The Kalam Cosmological argument on a B theory

William Lane Craig says that the Kalam Cosmological Argument (KCA) assumes an A theory of time. This makes sense because the claim is that since time had a beginning, the universe must have come into existence. Just taken at face value, and not getting all caught up in the ambiguity of words, claiming that the universe comes into existence implies real temporal becoming, i.e. a dynamic theory of time.

I said in a previous post that causation makes more sense on an A theory than a B theory since on a B theory, everything just sits there, but on an A theory some things bring about other things. I wasn't being perfectly precise there because there is such a thing as static causation. A parking brake causes a car to stay still, for example, but the braking doesn't have to precede the motionlessness in time. It's conceivable that the brake has been engaged from all eternity, and the car has never moved as a result. But I was thinking more of dynamic causes where one event follows another event in sequence, like a golfer whacking a golf ball with a club and causing the ball to go flying. That's the kind of causation I was talking about.

But suppose I'm wrong and that even dynamic causation happens on a B theory, however difficult it may be to explain. If that's the case, then I don't see why the KCA couldn't work on a B theory. The reason is because subscribing to a B theory wouldn't mean that events are not caused by earlier events. There is still "earlier" and "later" on a B theory. It's just that they don't happen sequentially. "Earlier" and "Later" are more like locations in space than moments in time like we normally think of them. The only difference is that whereas the direction of causation in space can easily go from east to west or from west to east, in the case of the block universe, causation always goes from earlier to later and never from later to earlier. So there's only one direction of causation.

Well, if there can be cause and effect in the dynamic sense within the universe, and if the earliest moment of the universe is an event within the universe, then it seems like it, too, could have a cause. It's just that the cause wouldn't be something that happened earlier in the universe. It would be more like a static cause from outside the universe. In that case, you could think of God is being the static cause of the earliest moment of the universe, and therefore the explanation of the whole uiniverse, even if the universe didn't come into being, strictly speaking.

One of the objections I used to have to the idea that God was a timeless being and that the whole spectrum of time was all the present from his point of view was that it didn't make sense to say God created the universe in that case. To say God created the universe is to say the universe came into being from a state of non-being. If God doesn't exist in time, then there is no change from God's point of view, so from God's point of view, he couldn't have caused the universe to come into being from non-being. From his point of view, the universe has always been there, so in what sense did he create it?

Well, he couldn't have created it in the ordinary sense of the word. But, in fact, on a B theory of time nothing is created in the ordinary sense of the word since there's no such thing as temporal becoming. Yet there is still a sense in which things come into being on a B theory. Maybe it's just a matter of perspective. It just means they have an earliest extreme. And if we allow that causation happens on a B theory, then earlier things cause later things to come to be in some sense. My parents are the cause of me coming to be. They are the reason for the earliest extreme of my existence.

Any reason we have to doubt that causation happens on a B theory would be reason to think the universe doesn't need a cause for its existence. But any reason to think causation does happen on a B theory makes it reasonable to ask whether the eariest moment in the universe has a cause.

If we can think of causation happening dynamically within the universe in some sense, then what are we to make of the universe coming into being from nothing, i.e. creation ex nihilo? Well, that would just mean the universe has an earliest extreme, and nothing preceded it, meaning there is no earlier moment. And it would also mean the universe isn't made out of anything that existed at any earlier moment. If it makes sense on a B theory to say that something comes into being in some sense, then it also makes sense to say the universe came into being in some sense. The only difference is that whereas things in the universe come into being from things that existed earlier, the universe came into being from nothing. So we could still hold on to creation ex-nihilo on a B theory. It would just have a different meaning than it does on an A theory, which would be true of anything that comes into being on a B theory.

I wonder, though, if the intuition that it's impossible for something to spontaneously come into being uncaused out of nothing would be just as strong on a B theory as it is on an A theory since they don't mean exactly the same thing. It's hard for me to answer that question since I'm kind of iffy about whether causation even makes sense on a B theory. I said in yesterday's post that I was unsure whether the A theory or the B theory was true. One reason I doubted the B theory is precisely because I don't know how to make sense of causation on the B theory. But suppose I was persuaded that the B theory is true. Would I be forced, by logic, to deny causation? Well, that would be a very hard pill for me to swallow. I think what is more likely to happen is that I will still believe in causation. I'll think there's some solution to the problem of causation that I just don't understand. But I think it's very unliikely that I will give up on causation if I adopt a B theory. I'm much more certain that some things cause other things than I am of either theory of time.

Well, if causation is just as certain on a B theory as it is on an A theory, though I can't understand how, it's likely that the intuition that "out of nothing, nothing comes" will be just as strong. If there's no reason to deny causation on a B theory, then there's no reason to deny that the universe has a cause. The fact that it's static would be no reason to deny that it has a cause since it being static is no reason to deny that causation happens within the universe.

It might sound to you like I'm committing the fallacy of composition. The fallacy of composition would be to say that because every event in the universe has a cause that the whole universe therefore has a cause. This is a misunderstanding a lot of people have about the KCA, even on an A theory. The misunderstanding comes from how apolgists argue for the causal principle. They'll say that because everything in our experience has a cause, the universe must have a cause. But they are not arguing from composition. Rather, they are arguing from induction. I'm not arguing from induction or composition, though. What I'm saying, rather, is that if causation is just as much a part of a block universe on a B theory as it is on an A theory, then the fact that we live in a B theory rather than an A theory is no reason to doubt that the universe had a cause. Presumably, the only reason to doubt the universe has a cause is beause it's static and doesn't literally come to be. It's always been there. But by that same reasoning, nothing in the universe has a cause either since every moment of the universe is static and didn't literally come to be. So I'm just taking two premises to their logical conclusions, not arguing from composition or induction. The premise that static things don't have causes would imply not only that the beginning of the universe didn't have a cause, but that nothing at all within the universe had a cause either. And the premise that static things do have causes would mean not only that thing in the universe have causes, but that the beginning of the universe has a cause, too.

Besides that, the beginning of the universe is a moment or event within the universe. So one can argue that if every event, state, or thing in the universe has a cause, then so does the first event, state, or thing. But since the cause of the first event, state, or thing can't be anything within the universe, it must be something outside of or beyond the universe. If the first event, state, or thing in the universe has a cause, that cause would be the cause of the whole universe. It would be similar to a situation in which you have a stack of books sitting on a table. The cause of the elevation of each book is the book directly beneath it. But the cause of the elevation of all the books is the table, even though the table only directly causes the elevation of the book directly above it, i.e. the first book. In the same way, if God caused the first event, state, or thing in the universe, and everything in the universe from then on caused the next thing in the universe, we can say that God is the cause of the whole universe. That would follow from the fact that God is the cause of the first moment of the universe.

Let's consider the often asked question, "What caused God?" This comes up in the A-theory of the KCA because it is wrongly assumed that one of the premises says that everything requires a cause. The correction, then, is to repeat that everything that comes into being requires a cause, and since God did not come into being, there's no reason to suppose he needs a cause. But in the B theory version of the KCA, nothing literally comes into being strictly speaking. So we are forced to say that static things require causes. Well, God, on this model, is a static thing, just as the universe is. Neither God nor the universe came into being on this model. So we can't make the same differentiation between the universe and God on the same basis as we can on the A theory. If we say static things don't require causes, then the universe doesn't require a cuase. If we say static things do require causes, then God requires a cause. Either way it would seem the KCA fails.

One differentiation we might be tempted to make is that the universe is contingent and God is necessary. Contingent things need causes but necessary things don't. If we make this move, we have abandoned the KCA in favour of the argument from contingency. They are distinct arguments since the basis for saying the universe requires a cause is different in each. In the argument from contingency, the universe would require a cause whether it had a beginning or not. But in the KCA, the reason the universe requires a cause is specifically because it has a beginning. So to try to salvage the KCA on a B theory by making this move is really to concede that the KCA doesn't work and to rest on a different argument altogether.

I think a better move is to say that the reason the universe requires a cause but God does not is because in spite of being static, the universe is nevertheless temporal, but God is not. The universe has a temporal dimension even if we think of it in static terms. If the earliest state of the universe were an atemporal state, and temporality sprung from that state, then there would be no reason to think the universe required a cause other than to explain how it went from atemopral to temporal. But that could be explained in terms of the atemporal state. William Lane Craig has arguments for why that won't work, but I'm not going to go into that right now. But it is precisely the fact that there is a temporal dimension within the universe that makes room for causation. Earlier moments cause later moments. So if the first moment of the universe is temporal, then it should require a cause for that reason, but that same reason wouldn't apply to God if God were atemporal. And God would have to be atemporal in order to be the cause of everything that is temporal.

I am going to come back to this in a later post because it's relevant to what I think is a very strong argument against the KCA that I've spent a long time stewing over.