Post by gadreel on Oct 4, 2022 23:33:26 GMT
This is just a version of the Kalam:
P1 Anything which begins to exist must have a cause
P2 The universe began to exist
C Therefore, the universe had a cause
I reject all premises of this argument and declare it a failure from start to finish. This cosmological argument was popularized by Christian apologist William Lane Craig as the starting point for another argument:
[If the universe has a cause, then an uncaused, personal Creator of the universe exists who sans (without) the universe is beginningless, changeless, immaterial, timeless, spaceless and enormously powerful.
Therefore, an uncaused, personal Creator of the universe exists, who sans the universe is beginningless, changeless, immaterial, timeless, spaceless and enormously powerful.]
Proponents tend to try to bolster the first premise by asserting that “something cannot come from nothing”, a nonsensical and illogical statement which cannot be supported in any evidence based argument. This argument presumes (with no justification) that there could have ever been “nothing” in the first place. And if you’re defining nothing as the absence of any properties, then you can’t make any statements about “nothing” as it has no properties to examine or make conclusions about. We have no knowledge about what can or can’t come from the absence of anything BECAUSE there is something (and as far as we know has always been something).
It’s also an internally inconsistent argument for a Christian (or any theist) to make as it necessarily require special pleading when the logic is applied to their god. According to them, God is both something AND existing with no explanation of where God came from. The reason P1 of Kalam was created was to put God in a “special” category of something which did not begin to exist. The problem here is that it’s a begging the question fallacy since that’s what the argument is trying to prove in the first place. It’s the assertion of a specific property of the god which they cannot demonstrate in order to prove that this god must exist and have that property. But it’s nothing more than a tautology that doesn’t end up proving anything.