The Kalam Cosmological Argument

[Sheldon]

I don’t see how William Lane Craig gets to a being with free will.

Not to mention that free will  is logically incoherent.

As of course, is most of Lane Craig's irrational guff.

[Disagreeable]

I would say that nonexistence cannot exist by definition therefore existence is necessary. This is the conclusion of the Kalam. But it does not get to God! A necessary existence is not a god. A god is also intelligent to say the least.

[Tonus]

But it does not get to God!

Craig never met a wall he couldn't climb over with an imaginary ladder. He simply injects a bunch of presuppositions into the argument and, unsurprisingly, gets the answer he wants.

Nearly every argument for the existence of god takes a form of "god is necessary." Start with the presupposition that god exists, use this god to fill any and every gap in our knowledge, and demand that nonbelievers unwind the mess he just created. Add more presuppositions to create a much broader base of claims that must now be unwound by the nonbeliever.

It does leave the theist with one particular problem: if this is as close as you get to an answer, then we can short-circuit the whole approach by accepting the conclusion and then asking them to demonstrate how we can possibly know which god it is. To add to the challenge, I prefer to put forth god as a purely research-motivated being, who builds and dissects universes because it wants to learn more about them. Who has no interest whatsoever in us apart from our usefulness as data points. Who need not interact with worlds that are nothing more than numbers to it. That god explains our universe quite nicely. All of the magic, none of the poorly written texts to struggle with for centuries. It even explains some of the presuppositions that theists use to support the existence of god. Fine tuning? Covered. Knowledge can only exist if god does? Covered.

I got tired of chasing ghosts. I figured I would build a better ghost and ask theists to explain why their ghost makes more sense than mine.

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

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