's mind" would be something like "the hardware versus the software of a computer" or "the composition of the brain versus it's particular activation state". At that point however, it seems like being "changeless" is a mere technicality and that it defeats the purpose of declaring God to be "changeless" in the first place.

More Links:
[12] http://en.allexperts.com/q/Atheism-2724/2009/12/Best-best.htm
[13] http://www.biblegateway.com/ Off the top of my head - when God learns that Adam and Eve have eaten from the Tree of Knowledge (Genesis 3:13), when God learns the world is so wicked he decides to undo his work and flood the world (Genesis 6:5-8), and when God is made to rethink punishing the Israelites by Moses (Exodus 32:9-14).
[14] http://en.allexperts.com/q/Bible-Studies-1654/god-change-mind-1.htm