graymouser

I've been away from IIDB for a while, but I've been having thoughts that I wanted to run by the people here. They concern the Cosmological Argument.

I'm intrigued by the Cosmological Argument, because it is not, in and of itself, as prima facie ridiculous as the Ontological Argument, nor is it as blatantly anthropomorphic as the argument from design. Relatively speaking, the Cosmological Argument - with the Aquinas summation "This we call God" instead of the modern ending "Therefore, God exists" - is actually a fairly reasonable argument: there must have been some First Cause, somehow, unless there is an infinite succession of causes, and that doesn't seem to be the case.

The key to the reasonableness of the Cosmological Argument is its summation - "This we call God." What I want to look at is the nature of this God: does it align with the God of the Bible? Well, Christian theologians suppose this to be true, but I'm unconvinced; barring the granting of revelation as true, which must necessarily be arbitrary, what can we say about the God that we know of from the CA?

Basically, we know that the First Cause God (FCG) must be some ultimate cosmic event, entity, or force, which exists without preceding cause; the theologians will usually tell us that it's an entity which exists necessarily. This is as reasonable as the other explanations, and in charity to theism, I'll grant it for the sake of this argument: FCG is some ultimate cosmic entity. But our theologians tend to add properties to it, which is where they err; they equate it with the Ontological Argument's Greatest of All Conceivable Entities, with the Argument from Design's Designer God, and with their religion's specific anthropomorphic God. This is a massive theological error.

What we know about FCG is that it is ultimate (nothing came before it), it is cosmic (it caused the universe to be), and we've granted that it's an entity (as opposed to a momentary event). It's fairly reasonable to say that FCG had something to do with the laws of physics being what they are; having caused the universe to exist, it must have had some effect on how spacetime would act. This gets us roughly to what Stephen Hawking means when he says "God," but not to the teleological Creator of the Enlightenment deists, much less the omnimax God of classical theism. And we can really go no further: we have no right to suppose that FCG has consciousness, or that if it does, it's conscious in the way we are. The Creator, unlike the FCG/God of physics, is anthropomorphized; a Creator has humanlike motives, humanlike designs, humanlike plans, and a humanlike mind to encompass all of that. The FCG need not have all of that; it could be completely and absolutely alien to us, such that no analogy we have could fit it.

All this is to say: the Cosmological Argument can be granted, but only if the person advancing it is willing to abandon anthropomorphism and classical theism until an argument is made for them.

-Wayne

KleinGordon

I agree. I think the Kalam argument is the best argument that theists have. The problem is that it is really an argument from ignorance at the end of the day. God of the gaps. That doesn't mean it is wrong, of course. I think the weakest parts are the parts that deal with beginnings of time and, especially, the part that deals with a "personal" being.

Since there is something now and since an ex nihilio origin seems unlikely (the quantum vacuum is something) it seems reasonable to assume that something is eternal. Maybe that just means that time cannot always be defined and the laws of physics as we know them break down. Once you guess "God", however, you are done.

mirage

I'm suspicious of the whole argument, since cause doesn't seem to be a necessary fundamental, but more specifically because space time cannot be caused into existence by definition. That ends the argument for me.

However, moving on to your main point about the identity of the First Cause, assuming such a thing is meaningful,

Erm...

Hmm...

No, I'm sorry, it just isn't meaningful. Any such first state of the system is simply that. We can't say anything about it beyond it encompasses the entire system at that point, and that we have groundlessly asserted that the system has a boundary here, by which we are defining this cause.

There are no grounds for granting any special property to this system state beyond its position in time. Whatever system properties are present (like physical "law") are present in this state just as they are in any other. There can be no sense in which this first state "caused" the behaviours intrinsic to the system as a whole, as these system properties are not temporal themselves and cannot be caused either.

It's bollocks. Just utter bollocks. We are constantly drawn to the question of the existence of the entire system, not any particular state along a time axis. Atemporal cause is meaningless. Composition fallacy. Aaaargh!

I agree that it is probably the most reasonable argument for God, and I also like Aquinas' wording for the conclusion.

The Kalaam version adds nothing but obfuscation.

KleinGordon

Mirage, that was a nice summary. I'm actually more familiar with the Kalam version than the Aquinas version so I guess I've received a full dose of obfuscation. One thing about the Kalam version that bugs me is what you described above - that the initial temporal point should hold no special status.

What do you think about that possibility that the universe is infinite is spatial extent as WMAP seems to indicate (although, the year two data isn't out yet...)? That would certainly throw a wrench in Craig's gears and the First Cause arguments.

Prof

Wayne,

I find I can't grant the Cosmological Argument the respect you seem willing to give it.

This is because we simply do not know anything beyond our universe. Our ideas of cause and effect are clearly drawn from our experience of this universe, and beyond that we don't know anything about how things operate - if they do - outside the universe. I am willing for arguments sake to grant the theistic position that there could have been a "cause" of our universe. I certainly do not have the knowledge to know that such a thing does not happen outside what I know as "the universe" (and neither does any other human that I'm aware of).

But, if I grant the idea of a causation outside of the universe (and thus able to cause our universe) I see no reason that this the cause of our universe must be anything resembling a God that anyone believes in. More important, even if there were a consciousness outside the universe that we would refer to as a God, I see no reason that God must logically be placed in the causal chain directly in front of our universe.

In other words, if I grant causation outside the universe then what stops there being a causal chain? There could be a huge number of "dumb" simple causes preceding and leading up to the formation of our universe. Somewhere waaaaay back might exist a consciousness in that chain, preceded by another consciousness as cause...or preceded way back by non-conscious causes. Therefore, the direct cause of the universe may well not be "what we call God," being a blind, simple force or reaction, whereas "what we would actually call a God" may exist but far, far back in the causal chain. And if there is somewhere a "necessary cause" it may well be far back in an unfathomable number of causal events preceding (for lack of better word) the appearance of our universe, and not be in direct relation to our universe.

That's why even the "whatever caused the universe we call God" line of thinking is not convincing. It's like if you win on a slot machine, the money pouring out being the universe, and assigning the last number that came up for the win as "God" because it immediately preceded or "caused" the win. But...there may be a sentience involved in the chain of your winning the money (someone designed the slot machine), but you have misplaced your guess of where that sentience, or what deserves the designation "God," is in the causal chain.

I have seen W.L. Craig's attempts to justify placing a consciousness as the immediate cause of the universe, but I find it highly unconvincing for reasons that are implicit in what I've said so far (but I'm out of time to go deeper).

Thanks,

Prof.

mirage

Hi Gordon,
Firstly, I am suspicious of any conclusion of infinite spacetime based on curvature measurements, as we would need to establish flatness with infinite precision and accuracy.

Secondly, I don't find any arguments against actual infinity on philosophical grounds very convincing. My attitude is "why not", especially given the limitations of signal transfer from relativity. (If you have an infinite classical mechanical system, you can have "space invaders" fly in at infinite velocity, which is a bit unsettling.)

The Kalaam arguments against actual infinity are weak IMnsHO. You can rebut them with a shrug of the shoulders and a laconic "So?"

The question of whether we might inductively guess the universe is truly infinite if we kept getting measurements of zero curvature with greater and greater precision is interesting. I think we might grant that there is a qualitative difference between infinite and finite and therefore give exactly zero a higher prior probability estimate than a flat distribution would suggest (which would be zero). Hopefully there will be other cosmological grounds on which to make a decision.

KleinGordon

Oh, definitely. The current cosmological models wouldn't allow us to conclude an infinite universe because an infinite universe occurs at only that one value (Omega = 1) so, as you say, we need other cosmological grounds. I think we need them anyway. But I think it is interesting that we are even that close to a flat and infinite universe which seems to suggest that the universe is at least very large (extending beyond what we see observationally). By the way, the WMAP year two data has been delayed for quite some time now...perhaps we will see some surprises come from their results when they work out the kinks.

luvluv

mirage:

That's interesting. Why do you say that? I assume it's not on the basis of spacetime realism, so I guess it's because of the whole "time begins at t=0" thing, and you assume that time is meaningless apart from spacetime/matter?

mirage

I have aesthetic tendencies towards spacetime realism or manifold substantivalism, but it doesn't directly bear on this question.

If we are relationalists we simply replace "spacetime" with "all physical objects and their spacetime relations", i.e. the universe, either way.

The basic point is the fallacy of composition. Cause is something we understand (well, we don't really, but anyway) from within the system. Causation is a relation between two states or components of the system defined in relation to time. We cannot validly apply the concept of cause to the primitive notion it is defined in relation to, or the entire system of which that concept (time) is a relation within. In the same way we can't say something is "earlier than" time itself.

If by cause we don't actually mean cause, but dependence from, as in "contingent" objects depending on "necessary" ones, then this is atemporal and avoids the problem. It is actually similar to logical dependence, that is often confused with cause. It has the new problem of being something we just made up and have no evidence that it is applicable to anything, let alone the universe.

35Kas

As i said on the other thread arguing god's creation of the universe....

There is one important thing we cannot ignore when stipulating causes to the existance of the universe. Total initial Energy = Total final Energy.

Anyone disagrees?

The implication of conservation of energy is that it, based on observations of our current time, must hold true. It may very well be the case that the universe is a closed, unbound set, which means there is just so much energy, which makes up the universe.

We can lift a "Fallacy of Composition" flag, but essentially, we have no grounds to declare that.

If the universe "started" at some point, the energy mustnt have come out into existance. That violates our understanding. It may be the case that energy randomly appears here and disapears there unevenly, but as far as i am aware, we dont know with certainty, but i am sure as hell we havent observed that oddity yet.

Think about this: If the universe exists, it should already be enough to "proove" it has always done so, because it seems much more likely that the energy that makes it up has always existed in one form or another, and it just reconfigurates differently "over time", or as i rahter put it, in subsequent configurations, forever bound to remain happening. It is appart from simplest explanation, the most conservative. We dont require a God to have created it, we dont need to invent a myth like "the invisible pink unicorn stampeded into a rock and thus the universe came into existance."

Those explanations are simply attempts to explain the unknown, but they just increase the degre of complexity of the issue, because where did god come from? Or where did the unicorn and the rock come from?

Occam's Razor people... Why keep inventing things to fit the observations into?

Time for instance is just a relationship of movement, or chaos, or entrophy even. To someone to come and say "time didnt exist before the Bib Bang" is just as groudless as someone claiming a god created the universe. No one knows how it as in the apparent begining, NO ONE. It is true that our current knowledge points to a singularity, but its essential to admit we dont know for sure what happened there, and sure as hell dont know how to explain it.

As i already mentioned in the other thread, a violation of the principle of conservation of energy would break our current concept of causality. If energy just happend to appear there and dissapear here without bound to a cause or consequence, the universe should make the twilight zone look like a bad sketch of reality. That unfortunetly is not what we observe, and stipulate on explanations for such activity is in itself pointless, because we dont even know if that happens.