Omnipotence, Uniqueness, and the Kalam Cosmological Argument

The Kalam Cosmological Argument is an argument for the existence of God that is broken up into two stages. The first stage purports to establish the existence of a transcendent First Cause of the universe, and the second stage purports to establish that this First Cause strongly resembles God as classically conceived. The foremost contemporary champion of the Kalam is the philosopher William Lane Craig. The first stage of the argument is commonly formulated by Craig in the form of the following syllogism:

1. Whatever begins to exist has a cause.
2. The universe began to exist.
3. Therefore, the universe has a cause.

In the second stage, Craig undergoes a conceptual analysis in which he derives various of the traditional divine attributes that are necessarily possessed by the First Cause. According to Craig, the overall conclusion of the Kalam is that “an uncaused, personal Creator of the universe exists, who sans the universe is beginningless, changeless, immaterial, timeless, spaceless, and enormously powerful” (“The Kalam Cosmological Argument,” in The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology, pp. 196). In what follows, I will assume the general soundness of the Kalam argument. The interested reader can read my fairly lengthy treatment and defense of the Kalam argument here.

One key attribute of God, of course, is His omnipotence: “I am God Almighty” (Genesis 17:1, 35:11). In Craig’s derivation of the divine attributes of the First Cause established by the Kalam argument, he concludes that the First Cause is enormously powerful in virtue of having “brought the entirety of physical reality, including all matter and energy and space-time itself, into being without any material cause” (ibid., pp. 192). But Craig does not go so far as to declare that we may conclude that the First Cause, as established by the Kalam, is all powerful, i.e., omnipotent. This isn’t necessarily a huge concession as anything that could bring forth space, time, matter, and energy into being out of nothing is so incredibly powerful that if it isn’t omnipotent, it might as well be. Still, it is certainly desirable to be able to show by way of argument that the First Cause must possess strict omnipotence. Such an argument is given by St. Thomas Aquinas, though it should be noted that St. Thomas famously rejected the Kalam argument (cf. Summa Theologica, I, 46, 2). Nevertheless, St. Thomas argues that creation ex nihilo implies omnipotence. Now, if the Kalam argument is sound, then it proves creation ex nihilo. Hence, if St. Thomas’s argument is also sound, we can get from the Kalam to the omnipotence of the First Cause.

Here is St. Thomas’s argument that the ability to create ex nihilo entails having infinite power:

The power of the maker is reckoned not only from the substance of the thing made, but also from the mode of its being made; for a greater heat heats not only more, but quicker. Therefore although to create a finite effect does not show an infinite power, yet to create it from nothing does show an infinite power: which appears from what has been said (ad 2). For if a greater power is required in the agent in proportion to the distance of the potentiality from the act, it follows that the power of that which produces something from no presupposed potentiality is infinite, because there is no proportion between no potentiality and the potentiality presupposed by the power of a natural agent, as there is no proportion between not being and being (ibid., I, 45, 5).

An example may help to illustrate the intuition behind St. Thomas’s argument. Consider a cup of coffee that is 60^o F. Clearly, this coffee has the potentiality of becoming 80^o F. Consider another cup of coffee that is 35^o F. It, too, has the potentiality of becoming 80^o F. But the “the distance of the potentiality from the act” for the second cup of coffee is greater than that for the first. Hence, for the potentiality of becoming 80^o F to be actualized, a greater causal power is required for the second cup of coffee than for the first. In general, the greater “the distance of the potentiality from the act,” the greater the causal power needs to be to reduce said potentiality to act. What St. Thomas is arguing is that creation ex nihilo involves actualizing something with no pre-existing potentiality and that this requires infinite causal power. One way to understand this is by way of a simple calculus analogy. As the pre-existing potentiality of a thing tends to zero, the causal power needed to actualize the thing tends to infinity in the same way that 1 / x tends to infinity as x tends toward 0 (from the right side). This is an imperfect analogy, since in calculus infinity serves merely as a limit and not as a completed value that one actually arrives at. Another disanalogy is that God’s “infinite” power is best understood qualitatively rather than quantitatively. Furthermore, the coffee analogy involves causal power acting on something that already exists rather than creating something ex nihilo. Even still, I think that the foregoing analogies are helpful in bringing out the basic intuition of the argument: The more a thing to be created tends to non-being, the more the causal power needed to create it must increase.

Is St. Thomas’s argument sound? One objection that could be raised against it is that if there is no pre-existing potentiality for a thing to exist, then the thing’s existence cannot be actualized. The upshot of this is that creation ex nihilo is metaphysically impossible. In response to this objection, we can make an important distinction between a passive potency and an active potency. The philosopher Edward Feser explains these concepts as follows:

[A]ctive potency…is the capacity to bring about an effect, and passive potency…is the capacity to be affected. Fire’s capacity to melt rubber is an active potency, whereas rubber’s capacity to be melted is a passive potency…[A]ctive potency is, strictly speaking, a kind of act or actuality (in particular, what is called a “first actuality”); more precisely, it is a kind of act relative to the substance possessing it, though a kind of potency relative to the action it grounds…Pure active potency or power unmixed with any passive potency or potentiality is just pure actuality, and identified by the Scholastics with God; in everything other than God active potency is mixed with passive potency. This difference is marked by the Scholastic distinction between uncreated active potency and created active potency (Scholastic Metaphysics: A Contemporary Introduction, pg. 39).

With these distinctions in mind, we can express that creation ex nihilo involves no pre-existing passive potency, but it does involve pre-existing active potency, which is grounded in the being of God. St. Thomas explains this as follows:

Before the world existed it was possible for the world to be, not, indeed, according to a passive power which is matter, but according to the active power of God; and also, according as a thing is called absolutely possible, not in relation to any power, but from the sole habitude of the terms which are not repugnant to each other; in which sense possible is opposed to impossible (Summa Theologica, I, 46, 1; cf. I, 45, 2).

Creation ex nihilo is a creation from nothing as regards a material cause and a passive potency but not as regards an efficient cause and an active potency. St. Thomas’s argument from creation ex nihilo can, therefore, be alternatively expressed as saying that in order for a thing to be created with no passive potency, an infinite active potency is required. More precisely, uncreated active potency is required, and uncreated active potency is to be found only in a being which is Pure Act, and such a being is omnipotent. As the Thomist theologian Fr. Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange explains,

However insignificant [something] may be, even if it were only a grain of sand, it needs an infinite power to produce it out of nothing. The more impoverished, indeed, is the matter to be transformed, the more powerful must be the agent that works upon it...When the matter is so poor that it practically amounts to nothing, an infinite power is needed to draw something, however little it may be, from this nothing. When passive power decreases, active power increases. We may go so far as to say that, when there is no longer any passive potentiality, the active power must be infinite...Only God, who is Being itself, can give to a thing the whole of its being (God, His Existence and His Nature, Vol. II, pg. 137-138; cf. pg. 48).

The objection, therefore, has been answered. While there are, of course, further objections that could be raised, enough has been said, I think, to show that St. Thomas’s argument has considerable force.

Another key attribute of God is His uniqueness: “I am the first and I am the last; besides me there is no god…I am the Lord, and there is no other, besides me there is no God…For I am God, and there is no other” (Isaiah 44:6; 45:5, 22). In order to argue that the Kalam gets us a unique First Cause, Craig appeals to Ockham’s Razor. Craig writes,

One could, of course, arbitrarily posit a plurality of causes in some sense prior to the origin of the universe, but ultimately, if the philosophical kalam arguments are sound, this causal chain must terminate in a cause which is absolutely first and uncaused. There being no reason to perpetuate the series of events beyond the origin of the universe, Ockham’s Razor, which enjoins us not to posit causes beyond necessity, strikes such further causes in favor of an immediate First Cause of the origin of the universe. The same principle dictates that we are warranted in ignoring the possibility of a plurality of uncaused causes in favor of assuming the unicity of the First Cause (“The Kalam Cosmological Argument,” in The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology, pp. 192, boldface added).

But if the omnipotence of the First Cause can be proven, then we can do Craig one better. Given the omnipotence of the First Cause, we can argue that there cannot exist multiple omnipotent beings and that therefore the First Cause must be unique. Craig relies on Ockham’s Razor—a methodological principle—to shave away polytheism, but if the First Cause is omnipotent, we can demonstrate that the First Cause must, of metaphysical necessity, be unique.

An argument against the possibility of multiple omnipotent beings can be given as follows: Suppose there are two omnipotent beings G1 and G2. Now, suppose that G1 wills that Earth gets created and that G2 wills that Earth does not get created. Who “wins”? On the one hand, Earth should get created since G1 wills it, G1 is omnipotent, and the creation of Earth is logically possible. On the other hand, Earth should not get created since G2 wills it, G2 is omnipotent, and Earth not being created is logically possible. The answer therefore seems to be that Earth gets created and Earth does not get created, a flat contradiction. Such a state of affairs, therefore, is impossible. And yet, such a state of affairs seems like it would be possible if there really were two omnipotent beings (since it seems possible that the two beings could will such mutually contradictory states of affairs). Hence, it must not be the case that there are two omnipotent beings. Even more strongly, it must not be possible for there to be two omnipotent beings. And more generally, it must not be possible for there to be any number of omnipotent beings greater than one, since the same paradox can be derived no matter how many more omnipotent beings we keep adding beyond two. The argument can be formalized as follows:

1. If there can be multiple omnipotent beings, then there can be two mutually contradictory (but individually logically possible) states of affairs willed by multiple omnipotent beings.
2. If there can be two mutually contradictory (but individually logically possible) states of affairs willed by multiple omnipotent beings, then there can be a logical contradiction.
3. There cannot be a logical contradiction.
4. Therefore, there cannot be two mutually contradictory (but individually logically possible) states of affairs willed by multiple omnipotent beings (2, 3).
5. Therefore, there cannot be multiple omnipotent beings (1, 4).

Since the First Cause of the Kalam argument is omnipotent, therefore, we may conclude that there cannot exist more than one First Cause. Hence, the First Cause is, of metaphysical necessity, unique. Overall, then, on the basis of the Kalam argument, we may conclude that a unique, uncaused, personal Creator of the universe exists, who is beginningless, changeless, immaterial, timeless, spaceless, and omnipotent. A further inquiry that is interesting to consider is whether there might be a way to derive omniscience from an analysis of the First Cause of the Kalam. That inquiry, however, will have to wait until another day.