The Case for a Creator - Lee Strobel [50]
We were ready to investigate what Craig himself believes to be “one of the most plausible arguments for God’s existence”17—an argument based on evidence that the universe is not eternal, but that it had a beginning in the Big Bang.
THE KALAM COSMOLOGICAL ARGUMENT
“You’re a famous proponent of an argument for God’s existence that’s formally called the ‘kalam cosmological argument,’ ” I said in opening our conversation. “Before you define what that is, though, give me some background. What does kalam mean?”
“Let me describe the origins of the argument,” he said. “In ancient Greece, Aristotle believed that God isn’t the Creator of the universe but that he simply imbues order into it. In his view, both God and the universe are eternal. Of course, that contradicted the Hebrew notion that God created the world out of nothing. So Christians later sought to refute Aristotle. One prominent Christian philosopher on the topic was John Philoponus of Alexandria, Egypt, who lived in the fourth century. He argued that the universe had a beginning.
“When Islam took over North Africa, Muslim theologians picked up these arguments, because they also believed in creation. So while this tradition was lost to the Christian West, it began to be highly developed within Islamic medieval theology. One of the most famous Muslim proponents was al-Ghazali, who lived from 1058 to 1111.
“These arguments eventually got passed back into Latin-speaking Christendom through the mediation of Jewish thinkers, who lived side-by-side with Muslim theologians, particularly in Spain, which at that time had been conquered by the Muslims. They became hotly debated.
“Bonaventure, the Italian philosopher, supported the arguments in the thirteenth century; John Locke, the British philosopher, used them in the seventeenth century, though I don’t know if he knew of their Islamic origins; and eventually they found their way to Immanuel Kant, the German philosopher, in the eighteenth century.
“Now, back to your question about the word kalam—it reflects the argument’s Islamic origin. It’s an Arabic word that means ‘speech’ or ‘doctrine,’ but it came to characterize the whole medieval movement of Islamic theology. That was called kalam—this highly academic theology of the Middle Ages, which later evaporated.”
I spoke up. “Obviously, none of these early philosophers knew about any of the scientific evidence for the origin of the universe,” I said. “How did they argue that the universe had a beginning?”
“They relied on philosophical and mathematical reasoning,” he said. “However, when scientists in the last century began to discover hard data about the Big Bang, this provided a more empirical foundation.”
“How do you frame the kalam argument?”
“As formulated by al-Ghazali, the argument has three simple steps: ‘Whatever begins to exist has a cause. The universe began to exist. Therefore, the universe has a cause.’ Then you can do a conceptual analysis of what it means to be a cause of the universe, and a striking number of divine attributes can be identified.”
I decided to work my way through all three steps of al-Ghazali’s nearly millennium-old argument, starting with a point that—surprisingly—has become more and more disputed in recent years.
STEP #1: WHATEVER BEGINS TO EXIST HAS A CAUSE
“When I first began to defend the kalam argument,” Craig said, “I anticipated that its first premise—that whatever begins to exist has a cause—would be accepted by virtually everyone. I thought the second premise—that the universe began to exist—would be much more controversial. But the scientific evidence has accumulated to the extent that atheists are finding it difficult to deny that the universe had a beginning. So they’ve been forced to attack the first premise instead.”
Craig shook his head. “To me, this is absolutely bewildering!” he declared, his