Philosophy 1020 Lecture Notes - Actual Infinity, Kalam Cosmological Argument, Natural Number

• School: Western University
• Department: Philosophy
• Course: Philosophy 1020
• Professor: John Thorp

Document Summary

The kalam argument, introductory historical and biographical matters, the word kalam is an arabic word meaning, roughly, speech and discourse, used in islam, to designate the tradition of philosophical theology, the basic kalam argument: Whatever begins to exist has a cause of its existence. Therefore, the universe has a cause of its existence. Defense of the first premise: nothing can just pop into existence: can"t just arise out of nothing, everything that happens has to have a cause (principle of sufficient reason, it seems unthinkable that something could come from nothing . Defense of the second premise: if the universe had no beginning, then its age would be infinite, actually infinite, its history would be actually infinite series, actually infinite series is impossible; can"t be such a thing. Therefore can"t be infinite old: that means the universe had a beginning. Suppose you have a library with an infinite number of books in it.