The Cosmological Argument

Now, let's examine your formulation of the Cosmological Argument;

1) Whatever begins to exist has a cause. 2) The Universe began to exist. 3) Therefore, the Universe had a cause.

The key to this argument is the phrase "begins to exist". But is this premise justified and is it true that whatever begins to exist has a cause? How do we come to know this? I submit that this premise is unjustified and cannot be accepted uncritically.

The only way premise 1 can be justified is by inductive inference, that is by observing that in this universe (of space and time) things that begin to exist tend to have a cause. But the conditions that obtains in this universe CANNOT be the same as the conditions that obtained in the pre-universe (note that I did not say before the universe as there existed no time before the time & space were created in the Big Bang event).

This premises falls foul of what is know as The Problem of Inductive Inference and as I have just shown above you seem to have drawn a pretty unsave conclusion by comparing two very dissimilar conditions.

There are other problems with the Cosmological Argument which I shall address later, but for now I would like to see how you deal with my objection.

Huxley (Nairaland)

On the Cosmological Argument (CA), Part 2.

On my earlier posts about the CA on this thread, I attempted to cast doubt on the reasonableness of making an inductive inference about the conditions that obtains in the present universe with respect to conditions that obtained "before" this universe came into being. I call this the Boundary Conditions refutation of the premiss that every thing that begins to exist has a cause. Another way to put this refutation is to ask whether the properties or attributes internal to the universe are the same as the properties of the universe. This remains to be demonstrated.

On this post, I intend to examine the concept of "Begin to Exist". What does it mean for something to begin to exist? I contend that the CA, especially this Kalam variety, has gotten a lot of mileage recent, thanks to William Lane Craig, mainly as a result of the general illiteracy of metaphysical and ontological matters by the general public. Granted, metaphysic and ontological analysis are very difficult subjects to contemplate and I claim no expert knowledge in these myself. But it should be obvious even to the most casual observer that the idea of "begin to exist" is not as trivial a matter, meriting no further explication, as seems on the surface. Advocates of Kalam CA, maybe knowingly exploit the public ignorance of metaphysics to sell to the public a defect argument.

Now, let's examine what exactly it means for something to "begin to exist". There are two ways one could examine this:

1) The general examination of "begin to exist" which relates to the ontology of things 2) The particular case of "begin to exist" as used in the CA, which relates to the theory of causation.

On this post, I shall only examine 1) and will look at 2) in a subsequent post. I shall start by asking the following questions:

i) Can anyone think of something that "begins to exist" and point out the exact time and space when the existence began?

ii) When does a painting begin to exist? Is it in the painter's head? Is it when the paint was manufactured? Is it when the canvass was stretched out on a wooden frame?

iii) When does a child begin to exist? Is it when her parents were themselves born, noting that her mother would have been born with near all her eggs in place? Is it when that particular sperm that fertilised her mothers eggs was made in her father's body? Is it when her parents had sex? Is it when the eggs and sperms fused? etc, etc?

iv) When did the sun begin to exist? Was it when the matter that accreted into the sun 5 billion years ago? Was it about 10 billion years ago when most of this matter was initially made?

I hope with the above question, it is possible to see that this is not a trivial questions with no trivial answers. As far as we know from science, things around us are simply forms of energy and things don't just "begin to exist", but matter/energy is transformed from one form of energy or state into another form of energy or state, invariably with no finite abrupt phase change time, but with slow imperceptible transitions.

I contend that premise 1 of the CA is not a cast-in-stone premise and should really not be accept as a logically unassailable premise.

Huxley

Hello Huxley: Sorry for the delay. Good to hear from you again.

In replying your first and second objections, there are different approaches that one could take, but I am going to make it a little bit conversational in style so as to help us to more closely focus the objection. It seems to me that after reading the Cosmological Argument (CA henceforth), you have decided to attack the first premiss. That is fine. But we have to ask ourselves, are you really attacking the first premiss as it was stated, or could you be addressing some basic but common misinterpretation of the first premiss? Furthermore, we have to ask ourselves whether the objections raised are anchored on sound plausible deductions.

Before I continue, I have to remark that the CA is a simple syllogism that leads unapologetically to a deductive inference. One does not need to know the conclusion a priori; all that one has to do is follow the step-by-step premises to logically and rationally arrive at the conclusion. The CA or indeed any other form of syllogism can be refuted or falsified however if it can be demonstrated that one of the premises are false. In other words, the premises of syllogistic statements are designed in logical reasoning to aid us flesh out certain truths which one may be led to assert without much evidence. They are not inductive in nature but rather deductive. So, it is not like when someone writes out a simple syllogism, such a person is writing a Law in Physics or some other generally agreed upon law in some other fields of expertise. It becomes the duty of anyone opposing the syllogism to state and demonstrate why he disagrees with any of the premises. The burden of proof lies on anyone who wants to demonstrate that the premises are unsound (or that the conclusion is unsound) to show why he or she ought to be believed.

Like I wrote elsewhere, “The first premiss is not to be understood as saying “everything has to be caused” instead it is saying that an entity needs a cause or explanation if and only if it has a beginning. To further expatiate on the first premiss, nothing comes out of nothing, from nothing, by nothing; or to simply state it “Being does not come from non-being.” So we are not talking of material causes here only but efficient causes as well. If things could really spontaneously pop into existence from nothing by nothing then there is no reason why any and everything doesn’t spontaneously pop into existence all the time.

So, there is no fear that while you are busy typing away at your pc, jackals could be popping into existence in the room next door and defiling the carpet or furniture. Indeed, there is no reason to believe that horses, watches, Darwin, erasers could pop into existence anywhere, anytime out of nothing, from nothing and by nothing. To argue against this will be to strain credulity. The first premise is more plausible than its negation. This is empirically confirmed constantly in science.”

So then you declare, in objection to the causal principle: “The only way premise 1 can be justified is by inductive inference, that is by observing that in this universe (of space and time) things that begin to exist tend to have a cause. But the conditions that obtains in this universe CANNOT be the same as the conditions that obtained in the pre-universe (note that I did not say before the universe as there existed no time before the time & space were created in the Big Bang event).”

But what exactly can you tell us about this pre-universe that you allude to? Do you know anything about this pre-universe that you declare rather emphatically cannot be subservient to the first premiss? Supposing I ask you on what basis one is to believe you when you talk about the pre-universe, what will your answer be? Current physics (science) cannot pronounce on that issue, so one is left with the conclusion that it is an empty assertion unless you can demonstrate efficiently why one should doubt a principle that is universally valid.

On your second submission, I studied the nature of your second response and it seems to me that it was just a simple misunderstanding of the first premise. I hope the explication given in this reply effectively addresses that. If you feel like they do not, I’d like for you to spell out exactly how they have disconfirmed the fuller and proper understanding of the first premise. The reason why I am returning that question back to you is because it is fairly obvious to me (and any informed person whether theist or atheist) that for each of those questions you asked, there are clear causes or explanations for them since they began to exist at a finite time in the past. If you claim not to have any good explanation for these questions, I can readily suggest very logical causes/explanations in my next reply.

But upon closer examination, it seems to me that the objections you raised in your second post are simply aimed to make the point that one cannot, with any degree of certainty, declare that things which exist in this world began to exist at a finite time in the past. That to me is patently wrong. There was a time in the historical past when the painting you alluded to was not in existence. If it begins to exist now, the first premise posits that it did not just pop into existence of nothing, from nothing and by nothing. It had to have had a cause or explanation for its very existence. The same applies to your question whether you are talking about a child, the earth or the sun. Indeed, the first premise is constantly confirmed in science regardless of the increasing size or configuration of matter. So the truth holds whether you are talking about a tiny marble ball, a basket ball, a ball the size of a car, the entire earth, the sun or other fireballs (stars), the entirety of a galaxy or the universe at the largest scale.

At this juncture, I will hastily point out that I do not think that your objections are trivial or that they deserve trivial answers. But what if you take the view that nothing can be said to BEGIN to exist, but that rather whatever we have in existence are just reconfigurations of previously existing matter? This is a great argument if one presupposes that matter itself is eternal. But are matter, space, time and energy which came into being (came into existence) at the creation/beginning of the universe eternal?

There are still many people who believe, despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary, that the universe was eternal in the past. This idea predominated for quite some time in academia. Unfortunately that is no longer the case now. There are powerful philosophical and scientific reasons to believe that there are no physically instantiated actual infinites. The universe (and matter by extension) had a beginning judging by its finitude in the past. Therefore, anyone who wants to believe that nothing in the universe could be said to have begun to exist on the assumption that whatever exists is merely is a reconfiguration of previously existing matter has to confront the veridicality of the finite and temporal boundary to matter’s existence itself.

Besides, it is not even a satisfactory answer to anyone seeking an explanation or the cause for the existence of any finite particulars to tell him or her not to probe any deeper because physically instantiated entities are simply reconfigurations of prior matter. Nevertheless, given this wobbly objection, the skeptic is then simply faced with the tougher task of explaining the origin of matter since we both agree that matter is a contingent entity and is furthermore, not eternal in the past. Such a person may have to start appealing to some unknown and empirically unverifiable Physics. Since such a person cannot say that the universe did not begin to exist (the existence of which brought into existence all matter, space, time and energy), such a person is then left with the deeply radical, irrational and implausible option of declaring without any evidence that the Universe created itself out of nothing uncaused or that it simply popped out of nothing, from nothing and by nothing. That, I submit, is worse than magic.

It is only the looming inference to theism, I suspect, that will make any atheist abandon overwhelming logic and scientific evidence to make special appeals to an unconfirmed, deeply implausible prior state of affairs. Such equivocations--such remorseless but baseless skepticism is a palpable double standard evident in atheists for we do not witness such empty contrarian speculations or dogmatic skepticism when the theory of evolution, for instance, is under consideration.

Cheers.