I was introduced to the Kalam Cosmological Argumant the other day (I know, late to the party), and it struck me that there seems to be a rather simple critique that I couldn't find an accounting of. It leaves me wondering where I'm going wrong, because my issue with the KCA is fairly obvious, and I'm by no means a professional philosopher, so I'm wondering what the response is.
In a nutshell, to say an object -begins- to exist necessarily implies that it exists in the universe, where time, and therefore 'beginning', is a meaningful construct. The universe can not be said to exist inside itself - it is the container for objects, not an object itself. So, if the first premise of the KCA argument, "Whatever begins to exist has a cause;" is intent on including the universe in the class of "Whatever", then it presupposes that the universe is an object contained within a higher dimensional universe where time there is a meaningful construct. In this manner, the KCA fails to avoid an infinite regress.
Here is a way restating the KCA to illustrate the problem (understand that it isn't formally equivalent to KCA):
I) All objects in a bucket were placed there
II) A bucket is in A bucket
III) A bucket was placed there
Our best explanation for the general relativity's experimentally verified results is that time is actually tied up with space into a 4D block of stuff, and it is tenseless, meaning that our experience of an uncertain future is an illusion. The future and that past are fixed.
In this framework, it is meaningful to say that something 'begins to exist' if, and only if, you are referencing that something's world-line. The 'world-line' is the term in SR (and GR) that describes a point's geometrical shape as it is within the bounds of the 4-dimensional block universe - as it is in time. You can point to the beginning (or end, it doesn't matter) of that shape and say that it -begins- in time a point t = x. You can not do this with the bounds of the universe itself, even though the extent of those bounds vary with respect to time. So, while we can rewind clock back to the the point of the big bang, the first point of time, you cannot rewind further. So to say that an object in time at point t = 0 begins to exist and has a cause necessitates a point t = -1 when it did not exist. This is nonsensical. Causality is a time-dependent phenomenon; it works at the speed of light. It requires two separate points in time to be coherent.
So formally stated:
I) Time is a property of a universe
II) Objects exist within a universe
III) Objects exist in time
The only way to reconcile the above with KCA is to do the following:
I) Time is a property of a universe
II) A universe exists within a universe
III) A universe exists in time
Hence, infinite regress. What am I missing?
