Alex Strasser

in my next substack i’m finishing what Parfit started with the help of a few allies

Kalam Cosmological argument: 1. Whatever begins to exist has a cause. 2. The material universe began to exist a finite time ago. 3. Therefore, necessarily, the material universe has a cause. This argument is obviously valid; that is, if the premises are true, then the conclusion must be true. It follows that if you don’t accept the conclusion, it is incumbent on you as a critical thinker to provide an argument against one of the premises. And if you accept the premises, then you logically ought to accept the conclusion. Now, if the conclusion is true, then something caused the entire material universe to come into existence. Let’s think about this for a moment. Something caused the entire material universe to come into existence. Since the cause precedes the effect in some distinct way, this “something” must be a being whose existence transcends space, time, energy, and all matter — the whole works. The cause of the material universe is therefore not a material being, and it exists in some sense outside space and time. If we employ Ockham’s razor and if we keep in mind insights from the design argument, then the cause of the universe is a supernatural being of unimaginable power, unimaginable knowledge, and supreme majesty, existing in some sense beyond space, time, energy, and all matter. As Aquinas, Leibniz, and the many other famous proponents of the cosmological argument would say, this we naturally call “God.” But are the premises reasonable? The ex nihilo principle and common sense provide solid support for the first premise (“Whatever begins to exist has a cause”). Big bang astrophysics provides solid support for the second premise (“The material universe began to exist a finite time ago”). The conclusion logically follows, in the sense that if the premises are true, then the conclusion clearly must be true. The conclusion of the kalam cosmological argument thus has direct support from logic, common sense, and big bang astrophysics — a tough combination to beat. A powerful argument indeed for an astonishingly existential conclusion. Paul Herrick

GPT5.4 did the best, but the results are still noisy. All three models detected the coding error in the IV regressions. That's better than AER reviewers! 2/