Jimmy Akin claims the Kalam Cosmological Argument (KCA) commits what he calls “the first and last fallacy.” (Read Jimmy’s post before considering my response. Context, and all that sort of thing.)
I will consider just one section of Jimmy’s critique, which should be sufficient to show that Jimmy is reading a false assumption into the argument and that his first-and-last fallacy doesn’t apply.
Jimmy writes,
“Some have reformulated the Grim Reaper Paradox so that it doesn’t involve time compression between noon and 1 p.m.
For example, you could have the Grim Reapers strike on New Year’s Day. If Fred is alive on New Year’s Day 2021, a Grim Reaper will kill him. But there also was a Grim Reaper set to strike on New Year’s Day in every prior year, going back an infinite number of years in history.
The same issue then results. There is no first Reaper that kills Fred.
And that’s the problem: The thought experiment is proposing an entity that can’t exist, because it involves a logical contradiction.
There can’t be a first Grim Reaper in an infinite series that has a final limit any more than there can be a first number in the series {. . . -3, -2, -1}. That’s a contradiction in terms.
It’s therefore a logical impossibility.”
Correction: The thought experiment is not proposing a first Grim Reaper. That is a misunderstanding. The thought experiment is saying that if — if, if, if! — there *is* no first reaper (given an infinite backwards series of causes), then we get the contradiction that 1) Fred is killed by a Grim Reaper, and 2) no Grim Reaper could have killed Fred. Thus, no “first-and-last” fallacy is committed, and Jimmy’s objection to the KCA fails.
More specifically, because we do not propose a first element in the GR thought experiment, and since Jimmy says, “The First-and-Last Fallacy occurs if and only if a person envisions a supposedly infinite series as having both a first and a last element,” his charge of fallacy doesn’t apply.
Here’s another way of thinking about this. If (x) depends upon the fulfillment of (so many) conditions, then given an infinite backwards series of causes (read: conditions being fulfilled) the conditions necessary to bring about (x) can never be ultimately fulfilled, since there is always 1+ more set of conditions to go. Thus, if causal finitism isn’t true, then (x) can never come to be. ([x], in this case, being the untimely death of Fred.) But since (x) has come to be, one man’s modus ponens becomes another man’s modus tollens, and causal finitism is true. There is — and must be — a first cause.
More concretely: Fred will be killed at 1BC by Grim Reaper (x) if Grim Reaper (x1) who comes before (x) at 2BC doesn’t kill Fred, and Grim Reaper (x1) will only kill Fred if Grim Reaper (x2) who comes before (x1) at 3BC doesn’t kill Fred, and so on and so forth, ad infinitum. We do not posit a first member, but instead show that in the case of there being no first member, the conditional can never in principle be fulfilled. But we know by the nature of the thought experiment that Fred is (and must be) dead at 1BC. Hence the contradiction: Fred is killed by a Grim Reaper and yet no Grim Reaper could have killed Fred.
Thus, we are not proposing a first element, we are proving a first element.
– Pat
Related Resource
Philosophy Friday: Dr. Koons on Cosmological Arguments for God, Grim Reaper Paradoxes, and More