About a month ago I got to attend a lecture and Q&A by William Lane Craig at Rutgers University. The lecture was remarkably dry ( like much of this blog), but anyone fascinated by the Kalam Cosmological Argument would have been satisfied. Dr. Craig defended the premises of the argument and then further argued that only theism could satisfy the argument's conclusion. At this particular lecture, the Kalam Argument he presented varied slightly from the one he usually gives, but for the purpose of this post I will present the usual one:
1. Everything that has a beginning has a cause
2. The universe had a beginning
3. Therefore, the universe had a cause.
I have heard his defense of the argument before, so I spent a lot of my time formulating the question I was going to ask in person. My question concerned an issue of inadequacy; in other words it concerned whether "God" (as described in classical theism) could be the "cause" in Kalam's conclusion. The Kalam Argument requires that the cause in the conclusion to be timeless without the space-time universe. However, just as Dr. Craig argued that naturalistic entities could not be the cause of the space-time universe because they themselves must be temporal, my point was that God, as a thinking/conscious entity, must necessarily be temporal.
Dr. Craig responded to my question (which I articulated quite well I may add) by saying that he had addressed such an objection of inadequacy in his book Time and Eternity. He said that a timeless person may not be your "garden variety" person, but it could still be a person nonetheless. Summarizing his own position, Dr. Craig said temporal features of person hood, such as memory, are inessential and thus the objection can be defeated.
Even though I haven't read what he wrote in Time and Eternity, from what he said to me, I doubt that his response could defeat the objection. Something like memory may be inessential to person-hood, but consciousness and thinking, I would say, are essential. In any case, classical theism cannot deny such properties to God, so if these properties are irreconcilable with timelessness, then classical theism has a serious problem.
Perhaps, however, I should elaborate on why these properties are irreconcilable. Consciousness seems inherently be a flow of mental states. I cannot conceive of a "static" consciousness. Perhaps, the inconceivability stems from the fact that I can't tease apart my thinking from my conscious states. But this only goes to show the intrinsic temporal nature of thinking. As evident by the "ing", thinking is necessarily a process, one that contains different mental states. It seems then that a timeless entity wouldn't be able to have any kind of train of thought.
To make my point clearer, ask yourself this question: Without the space-time universe, could God count to ten? It's clear that he couldn't, since counting would indicate the passage of time. First, this seems to make God's omnipotence contingent on space-time, but more importantly it shows that God isn't even able to think without space-time. Without thinking, God is robbed of one of his essential features, as one could no longer call him a mind. I don't know how Dr. Craig would respond to this illustration of counting, but I think it effectively demonstrates that a mind can't be timeless, and hence not capable of being the cause of the space-time universe.
As interesting as this point is as a defeater for Kalam and perhaps classical theism, it's also indicative of how difficult it is to grapple with non-space time reality. Can we conceive of any entity that exists beyond space-time? From what I remember from Dr. Craig's critiques, what he has to say about the inadequacy of naturalistic causes seems to hold up as well as my critique of God. Does this failure of our cognition point to a Kantian thesis where space-time are faculties of the mind? It may sound absurd, but maybe there's an element of truth to it. I hate to be a mysterian, but Kant's conclusion on the impossibility of conceptualizing the beginning of the universe seems to be on the mark.
I hope to encounter Dr. Craig again, but I will likely approach him with a different topic. Probably less cerebral...
