Wes Morriston is awesome

[Pizza]

Wes Morriston is a liberal Christian and philosopher best know for criticizing arguments for the existence of god. He has an online collection of papers here. In " Doubts about the kalam cosmological argument" he criticizes the KCA. Some large sample to give you a taste. It's good stuff.

---

I quite agree that a tiger couldn’t spring into existence uncaused. But we have been given no reason to think that what’s true of a tiger applies to physical reality as a whole. Remember that we’re talking about the origin of the whole natural order here. A tiger comes into existence within the natural order, and within that order it is indeed impossible for things like tigers just to pop into existence. But a s far as I can see, there is no comparable context for the origin of physical reality as a whole, and no analogous reason for thinking that it could not have begun to exist uncaused.

Stripped of all the vivid but confusing talk about “popping into being uncaused out of nothing,” Craig is saying two things: first, that premise 1 is true; and second that it is a metaphysically necessary truth—true, I suppose one might say, in all possible worlds. At this point, I believe that Craig has simply lost the thread of the argument. Recall that he began by arguing that this metaphysical principle must be true on the ground that it is required to explain “why just anything and everything do not come into existence uncaused from nothing.” In response, I have pointed out that the premise of this argument is patently false. Within the natural order, it is quite easy to explain where tigers come from and why they can’t just pop into existence. We don’t need a general metaphysical principle in order to provide the desired explanation. It is not dialectically apt merely to repeat that the metaphysical principle in question is true.

Is it Craig’s all-embracing metaphysical principle, or is it the comparatively modest claim that within the natural order things don’t begin to exist without (natural) causes? As far as I can see, Craig has given no reason for preferring the first of these answers.

It is also worthy of note that the empirical route is quite a dangerous one for the friends of the kalām argument to take if they want to conclude that the universe was created out of nothing by the will of a timeless and immaterial person a long time ago. Here are some other well-attested empirical generalizations, each of which is incompatible with that hypothesis about the origin of the universe.
(A) Material things come from material things.
(B) Nothing is ever created out of nothing.
© Nothing is ever caused by anything that is not itself in time.
(D) The mental lives of all persons have temporal duration.
(E) All persons are embodied.
It might of course be said that while these generalizations apply within the natural order, they do not apply to the natural order as a whole or to its cause. But then, of course, one could reasonably ask why the same should not be said of the claim that whatever begins to exist has a cause.
It is also worth pointing out that prima facie, at least, quite a number of these generalizations have as much claim to be metaphysical truths as Craig’s premise 1. One might be left with the impression that the friends of the kalām argument are picking and choosing metaphysical principles to suit the needs of the argument they want to make.

---