Dr. Craig is a liar.

[Simon Moon]

Okay, I'm gonna practice my (barely) rudimentary logic skills for a moment.

1) Everything that has a beginning of its existence has a cause of its existence.

(I reject this premise until someone can demonstrate with evidence that it's likely to be true, but for the sake of argument, let's continue.)

P1 has problems:

• We don't know that it's true; it's an arbitrary assumption.
  
• Physics (quantum mechanics) rejects P1 as false.  Very tiny things do not seem to have causes, and the beginning of the big bang would have been very tiny. To claim otherwise is to renounce science, or to proclaim that one is smarter and more authoritative than science.
  
• P1 is arbitrary and self serving.  If, instead of an unbegun god, you worshiped a blue god, P1 would read, "Everything that isn't blue has a cause of its existence."  And, thus modified, the argument would be exactly as strong as it is in Craig's version.
  
• There is no sense of the word "beginning" for which gods do not begin but the rest of the world does.  The first cause argument surreptitiously two-steps between two incompatable definitions of "beginning."  If we hold them to either definition, the argument has no appeal at all.  
  

(2) The universe has a beginning of its existence.
Therefore:

It is entirely possible that physicists believe the universe began, but I don't know of any reason to think they do.  Asimov said the big bang was the beginning, but then he immediately hedged by saying something like, "At least we can call that the beginning, because we don't know what happened before that."  

Hawking made the same move in A Brief History of Time.

I went onto a university campus with the intent of finding out what cosmologists actually think about this issue.  I found one, put the question to him, and he said, "Nobody knows what happened before the big bang.  Nobody knows what happened before the big bang.  Nobody knows what happened before the big bang."  

My tentative conclusion is that nobody knows what happened before the big bang.  I will of course abandon this belief if I am shown that there is some other scientific consensus.  But, after years of watching discussions such as this one, I feel confident that there is no such consensus.  If there was, the theists would be pointing it out all the time.  

(3) The universe has a cause of its existence.

The universe is everything that exists, by definition.  So it can't have a cause, because there is nothing to cause it.  Unless you want to allow for self-cause, or for causes that do not precede their effects, which is hardly what we mean by the word cause. 

Does a bullet hole cause a gun to go off?  No, because the gun goes off first.  If we didn't require causes to precede effects, then bullet holes would count as causes because the correlation between the holes and the discharges is so strong.  

So, either we abandon the normal meaning of "cause," or we accept that the universe can't have a cause.  

Now, there are also other meanings of "universe."  But if we want to look for the ultimate cause of the ultimate beginning, that is, if we are engaged in cosmology, then there is no point in restricting our investigation to some things rather than all things.  

If we define the universe as everything but god, then we are aren't looking for the first cause, but only the second.  And if theists wave away the suggestion that their logic should apply to their own god, then they aren't looking for the first cause either.  They are looking only for an excuse, an excuse to believe in their god.

...
I honestly don't understand how the KCA is supposed to prove anything...

The KCA's job is just to masquerade as an argument.  It can't convince anyone to be a theist, but it can suffice to comfort theists by letting them believe that their religion is logically justified.  But if you aren't a motivated believer, if you don't need to believe that theism is justified, then the KCA will have no appeal.

[/quote]



The biggest problem P1 has, as far as logic goes, is that it is guilty of the fallacy of affirming the consequent. 

To break it down:

The statement, "Everything that begins to exist", is another way of saying, there are 2 sets: one set contains everything that  begins to exist, the other set contains everything that does not begin to exist. 

The theist making the argument only believes that one thing, their god, is a member of the set of all things that do not begin to exist.

So, their god is inserted into the first premise, and is also the conclusion of the argument. 

Without even getting into the soundness of the premises, the modus ponens of the argument is flawed.