Kalam cosmological argument
The Kalām cosmological argument (sometimes capitalized as Kalam Cosmological Argument; abbreviated KCA) is a modern formulation of the cosmological argument for the existence of God rooted in the Ilm al-Kalam heritage in medieval Islamic scholasticism. An outspoken defender of the argument is William Lane Craig, who first defended it in his book The Kalām Cosmological Argument in 1979. Since then the Kalam cosmological argument has elicited public debate between Craig and Graham Oppy, Adolf Grünbaum, J. L. Mackie and Quentin Smith, and has been used in Christian apologetics. According to Michael Martin, Craig's revised argument is "among the most sophisticated and well argued in contemporary theological philosophy", along with versions of the cosmological argument presented by Bruce Reichenbach and Richard Swinburne.
In defending the argument, Craig has argued against the possibility of the existence of actual infinities, tracing the idea to 11th-century philosopher Al-Ghazali. He named this variant of cosmological argument the Kalam cosmological argument, from Ilm al-Kalām "science of discourse", the Arabic term for the discipline of philosophical theology in Islam.
Cosmological argument
In natural theology, a cosmological argument is an argument in which the existence of a unique being, generally identified with or referred to as God, is deduced or inferred as highly probable from facts or alleged facts concerning causation, change, motion, contingency, or finitude in respect of the universe as a whole or processes within it. It is traditionally known as an argument from universal causation, an argument from first cause, or the causal argument. Whichever term is employed, there are three basic variants of the argument, each with subtle yet important distinctions: the arguments from in causa (causality), in esse (essentially), and in fieri (becoming).
The basic premise of all of these is the concept of causality and of a First Cause. The history of this argument goes back to Aristotle or earlier, was developed in Neoplatonism and early Christianity and later in medieval Islamic theology during the 9th to 12th centuries, and re-introduced to medieval Christian theology in the 13th century. The cosmological argument is closely related to the principle of sufficient reason as addressed by Gottfried Leibniz and Samuel Clarke, itself a modern exposition of the claim that "nothing comes from nothing" attributed to Parmenides.
