Starter - Without your notes – define these
terms – 15 mins
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Synthetic
Posteriori
Inductive
Primary movers
Secondary movers
Ex nihilo nihil fit
Actual infinites
First Cause
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Demonstratio
Potentiality
Actuality
Intermediate Cause
Ultimate Cause
Priori
Contingency
Temporal
Kalam Argument
William Lane Craig and Ed Miller
The history of the Kalam Argument
• The Holy Qur’an called Muslims to use reasoning and to seek
learning.
• Islamic philosophy was referred to as kalam.
• William Lane Craig has re-visited the Kalam argument which
originated amongst Islamic philosophers.
Why it is different
• NOTE the difference between the KALAM argument and the
argument from CONTINGENCY
• The Contingency arguments (e.g. arguments such as St. Thomas
Aquinas’ ‘Five Ways’) seek to establish the dependence of the
universe on God now. They seeks to show there is something
necessary on which the contingent Universe depends
• The Kalam argument, by contrast, seeks to establish the
Universe has a beginning and that this beginning was caused.
William Lane Craig
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His argument can be summarized in the following three ways;
Everything that begins to exist has a cause of its existence,
The universe began to exist,
Therefore, the universe has a cause for its existence.
No scientific explanation can explain the cause and so the cause must be
personal
The universe began to exist....Prove it!
• Craig puts forward a number of arguments to support premise 2, that the universe began to
exist. The main ones are:
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An actual infinite cannot exist
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A beginningless temporal series of events is an actual infinite
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Therefore a beginningless series of events cannot exist.
Example of the library!
• An actual infinite is discussed in regards to a collection of things with an
infinite number within it, for example, a library with an actually infinite set of
books.
• He refers to a library with an infinite number of red books and an infinite
number of black books.
The complex bit!!
• One of the unique traits of an actual infinite is that part of an actually infinite set is
equal to whole set. For example, in an actually infinite set of numbers, the number
of even numbers in the set is equal to all of the numbers in the set.
• In regards to the Library both the red and the black books would have to equal the
same amount as the whole collection
• In other words A part of the set would have to be equal to the whole of the set.
• This is impossible!