Today I was watching a sexy dude on youtube talk about the Kalam cosmological argument. Basically it’s this: because something has a beginning something else must have caused it to begin.This argument is used primarily to make a case for God, though it’s not very sophisticated or well thought out (which is so typical of theology:/). More rhetorical, I suppose, than applicable. I mean first of all the idea that something can cause something that does not exist to then exist is senseless. For something that exists to have influence over something that does not is a logical meltdown. Much like Dualism, it’s flighty, mystical, and pretty annoying.
Besides that the big problem, I think, is that it relies on the assumption that things come to be. As if the parts that make the thing did not previously exist. Which, we can be pretty sure, they did. So the thing isn’t so much a new thing, but new arrangement of things. When I write a peice of music, I’m not creating anything really. I’m simply arranging things that already exist into something new (hopefully!).
So when we listen to Lady Gaga, or when we look at a new Peter Coffin, we’re not looking for new creations, but new arrangments of things we already know about. In fact “new creations” is a bit of paradox, yeah? For us anyway. Maybe once you reach the level of God it really is possible to make a square with a radius or a circle with right angles. But for us, here on the ground, our circles stay round and our squares stay square. So what’s there to do then? Are we just doomed to endlessly build and destroy, stacking materials and breaking them down again? Are we just a bunch of Doozers? And if so, who’s eating all our sticks???
