No Cause for Kalām

The Kalām Cosmological Argument (KCA) is a simple and popular argument for the existence of God.  Conceived by medieval Islamic scholars, the argument was resurrected and popularised by Christian philosopher and theologian William Lane Craig in his 1979 book The Kalām Cosmological Argument. He put it thus:

1. Everything that begins to exist has a cause of its existence.
2. The universe began to exist.
3. Therefore, the universe has a cause of its existence.

The KCA proper ends there, but sets the stage for the following claim: ‘The cause of the universe was God.’

Does the KCA hold up? That is the question I will answer in this article—with a resounding ‘no’. (And, hopefully, a sprinkle of originality.)

Does every beginning need a cause?

Several criticisms of the KCA were made by the philosopher Paul Draper in a 1997 paper, including that the KCA conflates two types of beginning:

• Things that begin after an earlier absence (everyday objects).
• Things that begin at the start of time.

Draper noted that it was ‘far from obvious’ that something which began with time required a cause, adding, ‘It’s not even clear that such a thing could have a cause of its existence’. However, he stopped short of concluding that no cause was possible. The remainder of this article outlines what a cause does, clarifies when a cause is possible, and then revisits the key question of whether every beginning requires a cause.

What does a cause do?

As a thought experiment, suppose that scientific evidence and philosophical arguments strongly suggest the universe to be of infinite age. We probably wouldn’t think that such a universe required a cause. But why wouldn’t we? Looking at the KCA’s reasoning, we might think, ‘Such a universe had no beginning, so there was no need for a cause’. But let’s consider a different explanation for why a cause was not required: In a universe of infinite age, there was never an earlier time than the universe when the universe didn’t exist. That being so, there was no transition from the lack of a universe to the presence of one. Because there was no change in need of explanation, there was no need for a cause; that which was never absent does not require a cause.

For the rest of this article, we’ll abandon the idea that the universe is of infinite age and assume instead that the universe and time began together a finite time ago. Crucially, even in this scenario:

• There was never a time earlier than the universe when the universe didn’t exist.
• There was no transition from the absence of a universe to the presence of one.
• So the universe did not need a cause.

Time for TEA

Suppose the cause of X is always associated with a change from the absence of X to the presence of X. For example, the cause (or causes) of a cake is always associated with a transition from that which is not a cake (the raw unmixed ingredients, aided by a chef and a cooker) to that which is a cake (the finished cake). We’ll call this criterion for identifying causation ‘Transition from Earlier Absence’, or TEA for short.

Everyday objects begin. They exist now, but there was once an earlier time when they did not, so a cause was needed to explain this change. The universe and time began. However, no causes were required here, there being no ‘earlier time’ when these things did not exist. You can’t have an ‘earlier time’ than time’s beginning, so you can’t have an ‘earlier absence’ in the case of time and the universe. That which was never absent does not require a cause.

If TEA correctly identifies that which requires a cause, then, as Draper suspected, the KCA’s first premise rests on a false analogy with everyday objects. Things which began at the beginning of time (time and the universe) require no cause, there being no transition from an earlier absence, but things which began later (everyday objects such as a cake) do require a cause, as there was once an earlier time when these things weren’t there.

TEA without time?

A critic of the TEA criterion might point out that the use of language such as ‘earlier’ and ‘transition’ implies the passage of time. As such, TEA rests on the assumption that causation only happens in time. But this assumption leaves no room, even in principle, for any cause that is transcendent (i.e. existing apart from, and without being subject to time and the limitations of, the material universe).

To avoid the charge of having ruled out even the possibility of a transcendent cause, we’ll adopt a broader criterion for identifying causation, called ‘Change from a more Fundamental state of Absence’ (CFA). Like TEA, CFA maintains that causation is always associated with a change from absence to presence. However, CFA is broader than TEA in allowing:

1. that there could, in principle, be a state of affairs more fundamental than the beginning of time and space; and,
2. that if there were such a state, change could have occurred from an absence of time to the presence of time, rather than merely from an earlier time to a later one.

No transcendent cause is simpler than one

Although the CFA criterion leaves open the possibility of a causal chain stretching back to something transcendent (more fundamental than the universe’s earliest state), it is also compatible with the alternative, namely a chain in which there is not anything more fundamental than the universe’s earliest state. If time and space began together, the latter option (omitting a transcendent cause) is preferable, for the resulting chain would describe:

• A causal explanation that is simpler in the sense of having one fewer causal link.
• A causal explanation that is simpler in the sense of employing one fewer type of causal link (invoking materialistic principles alone is simpler than invoking materialistic principles and principles that transcend them).
• A causal explanation couched in terms of a causal type with which we are familiar. We know a great deal about some types of materialistic causes, but transcendent causes (assuming they exist at all…) can hardly be termed familiar.

In preferring the simpler and more familiar of the two hypotheses, we have applied a philosophical principle known as Occam’s Razor, which states that entities should not be postulated beyond necessity. As Richard Dawkins once put it: ‘If you hear hooves clip-clopping down a London street, it could be a zebra or even a unicorn, but, before we assume that it’s anything other than a horse, we should demand a certain minimal standard of evidence.’

So even if we leave open the possibility of a transcendent cause by adopting the CFA criterion, the simpler and more reasonable causal chain under that criterion is the chain that does not require us to assume a supernatural transcendent cause. In that simpler chain, just as with the TEA criterion, the universe was never absent, no cause was required, and the KCA’s first premise rests on a false analogy with everyday objects.  Everyday objects have a beginning and require a cause because it was once the case that they were not there. The universe and time had a beginning, but did not need a cause, for there was never a more fundamental state in which time and the universe were not present.

No role for Nothing

Might the role of ‘a more fundamental state’ than the beginning of the universe be played by nothing? No, because ‘nothing’ is not a state—it is the absence of any state. To treat nothing as if it were a state is to commit an error known as reification. Reification occurs when we take something abstract (a thought or idea) and treat it as if it were something more concrete:

‘I see nobody on the road,’ said Alice.

‘I only wish I had such eyes,’ the King remarked in a fretful tone. ‘To be able to see Nobody! And at that distance, too! Why, it’s as much as I can do to see real people, by this light!’

– Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There (1871)

In this literary example, reification (treating the idea of nobody as if ‘nobody’ were a real thing) is desirable insofar as it sets up a joke. The reification (but also the humour) would have been avoided had Alice said, ‘It is not the case that I see anybody on the road’.  When a theologian claims, ‘Nothing is greater than God!’ they don’t mean ‘There’s some real stuff called Nothing, and it’s greater than God!’, they mean (rightly or wrongly…), ‘It is not the case that there is anything greater than God!’. 

Similarly, if we take the phrase ‘Nothing’s more fundamental than the universe!’ and rephrase it to avoid reification, we arrive at, ‘It is not the case that there is anything more fundamental than the universe!’ If it is not the case that there was a state more fundamental than the universe, then we cannot say ‘there was a state more fundamental than the universe in which the universe was not present’.

TEA and CFA both avoid reification (treating the idea of nothing as if it were something). Granted, both use ‘the absence of a cake’ to infer causation, but

1. Neither relies solely on ‘the absence of a cake’ to establish causation—both infer causation on the basis of a change from absence to presence.
2. ‘The absence of cake’ is not necessarily the same as the absence of everything (nothing). Provided ‘the absence of cake’ is used as a shorthand for ‘the presence of something real that isn’t a cake’ (for example, raw ingredients, a chef, a cooker), we are always invoking real things rather than nothing, so avoiding reification. In the case of ‘a more fundamental state’, we went out of our way to distinguish such a state from ‘nothing’; nothing is ‘the absence of everything’; ‘a more fundamental state’, in contrast, implies the presence of some kind(s) of thing(s), without specifying what.

Craig repeatedly charges those who deny the KCA’s first premise with supposing ‘that the universe should pop into being uncaused out of nothing’. However, the TEA and CFA criteria reveal a flaw in the first premise, and neither criterion rests on the idea that something can pop out of nothing.

In 2009, the KCA’s defenders threw down the gauntlet, in a somewhat loaded fashion:

Sometimes critics will say that while [sic] it is impossible for things to come into being uncaused in time, things can come into being uncaused with time, that is, at a first moment of time. But until the [first] premise’s detractors are able to explain the relevant difference between embedded moments of time and a first moment of time, there seems to be no reason to think it more plausible that things can come into being uncaused at a first moment than at a later moment of time.

Neither TEA nor CFA necessarily imply that time’s first moment was, in and of itself, any different to an embedded moment; the difference arises when we consider how these moments relate to other ones. An embedded beginning is known to be associated with a change from an earlier (TEA) or more fundamental (CFA) absence, but an initial beginning (something that begins with time) is not. TEA doesn’t imply that anything ‘came into being uncaused’ at time’s first moment; on the contrary, TEA implies that whatever existed at time’s first moment was never absent, so could not have ‘come into being’ at all. CFA reveals that the very notion of a first thing ‘coming into being’ rests on the assumption that there was a state of absence more fundamental than time’s first moment—an assumption which it is simpler not to make.

Beginning without a cause

In The Kalām Cosmological Argument, Craig marshalled philosophical arguments against the idea of an infinite past and scientific evidence against the ideas of cyclical or eternal universes, but such approaches, even if successful, establish only that the universe had a beginning; they don’t establish a more fundamental state than time’s first moment. Granted, Abrahamic theology typically holds God to be more fundamental than time’s first moment, but appealing to theology would be to assume what the believer is seeking to prove, and an admission that one of the supposed strengths of the KCA, namely its ability to prove the existence of a transcendent First Cause without recourse to theology, was not, in fact, a genuine feature of the argument.

Paul Draper was sceptical of the idea that the universe had a cause, but did not rule it out. If the TEA criterion is correct, the universe could not possibly have had a cause. If the CFA criterion is correct, a supernatural transcendent cause for the universe cannot be ruled out, although a simpler natural scenario is available. In that scenario, no cause was needed, or even possible—even though the universe had a beginning.