"the cosmologists argument fails"

Is your reason for the failure that the argument says all things that exist have a cause, which contradicts the conclusion that an uncaused cause exists?


If so, this is a misunderstanding, the argument is about things which begin to exist. So there may be things in existence, which did not begin to exist, but do exist.

Actually, the problem was with the claim "all things have a beginning".

That is why we are better off to refer to this as a first cause, rather than an uncaused cause, because of these semantic nuances.

I do not like to remove this cause from the realm of existence, because it is just as present to us as the things which we sense. Existence refers to what is present. Everything we sense, and all empirical observations are in the past, by the time they are sensed, so sensation and empirical observation give us only what is on the past side of the present, which is a boundary between future and past. All that is, on the future side of the present boundary, is given to us from some other source. But we cannot deny all that comes to us from this other source, from the realm of existence, just because it is of the future, any more than we can deny what comes to us from the senses, just because it is of the past.

None of that changes the fact that something must be the fundamental thing from which macroscopic objects are composed. It might be fermions, it might be superstring, it might be quantum foam, or it might be something else. — Michael

You think that constitutes an argument?

how do you defend the claim that everything has a beginning and must have a cause? — Michael

By asking you to name something that doesn't.

there may be things in existence, which did not begin to exist, but do exist. — Punshhh

For example?

"Actually, the problem was with the claim "all things have a beginning".

Where is that claim in the Kalam cosmological argument?

"For example?"

Anything eternal.

By asking you to name something that doesn't. — Wayfarer

The universe.

Furthermore, if you want to argue that the universe must have a beginning because everything has a beginning then you're back to the cosmological argument refuting itself, being that it concludes that there is a thing that doesn't have a beginning.

You think that constitutes an argument?

Yes:

1) Everything in the universe is either a simple or composed of simples
2) Simples do not have a beginning
3) Therefore the universe does not have a beginning

How is something that comes to us in the future, from some other source (Presuming that you don't assume that all things that exist to us are in the past)?

Where is that claim in the Kalam cosmological argument? — Punshhh

I was addressing Metaphysician Undiscovered's formulation of the argument here, where he says "all things have a beginning".

Simples do not have a beginning — Michael

This exchange started with you speaking about 'fundamental waves/particles(/superstrings/whatever) that make up the universe'. What you would have said, and would like to have said, was simply 'atoms'.

But now, regrettably, you can't use 'atoms' - indivisible particles, which are simple - because physics has deconstructed the very notion. The idea of an atom as a 'mereological simple' has been dismantled by science itself, hence the requirement to use the term 'fundamental whatevers'.

So instead you just use the term 'simple' as a placeholder for 'whatever science eventually finds out is the basic stuff'. As if that amounts to an argument!

if you want to argue that the universe must have a beginning because everything has a beginning then you're back to the cosmological argument refuting itself, being that it concludes that there is a thing that doesn't have a beginning. — Michael

This makes no sense.

Wayfarer, you're clearly in denial and wasting my time.

The cosmological argument contradicts itself. It can't use as a premise "everything has a
begining, and so a cause" and then conclude that there is a beginningless, uncaused first cause.

That is the whole point of the argument, and if, after all this, you can't grasp that point, then you are indeed wasting your time.

What is the whole point of the argument? That it contradicts itself? Then the argument fails. It's very simple.

Ok, I've yet to see your refutation of the original though, i.e. "All things that begin to exist have a cause"

Eternal things don't begin to exist, but do(perhaps) exist.

The problem will be with the second premise. The cosmological argument assumes that the universe isn't an eternal thing.

One might also argue against the premise that all things that begin to exist have a cause. Creatio ex nihilo might be a thing (in the sense that the universe may have spontaneously come into existence).

And then, assuming that the proposed God is more than just some impersonal force, one might take issue with Craig's claim that "agent causation, volitional action, is the only ontological condition in which an effect can arise in the absence of prior determining conditions".

It is reasonable to consider that the universe is not eternal, we can see around us that the known universe began to exist. I know that this a vague and can't be proven either way. Perhaps the argument could be refined to "the known universe", "our world" or something.

Anyway it is reasonable to group the universe in with things which began to exist.

Regarding having a cause, likewise all we can detect has a cause, although it can't be proven.

Regarding the "agent causation" of a god, yes it is taking the rational on to thin ice, it is a quite rational conclusion in other circumstances. In this case though it only hinges on the conclusion of a first cause, which might not require agent causation, or a mind.

I can't see the contradiction though.

It is reasonable to consider that the universe is not eternal, we can see around us that the known universe began to exist. I know that this a vague and can't be proven either way. Perhaps the argument could be refined to "the known universe", "our world" or something. — Punshhh

We know that inflation began at some point, but not that the infinitely hot, infinitely massive initial singularity had a beginning.

Regarding the "agent causation" of a god, yes it is taking the rational on to thin ice, it is a quite rational conclusion in other circumstances. In this case though it only hinges on the conclusion of a first cause, which might not require agent causation, or a mind.

If you lose the personal aspect of God then this "first cause" might simply be the initial quantum fluctuation(s) which caused the initial singularity to expand in the Big Bang.

I can't see the contradiction though.

The fixed version of the OP's formulation which I provided here isn't a contradiction. The contradiction arose was when Metaphysician Undiscovered tried to justify the second premise by saying that all things have a beginning.

The singularity hypothesis is pretty shaky these days. Likewise an existing infinity. But I agree we cannot claim that the universe is not eternal, certainly in the absence of its secrets.

Regarding a personal God, the case seems to rest more on establishing an eternal, supernatural, uncaused origin. I agree it is quite a leap to end up with a personal thinking God, or the like.

But there are other theories which support such a thing, more directly.

Regarding first cause, I think this can only be considered in abstraction, as in application to the universe, the origin might well not make sense to us, be incomprehensible, or imperceptible.

None of that changes the fact that something must be the fundamental thing from which macroscopic objects are composed. It might be fermions, it might be superstring, it might be quantum foam, or it might be something else. — Michael

Michael, how is saying that there must be a fundamental thing from which macroscopic objects are composed, therefore I assume the existence of such a thing, any different in principle, from the cosmological argument which says that there must be a first cause therefore i assume the existence of such a thing?

The actual difference, is that the cosmological argument is presented as a valid argument, whereas your assumption of a fundamental, "simple", is not. The cosmological argument demonstrates the weakness of your perspective, by showing that even things assumed to be simples actually come into existence out of something which is prior to that so-called simple. So it looks for a first actuality, which might be the cause of even the apparently simple things.

Even if you assume a simple thing, or a vast number of simple things, these things will not create the objects which we know and observe, without a cause. So the assumption of "simples" is really a dead end route of investigation. It does not look for the reason why the simples have formed into the objects, even if it assumes simples. So once we put aside this desire to locate "the simple", we can get on with the real task of looking for the cause. And this would be the cause of the apparent simples as well.

How is something that comes to us in the future, from some other source (Presuming that you don't assume that all things that exist to us are in the past)? — Punshhh

Do you understand that the present exists as a boundary between the future and the past? But since we are existing in the present, yet still sensing things in the past, then don't you think that we are also in some way experiencing the future as well? Is your mind not in the future, all the time and this is what accounts for awareness? Your mind prepares you for what may occur in the distant future, as well as what is imminent and possible, in the immediate future.

So the point is, that you are not sensing the future at all, yet you know an awful lot about the future. Where does this information concerning the future come from if not from the future itself, just like information about the past comes from the past? So your mind must actually be in the future to be receiving information from the future, in order that you can know about the future.

You might wonder, if my mind is in the future, why can't I see, touch, or otherwise sense, the future objects. But that would be impossible, because sensible objects don't exist prior to the present, they only come into existence as time passes, at the present. It must be the case that sensible objects only come into existence at the present, because human beings have the capacity to make random changes to sensible objects at any moment of the present. So your mind is actually in the future, and it can't see any physical objects there, because they don't exist there, but your mind has the capacity to move and change physical objects as they come into being at the present, because it is prior to them, in the future.

The cosmological argument contradicts itself. It can't use as a premise "everything has a
begining, and so a cause" and then conclude that there is a beginningless, uncaused first cause. — Michael

There is no contradiction, the conclusion is that the first cause is not a thing. There is some discrepancy between Wayfarer and I, because Wayfarer assumes that if it is not a thing, then it is not a being, and therefore does not exist. I am very hesitant to accept this, I think that the first cause has existence just as much as physical things.

The perspective I was describing to Punshhh, is that "existence" refers to what is at the present. But the present is just a boundary between future and past. Physical things are all in the past. The first cause is in the future, as that which causes things to come into existence as the things which they are, at the present. So it is no more proper to call things of the past (physical objects) existing, than it is to call things of the future (first cause) existing.

At the meeting of minds convened last week to honour Stephen Hawking’s 70th birthday – loftily titled “State of the Universe” – two bold proposals posed serious threats to our existing understanding of the cosmos.

One shows that a problematic object called a naked singularity is a lot more likely to exist than previously assumed. The other suggests that the universe is not eternal, resurrecting the thorny question of how to kick-start the cosmos without the hand of a supernatural creator.

While many of us may be OK with the idea of the big bang simply starting everything, physicists, including Hawking, tend to shy away from cosmic genesis. “A point of creation would be a place where science broke down. One would have to appeal to religion and the hand of God,” Hawking told the meeting, at the University of Cambridge, in a pre-recorded speech.

For a while it looked like it might be possible to dodge this problem, by relying on models such as an eternally inflating or cyclic universe, both of which seemed to continue infinitely in the past as well as the future. Perhaps surprisingly, these were also both compatible with the big bang, the idea that the universe most likely burst forth from an extremely dense, hot state about 13.7 billion years ago.

However, as cosmologist Alexander Vilenkin of Tufts University in Boston explained last week, that hope has been gradually fading and may now be dead. He showed that all these theories still demand a beginning.

New Scientist Why Physics can't avoid a Creation Event

What does this prove? Only that the idea of the universe having had a beginning, is resisted by scientists, because of the implication. So whilst Hawking would never assent to 'belief in God', he still resists the implication of the universe having a beginning, because it implicitly affirms the cosmological principle.

Wayfarer assumes that if it is not a thing, then it is not a being, and therefore does not exist. — Metaphysician Undiscovered

I didn't say that! The 'transcendent' is beyond 'existence and non existence'. Whereas everything that exists, might not exist, a necessary being cannot not exist, so is therefore beyond existence and non-existence.

when Eriugena calls God ‘nothing’, he means that God transcends all created being, God is nihil per excellentiam (‘nothingness on account of excellence’) or, as he puts it, nihil per infinitatem (‘nothingness on account of infinity’). Matter, on the other hand, is also called ‘nothing’ but it is ‘nothing through privation’ (nihil per privationem). Similarly, created things are called ‘nothing’ because they do not contain in themselves their principles of subsistence (Eriugena is here repeating St. Augustine's view that the creature, considered apart from God, is mere nothing). ...God is a ‘nothingness’ (nihilum) whose real essence is unknown to all created beings, including the angels. Indeed, Eriugena argues in a radical manner, following Maximus Confessor, that God's nature is infinite and uncircumscribable, such that He is unknown even to Himself, since He is the ‘infinity of infinities’ and beyond all comprehension and circumscription.

This mode illustrates Eriugena's original way of dissolving the traditional Neoplatonic hierarchy of being into a dialectic of affirmation and negation: to assert one level is to deny the others. In other words, a particular level may be affirmed to be real by those on a lower or on the same level, but the one above it is thought not to be real in the same way. If humans are thought to exist in a certain way, then angels do not exist in that way.

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/scottus-eriugena/

All of this has now been thoroughly and utterly forgotten, due to the later Duns Scotus, who dissolved the hierarchy into a unicity and began the descent into materialism.

Right! Another great book I read, years ago, by sociologist Peter Berger, 'The Heretical Imperative'. The gist was, in the olden days, you were told what to believe, 'heresy' means 'deciding what to believe'. Whereas nowadays we all have to 'decide what to believe' - hence the title. — Wayfarer

Yes, indeed. We have to make any tradition deeply our own. It's not real till we have twisted its proteins into our own. That's what I find in Jesus' "eat me!"

A pluralistic culture requires some psychological hardiness. You'll always be a fool or a sinner to someone out there. But if you are plugged in, it's a self-justifying experience. I guess those of us here like holding our "systems" up to the fire/Inquisition of other systems. We invite clever people to hack away at our most sacred ideas and identifications. That's why I love Hegel. He saw the violence from which the complete spirit is born.

(Y)

My apologies Wayfarer, for any misrepresentation, it was kind of an over-simplification. But I still don't see any real support for the claim that the uncaused cause cannot exist.

Whereas everything that exists, might not exist, a necessary being cannot not exist, so is therefore beyond existence and non-existence. — Wayfarer

We qualify "exists" with "contingent", such that those existing things which might not exist are call contingent. This leaves open the possibility of a necessary being. I see you agree that if there is such a thing as a necessary being, it cannot not exist, so I assume that it exists. Isn't the uncaused cause, that necessary being? How do you proceed to the conclusion that the necessary being is beyond existence and non-existence?

No apologies, required it's a difficult question and I am by no means expert in them.

This is all part of what I consider to be the study of ontology, which means 'the nature of being'. Now you might ask 'how is ontology any different to science?' And the answer would be, science is concerned with the study of phenomena, i.e. what exists, whereas 'the study of being' is a question of a different order. This is because we ourselves are beings, and in that sense, not objects of analysis.

If you peruse continental philosophers, such as Heidegger and other existentialists, you will find discussion of questions of the meaning of "being", and the sense in which such questions can be differentiated from questions about what exists. Whereas, generally speaking, in anglo-american analytical philosophy, I don't think you will find distinctions of that kind. I think this is one of the key differentiators between the Continental and Anglo-American philosophy at this time.

So I am trying to develop an ontological understanding which enables the distinction between 'being' and 'existence', which is a hard distinction to draw in the current lexicon. And the reason it's hard to draw, is that for most modern people, 'what exists' is 'what is "out there", i.e. is situated in time and space'. That is instinctive and conditioned.

Accordingly, nearly all discussions about the nature of the First Cause are misconstrued in terms of it referring to something that is 'out there', when of course it is not 'out there' in any sense. The fact that it's not "out there", is then taken to be an indication of its non-reality, when what has actually happened is that the question has been misconceived from the outset. In other words, atheist arguments often deny the existence of something which has never been said to exist.

The clearest statement of that in recent literature is in David Bentley Hart's book The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness and Bliss'

"Hart’s central claim is that the God made manifest in the classical theism of Christianity and, indeed, in all the great religious traditions, is “the unconditioned and transcendent reality who sustains all things in being, the one in whom all that nature cannot contain but upon which nature depends has its simple and infinite actuality.” He notes that

any argument for or against the reality of God not so understood—any debate over an intelligent designer, or a supreme being within time and space who merely supervises history and legislates morals, or a demiurge whose operations could possibly be rivals of the physical causes describable by scientific cosmology—may prove a diverting amble along certain byways of seventeenth-century deism or eighteenth-century “natural history,” but it most definitely has nothing to do with the God worshiped in the great theistic religions or described in their philosophical traditions, or reasoned toward by their deepest logical reflections upon the contingency of the world.

...
Hart concentrates on the fundamental error of conceiving of God as some finite object in a universe of other objects: more powerful, yes, but falling within the same metaphysical order of being. As he says, the God of classical theism “is not merely one, in the way a finite object might be merely singular or unique, but is oneness as such, the one act of being and unity by which any finite thing exists and by which all things exist together.”

So the approach required to understand this is in my view strictly apophatic, i.e. negative - you can't know it as it is never an object of knowledge nor is among them.

It's also interesting that the Intelligent Design advocates will often accuse both David Bentley Hart and Ed Feser - both representatives of classical theology - of being 'close to atheism'.

I'm still not sure what this means, and I asked four people to clarify your post - none of them could make sense of it either. I'm not trying to be dismissive, your post just confuses me.

Like why can't we apply the PSR to existence without applying it to the concept of existence? And what does it mean to apply the PSR to the concept of existence?

Like why can't we apply the PSR to existence without applying it to the concept of existence? And what does it mean to apply the PSR to the concept of existence? — Marty

Things have existence, it's an attribute, a property of things, they exist. When we abstract the property from the thing, to talk about the property itself, as if it were a thing, we are then talking about a concept. Consider other attributes for example, big, small, rough, smooth, red, green, etc.. If you think about one of these attributes, in itself, such as "big", you are thinking about the concept "big", what it means to be big.

At this point we are talking about the concept of "big", we have made "big" into a noun, to talk about it as a thing, just like the example of "existence". The PSR applies to things, so if we desire to apply it, we must treat these concepts as if they are things, and apply the PSR to these things.

Consider the concept of "being". We could pick out individual beings and apply the PSR to each one of them, but if we're talking about being in general, we are talking about the concept of being. So if we desire to apply the PSR to being, there is only the concept to apply it to. So if the principle of sufficient reason says that there must be a reason for these things, being, and existence, we must treat these things as the concepts which they are, and look for the reason for these concepts. To do otherwise would be a category error, because the PSR clearly applies to particular things. It is an inductive law, stating a generality, "everything", meaning every particular thing, must have a reason for existence. So if we apply the PSR to "existence", in general, to seek the reason for existence, it is not being properly applied because it is not being applied to a particular thing, but to a generality.

Do you understand that the present exists as a boundary between the future and the past? But since we are existing in the present, yet still sensing things in the past, then don't you think that we are also in some way experiencing the future as well? Is your mind not in the future, all the time and this is what accounts for awareness? Your mind prepares you for what may occur in the distant future, as well as what is imminent and possible, in the immediate future.

Interesting, I don't generally see it this way, rather I consider the eternal moment, rather than a narrow boundary. That we experience a narrow present due to restrictions imposed on us due to incarnation in the place in which we dwell. The details of our dwelling place I don't take a lot of interest in, as the science to understand it has not been done yet. Yes I do think we are experiencing the future in the present, along with the past and that my mind is preparing me for what may occur.

So the point is, that you are not sensing the future at all, yet you know an awful lot about the future. Where does this information concerning the future come from if not from the future itself, just like information about the past comes from the past? So your mind must actually be in the future to be receiving information from the future, in order that you can know about the future.

Yes, but as I say, this all happens in the moment, the future and the past are in some sense present in the moment and this is where a holism of being occurs.

You might wonder, if my mind is in the future, why can't I see, touch, or otherwise sense, the future objects. But that would be impossible, because sensible objects don't exist prior to the present, they only come into existence as time passes, at the present. It must be the case that sensible objects only come into existence at the present, because human beings have the capacity to make random changes to sensible objects at any moment of the present. So your mind is actually in the future, and it can't see any physical objects there, because they don't exist there, but your mind has the capacity to move and change physical objects as they come into being at the present, because it is prior to them, in the future.

I am not sure of the extent that you consider the momentary generation and dissolution of the objects of sensory experience. Or that they have some kind of longevity?
For me these objects are in a sense eternally present with me in the moment.

At this point we are talking about the concept of "big", we have made "big" into a noun, to talk about it as a thing, just like the example of "existence" — Metaphysician Undercover

I agree with the paragraph that comes before this, but the fact that we talk about the concept "big" does not imply that we are talking about "big" as a noun, in the same way that we talk about cats, brooms and tables as nouns.

We are, in fact, talking about "big" as a different sort of noun, also termed an "adjective".

We use "existence" as a noun, to refer to an individual's existence, as if it were a thing separate from the individual, saying that the person has a peaceful, meaningful, or some other adjective, to describe the person's "existence". But when we do this, it is an abstract concept of existence which we are referring to, and it is only through that abstraction that we can refer to the person's existence separately from the person, and describe it as if it were a thing separate from the person.

We are, in fact, talking about "big" as a different sort of noun, also termed an "adjective". — hunterkf5732

An adjective is not a different sot of noun.