The Kalam Cosmological Argument Is The Worst

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[sjhoneywell]

Wow. Craig and Shapiro on stage at the same time? It's a wonder it didn't collapse under the combined weight of arrogance and smug.

[dragonobskuritas]

The kalam cosmological argument is in essence a non sequitur, the conclusion does not follow. Since there is only this one argument and it is already sufficiently dealt with in this video, I will simply quote myself from another comment: Therefore we conclude that Odin Allfather must exist. If you can use the same argument for a different god, it is unreliable.

[zacharyberridge]

I find the ontological argument to be the most insultingly stupid argument for the existence of a God, as it amounts to, "If you can imagine it, it must be real!", but this one is up there. Just an argument from ignorance, spiced with absurd logical leaps to pre-determined conclusion.

[mikelapine]

Someone naming their snake Fluffy is as whimsical and heartwarming as Data naming his cat (an orange Tabby) Spot. I genuinely hope someone has done that in reality.

[inter-partyconflict]

The fact that Craig inserted "personal" in his assertion of a god is hilarious. What part of the Kalam, Mr. Craig, made you think that the cause MUST be personal? Is it just that the god you believe in is personal, therefore any god you infer and assert must also be personal?

[roderickshaka]

🔹🔹🔹🔹🔹🔹🔹🔹🔹🔹🔹
while we are at it, here is my counter to the cosmological argument that I will call ''Vijnana cosmological argument''

1️⃣ Everything that is sentient has an origin.
(1b) demonstrate that sentience can exist outside of material & why it should.
2️⃣gods would be sentient things
3️⃣gods then have an origin
4️⃣gods can't be the first cause (b/c we end up in an infinity paradox)

[Ken_Scaletta]

The Kalam is just a glorified version of "So how did everything get here then?"

[tommystyx]

I loved it when you said, "let's hear it from the horses mouth", I thought it came from another orifice.

[boxingboxingboxing]

I’ve watched a few videos on debunking the kalam. Some make some good objections.

This video is perhaps one of the worst philosophical ‘debunking’ videos I’ve ever watched.

[pauldaigle]

I think there's a deeper problem with the Kalam, which is that for it to be coherent and well defined, it can't be talking about what it says it is.

1. Everything that begins to exist has a cause.
a. What do we mean by "begins to exist" here? If we're talking about anything observable, like a bolt of lightning or something, we're talking about a change in state of existing stuff.
b. If we're not talking about anything observable, we can't really define the phrase "begins to exist" or "has a cause" because we have no examples of things beginning to exist or having causes.
2. The universe began to exist.
What does "began to exist" mean in premise two?
a. Are we talking about a change in state of existing stuff? In that case, the universe beginning to exist is a change of state of existing stuff. Stuff itself cannot have the property "begins to exist", and therefore does not logically need to have the property "has a cause". The argument can't be applied to the existence of stuff, which is what Craig wants to apply it to.
b. Are we using some other definition that we want to apply to stuff itself? In that case, we're speculating that there exists some undefined property "begins to exist" that can be applied to the universe, and that all things with this first undefined property have a second undefined property "has a cause".

So the Kalam as presented is either trivial (1a, 2a), undefined (1b, 2b) or incoherent (1a, 2b; 1b, 2a).

[michaelhaddock]

To my mind too many critiques jump past the term 'begin to exist'.
What does it mean to begin to exist?

What does it mean for (say) a table to begin to exist. If I buy a flat pack table from IKEA is it a table when it is still in the box even if it has never been assembled.
If it only starts to be a table when it is assembled, at what point can we say that the table begins to exist? When one leg is attached, two, three or all four? If I later take it apart again can we say that the table ceases to exist?
If it is already a table when it is in the box when did the table begin to exist. Did it already 'exist' while it was still a tree?

...and the table beginning to exist is nothing like a Universe beginning to exist. We tend to think of 'begin to exist' in terms of the physical things around us like the table, but a table is merely a rearrangement of existing materials. This is not the case for the Universe coming into existence, so we would need to look for examples of things coming into existence that are not just rearrangements of existing components such as ???

So to say that "everything that begins to exist has a cause" one would first have to give an example of something beginning to exist.

[nemanjalazarevic]

T: *Kalam cosmological argument*
A: What about your god? Didn't he also begin to exist?
T: He's always existed
A: Assuming that's true, why didnt he think to create the universe earlier?
T: It wasn't part of his plan! God works in mysterious ways
A: Then how do you know god created the universe if he's so mysterious?
T: It's the only logical explanation, a car doesn't appear out of thin air, and neither does the universe, someone has to make it!
A: That doesn't answer the question
T: Well... do you know what created the universe?
A: Nothing created the universe
T: That contradicts all of science!
A: The universe could've always existed...
T: the universe is 13.8 billion years old! Everyone knows that!
A: Didn't god create the universe in 7 days?
T: He could've only done that... making an entire universe must be tiring
A: Then whats the point of praying, or believing? You just said yourself he might've only made the universe then vanished
T: When you're in hell, dont complain to me that I was right!
A: When you're in any other religions hell, dont complain to me that you were wrong!

[NotGoodAtNamingThings]

There's also the fallacy of composition. Everything that begins to exist (which is inside our universe) has a cause. At the macroscopic level that's mostly true. Even if it were totally true, it doesn't mean that universes themselves have causes if they begin to exist. It seems logical to us that they must. That doesn't mean it's the case.

There's also equivocation. "Begins to exist" has different meanings for the two statements. In one, it means existing mass energy is rearranged to make something exist. In the other, it means something began to exist where before there was nothing.

This argument is dumb and falls apart on so many different levels.

[jackplumbridge]

'I concluded that all of the arguments for God's existence were false without spending much time thinking about them' - This isn't the victory speech you think it is, Plink.
I'm going to give some responses to your video here in the hopes of raising the bar of your criticism's because I don't think your criticism's are any good at all. That may come from the (self-admitted) fact that you haven't spent much time thinking about the arguments you are critiquing.

1) You confused the logical validity of an argument with the soundness of its premises.
In your cat argument example you claimed that if the second premise was false, and fluffy was actually a snake, the argument would be logically invalid as the conclusion would no longer follow from the premises. This is obviously false.
The argument would remain just as logically valid as before you concluded that fluffy was a snake. The structure of the argument wouldn't change at all if you found out that fluffy was a snake.
Finding out that fluffy was a snake would reveal that premise 2 of the argument was false, and therefore, the argument is unsound. It would do nothing to undermine the logical validity of the argument.

2) Your epistemic standards are absurdly high.
You are demanding that the premises in an argument be necessarily true in true in order for the conclusion to be believed as true. This is an absurd standard to hold to as you would never be able to prove anything beyond what is logically necessary. You would not even be able to believe that the external world was real since you cannot show that the proposition "the external world exists" is necessarily true.
The standard that has to be met for a premise to be considered true is "more plausibly true than false". If a proposition is more plausibly true than false, then it ought to be believed, and how much more plausibly true than false the proposition is will determine how firmly or tentatively you believe it.

3) You think God being an uncaused being is special pleading.
I never know how low I should set my expectations when dealing with internet atheists since the standards of their criticisms can vary. But this response of yours is certainly one of the most intellectually lacking responses one could ever have the misfortune of coming across when discussion natural theology.
Please cite me any piece of intellectual literature written on the Kalam cosmological argument (or any other cosmological argument) in which a proponent of the argument arbitrarily excludes God from their causal principle. I'll be waiting...

4) Virtual particles.
No, Plink, virtual particles do not come into existence without a cause. What is happening is that the energy contained in the quantum vacuum is being converted into these virtual particles, and then the virtual particles are being converted back into energy. Nothing new is coming into being at all, let alone uncaused. It is no different than me re-arranging my fingers to form a fist, and then re-arranging them again to form an open hand. Claiming that a fist popped in and out of existence uncaused would be absurd. Likewise, claiming that virtual particles pop in and out of existence uncaused is equally as absurd.
You clearly haven't studied this area in any depth at all, rather you have opted for reading some popular level blog or post on the topic and accepted what you heard as fact without questioning it. Rather ironic for someone who claims to approach things from a rational standpoint...

5) Dark matter possibly shows the first premise of the Kalam is false.
This is a textbook argument from ignorance fallacy. You are claiming that we ought to reject the first premise of the Kalam because, for all we know, dark matter might be uncaused.
Placing aside your logically fallacious reasoning; dark matter is part of the physical universe. It would have began to exist when the universe did, and thus, would need a cause. Arbitrarily asserting that it might not need a cause without providing any defence of such an assertion is not a refutation of anything.

6) The big bang and the beginning of the universe.
You reveal yet more ignorance regarding science in this response. The singularity is not a thing. It is not an entity. It is a boundary point to space-time. A singularity cannot be a thing that exists by its very nature, as a physical object that is infinitely small, having a size of 0, is literally nothing at all. The singularity serves a similar function to the potential infinite in calculus, it is an ideal limit or boundary.
Furthermore, whilst the beginning of the universe is technically not a part of the big bang theory, it is nevertheless the implication of the theory. The big bang theory establishes that the physical universe began to exist roughly 13.8 billion years ago, as the physical universe cannot be extended beyond the singularity (which serves a boundary to space-time).
It may also be worth pointing out that the big bang theory does not even rely on an initial beginning **point** of the universe, as the geometry of space could be represented with a rounded off cone instead of a cone with a sharply defined point, but maybe this is going beyond what is necessary to respond to your claim here.
So yes, the big bang theory most definitely entails the universe having a beginning.

7) The Kalam doesn't say anything about God.
Cameron Bertuzzi finds this response to be the worst response anyone could make against the Kalam. The first stage of the Kalam gets you a cause of the universe. The second stage of the argument gets you the features or attributes the cause must have. Trying to separate the second stage of the Kalam from the first stage and declaring the argument doesn't work because it says nothing about God is ridiculous.
Furthermore, no one is claiming that you get the Christian God from the Kalam. I have no idea where you got the idea that Craig concludes "therefore, the Christian God exists" from the second stage of the Kalam. I can only guess this ignorant assertions comes, yet again, from the fact that you have never studied the argument in any depth.

8) How do we establish the attributes of the cause?
If you want to know how we establish the attributes the cause of the universe must have, perhaps you should actually spend some time studying the argument.
You have already admitted that you haven't seriously studied any of the arguments for God's existence, so it isn't any surprise that you don't understand how the arguments work. But if you want to remedy your ignorance then you will actually have to study the arguments. Study first, speak later. This video wouldn't exist if you followed this simple and obvious principle.

Plink, your responses to the Kalam cosmological argument presented in this video are some of the worst responses anybody could present. You clearly haven't read ANYTHING on the argument, your "study" of the argument seems to consist of watching one or two YouTube videos.
You haven't added anything new to the conversation, and your objections are not taken seriously by academic atheists who raise objections to the Kalam.
I don't know what convinced you to start making responses to arguments you have never studied, but I would recommend you take the advice I offered you in point #8: Study first, speak later.

[Griexxt]

Why would you need an argument for the Universe having a cause, if you already claim to know that everything that begins to exist has a cause? It seems to me that what the argument is actually saying is that "everything else that begins to exist has a cause, therefore the Universe must have one too", which is inductive reasoning, not deductive.
Comparing it to your example of the cat, where you have a first premise that is true by definition, and a second premise that can be confirmed by observation, the KCA differs from this pattern. In the KCA you have a first premise that can only be true if the conclusion of the argument is also true. Hence the argument is circular.

[michaelreindel]

The Kalam could just as easily be used to “prove” that the universe was sneezed into existence by the Great Green Arkleseizure.

But that’s the problem with most apologetics. With minor tweaks (often just changing a single, proper noun) they can be used to “prove” Spider-Man… vampires… wHaTeVeR.

[vestafreyja]

I'm not a fan of William Lane Craig.

Some people might consider me to be somewhat educated as having earned a BSc in Psychology with a minor in Biochemistry, BSc & MSc in Computer Science and a PhD in Computer Science and Engineering. The more I hear William Lane Craig speak the more I become convinced that he is what poorly educated people believe a highly educated would express themselves. As a somewhat educated person what I hear is a educated person saying really stupid things. When WLC thought Adam & Eve were Homo erectus I was absolutely dumbfounded as being one of the moronic things I have ever heard a supposedly educated person ever say!

[Suckmuffet]

And I find myself going "holy shit, I get it! I actually get both the argument and the deconstruction!"

I've tried so har to wrap my mind around this argument for so long and this is the video that got to me. There are alot of great videos made by a bunch of great atheists, professors, phd:s and science people.. but this gave me the end piece of it.
I've felt like an idiot for so long. Thank you

[dane]

When you have to write an ENTIRE book on two simple premises and a conclusion well, you have a CAREER in Aologetic$.
Afterall, apologia isn't about finding truth, it is nothing more than "a formal defense of one's opinions or conduct".

I enjoyed your take on this, thank you.

[HurricaneJD]

I still believe that Craig knows that he's lying and he knows that it's horsesh** and he's just a car salesman trying to sell his cars. It's the only thing that I can come up with As for the reason why you can point out all those flaws in that argument and he still just ignores everything you say and he's still cool with that argument. If it was something that he was doing by accident you would think he would say oh wow you're right I'm so sorry you're totally right on that I can't believe I missed it