Canadian Journal of Philosophy

Craig, William Lane.
J. Howard Sobel on the Kalam Cosmological Argument
Canadian Journal of Philosophy - Volume 36, Number 4, December 2006, pp. 565-584

University of Calgary Press

William Lane Craig - J. Howard Sobel on the Kalam Cosmological Argument - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 36:4 Canadian Journal of Philosophy 36.4 (2006) 565-584 Muse Search Journals This Journal Contents J. Howard Sobel on the Kalam Cosmological Argument William Lane Craig Talbot School of Theology La Mirada, CA 90639 USA Introduction J. Howard Sobel devotes seventy pages of his wide-ranging analysis of theistic arguments to a critique of the cosmological argument. The focus of that critique falls on the argument a contingentia mundi; but he also offers in passing some criticisms of the argument ab initio mundi, or the kalam cosmological argument. Sobel provides the following statement of the argument: Everything that begins to exist has a cause of its existence. The universe began to exist. Therefore, the universe has a cause of its existence [that did not begin to exist]. Sobel will accept the causal premiss (1) only if 'begins to exist' means 'has a first instant of its existence,' and he disputes the arguments and evidence for (2). Traditional proponents of the kalam argument sought to justify (2) by means of philosophical arguments against the infinity of the past, while contemporary interest in the argument arises from the empirical evidence of physical cosmology for the truth of (2). Both of these considerations arise in the course of Sobel's discussion of the possibility of an infinite temporal regress of events, as he weighs Thomas Aquinas'...