Richard Dawkins on The Kalam cosmological argument
Dawkins considers the Kalam a sophisticated version of the 'who made God?' regress and finds its leap from first cause to personal God unjustified.
Dawkins has engaged the Kalam cosmological argument primarily through his general critique of cosmological arguments in The God Delusion. He treats the Kalam as a more rigorous version of the basic cosmological argument but finds it subject to the same fatal objection: if God can exist without a cause, so can the universe. The argument's first premise — everything that begins to exist has a cause — is used to establish that the universe needs a cause, but God is then exempted from the same requirement by definitional fiat.
He is particularly sceptical of William Lane Craig's conceptual analysis of the cause. Even granting that the universe had a cause, Dawkins sees no reason to think that cause was personal, conscious, or good. Craig's argument that only a personal agent could make a free decision to create the universe strikes Dawkins as an unjustified anthropomorphic projection. Why could the cause not be an impersonal quantum fluctuation, or something entirely outside our conceptual framework?
Dawkins has largely avoided debating Craig directly on the Kalam, a decision that has drawn criticism. His position is that the argument's apparent rigour conceals the same fundamental error as all God-of-the-gaps reasoning: it takes a genuine mystery (the origin of the universe), labels the mystery 'God,' and declares the mystery solved.
“Even if we allow the dubious luxury of arbitrarily conjuring up a terminator to an infinite regress and giving it a name, there is absolutely no reason to endow that terminator with any of the properties normally ascribed to God.”