Does modern cosmology prove the existence of God?

Conversation
,
41

The premise that everything that begins to exist has a cause is unsupported. Particularly the sense in which the universe is assumed to have begun to exist, that is from nothing, is wholly outside of experience. There is zero evidence in support of that premise.

Every example we have of something beginning to exist is actually something changing into something else.

And it is an assumption that the universe came into existence out of nothing. There is no evidence in support of that premise either. It’s hard to see how there even could be any such evidence, since nothingness would seem unable to leave evidence behind. No fact of the matter with respect to the universe we see compels the conclusion that there was ever a time at which it did not even exist at all.

So the people who insist that is how the universe began to exist, ex nihilo, have quite a mountain to climb to support premise 1 and 2 in the Kalam.

7 Likes
42

And then, were they to climb that mountain, they’d have the small problem that none of their theistic conclusions follow from those premises. One seldom sees so much ink spilled on an argument which is so utterly nonsensical from end to end.

6 Likes
43

As you specifically stated it I agree it is not a burden shift fallacy. I would say it is a statement lacking support.

Identifying a label points out that the point is being made by an unsupported label and not argument. This is very useful to help with critical thinking.

It is using a label to assault her credibility instead of arguing the points of interests to the electorate. It is used in the context of logical arguments about the positions of the candidates.

44

Thanks for doing my dirty work Rum.

2 Likes
45

Balderdash!

  1. As I have already pointed out, labels are ubiquitous in philosophical arguments. “Identifying a label” is therefore ‘like shooting fish in a barrel’ in such an environment, and thus of no informational value.

  2. Given our widely differing viewpoints, it is inevitable that you and I (and others that you are conversing with) disagree on whether a label is “unsupported” or not on a wide range of issues. Therefore your assertions that they are unsupported holds very little weight.

  3. None of this alters the fact that a disagreement over labels is, by and large, a disagreement over factual premises, not over logic, and thus does not implicate the question of “fallacy”. Thus your labeling these issues “fallacies” is itself an unsupported label.

I was not defending Trump’s behavior, merely objecting to the mislabeling of it. In the same way that somebody might object to written defamation being called “slander” or spoken defamation being called “libel”. If you are going to use the terminology of a discipline, be it logic or law, it behooves you to use it correctly. Otherwise you simply confuse your reader.

An error of fact is a falsehood, an error of logic is a fallacy. Calling either the other will simply cause your reader to look in the wrong place for the purported problem.

6 Likes
46

Hi @Patrick, @Michael_Okoko, @structureoftruth, @Rumraket, @Tim, @Roy and @CrisprCAS9,

I’d just like to make a couple of brief comments on the question, “Does modern cosmology prove the existence of God?”

It strikes me that in answering this question, the proper way to proceed would be to look at the best argument for the existence of God which appeals to the findings of modern cosmology. That argument is not the kalam cosmological argument; it’s the fine-tuning argument.

Physicist Sean Carroll (who has previously debated Dr. Craig on the fine-tuning argument) thinks that the argument is a poor one. His best take-down of the argument is a 9-minute video which I embedded in a 2016 post I wrote for Uncommon Descent and which you can view here. I would still broadly endorse its conclusions, even though my views have changed a lot in the last five years. I would invite readers to peruse the post at their leisure and weigh up the evidence for themselves.

I’d also like to comment on Craig’s premise:

  1. If the universe has a cause, then an uncaused, personal Creator of the universe exists who sans (without) the universe is beginningless, changeless, immaterial, timeless, spaceless and enormously powerful.

I don’t think it follows from the fact that the universe has a Cause that this Cause is personal. (Craig thinks it must be, because the only things we know of are physical entities, minds, their thoughts and abstract concepts, and among these, only a mind could create a physical entity like our universe, but I don’t see any reason to assume that those are the only possibilities.)

However, I do think that the fact that the universe is fine-tuned points to its having an intelligent Cause which lies beyond our cosmos. What we don’t know, however, is whether this Cause is the God of classical theism. We also don’t know whether it is changeless or even beginningless, since we don’t know whether the Fine-Tuner of our cosmos is metaphysically ultimate. One could argue that even if it isn’t, there must still be some Ultimate Cause, but the gap in the argument is that it seems we cannot show that the Ultimate Cause of a personal Fine-Tuner must itself be intelligent and personal.

In a nutshell: cosmological “First Cause” arguments can take us to an Ultimate Cause but cannot establish that it is personal; while teleological arguments can take us to an Intelligent Cause but cannot demonstrate that it is metaphysically ultimate. So, what kind of argument can show that our universe is grounded in a Reality which is both metaphysically ultimate and personal?

It seems to me that a line of argument developed by the Scottish existentialist philosopher John Macmurray in his Gifford Lectures (available online - see especially his works, The Self as Agent and Persons in Relation) might be able to bridge the gap. Macmurray argues that the idea of a person is ontologically basic, and that our scientific concept of a body is really a stripped-down concept of a person, where the “goals” of the body are blind and invariant ones, which are capable of being described as laws." To make sense of the idea of a body, we have to start with the idea of a person in the first place. So the notion that something impersonal but law-governed, such as the quantum vacuum, might turn out to be the metaphysical bedrock on which everything around us (including ourselves) is built, turns out to make no sense, if Macmurray’s line of argument is correct. It’s a futile attempt to construct the 3-D reality of the personal out of the 2-D reality of physical objects - which is rather like trying to explain colors in terms of monochrome. Ultimate Reality can only be personal.

QED? Not quite. A critic might argue that our inability to define bodies without recourse to the personal merely indicates a cognitive limitation on our part, and that a reduction of the personal to the physical is nevertheless possible, even if we will never grasp it. While I cannot refute this “mysterian” view, I will point out that it’s a metaphysical leap in the dark, and that personalistic theism offers a worldview which we can at least grasp.

I’ll leave it there for now. Cheers.

2 Likes
47

Hi Tim
I appreciate this discussion and agree with several of your points. A label in many cases is associated with a possible fact. Is Hilary crooked? That is either an established fact or simply an image Donald Trump wants to associate with Hillary to create doubt about her credibility. Donald has not established this and therefor it should be researched when evaluating his rhetoric.

So a label can be a assignment of logic, an assignment of fact, or a method of inserting an unsupported assertion into an argument. I would again argue their use when not accepted by both sides weakens a persons position.

48

Yeah, that’s just the thing, isn’t it? Unless one endeavors to make arguments without using any descriptive terms at all, “labels” are essential to communication. Try as I might to construct meaningful sentences with no subject or object, they tend to wind up conveying very little.

True, but I think it’s actually much worse than that.

In decades of legal work in which the soundness of arguments of a philosophical (or quasi-philosophical, perhaps) nature was argued about constantly, I do not recall a single time when any competent advocate (or, indeed, any incompetent one) used the term “fallacy.” Why? Because running about yelping “fallacy,” even when faced with an actually fallacious argument, is the wrong response. It’s the sort of thing that a person with a decent education learns not to do just about ten minutes after he learns how to do it. Fallacies, when offered by one’s interlocutors in an argument, are not there to be named. They do not come out of a man like demons, if only the demonologist knows the name of the fallacy. Rather, what one does is recognize the hole in the argument which the fallacy leaves. And when one has evidence and/or compelling argument on one’s side, one charges straight for that hole and drives the truck through.

Fallacy-yelping is the sign of the lack of merit in one’s own position. It is rarely worthwhile, and never persuasive. It’s like the exaltation of procedure over substance.

And then, of course, there is the routinely-observed fact that the people who make a practice of identifying and calling fallacies are almost always completely, and often quite hilariously, wrong.

3 Likes
49

Two things have struck me about the Kalam Cosmological Argument:

  1. The argument has an impressive name;
  2. The argument itself is very run-of-the-mill, and not at all impressive.

So I will agree with @vjtorley that the fine tuning argument is better. I don’t find the fine tuning argument at all persuasive, but I agree that it is better than KCA.

6 Likes
50

This strikes me as being more mere assertion or assumption, than an even-remotely substantiated claim, as:

  1. we have no evidence of anything ‘creating’ a universe, meaning that we have no evidence as to what “could” create one, and

  2. we have no evidence of a mind, unconnected with a “physical entity”, even existing, let alone such a disembodied mind creating anything physical.

Given that we have no idea (i) whether physical constants can be altered independently, and (ii) what forms of life completely unlike our own are possible in this universe, let alone in a universe with different physical constants, I would not consider this to be a “fact” so much as a conjecture. We know too little about what degree of fine-tuning is possible, and about what life-forms are possible for this to be more than conjecture.

4 Likes
51

  1. I don’t think you’ve established that “a label can be a assignment of logic” as opposed to one of fact.

  2. As both @Puck_Mendelssohn and I have suggested, labels are a useful and ubiquitous tool in such discussions. Attempting to avoid them completely would result in arguments that are both unwieldy and incomprehensible. I think this is true even when there is disagreement over the applicability of the labels. It would be hard to have a coherent disagreement over whether ‘the universe has a beginning’ without employing the labels ‘universe’ and ‘beginning’ (or some equivalent).

@Puck_Mendelssohn: I would tend to differ from you on the utility of pointing out a fallacy. This may be because I haven’t spent any time trying to convince a third-party adjudicator, either judge or jury. Naming the fallacy has seemed to me to be a useful short-hand, or ‘label’, for why I reject the ‘logic’ of an opposing argument.

I dare say that, if I wished to take the time, I could ‘drive a truck through’ them, but lacking the stakes of a trial, it seldom seems to warrant the effort. Particularly as, more often than not, the premise that they are basing their fallacy on also fails to hold up under scrutiny.

I would however agree with you that “that the people who make a practice of identifying and calling fallacies are almost always completely, and often quite hilariously, wrong.”

2 Likes
52

You described the fine-tuning hypothesis as:

Of course, our universe permits the existence of life but it is obsessively trying to end it. Living organisms are constantly engaged in a struggle to survive: microbes evolving resistance to our antibiotics and we fighting back by creating newer antibiotics; the sun helping us make vitamin D but also promoting skin cancer development; our aerobic respiratory machinery giving us chemical energy in the form of ATP and also producing free radicals some of which cause damage all through our lives; asteroids hitting our planet and killing lifeforms at and around the area of impact; pandemics killing millions of humans, animals and plants; The list goes on. The fine-tuning argument holds no water IMO.

With the way you stated the FTH I don’t see how, as HIV, SARS-CoV-2, Ebola virus, Lassa virus etcetera don’t want intelligent lifeforms like us alive. Unless of course, there is an intelligent Anti-Cause who antagonizes the actions of the intelligent Cause.

Cheers!

3 Likes
53

If the universe is fine-tuned for intelligent life, why is intelligent life in such a minuscule part of it?

3 Likes
54

A universe can either preclude life, permit life, or be optimized for life. With natural processes, optimized should be extremely rare relative to permissive, and we wouldn’t be here in the first place if life is impossible. So with natural causes, we should expect to be in a universe that permits life, but barely. That is what we find. If we were in an optimized universe, that would be evidence for a designer, but that is clearly not the case. If we were in a precluding universe, that would be extremely strong evidence for a designer, but again, that isn’t the case. What we actually observe is not evidence for a designer at all.

7 Likes
55

Hi Vincent. Of course I would agree that, in so far one seeks to undermine the best case for theism built on modern cosmology, one should address the best arguments in that case.

But I have to say I actually think the dependence of life on the physical constants of our universe is evidence against theism. That is because given God’s omnipotence, there seems to be no reason why life should require following the physical constants, as God could sustain life’s continuing existence even against physical forces that would otherwise destroy it merely as a trivial act of his literally unlimited will.

Or alternatively, life could be fundamentally different from the material or physical, in a way similar to the concept of substance dualism, or vitalism, life and not just mind could be it’s own fundamental substance. There seems to be no end to the number of possible fundamental substances that God could create, so the fact that life is of the same substance as anything else, as best we can tell, is evidence favoring naturalism over theism.

We could have discovered that life obeys fundamentally different rules and laws, isn’t subject to thermodynamics, or newton’s 3rd law of motion, that the living aren’t made of atoms found on the periodic table of elements, invulnerable to radioactive decay, that no biological molecule(or other substance entity) could be synthetically created in the laboratory.

4 Likes
56

I wish this point would be raised more often. Very right. And when the entire fine-tuning argument is based upon nothing more than this hypothetical possibility that perhaps universes might be constructed which had different constants, it’s bizarre that the fine-tuning advocates constantly rail against the “multiverse” as being nothing more than a speculative, hypothetical possibility. What is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander, of course, and if we’re going to engage in wholly ungrounded speculation of one kind, we may as well engage in speculation of any kind.

These sorts of things simply go to remind one of the complete absence of competent, credible evidence for theism; if there were evidence worth a damn, we would not be burdened with this sort of argumentative, rhetorical slop.

6 Likes
57

Can a label be an assignment of fact when it is not a fact? If this is done does it imply dishonesty?

58

The universe appears to be fine-tuned for vacuum with occasional hydrogen atoms.

4 Likes
59

Is that why the fine-tuning argument is so vacuous, and why statements of it are so gassy?

1 Like
60

Good question for @vjtorley