Where do we ever see anything that truly begins to exist?
Because I know of no thing that really began to exist. Rather all “beginnings” I know of are material things changing into other material things.
It is typically stated that these don’t begin to exist from nothing, but comes from a quantum field or w/e, and they so they’re just more examples of things changing into other things.
This whole debate goes back way before this thread. Particularly with respect to William Lane Craig and his formulation of the Kalam cosmological argument, there has been quite a long-standing controversy over how Craig has defended the premises in the argument against various criticisms. One particularly noteworthy example begins here, over 10 years ago:
All the time. For example my home did not exist before 2002. I did not exist before my conception or birth. The football game I am watching and the plays start at particular times. Are you saying all these things always existed and never began to exist?
Sure on one level the atoms and sub atomic particles always existed. However that doesn’t mean they were always arranged as you, me, a car, house, planet, star, galaxy, etc. These material changes you refer to have causes. So are you saying that there is no such thing as you, my computer, voyager spacecrafts, etc? Or are you saying things like you, my computer, spacecrafts always existed - even before they came into existence? What do we mean, then, when we say the car was manufactured in 2002 or that the game will be played on December 20th at 2:00PM? What do we mean when we say that the earth is 5 billion years old, or that a gravitational wave is caused by a the collision of 2 black holes or a creation of black holes? Are you saying the gravitational wave we measured a few years ago always existed?
…and these changes have causes.
It’s difficult for me to even see how science is possible with what you are arguing here. For example, we look for causes of the moon’s formation, the solar system formation, an infection, evolutionary changes and mechanisms, etc. These arrangements and activities of matter all begin to exist even if their underlying material ingredients were always around. When science and observations describe causes, these aren’t just ways of talking about something that doesn’t exist. Scientific language and even regular parlance describing the ontological reality of something existing in its current form - even if the underlying material substrates always existed - refer to things, arrangements, transformations, patterns, etc. actually coming into existence.
So we see things coming into existence all the time and we always observe them to have causes - which is what underlies virtual all human investigations including and especially science. If there were no causes, what are scientists actually looking for in their work?
I understand. I have seen Dr. Craig debate the KCA and defend it and I saw an analysis of his debate with Sean Carrol. That being said, I am not a proponent of the KCA because I think the universe could be eternal. However I was just struck by the claim, apart from the KCA, that there was no evidence that everything that begins to exist must have a cause because that is all we observe. So this question, for me at least, is not related to the KCA.
You still have not understood my question in the least. If God did not want us to understand the universe, he would have created a situation in which we are all convinced these models work, when in fact the universe nothing like how they predict. In such a situation, there would be no difference at all in how we perceive the world. If you disagree, please provide a specific example of an observation that would distinguish the two hypotheses.
How would you make predictions in the deceptive universe? You would try but your hypothesis would continually fail. Repeated successful prediction distinguishes the universes. Human technological advancement distinguishes the universes.
Am I saying that? Haven’t I talked about the sense in which things begin to exist? Is it not obvious that I think there is a difference between material things interacting, and reality itself coming into existence without anything to interact with?
What might be true of one, is not necessarily true of the other. Causality requires things to already exist so that they can affect each other and cause each other to re-act. If there is no thing in existence, then it is not obvious to me why it has to be the case that, should something come into existence, it must have been caused to do so: exactly because there would not have been something to interact with.
Yes, their interactions. The physical forces between the objects. Things attract or repel each other and cause them to change. Shape, location, and so on.
Am I? I don’t think so. I think I’m saying those things have “beginnings” of a fundamentally different nature than the one we are trying to understand. Not that the did not begin to exist, or that they don’t even exist, but that your computer, and you, used to be something else we would not recognize as you, or your computer. Those things changed through interactions with other things, and they became you, and your computer.
That there were already things that interacted, and some of those things became a car in 2002.
That the players will be present at some location and interact in a particular way we recognize as a game being played?
We don’t say that, because it’s thought to be 4.56 byo, but I get the question. What we mean is that the Earth as a recognizeable planetoid grew by gravitational accretion from supernova remnants circling the young Sun. Approximately something to that effect.
Things that already existed interacted and came together into another thing with a new shape and physical and chemical properties.
The wave is the product of the coming together of two very massive objects that already were strongly bending space around them, and them orbiting each other faster and faster as they came closer caused ripples as the curving spacetime around the two masses overlapped more and more closely.
Now I actually don’t think you lack the capacity to have thought out these answers yourself, so I wonder why you didn’t.
I find that absolutely remarkable. Consider that it is possible in the following way: I posit that, perhaps uniquely, coming into existence out of nothing does not require a cause. But that beginning to exist through physical and material interactions, does require causes. I then proceed to go back into the laboratory tomorrow and assume, because I work with material things and not realities coming into existence ex nihilo, they do causally interact.
Wow, seems pretty straightforward to me.
Consider also that, if something is not already in existence, then it is not there to be caused to do anything. So that also seems rather straightforwardly to explain why that kind of beginning would not (could not?) require a cause. It seems to me you can only have or demand the rules of causality when there are things that can interact. If there is no things at all, why would the rule even apply?
Thirdly, consider that what makes it possible to do science is not necessarily true about causality, just because it is a practically useful assumption. Another useful and productive rule of scientific inference is Occams Razor. We generally prefer the simplest explanation if and when it explains the same number of facts. But we have to be mindful that, even though that rule is very useful(particuarly effetive against overly ad-hoc explanations), it’s some times wrong, and reality can be a bit more complicated.
And they all began to exist through interactions among those already existing things. If we are to generalize from experience that all beginnings require causes, then the generalization that all beginnings are of the sort that they constitute interactions among already existing physical things is exactly equally well supported.
And we only ever see that happen as being the interactions of physical things.
Who says there are no causes? I think we should be able to understand that some rules apply to some things, and not to others, and that their natures can dictate when and where the rules apply. Objects without electromagnetic charge do not change trajectory in an electromagnetic field, but charged objects do. So here we have two things with different natures, and those natures determine what rules apply to them.
It is just not obvious to me why it should be the case that if there is not any thing in existence, then the rules of causality that apply among physically interacting things, still apply if there is not any thing in existence. And it seems to me I can still do science by thinking those rules apply among physically interacting things. And it seems to me that, if I were to apply the rule of experience, all that gets me is that the universe began through the physical interaction of some pre-existing material things. And further still, as best I can tell, when A does something and was caused to do so, it is because A already existed and interacted with B. If A does not exist(indeed, if there is no thing in existence), how can Be cause “it” to do anything? It isn’t there.
Again I think you need to be careful to distinguish the senses in which things begin to exist. The claim is that the universe began to exist out of nothing, and rules about a fundamentally different type of event, physical interactions, is generalized into this complete unknown about which we have zero experience (the literal coming into being from nothing).
Why the first-person pronoun? How many mathematical models have you made?
What was your personal contribution to those?
How many such predictions have you tested?
I’m puzzled as to why anyone would object to this. Bill is saying that the criterion is whether humans are capable of understanding something, so I am simply asking whether this criterion is applied at the collective or personal level. It’s a perfectly reasonable question.
How would you create a car an airplane or a computer in this universe? Are you claiming these are not real we just think we are making progress using the tools of science?
What evidence do you have to support your claim of a universe that is deceptive?
God would make them work thru his Supernatural Omnipotent Magic. Why not, if he wanted to fool us?
No, I’m claiming that your “hypothesis” that the universe was created by some guy so we would be able to understand it is a stupid idea and you have no way of confirming or refuting it. As you are demonstrating by your failure to provide a means by which you could do so.
It’s is not my claim. It is a claim you must be able to falsify if your “hypothesis” has any worth whatsoever. And, since you can’t falsify it, what should we conclude?
Claiming VJT’s hypothesis is a stupid idea is simply an assertion. Claiming I have no way of confirming or refuting it is also an assertion. You have yet to make an argument or attempt to provide evidence that your alternative is viable. Given the evidence of what man has accomplished with the help of the scientific method your counter argument is a non starter.
@vjtorley hypothesis of the discoverable universe has exceedingly strong evidentiary support. I hope he continues to develop this argument. The argument also has very interesting theological implications.
When Craig says that God created the universe out of nothing, he means that the universe has no material cause, only an efficient cause, which is God himself.
All that “evidence” is just the result of God having confused our minds to think that we can use science to produce technology to works. In fact, those things only work because God uses Supernatural Magic to make them work, as part of his deception.
The world does not have proofs void of assumptions. The best we can do is gather empirical evidence and reach logical conclusions from the evidence.
We know that forces work independently and repeatably in nature. This is why science works. IMO we eventually get to God as an ultimate cause but the evidence is that nature is very capable of doing many things on its own from controlling the weather to reproducing life from life.
Nature is beautifully designed to be understood by man and God is the best explanation for that design. We cannot prove the existence of God void of assumptions but we can infer His existence from the evidence.
No, we can’t. Because an omnipotent God has decided to deceive us and make it impossible to gather empirical evidence about the world as it actually is.
Siegel’s claim that quantum phenomena refute the premise that “Whatever begins to exist has a cause” is highly misleading, since it confuses determinism with causality. Causes don’t have to be deterministic. The background cause of radioactive decay is the quantum vacuum.
Before the universe came into existence approximately 13.8 billion years ago, there was no quantum vacuum and there were no laws that were active; hence, neither of these could have brought the universe into existence.
Siegel’s claim that under an inflationary scenario, the universe could have been expanding eternally without a beginning, fails since it ignores the fact that “inflationary models break down when the volume of the universe drops below the Planck scale… Cyclical models also require a beginning due to the constant increase of entropy. No realistic quantum models allow for a past-eternal universe.”
Siegel refers to the steady-state eternal inflation model advanced by astrophysicists Anthony Aguirre and Steven Gratton, which circumvents the Borde-Guth-Vilenkin theorem appealed to by apologists such as William Lane Craig, obviating the need for a beginning, but this is an unrealistic model which “requires an unimaginable level of fine-tuning in the infinite past for the universe to have contracted to such a special low-entropy, compact state at the transition from contraction to expansion.” Thus “if the model were even plausible, the level of required fine-tuning would represent even greater evidence of design than it was intended to avoid by removing the beginning.”
My comments, briefly, are as follows:
is a telling philosophical point, in my opinion. A non-deterministic cause is still a cause.
sounds rather doubtful to me, as I was under the impression that the multiverse has its own vacuum state (see here). Perhaps some physicist could set me straight on this one.
is a claim that I don’t feel qualified to assess. If Miller is right, then the ball is in Siegel’s court.
is, in my opinion, Miller’s most telling point: an eternal inflation scenario requires incredible fine-tuning for it to work, so it doesn’t solve the fine-tuning problem but rather, exacerbates it. (Arch-atheist and physicist Sean Carroll admitted to me that inflation requires fine-tuning in a brief email he sent me several years ago.) Until Siegel can come up with an answer to this point, I’d say the state of the fame is definitely Advantage Miller.
Hi Faizal
This is a burden shift fallacy as you have put impossible burden on the other side of the argument. Yes, the ID guys used to fall for this. Behe did not. Making an assertion and asking the other side to prove you wrong is something you can do with any position as there is no such thing as assumption free truths.
The evidence that humans have made massive technological progress is very strong evidence your assertion is a non starter.
Not necessarily. An ID proponent could argue that the universe is fine-tuned to support life, but not fine-tuned to create life. ID proponents typically argue that life requires the existence of a genetic code, and that codes cannot be created by the laws of physics. (I’m not saying I agree with this argument or anything.) If this line of argument were correct, then even a fine-tuned universe would still require a Designer to create life.
