One should never assume that just because someone is a professional philosopher (or otherwise intelligent) that they’re up to snuff on arguments for the existence of God (or the literature in philosophy of religion generally). Very rarely would that be the case, though I certainly admit to the occasional exception.
Of course, there are all those classic examples of quite brilliant people being almost hilariously ill-informed on traditional theistic arguments: of Bertrand Russel assuming all arguments for God can be safely and swiftly dismissed with the glib rebuttal of “Well, if everything has a cause, then who caused God?” which only betrays a profound ignorance of how metaphysical arguments for God commence (typically, by a commitment to the exact opposite premise: that *not* everything can have a cause).
A more recent example, however, would be Michael Huemer (a philosopher I appreciate for his critiques of secular political philosophy and political authority, more especially) and his post on the Kalam Cosmological argument. As mentioned in a recent podcast with John DeRosa, I’ve had something of an on again/off again relationship with the Kalam argument, only having recently settled into the position that the argument in its more contemporary form is probably sound. Regardless of my position, Huemer’s criticisms are inadequate, and fail to address responses from one of the more prominent defenders of the Kalam argument: Alexander Pruss.
Before we get into it, and somewhat ironically, Huemer does mention the critique of Bertrand Russel. Here, I was hoping Huemer would criticize Russel’s dismissal as exceedingly crude (which it is), but instead he tips his hat only in passing, offering what seems to be something of an implicit endorsement. A shame, really; if only because nobody familiar with the tradition of cosmological arguments would put any stock in the “if everything needs a cause,” objection, for they would be eminently aware of the fact that no venerable theistic argument ever proceeds from such a dubious (if not self-evidently false) premise. In my eBook How to Think About God I start from precisely the opposite points of view: that not everything can have a cause, otherwise nothing would exist. But other arguments start from notions such as “whatever is reduced from potency to act has a cause,” or, “whatever is composite has a cause,” or “a cause is required for anything whose essence is really distinct from its act of existence,” but these are all radically different in their causal claim than simply “everything has a cause,” since these arguments ultimately trace back to that which not only does not have a cause, but could not in principle have a cause, precisely because that explanatory ultimate never moves from potency to act, is absolutely simple and non-composite, and whose essence just is subsistent existence itself – namely, God.
Obviously, this isn’t a major theme of Huemer’s critique, but it’s worth pointing out, because it is a significant oversight. Also, in the combox, when somebody gestures towards Aquinas, Huemer responds, “Yeah, the motion argument sounds outdated. Some people would say that for something to persist over time, there has to be a ‘sustaining cause’ – something that makes it keep existing. That isn’t refuted by physics, but I don’t really see why people believe it.”
This is a curious statement for several reasons. First, there’s a difference in saying, “I can see why people might believe that, but here’s why I think it’s false,” versus what Huemer says, “I don’t really see why people believe it.” Well, the reason people believe it (including me, a former atheist) is precisely because of the sorts of metaphysical motivations that Huemer would seem to be largely unaware of — that precisely those things which are metaphysically composite, or in which there is a real distinction between the “what-ness” and “is-ness” of a thing, there not only must have been a cause of its coming into existence (if such a thing ever began to exist) but a cause which upholds such a being in existence. Again, I don’t want to get into those arguments now, since that isn’t the overall theme of Huemer’s critique (again, see my eBook How to Think About God, or Feser’s 5 Proofs, for the deeper treatments), I just want to highlight that, intelligent as Huemer is, he simply hasn’t done his homework on this one.
In the combox somebody also mentions the more perennial question of why is there something rather than nothing, to which Huemer replies, “I don’t know if it should be called a cause. But I don’t think there is (or could be) a reason why there is anything rather than nothing. There are just irreducibly contingent facts that the universe is a certain way.”
So, Huemer is positing brute facts, perhaps unaware of the developments on the many problems the brute fact hypothesis entails, predominantly a collapse into radical empirical skepticism. I have an extended conversation on this issue with Robert Koons, here, for those interested.
Finally, as for Heumer’s critique of the Kalam argument (the proposal that only that infinite intensive magnitudes are impossible), this is something Alexander Pruss has responded to in at least two places: here and more substantially here. Furthermore, because Pruss is among the most competent/relevant defenders of causal finitism (which supports premise 2 in the Kalam), it seems somewhat egregious that his critiques are overlooked.
As Pruss points out, Huemer’s proposal has some high costs attached to it, such as rejecting certain aspects of General Relativity, but also that “no infinite intensive magnitudes” doesn’t work because if causal finitism is false then it is, in fact, possible to have natural infinite intensive magnitudes (Pruss gives an example of an infinitely high stack of pancakes, where the z-coordinate of the center of mass will be infinity, which is not extensive), and so after trotting out a series of critiques to Huemer’s alternative proposal, Pruss eventually concludes, “Causal finitism is not tied to details of laws of nature in the way that Huemer’s solution is, and appears on the whole superior. We can thus accept Causal Finitism as our best available unified explanation of a variety of paradoxes.”
And with causal finitism in place, the Kalam argument would seem to go through.