Brief Critique of Wl Craig's Kalam Cosmological Argument

The KCA runs as follows:

1. Whatever begins to exist has a cause.

2. The universe began to exist (in an absolute manner).

3. Therefore, the universe has a cause.

This cause, Craig argues, produced time altogether. He says time had an absolute beginning from a timeless cause, and the only way for a temporal effect to come from a timeless cause is for the cause to be personal (to possess self-awareness and free will). If that’s correct, then the cause of the universe is essentially a person that “was” timeless without the universe but is “now” temporally-extended with the universe. This is one of the most talked-about arguments for theism, but I’m not currently convinced by its usual formulations.

I’d like to question premise 1. Craig offers three reasons why he thinks premise 1 is true:

a) “Something cannot come from nothing” (actual quotation from Craig)

b) We don’t see other things coming into being from non-being... why is the universe the only thing that came into being from non-being?

c) The premise is constantly verified by observation, but never falsified.

Okay. Let’s talk about those justifications.

Defense a merely re-states the premise and hence cannot be a defense of the premise. To say that “something cannot come from nothing” is identical to saying that everything which begins to exist has a cause or that everything which comes into being did so because of some other being.

For defense b, Craig says that nothingness cannot be constrained by anything because “there isn’t anything to be constrained.” And he says that nothingness cannot have properties because there isn’t anything to possess properties. So IF the universe “literally came from nothing”, Craig wants to know why other things don’t also come from nothing. He says “it becomes inexplicable why just anything and everything doesn’t come into being from nothing.” We can’t say that nothingness is limited to producing universes because there isn’t anything to be limited.

Craig thinks this is a good defense of premise 1. However, the same reasoning can go in the other direction. Why should we expect “nothingness” to produce “anything and everything”? We can’t say that nothingness should be expected to possess such creative potential because there isn’t anything to be “creative” or to possess such creative potential. Moreover, “inexplicable” doesn’t mean “impossible”.

Regarding defense c, I would say that observing beings producing other beings does not undermine the possibility of some beings coming from non-being. Craig seems to mean that if it were possible for being to come from non-being, then we ought to observe it happening. But that was already suggested by defense b, to which I asked why we should expect nothingness to produce other things given that there isn’t anything for us to have expectations about.

Having said all of that, it may be the case that it’s metaphysically impossible for being to come from non-being. But if that is the case, we currently don’t have any way of knowing that it is the case. It’s just an assumption, or if you like, an intuition.