• Premise 1. Everything that began to exist has a cause.
• Premise 2. The universe began to exist.
• Conclusion. Therefore, the universe has a cause.

This is the basic form of the Kalam cosmological argument for the existence of god. Some say premise 2 is implied by the big bang theory, but this is not strictly correct. Science cannot, at present, distinguish between a universe that began to exist and a universe that always existed. One counter to this argument is to say that premise 1, if true, must apply to the cause described in the conclusion. Religious folks typically respond in an ad hoc way by defining god as an uncaused cause, but this clearly violates premise 1, undermining the argument. After all, if god could be uncaused for all we know, then the universe could be uncaused for all we know. Additionally, it is not clear that the cause described in the conclusion is a god in the sense of Christianity or other mainstream religions.

My problems with premise 1

Consider a rock on the side of a mountain. We’d be inclined to say it began to exist, but when did it begin to exist? Was it when it broke off from its parent rock? It would be strange to say it did not already exist as a part of the parent rock. When rocks are dated, it is usually to their formation. Rock formation is a gradual process of transforming already existing material. This material originated in supernovae and later coalesced with the rest of the nascent earth, but only came together as a unit as early as the rock’s formation. My point is that physical objects don’t have single points of origin, they have histories. Everything can ultimately be traced back to the big bang or whatever hypothetical origin point of the universe.

“If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.”

Carl Sagan

We also run into some problems with objects that change their physical constitution over time, such as living organisms or the Ship of Theseus, which are not physically identical to themselves when they began to exist. More to the point, as a mereological nihilist I don’t believe that objects with proper parts exist at all, and if something does not exist then it never began to exist.

It may be that the universe is the only thing that ever “began to exist,” in which case our intuition about everyday items having causes may not apply.

More troublingly, we cannot reliably establish the law of cause and effect in general. As Hume pointed out, we can only observe correlation and we must infer causation. Causality is part of our quotidian understanding of the world, and it evidently works well for that. However, it doesn’t have the kind of philosophical grounding required to extend it to something like the creation of the universe, which is far beyond our present comprehension.

So I reject premise 1 on the grounds that we have never observed something coming into existence and have no idea if such an event would have a cause or not. What we have observed is rearrangements of existing matter which are caused by physical processes. The origins of the universe are mysterious, to be sure, but there is no cosmological basis for believing in a personal creator god.