Philosopher and theologian William Lane Craig recently appeared on the Ben Shapiro show to present the case for reasonable Christian belief. Pat offers commentary on that episode, dives deeper into some of the arguments, and responds to objections made to a comment he posted on a video.
Reasonable Faith, The Kalam Argument, and William Lane Craig
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The Ed Feser interview I also enjoyed a lot:
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I learn so much from your podcasts Pat. I never heard about the Kalam Argument until today. It’s another fascinating approach to evaluating the existence of a universal cause. From what you’re saying, it does play into a monotheistic belief system and I’m going to look into it more. I like how you explain the basics (sometimes more) of very complicated concepts and some of the counterarguments for these concepts. Yet another tool in my theological toolbox thanks to your Sunday School. On a side note, I agree 100% that people shouldn’t waste their time with endless replies to online arguments. Otherwise, you’ll find yourself wasting valuable time with trolls and people with nothing better to do than post online. It reminds me of what you mention in your new book How to Be Better at Almost Everything that not everyone is going to agree with you and you shouldn’t worry about bringing everyone over to your beliefs.
Pat I forgot to ask. I’ve been studying natural law lately and I was wondering how natural law arguments square with the Kalam Argument. Also, what are your thoughts on natural law?
Catholics have long affirmed the reality of the natural law, but would only qualify that, apart from the light of Scripture and Tradition, people engaging in arguments or deductions from natural law may still be prone to error. So I’m a fan. One of the essays for my masters program was on happiness according to natural law being found only in God, which Aquinas famously argued for. I find natural law to be the only workable system of morality from the standpoint of reason. Of course, it still requires God to be fully, logically supportable, but the neat thing about natural law theory is you can deduce various moral principles and goals without pointing directly to the Bible. Obviously, one can see the advantages of such an approach when engaging in an otherwise secular society where the Bible may or may not be taken seriously when having moral or political conversation.
Natural law has to do with both an essentialist and teleological metaphysics. In other words, that agents have substantial forms or essences or whatever you want to call them, and are pointed toward ends by virtue of what they are. An example of this would be “man as rational animal” according to Aristotle, the purpose of which is to use our reason to discern what is really good for us. A simpler example would be the essence of triangle, which is to have three straight sides whose angles add up to 180 degrees. From there we can close the so-called “fact/value” distinction that so plagues modern philosophy, since just to understand what a thing is (according to natural law theory and classical A-T metaphysics), is to understand what is good for it. It is “good” for a triangle to have straighter sides than not, because that is part of the essence of a triangle, and anything falling short of that is a privation. It’s not a matter of preference, for example. To understand a triangle is to understanding something that is “aimed” at having three straight sides whose angles add to 180 degrees, etc. To understand man is to — at least in the final analysis — see that man is supposed to use his reason to find his ultimate fulfillment in the beatific vision, since man, by his nature is pointed toward happiness, and God can be the only perfection completion of it.
As for the Kalam Argument, there is no necessary connection there to natural law theory. There is, however, a connection between the general, background metaphysics of Aquinas’s arguments for God’s existence and natural law theory–those all come from the Scholastic principles of act vs potency, etc. But the Kalam argument, since it’s really only looking at efficient cause (whereas Aquinas considers formal, final, and material causes for many of his arguments) can be run wholly apart from whether a person adheres to natural law theory, Scholastic metaphysics, or what have you. It’s a very general argument and for that reason I can see why Craig likes to use it!