Cosmological Arguments

Craig's Formulation of the Kalam Argument

• Craig presents the first stage of his version as a simple syllogism:
• Premise 1: Whatever begins to exist has a cause.
• Premise 2: The universe began to exist.
• Conclusion: Therefore the universe has a cause.

This first stage of the argument is valid. But are its premises true? And a second question: How does God get into the act, as it were? How does one get from the conclusion that there is a first cause to the further conclusion that this is God?

Aquinas thought it sufficed to say: “this all men call God.” Craig, however, supplies a second stage of argument, claiming that the most plausible account of the first cause is that it is a personal God who, while creating space and time, is (or was) himself not in either.

Premise1: “Whatever begins to exist has a cause.” As with all other versions of the cosmological argument, the kalam has at least one empirical claim among its premises—a claim, that is, for whose truth we have to rely on our experience of the world around us. So the question arises whether, in our experience, everything that has a beginning does in fact have a cause.

To most people Premise 1 seems so obviously true as not to need defending. Objects don't just “pop into existence.” Likewise with events (changes in things or states of affairs). They begin and end in a temporal series of causes and effects. Things, we say, don't “just happen.” Rather, every event is caused by, and hence determined by, some event or events that precede it in time.

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