I expected to find people on these forums who find the Kalām cosmological argument compelling. What I didn't expect to find were people who claim to have never seen it refuted. That's why I'm wondering if my idea of its refutation is sound, or whether I'm missing something.
I'm most familiar with the argument in the form in which William Lane Craig presents it:
Premise 1: Everything that begins to exist has a cause.
Premise 2: The universe began to exist.
Conclusion: The universe has a cause.
If you have a better version of it, I would like to hear it. For now, I'm going with this one.
The first objection I have is to the phrase 'begins to exist'. It appears in premise 1, to establish, presumably by appeal to common sense, or everyday experience, that things have causes.
This is an incomplete summation of the reasons given for believing premise (1) to be more plausibly true than its denial.
In my Apologia of the Cosmos, [thread=7674415]Kalam Apologia[/thread] I presented this very argument and went through step by step, expounding upon the premises. I want you to review it and I will be willing to dialogue with you regarding it. The thread has over 11,000 views and was the center of much discussion.
With regards to premise (1) this is taken from my post:
Cosmological Argument
This particular argument shall rely heavily on scientific observation which should appeal to the scientific minded.
The argument is listed below:
1. Everything that begins to exist, has a cause.
2. The universe began to exist at some point in the distant past.
3. Therefore, the universe has a cause
The argument is valid because the conclusion follows from the premises. The question is, are the premises true? What is the evidence?
Premise 1
The Law of causality, which is the fundamental principle of science establishes premise one as true. Without the Law of Causality, science would be rendered impossible. Science is a search for causes. If we know anything about reality, it is that things don't happen without a cause.
Francis Bacon, the father of modern science says: "True knowledge is knowledge by causes."(The New Organon 1620; reprint, Indianapolis: Bobbs Merrill, 1960), 121
Skeptic David Hume admits: " I never asserted so absurd a proposition as that something could arise without a cause." (in J.Y.T. Greig, ed., The Letters of David Hume, 2 vols. New York: Garland, 1983), 1:187.
It then appears in premise 2 to say that the universe had a beginning. If we were to grant premise 2, this would mean that we were to grant that the universe was created out of nothing.
This is incorrect.
The conclusion of the argument is:
(3) Therefore, the universe has a cause.
*Not: (3) Therefore the universe was created out of nothing
Not by some rearrangement of previously existing stuff.
This is indirectly implied by the conclusion of the argument.
If we use the phrase 'begin to exist' to describe such an event, it seems fair to use it in the same way in premise 1. Because if we use the same label for two different things, we would be equivocating, and our conclusion wouldn't follow from the premises.
But if we try to look for other instances of stuff appearing out of nothing, without rearranging previously existing matter, the list comes up rather short.
Indeed, there would be no list, for there are no instances of stuff appearing out of nothing. So I agree.
We could talk about virtual particles, but those are a concept from quantum mechanics, and can appear out of nothing without cause.
Virtual particles do not appear out of nothing without a cause, but rather emanate from fluctuations in the energy contained within the quantum vaccuum itself.
Below is a response of mine to an earlier objection regarding quantum mechanics:
This idea is being used by some physicists to cast doubt on the veracity of the Law of Causality. But as it shall be shown, these attempts are completely unfounded, but not only that, they are intentionally misleading and border on pop-metaphysics.
Contemporary philosopher Quentin Smith actually used this as an argument against holding that the Law of Causality was applicable to the Big Bang model.
However the reason this argument fails is that the motions of elementary particles described by statistical quantum mechanical laws,
even if uncaused,
do not constitute an exception to this principle:
1. Everything that begins to exist, has a cause.
As Smith himself admits, these considerations "at most tend to show that acausal laws govern the
change of condition of particles, such as the change of particle
x's position from
q1 to
q2.
They state nothing about the causality or acausality of absolute beginnings, of beginnings of the existence of particles" (p. 50).
Smith seeks rectify this defect in his argument, however, by pointing out that the Uncertainty relation also permits energy or particles (notably virtual particles) to "spontaneously come into existence" for a very brief time before vanishing again. It is therefore false that "all beginnings of existence are caused" and, hence, ". . . the crucial step in the argument to a supernatural cause of the Big Bang . . . is faulty" (pp. 50-51).
But as a counterexample to (1'), Smith's use of such vacuum fluctuations is
highly misleading. For
virtual particles do not literally come into existence spontaneously out of nothing. Rather the energy locked up in a vacuum fluctuates spontaneously in such a way as to convert into evanescent particles that return almost immediately to the vacuum.
As John Barrow and Frank Tipler comment, ". . . the modern picture of the quantum vacuum differs radically from the classical and everyday meaning of a vacuum-- nothing. . . . The quantum vacuum (or vacuua, as there can exist many) states . . .
are defined simply as local, or global, energy minima (V'(O)= O, V"(O)>O)" ([1986]
, p. 440).
The microstructure of the quantum vacuum is
a sea of continually forming and dissolving particles which borrow energy from the vacuum for their brief existence.
A quantum vacuum is thus far from nothing, and vacuum fluctuations do not constitute an exception to the principle that whatever begins to exist has a cause. It therefore seems that Smith has failed to refute premiss (1').
Therefore the assertion that "there is an exception to the Law of Causality" is completely unfounded and intentionally misleading.
Also:
To reiterate, virtual particles are not uncaused, they are fluctuations of the energy in the vacuum. The quantum vacuum is not nothing. It is a roiling sea of energy. The German philosopher of science Bernulf Kanitscheider emphasizes that in so-called quantum creation events we're dealing with "a causal process leading from a primordial substratum with a rich physical structure to a materialized substratum of the vacuum. Admittedly this process is not deterministic, it includes that weak kind of causal dependence peculiar to every quantum mechanical process" (Bernulf Kanitscheider, "Does Physical Cosmology Transcend the Limits of Naturalistic Reasoning?" in
Studies on Mario Bunge's "Treatise," ed. Weingartner and G. J. W. Doen [Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1990], pp. 346-74).
Read more:
http://www.reasonablefaith.org/objections-to-the-causal-principle#ixzz2JDtfAlky
Nothing that we've ever observed can be said to 'begin to exist' in the sense that the universe did. If it did.
I agree.
So, to summarize: I would like to know what it means for something to 'begin to exist', before seeing if it's reasonable to grant any of the two premises of the argument. Can anybody help me out?
I would be delighted to.
When proponents of the Kalam such as Dr. Craig say that "whatever begins to exist..." all they mean is that beginning to exist is not transition from non-being into being, since in creation there is no enduring subject but the absolute coming-to-be of that subject. Rather, the key notion here is again the reality of
temporal becoming. That is to say that the
kalam cosmological argument presupposes from start to finish an A-theory of time. Things do not come into being without a cause. If the universe is finite in the past, then it began to exist in the sense that it came into being. The first moment of creation is not a tenseless instant at the head of a four-dimensional block but an evanescent moment that came to be and has passed away.
The
kalam cosmological argument uses the phrase “begins to exist.” For those who wonder what that means I sometimes use the expression “comes into being” as a synonym. We can explicate this last notion as follows:
for any entity
e and time
t,
e comes into being at
t if and only if (i)
e exists at
t, (ii)
t is the first time at which
e exists, (iii) there is no state of affairs in the actual world in which
e exists timelessly, and (iv)
e’s existing at
t is a tensed fact.
From clauses (i) and (ii), you can see that in order for
e to begin to exist there is no need for there to be a time prior to
t at which
e does not exist. If that were the case, then it would be true by definition that time did not begin to exist, which is surely a matter to be settled by investigation, not definition!
Clause (iii) precludes God’s beginning to exist if He enters time at the moment of creation from a state of timelessness sans creation. This result is intuitive because God, if He exists timelessly sans creation, doesn’t begin to exist or come into being at the moment of creation!
Clause (iv), is what gives us temporal becoming as opposed to mere static existence. Let me explain what I mean by a “tensed fact.” We’re all familiar with tense as it plays a role in language. In English we normally express tense by inflecting the verb of a sentence so as to express the past, present, or future tense. Although most of our ordinary language is tensed, there are occasions on which we employ sentences which are grammatically in the present tense to express what are really tenseless truths. For example, we say such things as “Lady Macbeth commits suicide in Act V. scene v,” “The glass breaks easily,” or “The area of a circle is
πr2.” It’s evident that the verbs in these sentences are really tenseless because it would be wrong-headed to replace them by the present tense equivalent of “is + (present participle),” for example, “is committing,” “is breaking,” and so forth. Such a substitution would render some of these true sentences plainly false.
The function of tense is to locate something in relation to the present. This can be done not only by means of verbs, but also by means of temporal indexical expressions like “today,” “now,” “three days ago.” Such tensed expressions differ radically from expressions using clock-times or dates, which are tenseless. “January 3, 1812” invariably refers to the same day, whether it is past, present, or future; whereas temporal indexical expressions like “yesterday,” “today,” or “tomorrow” depend upon the context of their utterance for what day they refer to.
Dates can therefore be employed in conjunction with tenseless verbs to locate things tenselessly in time. For example, we can state, “In 1960 John Kennedy
pledges to send a man to the moon before the end of the decade” (the italics being a stylistic convention to show that the verb is tenseless). This sentence expresses a tenseless fact and is therefore always true. Notice that even if you knew this truth, you wouldn’t know whether Kennedy has issued his pledge unless you also knew whether 1960 was past. By contrast, if we replaced the tenseless verb with the past-tensed verb “pledged,” then we would know that the event referred to has happened. This tensed sentence would, however, not always be true: prior to 1960 it would be false. Prior to 1960 the tensed verb would have to be the future-tense “will pledge” if the sentence is to be true. In contrast to tenseless sentences, then, tensed sentences serve to locate things in time relative to the present and so may change their truth value.
The salient point of all this is that in addition to tenseless facts, there also appear to be tensed facts. The information conveyed by a tensed sentence concerns not just tenseless facts, but also tensed facts as well, facts about how something is related to the present. Thus, what is a fact at one moment may not be a fact at another moment. It is now a fact that the U.S. is at war in Afghanistan; but in a few years that may no longer be a fact. Thus the body of tensed facts is constantly changing.
Now if there are tensed facts, then time itself is tensed. That is to say, the moments of time are really past, present, or future, independently of our subjective experience of time. Tense is not merely a feature of human language and experience but is an objective feature of reality. It is an objective fact, for example, that Columbus’ voyage in 1492 is over; it’s past. Therefore, 1492 is itself past, since the voyage was located at that time. The reality of tensed facts therefore entails a tensed theory of time, usually called an A-Theory of time in the philosophical literature. One of the implications of an A-Theory of time is the objective reality of temporal becoming. Things come into and go out of existence. Things that are real exist wholly in the present and endure through time from one present moment to the next. Thus, on an A-Theory of time there is a dynamism about reality, a constant becoming of reality in time.
Read more:
http://www.reasonablefaith.org/beginning-to-exist#ixzz2JDvIaHpv
). I'm still a n00b at all of this.
