Talk:Kalam

Hey guys. I wanted to throw something at you that I'm not sure if you're aware of. You probably are, but it relates directly to the supporting argument for KCA premise 2; That the universe began to exist. As I'm sure you are aware, the way that physicists use the word 'universe' is different from the vernacular usage, as it is with many words. This is by-the-by, of course. The real point I wanted to raise was the work of Neil Turok and Paul Steinhardt, who actually suggest that time is an underpinning dimension that was always there in one form or another. Their model for the instantiation of the universe is widely regard as the best model we currently have on the table relying, as it does, on physics that we observe in our own cosmic expansion.

Papers are available from:

http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/hep-th/pdf/0611/0611259v2.pdf

http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/hep-th/pdf/0702/0702153v1.pdf

Further reading: The Endless Universe by Neil Turok and Paul J. Steinhardt

Hope this is useful.

Keep up the good work.

christians and kalam objections
http://midwestapologetics.org/articles/godsexistence/refutingobectionstokca.htm

Counterargument

 * S1 and S2 cannot be simultaneous, as the Universe would exist at the same instant that it doesn't exist - a contradiction.

The use of the words 'simultaneous' and 'instant' seem to be assuming time in a place where time has been explicitly forbidden. The premises underlining the quoted claim would seem to require an atemporal state of affairs to be unchanging. But doesn't that beg the question? --Victor 16:01, 11 August 2011 (CDT)

So what???
So what

''Although some other variation of the Kalām argument or Cosmological argument may be internally consistent even if all the terms given are agreed upon by all parties concerned, the argument actually makes no effort to demonstrate anything tangible in nature regarding the manifestation of a God. An example analogous to the Kalām argument would be a geometry proof on some type of polygon. Even though the entire table of proofs is totally internally consistent, it does not demonstrate that the actual polygon exists in nature. An exhaustive effort to prove all the angles of a triangle will always add up to 180 degrees says nothing about whether or not triangles exist.''

How is that? Kalam argues that God is a logical necessity for the existence of our universe- and not some sort of mathematical abstraction.


 * The problem is, even if this argument were logically sound, it doesn't say anything about what this "uncaused first cause of the universe's coming into existence" actually is. Some versions of the argument will define this uncaused first cause as "God". But then how do you know that (1) it's the same as the "God" that you are thinking of, and (2) that it even still exists? - dcljr 18:02, 15 January 2011 (CST)

Zealous deletion
In case you noticed me deleting big chunks of this page, and wondering what got into me:

A while back, we had a user with a tendency to create pages here from other people's essays. At the time, I tried to clean up as much as I could, but there was a lot to go through.

Since Kalam came up in the TAE blog comments, I revisited the page, saw some sections that seemed to have a style preferred by the aforementioned user. Rather than carefully sift through what was copied from other sites and what was changed by later Iron Chariots contributors, I just assumed that anything that looked too "academic" was plagiarized from someone else's essay, and deleted it.

If your favorite original contribution got tossed in the trash, I'm sorry. You should be able to rescue it from the page history. --Arensb 21:19, 16 February 2011 (CST)

Unproven Premise
Is it a flaw in the argument that the first premise: "Everything that begins to exist has a cause", is unproven? Humans have very little experience with things beginning to exist ex nihilo, and so have no way of knowing whether the beginning of something's existence must be caused. When it comes to things like particle-antiparticle pairs, which do begin to exist (as far as we can tell) ex nihilo and (usually) quickly annihilate, there is no cause that we can discern for their beginning to exist. We have no empirical evidence for the causation of the beginning of existence. wackojacko1138 00:17, 20 March 2011 (CDT)