Tag: Wes Morrison

Origen’s Completion of the Kalam Cosmological Argument

My claim in this blog, is that the particular failures of William Lane Craig’s version of the Kalam Cosmological argument inadvertently point to something like Origen’s picture of the relation between time and eternity as found in Christ. The fact that Origen is wrongly accused of believing in the transmigration of souls may be an indicator of the flatness of the reason by which he was judged and the difficulty of recognizing the orthodoxy he represents.

The standard cosmological arguments (which usually make no reference to Christ) depend upon arguments which confirm, rather than challenge, the standard order of reason. The revolutionary realization of the New Testament pertains to how creation reconceived (as ex nihilo) in light of the resurrection of Jesus, gives rise to an entirely new order of rationality. These two beliefs (creation ex nihilo and resurrection) are at the center of a new identity (resurrection faith) and worldview, which arise together historically. The cosmic order and its material make-up are reconceived in the full recognition and meaning of Jesus is Lord. His Lordship demands a reconceptualization of all things (including time and eternity), and yet the standard arguments making this case tend to betray resurrection rationale, though this failure itself can be enlightening.  One of the premiere apologists in the Western world, Craig and his Kalam Cosmological argument, demonstrates the point.

Craig states the argument as a brief syllogism: Whatever begins to exist has a cause; the universe began to exist; therefore, the universe has a cause. This cause is God. Throughout Craig’s argument the contradiction of an actually existing infinite series is indicated (the universe cannot be infinite but must have a beginning). For example, it cannot be rationally conceived that there is an infinite library, because if half the books go missing, there are just as many books (which is a contradictory outcome). By the same token there cannot be an actually existing infinity before creation commenced, as the point of the start would never be reached.

But then Craig, absent any reference to Christ, moves this contradiction, unwittingly, into the mind of God. “His timeless intention to create a world with a beginning, and His power to produce such a result” are conceived as two distinct points. The distinction is between, “His causal power in order for the universe to be created” and “God’s timeless intention to create a temporal world.” Causal forces exist in time (this side of the nothing in creation ex nihilo) and exist over and against the eternal (prior to nothing) and so the thought (which is eternal), and “God’s undertaking to create” (which has a definitive beginning), must be differentiated.[1] 

Wes Morrison points out that Craig maintains that “’prior’ to the beginning of the universe God was outside of time.” As he writes, “Craig makes it sound as if God ‘used to be’ outside of time, but ‘then’ he created the world and put himself into time. But this can’t be right if there is no time prior to the beginning of the universe.”[2] Craig posits a point prior to creation when God decides to act, but he is dependent upon the sequence of before and after, which do not pertain in eternity. Is God temporal or non-temporal, in time or out of time. Can God cause the universe in time prior to the time of the universe? Can something “begin to exist” without there being a time before it began to exist? The way in which time and eternity are interrelated in Craig’s argument, creates a picture of time and eternity as related consecutively or sequentially. There is a divide between the “before” the beginning and the beginning, as a point in the decision making of God. Morrison’s critique of Craig is as stilted as Craig’s argument but neither of them relates time and eternity, through Christ, in the manner of Origen.

In Origen’s picture, it is the Logos, or Jesus Christ alone, who bridges the gap between time and eternity. Jesus Christ is simultaneously created and divine and in him all things (time and eternity) hold together. The “logoi” or “eternal things” or Wisdom of God or the Body of the Logos, pervade all of creation. All things hold together through the constituent parts of the eternal wisdom which Origen calls “logoi.” As Panayiotis Tzamalikos describes, “Since the logoi are the object of creation and make up the Body of Logos, the logoi are the means through which the Logos becomes History. They are incorporeal causes (hence, they stand outside of time and space), and yet it is by means of them that Time is realised; indeed, in a hypothetical absence of logoi, Time would be blind and meaningless, actually, it could not exist at all.”[3] The reality of time continually takes place in and through its beginning. Christ is the beginning and end, the alpha and omega, the source of reality.

Christ is not the beginning in a temporal sense, but in the sense of John 1:1 – the source (άρχή) of reality. Christ is the continual resource, the continual beginning, or the wisdom of God applied to the world. In Him there is an intersection between time and eternity: “In this Wisdom, who ever existed with the Father, creation was always present in form and outline and there was never a time when the prefiguration of those things which were to be hereafter did not exist in Wisdom.”[4] The Logos is the ordering matrix of eternity imprinted upon time.

Origen distinguishes between wisdom and Logos in that the Logos is the communication of God enacted. “Speaking either of Wisdom or of Logos one actually refers to the same person, namely the son of God himself. The difference nevertheless is that Wisdom indicates the living incorporeal personal substance in herself, without any allusion to the world or to anything else, while the Logos is the Wisdom conceived in her communication to rational creatures.[5] In Tzamalikos explanation, “Origen’s notion about ‘conceptions’ of the son is exactly what allows him to portray his perception of the correlation of timeless God to the temporal world. This correlation is possible through the assertions of Origen’s about the Logos. For the Logos actually becomes a kind of span, through which this relation is established.”[6]

In Origen’s description:

…it is along those ways that the son of God is moving decorating, taking thought for, making benefaction, favouring, into this [sic. the world] which was made in wisdom. In saying therefore that the Logos was in άρχή it is not implied that the Logos is different from her (sc. the άρχή, that is the wisdom) in terms of substance, but only in terms of conception and relation, so that it is the same being who in named in the scripture and who, in as much as she is conceived in her relation to God himself, is named wisdom, and again, in as much as conceived in her relation to creatures she is called as Logos the creator.[7]

 In Origen’s conception, “Creation flows perpetually from the Godhead in the same way that rays of light flow from the sun.”[8] There is an eternal aspect to all of creation, though Origen certainly confirms creation ex nihilo. The corporeal world has a beginning in time, but its true beginning or resource for existence is beyond time in eternity. Origen holds that time arose with creation and did not precede it, so that the picture of a six day creation is simply to accommodate human capacities. He states emphatically that “everything was made at once…. but for the sake of clarity a list of days and their events was given.”[9]

The Logos created the world and sustains it, and is constantly related to it, and yet the world is external to God. “Hence we should conclude that Origen conceives the Logos as being both ‘in’ wisdom, that is to say into timelessness, and into the world, that is ‘out’ of the Trinity.”[10] The Logos is the mediator between the timeless God and the temporal world. The Logos is with God but also in the world, though not identified with the world. (Though He is identified with each rational being created in his image.)

So the distinction which Craig would attribute to God’s intention and God’s acting on that intention can be directly attributed to Christ. There is no “before” creation any more than there is a before Christ. According to Tzamalikos, “There are no turning points nor moments nor succession nor temporal flux in timelessness. Subsequently, any question pertaining to timelessness and involving notions of this sort is groundless and misleading.” [11] Succession, change, before or after, may be necessary to human thought, but are not proper to timelessness or eternity. It is not that the world is eternal, or that Origen thought as much, but God acts directly in the world through his Son who is divine and human.

The person of Jesus Christ explains how there is a beginning coming out of a timeless corporeal nothing. Science, and big bang cosmology do not presume to describe the big bang (in scientific terms as science breaks down). There is no actual, knowable, “infinite density” (describing what existed before the big bang) anymore than there is an actually existing nihilo. In this Origen accords with the Einsteinian notion that time and space are singular. As Gerald Bostock states, “Origen . . . would be quite happy with the concept of a ‘Big Bang’. He would also, to judge from his writings, be happy with modern scientific theories about the nature of matter.”[12] As modern theories indicate, and Origen would concur, matter is not fully knowable: “By the intellect alone the substance which underlies bodies is discerned to be matter . . . when our mind by a purely intellectual act sets aside every quality and gazes at the mere point, if I may so call it, of the underlying substance in itself, then by this artificial mode of thought it will apparently behold matter.”[13] But this is a theoretical exercise, on the order of modern physics. Matter can take on every possible form but it is the nonmaterial which makes its imprint. God can transform matter “into whatever forms and species he desires, as the merits of things demand. The prophet points to this when he refers to God making and changing the form of all things (Amos 5:8).”[14] As Bostock notes, “It is through the interplay of subatomic randomness and of transcendent causes that all the potentialities of life are actualized and the wonders of creation emerge. Whether we are looking at the indeterminacy of the electron and the stability of crystal or the interaction between genetic mutations and the ordered structure of a biological organism we are seeing the polarities of chaos and cosmos.”[15]

Just as God imposed order on the chaos of the primal waters, Origen sees God as continually bringing order into the cosmos. The order of the universe is God’s transcendent cause continually at work. “A cause is not the physical antecedent of a physical process but an active force impinging on a passive subject and, because reality is ultimately spiritual, such a force must be of a spiritual character. It is given expression in Origen’s concept of transcendent λόγοι or intelligible forms, which determine both the nature and the meaning of created things.”[16] As Origen writes: “the works of divine providence and the plan of this universe are as it were rays of God’s nature. . . . our mind understands the parent of the universe from the beauty of his works and the attractiveness of his creatures.”[17]

There is not a divide between time and eternity, in the manner conceived by Craig, but creation relies upon eternity in Christ. In turn, the world is comprehensible (Einstein called the world’s being comprehensible the most incomprehensible thing about it). It is comprehensible through the Logos bridging the creation and Creator in all who are made in His image. In Origen’s description, “The life added to us, when the logos in us is brought to fulfilment through our participation in the primary Logos, . . . becomes the light of knowledge . . . with some a potential light and with others an actual light.”[18] The light of Christ is available potentially to all, as this is the eternal image in whom all are made, and He is the eternal rationale undergirding the world.

[1] Wes Morrison “Must the Beginning of the Universe Have a Personal Cause?: A Rejoinder,” forthcoming in Faith and Philosophy, 151. accessed at https://spot.colorado.edu/~morristo/kalam-not.pdf

[2]Ibid.  

[3] Panayiotis Tzamalikos, Guilty of Genius: Origen and the Theory of Transmigration (New York: Peter Lang, 2022) 248.

[4] Origen, De Principiis 1,4,4. Cited in Gerald Bostock, “Origen’s Doctrine of Creation” THE EXPOSITORY TIMES February 2007. Vol.118, No.5, 2.

[5] Panayiotis Tzamalikos, The Concept of Time in Origen (University of Glasgow, PhD Thesis, 1986) 142.

[6] Time in Origen, 143.

[7] Origen, Commentary on John John, 1.  Cited in Time in Origen, 143-144.

[8] Bostock, 5.

[9] Origen, FrGn 2,2. Cited in Bostock, 3.

[10] The Concept of Time, 144.

[11] The Concept of Time in Origen, 142.

[12] Bostock, 3.

[13] Origen, De Principiis 4,4,7. Cited in Bostock, 3.

[14] Origen, De Principiis 3,6,7. Cited in Bostock, 4.

[15] Bostock, 4.

[16] Ibid.

[17] Origen, De Principiis 1,1,6. Cited in Bostock, 7.

[18] Origen, CIo 2,24. Cited in Bostock, 7.

Reason Dependent on a Reified Nothing: From Genesis 3 to Kalām

The concept of nothing or emptiness in Scripture is connected to the concept of creation ex nihilo (creation from nothing), to the idol (which Paul declares is nothing), to the concept of death (the biblical depiction is of being brought to nothing), and to the empty tomb of Christ. It is connected to evil in a twofold sense, in that Paul concludes the idol is nothing (nothingness reified) but then immediately warns that this particular brand of nothingness is demonic (I Cor. 10:19-20). The reification of nothing, or making nothing an absolute something, characteristic of idolatry, is a process that is not halted in being exposed, as it is the characteristic form of sin and evil in which nothing “comes alive.”

One way of characterizing the problem raised by natural philosophical arguments is that the category of nothing or absence is made to come alive through the form of reason in which these arguments are packaged. Nothing and darkness are made a positive experience in Anselm’s cosmological and ontological arguments (“God I have seen you, yet I have seen only nothing and darkness”), which is not just any old mysticism and rationalism, but it is the characteristic form of thought taken up by Descartes and modernity. Nothingness and emptiness have come to play a key role in the “virtual reality” (the marker of nothing, zero, illustrates the necessity of nothing behind the virtual) that is the modern, which is neither recognized as virtual nor equated with sin and evil, as it is the nihilism of foundational reason (nothing made something) that has come to dominate in theology. Below, I sketch the biblical depiction of sin and evil (revolving around nothing (death, absence) made something), which has been obscured, and explain, in part, the how and why of this obscuring as it is interwoven with the rationale of the kalām cosmological argument.

The devilish or the demonic in Scripture, from Genesis 3, is not portrayed as a positive ontological force which opposes God, but as a corrupting sub-personal entity which would alienate and empty out the presence of God. The serpent appears in Genesis 3 from among the creatures, out of creation – it appears and disappears. The perspective sold by the serpent is the immanent frame (a closed universe) in which knowing (epistemology – “knowing good and evil”) is attached to being (ontology – “you will be like gods”). Death is denied (“you won’t die”) but is displaced by the positive knowing and being which, I presume, are not exposed in the subsequent experience of shame and alienation. The isolating, alienating factor of sin, its death denial, and its exponential mimetic desire (in the first pair and their offspring) will all become part of the biblical depiction of sin. What is offered in place of life is death, in place of God shame and absence are held out as divine experience. In place of naming and knowing God, a knowing which refers back to itself (the reduplicated “I”) is taken up.  And this is always what the arche, the principle of the world does; it constitutes a closed world in which nothing is made an absolute impassable boundary. The idol is an unobtainable object which creates exponential desire which gives rise to child sacrifice.

Paul equates sin with this same idolatrous desire which comes to grip everyone, as they are confronted with the law and they find that their own “I” or ego is as unobtainable as an idol. The death connected with this desire can either be a slow masochistic struggle with one’s own body of death, or it can just turn to murder or idolatrous slaughter (Rom. 3), but the point is to gain, through death, what was withheld by desire. This is why Paul connects universal death with the spread of sin, as death evokes the response which characterizes sin.

The mistranslation of Ro 5:12 and Augustine’s formula for original sin (all somehow mysteriously sin in Adam) reverses cause and effect, so that instead of death spreading to all and giving rise to sin, sin is made the cause of death such that anyone subject to death has to have been thought to have somehow sinned. In Paul’s original argument, it is the reign of death which accounts for the spread of sin and not vice versa. Interwoven throughout the passage is the universally observable truth that death reigns (“death spread to all men” v. 12; “death reigned” v. 14; “the many died” v. 15; “death reigned through the one” v. 17; “as sin reigned in death” v. 21). As Paul concludes in verse 21, “sin reigned in death” and not the other way around. Sin’s struggle, in Paul’s explanation, is a struggle for existence in face of the reality of death. The biblical picture in Genesis and Ro 5 accords with the obvious reality that we all have the problem of death.

The human project is to extract from the mortal that which is immortal, to make the perishable imperishable and this is what Paul calls sin. Notice that the sequence of events in I Cor 15:55-56: O death, where is your sting?” The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law.” Paul is describing a law, given power, through sin’s orientation to death.  This law of sin and death pertains to any law, any symbolic framework, which would reify nothing.

A different way of saying all of the above, is through a misconstrued creation ex nihilo (as Jacques Lacan first recognized), in which nothing is posited as that out of which every subject generates himself. The self consists of a three-fold dynamic in which the symbolic order (the law) names and posits an object (the ego – the “I”) which is nonexistent, and the drive or dynamic to grasp or obtain, is death or the death drive. In this depiction the human subject is a continually generated creation ex-nihilo. Like Martin Heidegger’s vision of a vase, as structured around and containing nothing, or actually creating a void, this named void describes every idol. This captures Paul’s depiction of the subject that would displace God: the law acts as father creator, and the ego is the object he would draw from the nothing, and this dynamic of death serves in place of life.  On the way to thinking and grasping after being, there is a generation of nothing. But this exercise is continually reduplicated in various human undertakings, whether religious (idolatrous religion but also every sacrificial form of religion), philosophical (Conor Cunningham runs this down exhaustively), or in the philosophical arguments for God

Many things reduce to nothing, but it is the way in which philosophical arguments providing for the initiation of the theological project have introduced nothing into the heart of theology which is my present concern. It is not so much the legitimacy of the various philosophical arguments for God but the form of reason with which they are connected and to which they give rise, which requires scrutiny. As I have previously claimed, the danger with the traditional arguments for God is that they impart the epistemological skepticism upon which they rely as normative. The “reason” that attains God in the ontological argument (on the basis of an incomparable difference) is deployed by Descartes, critiqued but confirmed by Kant, so that the gap between a thinker and his thought, between the noumena and phenomena, or between God and the world, is the implicit necessity which Hegel and Schelling expose. The peculiar modern form of thought, which René Descartes is usually credited as fathering would generate or identify being with thought (“I think therefore I am”).  The move is a reduplication of the lie of Genesis 3 in its claim to life through knowing, and can be directly traced to Descartes’ deployment of Anselm’s ontological argument. Anselm illustrates the same move in both his cosmological and ontological arguments, as in his cosmological argument all thought ceases before the ontological divide but in the latter, there is a singular thought of God or the name of God which begins from the other side of this ontological divide in which immortal being is grasped (though this greatest thought does not allow for any other thought, such as thought of the created order).

 A more obvious and pervasive incidence of the same thing is the Kalām cosmological argument, which develops as part of the Islamic version of scholasticism as an attempt to establish and defend the tenets of Islam. The Arabic Kalām literally means “speech, word, utterance” and is derived from the expression Kalām Allāh (Word of God) and refers to a special mode of thought and argumentation. Kalām denotes then, not just one argument, but the discipline within Islam, and eventually Judaism (as in Jewish Kalām or Kalāmists), which will be absorbed by Christian scholasticism and western rationalism which will foster the same abstraction and the same gap between God and his word. The controversy surrounding the “Word of God” in Islam (is the Word created or part of the essence of God) marks the problem as it will arise in Christian scholasticism regarding the person and work of Christ. The focus on the equivocal or analogous as opposed to the univocal and propositional, describes the gap brought about in the peculiar abstractions surrounding and prompted by kalām.

Knowing God on the basis of the world is obviously very different than knowing God through Christ, which is not inherently a problem, but the first sort of knowing has historically come to interfere with the second order of knowing. It has given rise to a reason to which the Logos of Christ is made to adhere. It is not simply that the argument falls short of the personal God of the Bible, but it fosters a cause and effect notion in which God might be an extrapolated cause of reason, behind or before the universe, but is removed by the very mode of the argument from our words and world.

William Lane Craig, as one of the key promoters of the kalām cosmological argument, posits this gap in God as existing between “His timeless intention to create a world with a beginning, and His power to produce such a result.” The distinction is between “His causal power in order for the universe to be created” and “God’s timeless intention to create a temporal world.” Causal forces exist in time (this side of the nothing in creation ex nihilo) and exist over and against the eternal (prior to nothing) and so the thought (which is eternal), and “God’s undertaking to create” (which has a definitive beginning), must be differentiated.[1] What is implicitly made to differentiate and divide is the nothing, prior to which God only intends to create and after and out of which he creates.

God’s undertaking is the very first event God causes, which posits the same sort of infinite regress the argument rejects. The kalām argument depends on there not being an actually existing series of objects or discrete entities (an infinite library or infinite rooms in a hotel reduces to contradiction as subtraction or addition to either will not register) reduces to a logical contradiction. Yet Craig needs this same discretion to exist in the mind of God so he does not simply fall back on an unreasonable eternity. He insists on this element of the argument to preserve the argument from the unreason it repudiates and builds upon.

This is not so different than imagining that God is self-caused, as if there is a division between the being of God and the cause of that being – one that allows for the thought of God. This supposition, as worked out in Schelling and Hegel, is not simply necessary for God but it is a necessary move to posit reason as its own sufficient ground. Reason as absolute – the reason of God – cannot be constrained or contingent lest it be caused by something beyond pure reason. Eternity, for Schelling, holds out absolute freedom as that which is enjoyed by a Will which wants nothing as it is wanting in nothing. It is actualized – or in the language of Craig, it becomes a causal power – when it actively and effectively wants this nothing (Indivisible Remainder, 23). Only nothing can avoid the possibility of some determinate content, but this is a nothing made something, so that God himself is produced through the creation ex nihilo of pure and perfect reason. The formal conversion of nothing into an actively sought after “nothing” accounts for the absolute “ground” of God’s coming to himself. “The blissful peace of primordial freedom thus changes into pure contraction, into the vortex of ‘divine madness’ which threatens to swallow everything, into the highest affirmation of God’s egotism which tolerates nothing outside itself” (Indivisible Remainder, 23). Otherwise nothing would ever happen. What Schelling and Hegel expose is the necessary role of negation and nothing in absolute reason.  

God serves as his own ground and posits himself in the absolute freedom and rationalism of the enlightenment. An argument which will deliver God, is an argument in which reason is posited as more primary than belief in God.  The strength of the argument depends upon the strength of the reason deployed and absolute reason depends upon a conclusion arriving at the absolute. Craig’s version of the kalām argument depicts the gap of nothingness which the argument brings to life.

The point of the incarnation, the empty tomb, the risen Lord, is to erase the reifying lie inherent, not only to modern rationalism, but surrounding the impetus to alienation and death (he who would save himself). Where the cosmological argument assumes that something exists, then argues from the existence of that thing to the existence of a First Cause or a Sufficient Reason of the cosmos, Christian believers presume to encounter God in his essence in Christ, and this presumption tells us what sort of world we live in. There is no inherent incommensurateness, no gap, no duality, no noumenal/phenomenal split, as creation, language, the world, are perfectly suited to revealing God, but what stands in the way of this revelation is the insistence on a sufficient knowledge apart from the act of God.

[1] “Must the Beginning of the Universe Have a Personal Cause?: A Rejoinder,” forthcoming in Faith and Philosophy. Quoted from Wes Morrison, “A Critical Examination of the Kalam Cosmological Argument,” accessed at https://spot.colorado.edu/~morristo/kalam-not.pdf