Written by Dr Jerry Kapus
I have always been fascinated by beginnings, by something coming into being, by understanding origins. This is part of why I enjoy education with its academic year full of beginnings. My fascination centers on understanding how something new emerges from what came before and with understanding how origins impact who we are. As I think about beginnings, I often find myself going back further and further until I arrive at the big question of where did it all come from? What started it all going? Of course, the answer that immediately comes to mind is the Big Bang. Modern cosmology is very much a scientific project. However, it only takes a bit of further reflection to wonder, what caused the Big Bang? We are back to our original question, but now the question seems a bit bigger since the question invites philosophical and theological considerations in addition to scientific investigation. Because of this, I have found the cosmological question and answers to it particularly effective in engaging students in developing their skill at thinking through big questions and understanding some of the epistemological issues that big questions confront.
One example of this is William Craig’s contemporary formulation of the Kalam Cosmological Argument. He draws on ideas from mathematics, physics, and philosophy to argue that the universe had a beginning, the beginning of the universe was caused, and this cause was the result of a creative choice. He supports his first premise by arguing that the Big Bang shows that the universe has a beginning and by arguing that mathematical work on infinity shows that there are no actual infinites as applied to our universe. He supports his second premise by highlighting the ubiquity of cause and effect relationships and draws on the conceptual truth that something cannot come from nothing. He defends this conceptual truth against interpretations of quantum mechanics suggesting that some things may come into existence from nothing. For the last step in the argument, Craig draws on the idea that if something is a sufficient cause for an effect then an eternal sufficient cause would lead to an eternal effect, a universe with an infinite past. Since the universe has a finite past, he argues that the only way for an eternal cause to result in a temporal effect is for the effect to be the result of a free choice to create the effect in time. Although Craig’s argument has been met with objections, his version of the Kalam Cosmological argument weaves together ideas from math, physics, and the philosophy of science and religion that give rise to important questions about how these ideas can be intertwined in problem solving and questions about the nature of explanation in differing contexts.
As educators, we want to develop students’ epistemic skills in problem solving. This skill development can be done within the context of problems that are primarily domain specific, such as solving a symbolic logic proof, or within wide ranging contexts that require an interdisciplinary approach. Big questions are often big because they require an interdisciplinary approach and an understanding and evaluation of competing epistemic values across these approaches. My own teaching experience has shown that the Kalam Cosmological Argument is especially effective at engaging students in thinking about interdisciplinary problem solving. It engages students in the following knowledge domains:
1. philosophical understanding of the concept of infinity, causal explanations, and Leibniz’s principle of sufficient reason.
2. Mathematical analyzes of infinite series and sets 3. Results in physics relating to the Big Bang theory and quantum theory.
The evaluation of the Kalam Cosmological Argument engages students in epistemological issues such as
1. whether a question should only be solved through empirical or scientific methods.
2. whether there is a useful distinction to be made between actual and potential infinity
3. the epistemological status of the intuition that something cannot come from nothing and the principle of sufficient reason
4. whether we should accept that there are different ways of explaining and ways of knowing
5. the criteria for evaluating an inference to the best explanation
6. what determines whether a concept has explanatory value.
The Kalam Cosmological Argument addresses a big question that helps students to develop skills at thinking through complex issues that reach across different knowledge domains. I have found that students also tend to find the issues surprisingly interesting and fun to think about as they see how philosophy, science, and theology can be intertwined. These are the
types of big questions that should be made more salient in our curriculum.
Dr. Kapus teaches courses in epistemology and metaphysics, ethics, symbolic logic, and philosophy of religion, at the University of Wisconsin-Stout. His research focuses on theories of truth and realism/anti-realism.
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EDITORS NOTE: If you enjoyed reading Jerry’s blog, you might enjoy watching the video below: