Welcome to the Council of Trend Podcast, a production of Catholic Answers.

Hey everyone, in today's episode I'm going to finish my reply to Skydive Phil's documentary

on the Kalam argument.

In part one, which you can check out in the link below, I talked about the documentary's

critique of philosophical arguments that are offered for the beginning of the universe.

So the impossibility of an infinite past.

In this part I'm going to focus on where the documentary talks about the scientific

evidence for the beginning of the universe.

And also principles and arguments that are related to the first premise in the Kalam

argument, or that whatever begins to exist has a cause for its existence.

So let's take a look.

What about cosmology?

Doesn't the big bang imply the universe had a beginning?

The penrose-hocking singularity theorems that supposedly proved this have assumptions

that almost nobody in cosmology takes seriously anymore.

In particular, most physicists think Einstein's theory of gravity will need to be modified

to take into account quantum or other effects that arise in the extreme conditions of the

big bang.

This isn't just the consensus of cosmologists, but the views of the very authors of the singularity

theorems, Roger Penrose and Stephen Hawking.

The real lesson of the singularity theorems is therefore that we need to combine the general

theory of relativity with quantum theory in order to understand the origin of the universe.

...