Hi all, I'm also new to EvC: been reading for some time & learned a lot of stuff I didn't know. Great!
I wanted to go back to the oirginal question: what wrong with KCA. Anyone correct me if I'm mistaken, but I believe this argument is more or less the original Cosmological Argument, if brought up to date some what:
1. Everything which exists has a cause to its existence which is outside of the thing itself,
2. The universe exists
Therefore: the universe has a cause to its existence which is outside of the universe.
And therefore God exists (that which caused the universe)
Your argument is slightly refined in terms of inserting "begins to exist", to head off the obvious challenge.
The classic challenges to this argument are, firstly that it's a long way from establishing the universe has a "cause" to God in terms of any of the religions I'm aware of and, secondly, and more problematically, because the argument may be turned against God himself to prove that he must also have a cause, God2 say, who must (by the same argument) have a further cause, God3 say... for ever.
The response to this latter (seemingly fatal) challenge was to introduce the concepts of contingency and necessity: somethings are contingent, they don't have to exist, while others are necessary, they could not fail to exist. Only contingent things need causes. So the argument was reformulated in terms of contingent things to try to avoid the problem of it being applied to the cause (God) of the universe which the argument supposedly proves.
This, however, dodn't stand up for long firstly because it's not obvious that the universe is contingent (included premise 2 of this version of the argument), and secondly because it assumes God is necessary: you cannot prove God exists by starting with the assumption that God is necessary (a stronger assertion surely?).
Finally the argument was given another run, this time as Kalam. The point of KCA was to drop all the suff about contingency and necessity, and to go back to the original cosmological argument. But this time, when the objection is raised that the argument may be applied to the conclusion, to show that the cause of the universe must itself have a cause, and that cause must have a further cause etc, instead of permitting this to go on forever, Kalam appeals to the "fact" that nothing infinite can exist in reality, only "potentally infinite" things can exist - numbers, say, are potentially infinite because they can in theory go on forever, but in practice we can only every count up to a finite number. Thus, the argument goes, the chain of causes cannot go on forever and must stop. And that's your God.
Of course, this is as open to attack as all previous versions:
- how do we know that nothing infinite can exist in reality: the geometric series 1/2 + 1/4 + 1/8+ ... is infinite in length, but finite in sum (I know - numbers aren't real, just a thought).
- doesn;t the final conclusion rather blow a hole in KCA: the final cause contradicts the argument in being a thing which exists without cause. Also, if God can exist without cause then why not the universe?
I think, however, the argument is really smoke and mirrors - misdirection. Everyone looks at premise 1 and the conclusion (and what it implies about causes of causes), whereas the real problem is premise 2: "the universe exists", the statement which apears utterly incontravertable. It should say "the universe is a thing which exists", after all premise 1 is "Every thing which exists..." so to apply premise 1 to premise 2, you must be talking about a "thing" which exists. And here's the problem: the universe is not a "thing" in the sense of other things - it's "everything".
The argument should be stated as (note the spacing):
1. Every thing which exists has a cause to its existence
2. Everything exists
Therefore... nothing: 2 does not meet the conditions of 1.
It's a bit like arguing that since every person has a mother, therefore mankind has a mother: it's absurd, and obvious class error.
I believe this line of attack can be attributed to Bertrand Russell, who saw the problem of thinking of the universe as a "thing" in terms of his famous paradox concerning the set of all sets: the universe would be the thing of all things and we'd be able to define other "things" which could neither exist nor not exist.
So, really even if you accept premise 1 (I don't - some very excellent posts already on this) and find a way round the obvious problems of infinite regress, frankly the argument just doesn't work.
Bye
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