The Kalaam Argument

As an example of how apologetics can help us better understand God and his relationship with the world, Dr. Blehm uses the example of the “Kalaam” argument for God’s existence. The name Kalaam comes out of medieval Islamic theology and philosophy, which had some impact on medieval Christian thinkers like Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274).

But the “argument from cause” or cosmological argument for God’s existence goes much further back to the time even before Christ. In the 300s BC, the Greek philosopher Aristotle argued that the world had to be moved by something, and he called this first cause of the universe the “Prime Mover.” A song from the movie, The Sound of Music, catches the argument when: “Nothing comes from nothing; nothing ever could.” Therefore, there must be a God.

Here is the Kalaam argument as Dr. Blehm and others like William Lane Craig have presented it:

The idea that things have causes is deeply ingrained in our experiences of the world. If a house explodes, you think to yourself, “What caused that to happen?” Houses don’t just explode every day. In the same way, if the universe “exploded” into existence at some point in the past, it is natural to ask, “What caused that to happen?”

There have been times when some have tried to argue that the universe might be more or less eternal. In the 1950s, an idea called the “steady state theory” was popular in some circles. It more or less suggested that the universe has been in its current “steady state” for all eternity past. Another idea, the idea that the universe began with a “bang,” was looked down on because it seemed to play into religious belief too easily.

But Einstein’s equations suggested otherwise… and Einstein himself didn’t like it. A Catholic priest named Georges Lemaître – who was also a scientist – saw this dimension to Einstein’s relativity in 1927. Einstein scoffed, “Your math is correct, but your physics are abominable.” It wouldn’t be the last time Einstein was wrong.

In the early 1960s, the discovery of cosmic background radiation indicated that Einstein and the steady-state theorists were wrong. The universe had a beginning. The idea of the Big Bang actually supports Christian faith because it indicates that the universe had a beginning. That suggests that it had a Cause.

What was that Cause? Dr. Blehm and the Kalaam argument suggest that the cause must be timeless, spaceless, immaterial, and incredibly powerful. That is to say, the cause must be beyond and outside this universe. If it creates this space, it must be beyond this space, “spaceless” in terms of space as we know it. The same goes for time. It must be outside of our sense of time. It must be outside our sense of material. 

And it obviously must be more powerful than the power of this universe. You can’t lift 200 pounds unless you’re 200 pounds strong. So the Creator of this universe must be at least “universe-strong.”