1. Unique systems with unique parts and processes can’t have been caused by processes that operate inside the system.

(Otherwise the moment of popping into existence wouldn’t be unique.)

2. The universe is a unique system with unique parts and processes if it’s been caused from nothing.

3. The universe has been caused from nothing.

4. Physical causes, mental causes, spiritual causes or personal causes are (if anything) causes that exist in our universe.

5. The universe is not caused by physical, mental, spiritual or personal causes.

5. God is a spiritual, personal entity that hence gives rise to personal, spiritual causes.

6. God can’t have caused the universe.

The anti-kalam argument ©

Have you noticed by the way how Craig dodges the last question in the last video by switching from the question about the falsifiability of the whole argument to the verifiability of premise 4 (the universe as beginning)? In any case, he didn’t address the question.
The upshot of the question would have been that the whole Kalam argument makes metaphysical statements that as a scientists you just have to shrug your shoulders over.

http://www.dbskeptic.com/2009/03/15/a-critical-examination-of-the-kalam-cosmological-argument/

here is victor stenger’s straightforward answers to the argument.

1. Everything that begins to exist has a cause.
A. false. virtual particles pop into and out of existence all they while without cause.
i.e. in a region of space devoid of any matter or radiation (a vacuum) virtuals particles of electrons
position pairs are created and destroy themselves. the physical effects are observed in the
casimir effect.

2. the universe has a beginning
A. false. the universe is not known to have a beginning. The “big-bang” is a theory about the
expansion of the universe. it is a misconception (even by professional physicist and some astronomers) that
the universe began at the big bang. the popularly cited arguments by stephen hawkings and roger penrose ignored
Quantum mechanical effects at the planck scale and is therefore incorrect.
see “Misconceptions about the Big Bang” by Charles H. Lineweaver and Tamara M. Davis.
“Origin of the Universe” by S.W. Hawking.

3.Therefore, the universe has a cause.
A. possible but unjustified by arguments 1 & 2 above.

4&5. unjustified also. how is it an inference even if 1-3 above is true that the cause is “uncaused, personal Creator of the universe exists,
who sans the universe is beginningless, changeless, immaterial, timeless, spaceless, and enormously powerful?”
how is it that the cause in 4&5 is a better alternative than String theory D-brane options for the big bang, cyclic universes,
Ekpyrotic universe etc and the other numerous speculation from astronomers? those properties are poorly motivated and unjustified.

I dunno about the others but I have looked and not found any defeater for my free will point in any of Craig’s writings online. And I have not read Dan Barker. Do you have a link?

“According to the version of divine command ethics which I’ve defended, our moral duties are constituted by the commands of a holy and loving God.”

&

“…since our moral duties are determined by God’s commands, it is commanding someone to do something which, in the absence of a divine command, would have been murder. The act was morally obligatory for the Israeli soldiers in virtue of God’s command, even though, had they undertaken it on their on initiative, it would have been wrong.” (emphasis his)

Reginald Selkirk: Only if your version of the theory insisted that the laws of physics are identical in all iterations of the oscillating universe.

 
It’s not “my version.” There is no mechanism in the mathematical model of the oscillating universe that allows the cosmological constant to change. If there is some updated model that allows this happen then I’d love to see a scientific reference. Otherwise all you are doing is pinning your hopes to a dead theory.

Justin Martyr: Wrong, it falsifies the physics of the oscillating model. The discovery of dark energy proves that the cosmological constant is positive.

Only if your version of the theory insisted that the laws of physics are identical in all iterations of the oscillating universe.
 

Heuristics: Free will is does not mean randomness. Randomness does not mean uncaused. Randomness means unpredictible, basicly that it does not conform to any statistical distribution that would cause one part of the stream of data to be more likely then other parts. It is therefore tightly coupled to predictability and as the compatabilists claim in regards to free will, not even determinism (or total non randomness) is a threat to free will.

Hi Hueristics.

I have to be quick here. I am talking about free will in this particular scenario.  However the pre-universe “conditions” under which the universe was “personally created” render any coherent concept of free will meaningless. No “being” or “entity” could had free will in a timeless, eternal and changeless (pre-universe) cosmos. It is a logical impossibility so Craig’s argument is incoherent.

Hi Taranu,:
Heliopolitan: “God (at least, Craig’s Kalamopixie) can’t be separate from his creation, because immediately that implies a higher-order reality in which both the god and the creation can exist.” 

This sorta goes to Set Theory. If the Kalamopixie (K) is fundamental, then the set of Everything (call it “U”) must at the very least be a subset of K. But if we find that there exists a set within U that is *outwith* K, then K cannot contain U (are you with me so far?); there must be a “super-set” that contains both K and the non-K elements of U, so our ontology has to shimmy up a level – to a level *above* K, meaning that K cannot be invoked as a catch-all for everything.
 
Is that any clearer (maybe not!)
Cheers,
-H

Reginald Selkirk: That the current version of the Universe appears to be ever-expanding does not establish that prior universes could not have preceded the Big Bang in an oscillating fashion, but it certainly dampens the enthusiasm for that model.

 
Wrong, it falsifies the physics of the oscillating model. The discovery of dark energy proves that the cosmological constant is positive. The only way the universe can collapse is if the cosmological constant is negative. The oscillating model does not have a mechanism to change the cosmological constant anymore than it has a mechanism to change the gravitational constant.

This is why I think that a pantheistic argument is clearly on a firmer rational ground. There is no such thing as nothing. Something has always existed.

Christians like Craig claim God existed and thenn just whipped something up out of nothing. It is magical thinking plain and simple. They cannot have God making stuff using himself because that is pantheism. They need a distinction between God and his awesome yet feeble (in comparison to him) creation.

Someone help me out. Every time I mention this in Christian or atheistic disuccion forums it is ignored. How is a pantheistic explanation not a more reasonable one? There is no something form nothing. No magical thinking. Just an eternal form who changes and forms things into different forms.

This is not an explanation I buy into, but I think it is a better one than the monotheistic explanation. I read a review of the Blackwell Companion that says the book destroys panthiestic and monistic arguments. I’f like to know how they did it.

When we use the word “exist,” we mean “be instantiated in the mind-independent world.”

one would think that a reductio ad absurdum argument against the existence of a thing should use only mind-independent properties of that thing.  On P. 116, Craig and Sinclair write

If we mentally take away all the odd-numbered events, there are still an infinite number
of events left over; but if we take away all the events greater than three, there are only four
events left, even though in both cases we took away the same number of events.

The key phrase above is “mentally take away.”  In this argument, Craig and Sinclair are using mind dependent properties of time: one can only imagine “taking away” a collection of times from another collection of times.  (And even then, it’s not really clear what it means to imagine an infinite collection of times.)
 
 
One might respond that the fact that a thing has a given mind-dependent property can itself be a fact about the mind-independent world, but such a response could make mathematical objects subject to the same kind of metaphysical reasoning in the KCA, negating the distinction Craig and Sinclair make above.

faithlessgod: I find the various pro and con Kalaam arguments generally besides the point. The point that annihilates Craig’s conclusion over a personal creator is that only such a person can have free will, and only such a free will is necessary to start the universe, as Craig so argues. However this free will is quite incoherent, especially in this particular argument.  How can a timeless, eternal, changeless entity have free will and if it does then this must be uncaused, yet this is just another name for random (which literally means uncaused), yet it was because Craig argued against a random start to the universe that he thought justified the invocation of a personal (whatever the hell that could possibly mean here anyway) becuase only such a being has free will. You can grant all the rest of his argument but it collapses here. Once cannot logically deduce a personal creator from the Kalam. Indeed applying the same standard of reasong that Craig supposes,  the Kalam shows that a personal creator is logically impossible.

Free will is does not mean randomness. Randomness does not mean uncaused. Randomness means unpredictible, basicly that it does not conform to any statistical distribution that would cause one part of the stream of data to be more likely then other parts. It is therefore tightly coupled to predictability and as the compatabilists claim in regards to free will, not even determinism (or total non randomness) is a threat to free will.

Reginald Selkirk: I repeat, for the last time: he claims to have shot down an entire field of mathematics, using integers, not “instantiated objects.” I think that disqualifies him as an expert on mathematics.

No. Craig is explicit on this in his 2009 article:

When we use the word “exist,” we mean “be instantiated in the mind-independent world.” We are inquiring whether that are extratheoretical correlates to the terms used in our mathematical theories. We thereby hope to differentiate the sense in which existence is denied to the actual infinite in (2.11) from what is often called “mathematical existence.” Kasner and Newman strongly differentiate the two when they assert, “‘Existence’ in the mathematical sense is wholly different from the existence of objects in the physical world” (Kasner & Newman 1940, p. 61). “Mathematical existence” is frequently understood as roughly synonymous with “mathematical legitimacy.” Historically, certain mathematical concepts have been viewed with suspicion and, therefore, initially denied legitimacy in mathematics. Most famous of these are the complex numbers… To say that complex numbers exist in the mathematical sense is simply to say that they are legitimate mathematical notions; they are in that sense as “real” as the real numbers. Even negative numbers and zero had to fight to win mathematical existence. The actual infinite has, similarly, had to struggle for mathematical legitimacy. For many thinkers, a commitment to the mathematical legitimacy of some notion does not bring with it a commitment to the existence of the relevant entity in the non-mathematical sense. For formalist defenders of the actual infinite such as Hilbert, mere logical consistency was sufficient for existence in the mathematical sense. At the same time, Hilbert denied that the actual infinite is anywhere instantiated in reality. Clearly, for such thinkers, there is a differentiation between mathematical existence and existence in the everyday sense of the word. We are not here endorsing two modes of existence but simply alerting readers to the equivocal way in which “existence” is often used in mathematical discussions, lest the denial of existence of the actual infinite (2.11) be misunderstood to be a denial of the mathematical legitimacy of the actual infinite.

lukeprog: Craig argues that while an actual infinite may be mathematically possible or conceptually possible, it is not metaphysically possible. That means an actual infinite cannot be instantiated, among other things.

I repeat, for the last time: he claims to have shot down an entire field of mathematics, using integers, not “instantiated objects.” I think that disqualifies him as an expert on mathematics.
 

Craig argues that while an actual infinite may be mathematically possible or conceptually possible, it is not metaphysically possible. That means an actual infinite cannot be instantiated, among other things.

Justin Martyr: That’s what the oscillating model holds – the universe has been in an infinite cycle of Big Bangs followed by contraction into Big Crunches, and so forth. It was put into serious doubt by Hawking and Penrose’s work on singularities and finally killed off with the discovery of dark energy in 1998.

That the current version of the Universe appears to be ever-expanding does not establish that prior universes could not have preceded the Big Bang in an oscillating fashion, but it certainly dampens the enthusiasm for that model.
 

lukeprog: Just because some mathematicians disagree with him, does not make him a non-expert. There are plenty of philosophers who agree with Craig that infinity is not and cannot be instantiated.

Instantiated? Please remind yourself that in this example, Craig claims to have demonstrated a contradiction in the mathematics of infinity using integers, not physical objects.

Rather the contradiction lies in the fact that one can subtract equal quantities from equal quantities and arrive at different answers. For example, if we subtract all the even numbers from all the natural numbers, we get an infi nity of numbers, and if we subtract all the numbers greater than three from all the natural numbers, we get only four numbers. Yet in both cases we subtracted the identical number of numbers from the identical number of numbers and yet did not arrive at an identical result. In fact, one can subtract equal quantities from equal quantities and get any quantity between zero and infinity as the remainder.

Toni: Isn’t the interpretation, that space and time really began to exist with the Big Bang, a premature conclusion? Couldn’t one image a former kind of universe that collapsed into a singularity and reemerged as our universe? And if that is correct, shouldn’t Craig know this, instead of being so vigorously confident?

 
That’s what the oscillating model holds – the universe has been in an infinite cycle of Big Bangs followed by contraction into Big Crunches, and so forth. It was put into serious doubt by Hawking and Penrose’s work on singularities and finally killed off with the discovery of dark energy in 1998.

Reginald Selkirk: That is questionable, based on discussion in previous threads.

Just because some mathematicians disagree with him, does not make him a non-expert. There are plenty of philosophers who agree with Craig that infinity is not and cannot be instantiated.

I’m not qualified to answer the question, but if some god who knew the answer held a gun to my head and told me to answer the question, I’d bet against the instantiation of an actual infinite.