The Kalam cosmological argument argues for a completely closed or isolated system (which I believe accords with the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics). Which means that for something temporal to exist the agent that first caused the universe would need the following characteristics. It would have to be uncaused, eternal, changeless, timeless, and immaterial. Furthermore, this cause must have a purpose for having been caused within eternity and without time or space. Taking into consideration the intricacies of the universe to produce something as fragile as life... what other non-intelligent agent could do such a thing? Anything but a personal creator to account for the cosmology of the universe is grasping for straws.
Just a point of semantics here, the Kalam cosmological argument is the antithesis of the idea of a closed system because a closed system cannot have any external source of energy or manipulation. To explain this, let's assume for a moment that God *did* create the universe, God would then have existed before the universe, and we can assume God existed after the creation of the universe, so God did not transform into the universe. This leaves two options, God created the universe external to himself, or the universe is a part of God. If the universe is external to God, then God is an external influence, making the universe an open system, if the universe is part of God (or God a part of the universe is assumed here), then God still existed before the universe, and so the universe's inception was via an external source. This is batting semantics here, so I'll leave it at that and argue the meat of it: Can Kalam's Cosmology be used to postulate an intelligent creator?
There are several ways to break this- The first is the unproven assertion that the universe had a beginning, and to understand why this is a potentially fatal flaw in this thought train, you must understand the potential for infinity within multi-dimensional space. Working with a 4-dimensional object called a hypersphere, it's possible for you to travel in any direction in 3d space, in a straight line, and end up back where you began, to understand this let's imagine an alternate universe composed of 2 spacial dimensions. In this universe, we'll call it flatland, the flatopians are 2 dimenisonal creatures who can only move in two directions, they can't sense in any way a 3rd dimension. Now let's take flatopia and put it on the surface of a sphere, now flatopia is infinite to a flatopian, but finite to us. If a flatopian stared far enough in one direction, they'd even be able to see the back of their own head! If time is wrapped along a hypersphere cosmology, then the flow of time need not ever had a beginning or end.
The second part is what you're defining the creator as: uncaused, eternal, changeless, timeless, and immaterial. Even assuming these are possible traits for anything to have, intelligent or not, there is nothing inherent in these that cannot be applied to non-intelligent phenomena. Harking back to my analogy of two rocks colliding, if these weren't rocks, but isntead were uncaused, eternal, changeless, timeless, and immaterial hyperstrings that happened to intersect in some quantum fluctuation, this has as much validity as the idea of a super intelligence of the same qualities. Applying Occam's razor, God has these assumptions: uncaused, eternal, changeless, timeless, and immaterial, and intelligent, while my hyperstrings have these assumptions: uncaused, eternal, changeless, timeless, and immaterial, thereby making the non-intelligent hyperstrings more likely. To note, there is a theory floating about more complex than the idea of nth-dimensional hyperstrings, the idea being that our universe is a bubble of 3-d space collapsed from a higher-dimensional super-space. Time and the big bang began when the collapse took place, the 'size' of our universe is expanding like a crazy mad-hatter explosion, and it will eventually return to it's previous nth spatial state. It was proposed when string theory came about, and has hung around all the way through m-brane theory.
Both these, to me, show that jumping to an intelligent creator as the impetus for our universe's inception is an unfounded assumption, even within the confines of the proof provided. The fact is, adding intelligence to the mix does nothing to advance the argument of Kalam's Cosmology, it only served to add an additional assumption which complicates the matter without adding value to the argument.
The problem here that I see (and maybe it's just your wording) is the idea that the creator is intentionally masking his existence. Other options exist. For instance... materialist naturalists aren't looking for God... so it's no big surprise they can't see him. The creator is not masking himself from us, but we don't have the tools or are using the wrong tools to see him. Or maybe we're looking in the wrong place completely. I, personally, am betting on the first option... that God exists. He wants to make himself known to his creation, but his creation refuses to acknowlege him.
I agree that there is room for exploration in the idea of God hiding himself and this can use a deeper analysis (I invite it, I'm 'in the box' so to speak on this idea, so external analysis is critical for my growth in this area), however, the argument given here is weak. Not all scientists are materialist naturalists, many are very devout theists and would probably love to look up at the sky, into animal populations, at the genetic code, or at the geologic processes and say 'God's mark is here' with empirical evidence to back it up. Unfortunately, though, even they either rely on misunderstanding of information outside their field, or on faith for their beliefs. The lack of empirical evidence is my reasoning, and if we're looking in the wrong place, then eventually we'll find his presence and all rational atheists will have no choice but to see the light or give up rationality.
Well again, I think you haven't yet explored all your options as far as empirical evidence is concerned.
If you have empirical evidence for the existence of God, we can start a new thread for that, if you'd like?
Well, I'd argue that. It's a bit egotisitic, and, well... unreasonable to assume that science will someday 'explain it all' (almost as bad as leaning on the phrase 'goddidit' without using a little critical thinking). Science will teach and continues to teach us much. I doubt we'll ever have all the answers by naturalistic means.
I can't argue this, but at the same time, while we have no reason to suspect that science has no limits, we have no reason to suspect science has limits. All we can do is work till we either know it all within a reasonable doubt, or hit a limitation to what science can achieve. My thought problem was off topic as I stated, and just me having a little fun playing with an idea.
Lucifer used the same line of thinking... look at what happened to him lol
If I believed in Lucifer, this would be a valid warning. A more apt warning would be to not let hubris blind us to the risks, sometimes science is a grab of power from nature, and power can corrupt and blind.
Kind of begging the question though, isn't it? How do you prove something unprovable if you don't even have the right tools to do so?
That really is the question, and isn't it around the same area of this thread? Working with default positions is an attempt to rationalize an expectation or belief when no empirical evidence is there for it.
What we do know, however, is that a causer must always be greater than the cause. Something greater than the universe must have created the universe.
I understand this was addressed to Soul Biscuit, but it's my thread and I can do what I wanna! j/k Honestly though, there is no reason that an initiator must be greater than the initiated. Chaos Theory is a prime example of this, in complex systems beyond our ability to know every variable exactly, a small variation can have increasingly greater changes over time, this is the origin of the idea of a butterfly flapping it's wings in Africa causing a hurricane in Florida. Therefore, while it's possible that what created the universe was greater than the universe, it could also have been something as small as a pair of intersecting photons.
That could be, and is argued, but more to the point, the order of the universe is so fine tuned as to make it practically impossible for it to be ordered the way it is, purely by chance. Not to even mention that it has the ability to sustain life.
There's two interesting arguments to this: If the chances the universe as we know it is ordered this way are 12*10^30,000,000,000,000 (or a 12 with 30 trillion 0's after it), then it would take that many universes for the chance of this 1 universe forming ever popping up, in the hypersphere cosmology, there could have been this many previous iterations of the universe in the past, or in a multiverse topology, there could be this many universes existing at the same time. The 2nd refutation to this is: What are the chances we would exist in a universe like ours? 100%, because if the universe were different, we wouldn't exist, and therefore wouldn't know- Inversely, if the univserse had a law stipulating all planets must be cubes, then we'd be debating the chances of existing in a cubicle universe as proof of God.