The Kalam Argument and First Cause Coherence

At my school there is a monthly undergraduate philosophy journal that is published by students specifically for the purpose of allowing their fellow undergrads to develop and write philosophical works. In this journal, there was an article questioning the coherence of the Kalam Cosmological Argument. Rather than detailing all of the critiques of the argument that were offered (as I am trying to be very brief with this particular blog posting), I wish to address one claim in particular.

The person writing the article (whose name I will not mention because it is not relevant) said that if there is such a thing as a first cause to the Universe, and it itself is uncaused, then this goes against all of our previous conceptions of what cause and effect entail, and for that reason the claim of an uncaused first cause incoherent. That is, how can this “first cause” create the Universe without being caused to do so? If this is the case, then our first cause somehow acts without being caused to act (which makes no sense), or we must concede , on the other hand, that the Universe is the result of an infinite number of causes.

Of course, I address this idea in the article I wrote (see below) on the Kalam Cosmological Argument, but here I want to address more directly the notion that an uncaused Cause could produce the Universe (something itself which is the first cause in the string of causes which constitutes our Universe), and how this idea is neither incoherent nor mysterious.

I will first say that the idea is not mysterious because I propose that the first cause of the Universe is a personal being. From what we know of entities that are personal, they seem to have this notion we call free will, Libertarian Freedom, or the power of agent causation (these three being the same thing). Human beings are typically considered to have free will, as most people would stipulate that such is necessary if we are to be morally responsible beings - which most people will maintain that we are. Hence, human beings are persons, and persons by nature are said to have free will. Specific formulations of what it means for a being to have free will, or the power of agent causation, are a bit tricky. We could say, roughly, that if a being is free with respect to choosing to do "X", then no antecedent conditions are necessary for them to make the decision to do "X," or, to not do "X." In other words, they are not determined to act a particular way because of the antecedent conditions in which they exist (be they internal, or external conditions, such as our states of mind or the atmospheric pressure).

I gave the above explanation for informative purposes only, because a precise formula of what it means for a being to have free will is not necessary to the defense that I wish to make. The point that I will be arguing for is that the idea of an Uncaused cause acting without being caused to act is not an incoherent idea, if such a cause exists. I will not henceforth be arguing that such a cause exists, nor that it is reasonable to believe something can exist which has no cause for its existence, but only that if such an Uncaused cause exists then there is not an insurmountable conceptual difficulty in understanding how it might act without being acted upon.

What I want to suggest , then, are the similarities between human beings and this first cause, given that human beings are personal, and that the first cause (on my view) is personal. If we can be said to have a grasp of what it is for human beings to have free will without a definition of what such a concept would entail, then I think that we can understand what it would be for a being which is personal (but not a human) to have free will. That is, the degree to which human free will is mysterious is also the degree to which the free will of a personal cause of the Universe is mysterious, considering that both have this ability in virtue of being persons. And, it does not seem all that mysterious to say that human beings have free will. Now, if we do not consider the idea of human free will to be so completely mysterious and incoherent such as to suggest that humans do not have free will, then there is no reason to think that the free will of an uncaused, personal being who created the Universe is, by contrast, so mysterious as to be incomprehensible. So, ruling out the idea that a cause of the Universe could have free will cannot be done on the basis of the fact that it is incoherent and therefore untrue.

Next, we would say that if this uncaused Cause has free will, then it can act to create the Universe simply in virtue of having a free will. That is, nothing causes it to act, it simply has the ability to act uncaused – as this is what we mean by agent causation.

Hence, a simple response to this problem is just to say that the cause of the Universe is personal, and therefore it does not require a cause to act. However, if someone still wishes to maintain that this notion is incoherent, I have given them the grounds for doing so. What they need to do is show that human free will is incoherent and mysterious, therefore the free will of a first cause suffers the same difficulty. The problem with this response, however, is that it then denies that humans beings have free will. Now, the natural reaction of most people is to object at this point and maintain that human beings have free will, typically citing the moral implications of denying such a view. I, however, will not even go that far, and can grant for the sake of argument that human beings do not have free will. I think that the result, however, will be less than thrilling for the person who still wishes to maintain the incoherence of the first cause.

So, to recap quickly, we have said (hypothetically) that human beings do not have free will because such a concept is too mysterious and incoherent to be true. Fine, I can grant that. The difficulty, however, is in then seeing what force this argument has against the coherence of the Kalam Argument. That is, if we human beings are not free with respect to our will so that all of our thoughts and decisions are caused, then how can we claim that because something is incoherent, therefore it is untrue? Our very notion of coherence is the result of causal processes, and so may not be coherent for all we know! Furthermore, if we deny human free will, then we deny our ability to rationally assent to truths that deserve rational assent, such that we might be assenting to the idea that the first cause argument is incoherent when it is actually perfectly coherent! The point is that because all of our decisions about what we will believe are caused, we have no way of knowing if they are rational or not. We might think that they are rational, but this is only because we are caused to think so. And if we think that the first cause argument is incoherent, then it is because we are caused to think this, not because it actually is incoherent.

Hence, what I see following from my response to this objection is one of two conclusions. We either give up the objection by maintaining that human free will is not mysterious, therefore the free will of a personal cause for the Universe is not a mysterious concept either. Or, we maintain that human free will is too incoherent to be true, and then admit that our arriving at this conclusion was not the result of reason, but causal processes, suggesting that the argument itself has no rational force.