In my experience, most opponents and skeptics of theism reject theistic arguments on less than epistemically justifiable grounds. For example, premise one of the kalam cosmological argument proposes that “everything which begins to exist has a cause” (and concludes that since the universe began to exist, the universe has a cause). Some detractors of the argument will counter that since our only experience with cause and effect is within the spatio-temporal world, we cannot be certain that causation is possible outside the spatio-temporal world. While I think this is a fair point to consider, does it really undermine the premise, and hence the conclusion? It doesn’t seem to me that it does. While it is possible that the principle of cause and effect does not apply beyond the temporal framework of our universe, unless one can demonstrate that non-temporal causality is incoherent/impossible, the mere logically possibility that the principle of causality does not hold outside of the universe does not override the warrant we have for thinking all effects require an antecedent cause (and that contingent things require an external cause).
William Lane Craig has offered a good set of criteria for what constitutes a good deductive argument, as well as what kind of epistemic justification is required before one can legitimately reject the conclusion of such an argument:
Now keep in mind what I mean by a “good argument.” I mean an argument which (i) is logically valid; (ii) has true premisses; and (iii) has premisses which are more plausible than their negations. In order to show that an argument is no good, it is not enough for the sceptic to show that it’s possible that a premiss is false. Possibilities come cheap. I’m puzzled that so many laymen seem to think that merely stating another possibility is sufficient to defeat a premiss. This is mistaken, for the premisses of an argument need be neither necessary nor certain in order for that argument to be a good one. The detractor of the argument needs to show either that the premiss in question is false or that its negation is just as plausibly true as the premiss itself.
Just because it is logically possible for a premise to be false does not mean one is justified in rejecting it. So it is with premise one of the kalam cosmological argument. Given the preponderance of the evidence, there is neither reason to believe the premise is false, nor that its negation is just as plausible or more plausible than the premise itself. As such, one would be intellectually dishonest to dismiss the kalam argument on the basis that one of its premises cannot be known with certainty. After all, such is the case with virtually all premises.
For additional reading see my article titled Skepticism is Not Worthy of Belief, as well as my posts Could we be wrong about Christianity? and Are our Senses Reliable?
Thinking to Believe 
December 8, 2010 at 5:25 pm
Some skeptics respond to the first premise of the KCA by saying we have never seen anything actually come into existence; we only see matter and energy take different forms. Do you have a response to this line of argument?
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December 8, 2010 at 6:15 pm
jayman777,
Excellent question. Yes, I do have an answer. The problem with this objection is that it defines “begins to exist” in a very narrow way, as a creation ex nihilo. This is clearly not the definition of “begins to exist” employed in premise 1 of the KCA, and as such, the objection is a straw-man. “Begins to exist,” as it is used in the KCA, simply means to come into being. William Lane Craig defines it even more precisely:
“For an entity e and time t, e begins to exist (comes into being) if “(i) e exists at t, (ii) t is the first time at which e exists, (iii) there is no state of affairs in the actual world in which e exists timelessly, and (iv) e’s existing at t is a tensed fact.”
For the detractor’s objection to successfully undercut premise 1 of the KCA, he would have to demonstrate that the above definition of “begins to exist” is either false, or irrelevant to the question of causality. I don’t think either attempt can succeed. The definition we employ is clearly the most common definition of “begins to exist,” so the definition cannot be false. It is also relevant to the question of causality because we know through our uniform experience that things which did not exist at time t1, but do exist at time t2 required a cause to come into existence at time t2. If we cannot obviate the need for a causal entity to bring a new form of matter into existence by re-arranging pre-existing matter, then how much more can we not obviate the need for a causal entity to bring a new material entity into existence from no pre-existing materials! Nothing cannot become something without a sufficient cause.
Jason
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December 8, 2010 at 8:15 pm
Jason:
I understand the KCA to be: (1) whatever begins to exist (out of nothing or out of something) has a cause; (2) the universe began to exist (out of nothing); (3) therefore, the universe has a cause. This is clearly a valid argument.
But, since you object to defining “begins to exist” as creation out of nothing, you seem to believe the KCA to be: (1) whatever beings to exist (out of something) has a cause; (2) the universe began to exist (out of nothing?); (3) therefore, the universe has a cause. But this argument is invalid and I doubt it is what you wanted to convey.
Our experience confirms that whatever begins to exist out of something has a cause. The skeptic won’t accept our intuition that something cannot come from nothing. It is noteworthy that Aquinas’ First and Second Ways avoid this objection.
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December 9, 2010 at 11:42 am
I love the pic.
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December 9, 2010 at 8:04 pm
Hello,
I believe Isa. says it all.
Isa 45:7
I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the LORD do all these things.
I form the light, and dispatch darkness: I make peace, and dispatch calamity: I the Lord do all these things.
Charles
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December 10, 2010 at 12:29 am
Jayman777,
You are correct…that is not what I intended to convey. In denying that the KCA defines “begins to exist” in the narrow sense of creation ex nihilo, I did not mean to exclude entities created ex nihilo from the purview of the KCA. My point was merely that the definition employed by the KCA is obviously not limited to such entities.
What I am arguing is that “begins to exist” is a temporal concept that is wholly indifferent to the material source of the entity in question. Something which begins to exist includes any entity that is temporally finite, regardless of that entity’s material source (or to couch this in Aristotelian language, the “material cause”). So long as the entity in question is not eternal, then it can be said to “begin to exist” regardless of its origin. This is why I find your parenthetical additions of “out of something” and “out of nothing” next to the premises of the KCA to be misguided: it makes it seem as if the premises are focusing on the material origin of entities rather than their temporal origin.
To keep with your way of representing the issue, I would write the argument as follows:
P1 Whatever begins to exist (in time; i.e. has a finite past) has a cause
P2 The universe began to exist (in time; i.e has a finite past)
C Therefore, the universe has a cause.
I agree with you that our uniform experience confirms that whatever begins to exist out of something has a cause. But as I noted in my initial response, if this is true for things that begin to exist from pre-existing materials, then we have all the more reason to believe it is true of things that come into existence out of nothing. Would it make any sense for me to say, “We know from experience that in order for a car to begin to exist out of a pile of metal, it must be caused to do so, but there’s no reason to think a cause is needed to bring a car into being from absolutely nothing!”?
You say the skeptic won’t accept this, calling it an “intuition.” I think it is more than a modal intuition. I think it can be rationally demonstrated. There is no rational basis on which to affirm that something can come from nothing. From nothing, nothing comes. Something only comes from something. It is metaphysically impossible to get something from nothing. While existing things have potential to become something else, “nothing” has no potential to become anything because nothing is literally no-thing. Potentiality only inheres within existents. If there was ever a time when nothing existed, then there would be nothing still. The only way for some X to begin to exist ex nihilo is for some Y to cause it to exist.
Jason
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December 10, 2010 at 6:39 pm
Jayman777,
I have some more thoughts on your question I wanted to share with you.
Building on my last paragraph, I think the point to be made is that if the principle of causation applies to the less difficult (creation out of something), then this is good reason to think it applies to the more difficult (creation out of nothing) as well.
Think about it. If things that come into existence within the universe must have both a material and efficient cause (meaning they are created from something, and by something), why think the universe itself requires neither? It’s hard enough to conceive of how physical stuff could come into being without a material cause (source), but it’s unbelievable to think physical stuff could come into being without either a material or efficient cause. As William Lane Craig says, this is worse than magic, for at least when the magician pulls a rabbit from his hat, we have a magician to do so. But those who wish to think the universe could just pop into existence from nothing completely uncaused don’t even have a magician!
Why would any rational person think this is possible? If I had a new car in my driveway, and you asked me where I got it, and I told you, “It just popped into existence here in my driveway. No one made it happen. It just happened by itself,” you would either laugh me out of court or have me admitted to a psych ward. So why think someone who responds to the KCA by saying, “Well, our only experience with causality is limited to things made from pre-existing material, so there’s no reason to think that things that come into being from nothing require a cause as well” is being rational? If the principle applies to things within the universe that have a material source, then it should apply all the more to the universe itself which has no material source.
Indeed, our universal experience tells us that the first premise is true. We don’t know of a single exception, so on what grounds do we stand for doubting it applies to origin of the universe itself? If our universal experience is that every thing that comes into being requires an antecedent, external cause, then we are prima facie justified in thinking that causes are necessary to bring any contingent thing into existence. Since the universe is a contingent entity, then it needs a cause. There is no rational reason to doubt this.
I contend that if the KCA did not involve a theistic conclusion, and if that conclusion did not have existential implications for atheists’ lives, I doubt that any would object to the 1st premise. They object because they don’t want to believe the conclusion. But like I wrote in the post, just saying “it’s possible that X” doesn’t mean X is more likely than Y. And for the atheist to successfully undercut the premises of the KCA (and thus dismiss the argument), s/he must demonstrate that the negation of either premise is more probable than the affirmation. I fail to see how any honest individual can believe it the negation of premise 1 is more plausible than its affirmation. Surely it is not more plausible that “whatever begins to exist does not have a cause” is more plausible than “whatever begins to exist has a cause.”
Jason
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December 10, 2010 at 6:39 pm
Jayman777,
I ran across something that William Lane Craig wrote that is similar to the objection you raised (http://www.reasonablefaith.org/site/News2?page=NewsArticle&id=5705).
A questioner posed the following objection to Craig: “When we observe efficient causation we observe something acting on another thing to bring about some result. I think that I can understand what it means, for example, for a person to act on a block to cause a statue. I think that this is a perfectly intelligible notion of causation. But what would it be for a person to act upon nothing in such a way as to bring about an effect. Efficient causation as creation or ‘bringing about’ is an acting upon a thing. So whatever causation you have in mind here is radically different than anything we usually understand by the term. And the less I understand this notion of causation, the less inclined I find myself inclined to consider the God hypothesis to be the better explanation.”
Craig responded: “It seems to me that what you’re really arguing is the following: The justification which I offer in support of premiss (1), namely (A), actually supports a stronger premiss, namely,
1´. Whatever begins to exist must have both an efficient and a material cause.
But then the kalam argument would look like this:
1´. Whatever begins to exist must have both an efficient and a material cause.
2. The universe began to exist.
3. Therefore, the universe had both an efficient and a material cause.”
This seems to be similar to what you were saying. Of course, this particular form of the argument is incoherent because the universe cannot have a material cause.”
Jason
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December 10, 2010 at 6:39 pm
Jayman777,
I’m keeping these rolling. I found another definition for “begins to exist” from Craig: “’In order for something to come into existence, there must be a time t such that the thing exists at t and there is no time t* earlier than t at which the thing exists,’ or more simply, ‘In order for anything to come into existence, there has to be a first moment of its existence.’”
He also specifically deals specifically with the objection you raised that since everything we see comes from pre-existing materials, then nothing we see truly began to exist:
“The video tells us that the atoms of a watch have existed as long as the universe itself has existed, and that this is the same with everything in the universe. Never mind that atoms have not, as a matter of fact, existed as long as the universe; the more fundamental confusion is obviously the conflation of a thing with the material out of which the thing is made. Because the atoms currently composing my body have always existed, have I always existed? Did I exist during the Jurassic Age and the era of galaxy formation? If such a conclusion is not evidently absurd, reflect: I have certain essential properties, properties without which I could not exist. For example, it is essential to me that I am a human being. But my atoms prior to my conception were not a human being. Therefore, they were not I. Moreover, medical science tells us that every seven years the material constituents of my body are almost completely replaced by new constituents. So prior to my conception which set of constituents that have formed my body over my lifetime were me? The video’s suggestion that nothing has come into existence is therefore ludicrous.”
http://www.reasonablefaith.org/site/News2?page=NewsArticle&id=6515
He deals with this objection in another place as well. Apparently Adolf Grunbaum objects to the KCA’s conception of causality on the basis that “the concept is used equivocally, since in the premiss it refers to causes which transform previously existing materials from one state to another, whereas in the conclusion it refers to a cause which creates ex nihilo.”
Craig responds by noting: “The univocal concept of ‘cause’ employed in premiss and conclusion alike is the concept of efficient causality, that is to say, something which produces or brings into being its effects. Whether such production involves transformation of previously existing materials or creation ex nihilo is completely incidental. That this is so is evident from the fact that the proponent of the argument must confront and deal with the objection that the first cause may not have created ex nihilo, but instead transformed an eternal, quiescent universe into a universe in change (Goetz [1989]). So the argument is clearly not equivocal.”
http://www.reasonablefaith.org/site/News2?page=NewsArticle&id=5176
In other words, the material origin of the thing that begins to exist is irrelevant. What matters is whether it was caused.
Jason
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December 12, 2010 at 9:41 pm
Jason,
You quote Craig as saying:
Now keep in mind what I mean by a “good argument.” I mean an argument which (i) is logically valid; (ii) has true premisses; and (iii) has premisses which are more plausible than their negations. In order to show that an argument is no good, it is not enough for the sceptic to show that it’s possible that a premiss is false. Possibilities come cheap. I’m puzzled that so many laymen seem to think that merely stating another possibility is sufficient to defeat a premiss. This is mistaken, for the premisses of an argument need be neither necessary nor certain in order for that argument to be a good one. The detractor of the argument needs to show either that the premiss in question is false or that its negation is just as plausibly true as the premiss itself.
I don’t think the KCA meets his test for a “good argument.” It fails (ii) and (iii). It’s not true that everything, both inside and outside of the multiverse, has a cause (or, at the very least, there is no information whatsoever as to the rules are outside of the universe). The negation of that is at least as plausible as the premise.
It’s comparable to looking at a Pac-Man arcade machine, noting that the image of Pac-Man moves in the direction to which a joystick is pressed the rate of three inches per second except when he hits a wall, and concluding that, if the outside walls were removed and you held the joystick to the right, the image of Pac-Man would float through the air to the right of the monitor. That would be wrong. Just because something applies within a closed system doesn’t mean it applies outside of the system.
Craig is right that a possibility isn’t sufficient to defeat a premise. If you claim that unicorns do not exist, the mere possibility that unicorns might exist isn’t enough to defeat your premise. But the KCA’s problems are far more serious than that.
Arthur
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December 13, 2010 at 7:03 am
Jason,
I looked up William Lane Craig and listened to his statement on the existence of evil. The problem he addresses, of course, is the difficulty in reconciling the idea of an omniscient, omnipotent and omnibenevolent God with the existence of horrendous evil. Craig hangs his hat on the extremely unlikely possibility that somehow, someway, allowing extreme and mass evil could somehow be moral from God’s viewpoint. He says we’re not in a good position to know whether God’s actions are as evil as they appear, given God’s perfect knowledge of the future.
I find that remarkable. He expects us to believe that we’re not in a good position to determine the rightness of God’s actions, but we are in a good position to determine the scientific laws in effect prior to the existence of the multiverse? The most likely conclusion, in my view, is that we can clearly and accurately judge the morality of God’s actions/inactions, but we simply cannot determine the way things work outside of the multiverse due to a complete lack of evidence. Craig takes the opposite view in both cases, which he must do in order to reach his predetermined conclusions. By refusing to accept the obvious about God’s morality by relying on a possibility so remote as to render it effectively impossible, while simultaneously being willing to make firm conclusions about how causation works outside of the multiverse despite a complete lack of any evidence whatsoever, it casts suspicion on all of his reasoning.
Arthur
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December 13, 2010 at 12:39 pm
Arthur,
Regarding #10, you claim that “it’s not true that everything, both inside and outside of the multiverse, has a cause.” How could you possibly know that? Granted, you go on to say “there is no information whatsoever as to the rules are outside of the universe,” but this doesn’t help justify your skepticism. If there is no information about how things work outside the physical universe, how can you confidently say it’s not true that everything has a cause?
And given our universal experience of causation as it relates to contingent things, what is your basis for being skeptical about the universe itself? If both our intuitions and our universal experience tell us that every contingent being must be caused to come into being, how can you say that the negation of premise 1 is just as plausible as the premise itself? On what grounds? It can’t be on empirical grounds, for this supports premise 1. And given the fact that the causal principle is one of the most basic of our modal intuitions, I fail to see how you could appeal to our modal intuitions either.
Jason
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December 13, 2010 at 12:46 pm
Arthur,
Regarding #11, no, Craig would not claim “ we are in a good position to determine the scientific laws in effect prior to the existence of the multiverse” because (1) there couldn’t be any natural laws prior to the origin of nature itself, and (2) there is no empirical evidence for a multiverse.
As for Craig’s statement about evil, I don’t see anything fallacious about it. He’s simply making the point that from our limited perspective, some evil may seem gratuitious, but that from God’s perspective it may serve some larger moral good in the overall scheme of things. If anything, he’s advocating epistemic humility, rather than the hubris that atheists represent in thinking that they know better than God of the impact certain events will have on human history.
As for the evidence about causation outside the universe, it comes from our modal intutitions. As I’ve discussed before, there is no good reason to think that the causal principle only applies to temporal or physical things. Indeed, given our properly basic modal intuition that something only comes from something, it is patently absurd to think the universe could come into being from absolutely nothing, and without a cause to boot! That take a tremendous amount of faith, and it goes against both our experience and intuitions.
Jason
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January 4, 2011 at 1:05 am
I’ve noticed that the link to Craig’s article in which his definition of a good argument appears is not appearing in the post, and I can’t seem to insert it for some reason. It’s http://www.reasonablefaith.org/site/News2?page=NewsArticle&id=8533.
Jason
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June 8, 2015 at 9:09 pm
What is the definition of “nothing”, as in something can or can’t come out of nothing? Is there a scientific definition of it?
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June 10, 2015 at 6:23 pm
The Kalam Cosmological Argument Unclothed.
1. Everything that begins to exist has a cause;
2. The universe began to exist;
∴
3. The universe has a cause.
If # 1 is TRUE OR FALSE how can anybody know this? Since Nobody knows, it MUST BE ASSUMED TO BE TRUE FOR THIS ARGUMENT.
If # 1 is allowed as a premise/conclusion, then it must still ASSUME that # 2 is true, that the universe began to exist; because nobody knows if the universe began to exist or if the universe always existed.
Assuming that # 1 assumption and # 2 assumption are true one could assert that number 3 is benign without certainty.
However, two assumptions do not a conclusion make; rather itself, an insipid assumption as dull as dishwater.
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June 10, 2015 at 9:53 pm
Bret:
I tend to define “nothing” in a similar way that “darkness” is defined and the same way I define “evil” or a mirror image. These are defined as the absence of “something”/nothing, absence of light/darkness absence of good/evil in other words they are contingent on actuality or realism that is missing. A hole describes not a hole but the absence of material that makes a hole. A hole in a bucket is a simple description of an absence but the hole is “nothing” in and of itself, like “darkness”.
A vacuum in a glass tube would seem to be nothing without air but passing a magnet across the void will still engage and gravity still operates and light will penetrate through as well.
NEW YORK —Clara Moskowitz, LiveScience Senior Writer | March 22, 2013
It was all much ado about nothing as physicists and thinkers came together to debate the concept of nothing Wednesday (March 20) here at the American Museum of Natural History.
The simple idea of nothing, a concept that even toddlers can understand, proved surprisingly difficult for the scientists to pin down, with some of them questioning whether such a thing as nothing exists at all.
The first, most basic idea of nothing — empty space with nothing in it — was quickly agreed not to benothing. In our universe, even a dark, empty void of space, absent of all particles, is still something.
“It has a topology, it has a shape, it’s a physical object,” philosopher Jim Holt said during the museum’s annual Isaac Asimov Memorial Debate, which this year was focused on the topic of “The Existence of Nothing.”
As moderator Neil deGrasse Tyson, director of the museum’s Hayden Planetarium, said, “If laws of physics still apply, the laws of physics are not nothing.” [Endless Void or Big Crunch: How Will the Universe End?]
Deeper nothing
But there is a deeper kind of nothing, argued theoretical physicist Lawrence Krauss of Arizona State University, which consists of no space at all, and no time, no particles, no fields, no laws of nature. “That to me is as close to nothing as you can get,” Krauss said.
Holt disagreed.
“Is that really nothing?” he asked.”There’s no space and there’s no time. But what about physical laws, what about mathematical entities? What about consciousness? All the things that are non-spatial and non-temporal.”
Other speakers offered different ideas for nothing, such as a mathematical concept of nothing put forward by science journalist Charles Seife, author of “Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea” (Penguin Books, 2000). He proposed starting with a set of numbers that included only the number zero, and then removing zero, leaving what’s called a null set. “It’s almost a Platonic nothing,” Seife said.
The theoretical physicist Eva Silverstein of Stanford University suggested a highly technical nothing based on quantum field theory that involved a quantum system lacking degrees of freedom (dimensions). “The ground state of a gapped quantum system is my best answer,” she said.
Holt suggested another idea of nothing.
“The only even remotely persuasivedentition of nothing I’ve heard form a physicist came from Alex Vilenkin,” a physicist at Tufts University, Holt said.”Imagine the surface of a ball. It’s a finite space but with no boundary. Then imagine it shrinking down to a point.” That would create a closed space-timewith zero radius.
Absence of something
Neil deGrasse Tyson hosted a debate on the existence of nothing March 20 at the American Museum of Natural History in New York.
Credit: Clara Moskowitz/LiveScienceView full size image
Still, Holt said he wasn’t won over by that definition either, and wasn’t convinced that nothing actually exists.
“Analytic philosophers say nothing is a noun, it seems like a name for an entity, but it’s not — it just means not anything,” he said.”What’s so special about nothing? It’s not a fruitful philosophical notion.”
But just because nothing may be prohibitively difficult to conceptualize, doesn’t mean it’s not a real thing, Krauss countered.
“There are lots of things in science that are impossible to get any intuitive handle on, but that doesn’t mean they don’t exist,” Krauss said.
This difficulty in understanding nothing dates back a long time. The ancient Greeks had no concept of zero and hated the idea so much they refused to incorporate zero into their number system, even when their astronomical calculations called for it.
“We humans have a real revulsion for nothing, for a void,” Seife said. “For us nothingness represents something that we’re afraid of, disorder, a breaking of the rules.”
Ultimately, the definition of nothing may just be an ever-moving target, shifting with every scientific revolution as new insights show us what we thought was nothing is really something.
“Maybe nothing will never be resolved,” Tyson said.
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July 6, 2019 at 10:09 pm
Leo asks:
It is known by observation (a posteriori). Everything that we see beginning to exist has a cause. Science cannot proceed unless it at least presupposes this as a performative principle. As a metaphysical principle, the alternative is that something can come from nothing. But if that is the case, then “nothing” has to have at least the capacity to produce something, but if it has a capacity, then it is no longer nothing. Hence, the concept of something coming from nothing is unintelligible.
Defenders of the KCA don’t “assume” that the universe began to exist. The argue against the impossibility of an actual infinite and appeal to the Big Bang singularity and entropy as scientific evidence that the universe began. Thus, whether or not the KCA is sound does not rest on a temporal universe assumption.
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