fishbulb

You do not need my permission to present an argument for something. If you have a case that you wish to make, then go ahead and make it. The evidence is yours to volunteer, not mine to request.

The onus is not on the skeptic to investigate every assertion and claim made by someone. If it were, John Edward alone would consume every waking moment of our lives, since it takes far longer to evaluate a specious claim than it does to concoct one. The onus is always on the person with the extraordinary claim to come forward and make his case. If you have a credible case to make, then it is up to you to come forward and make it; it is not up to me to ask you.

Wiploc

This line, "It just seems to be a simple fact of life that everything that exists has a cause for its existence," is a full refutation of the KCA; and it is every bit as intuitively obvious as whatever you thought you were arguing for.
crc

fishbulb

Yes, this is a (wordier) re-statement of your earlier assertion that "whatever begins to exist has a cause."

If you have any evidence to support this premise, by all means make your case. If all you can say is that it intuitively seems right, then you have nothing to stand upon; intuition is not evidence. Intuition often points us in the right direction, but it frequently points to the wrong answer as well. One can point out lots of everyday things that are counter-intuitive. We cannot rely on our intuition as an indicator of the truth even in our day-to-day lives, let alone with respect to such exotic claims.

The question that any good scientist would as is: how would you go about evaluating this claim to determine if your intuition is right?

Wiploc

Actually, the line I quoted says that everything has a cause, not just that everything that begins.
crc

mattdamore

fishbulb,

Of course I don't need your permission; I just wanted to extend the permission over to you in the name of courtesy.

Ok, then I believe it is you who are making the extraordinary claim, since I believe it is more extraordinary to believe that there are some things that come into existence without causes than it is to believe that whatever begins to exist has a cause. Because of the fact, as Craig states, that I think is so intuitively obvious that scarcely anybody could sincerely deny that it is false. Hume, through not believing you could prove it, thought it absurd that it could be denied. Craig says, Hume didn't think that you could prove the causal principle, but he certainly believed in it. In fact, he thought that the denial of that principle was simply absurd.

So why is the onus of proof shifted to the one denying the first premise, because it can be seen to be self-evident. Craig explains, "Now is the premise self–evident? Well, it's rooted in the metaphysical intuition that something cannot come out of nothing. Out of nothing, nothing comes. And to me that surely is evident when you think about it. If there is absolutely nothing—no space, no time, no energy, no matter—then something cannot just come out of nothing. At least, it seems to me that the premise is far more plausible than its opposite. "

mattdamore

The key words in here are 'simple fact of life'. Life which exists within the framework or time, space, matter, and energy. This doesn't apply to God. Everything which exists within the framework of time, space, matter, and energy began to exist. So one can equate the truth-value of the premise 'whatever begins to exist has a cause' to 'Everything that exists in the framework of time, space, matter, and energy has a cause'. Since God isn't within the framework of time, space, matter, and energy then He didn't begin to exist. If He didn't begin to exist, then first premise doesn't apply to Him. Of course, this just might have been an editing error on Guthrie's part. I'll email him to find out if it is.

fishbulb

You are mistaken in your belief: I am not making any claims at all. Of the two of us, you are the only one making any claims. I am simply unmoved by your claim because you present no evidence but rather want me to accept your proposition as a self-evident truth. It may seem intuitively right to you, and it may (for argument's sake) even seem intuitively right to me, but there is no evidence.

No one is denying anything. You would put words in my mouth and have me say that I believe that your claim is false, but that is not what I say. I say that you have not made a convincing case that your claim is true. You ask me to prefer the claim that nothing can come into spontaneous existence over the claim that things can, in fact, spontaneously begin to exist. But you offer no evidence; all you do is appeal to intuition. Intuition can often lead us to evidence--though it has not done so in this case--but it is not itself evidence. Mere intuition is not enough for me to prefer one claim over the other. Therefore, I remain skeptical and remain unconvinced of either claim.

I do not say that one is right and one is wrong, or that both are wrong. I say that there is no evidence to suggest that (1) one claim is better than the other, or (2) that either claim is adequate to explain a phenomenon that may well be beyond any conception of time, space, and existence that we may have.

I am under no obligation to take a definite position regarding the truth of every claim I read. Given a selection of competing claims and no convincing evidence to support any of them, it is proper to conclude that cannot tell which, if any, of the competing claims is right.

mattdamore

fishbulb,

(i) It's naive to think that everything we take to be true must have evidence. That's not how philosophers operate. If every truth requires evidence then there will be an infinite regression and no new thoughts or theories can ever hope to be validated.

(ii) By "intuitive," of course, we don't mean something like "women's intuition" as if it is a sort of inclination toward some belief -- a mysterious force. "Intuitive" just means that something is more likely to be true then its negation because it strikes us immediately as obviously true. For example: The world was not created 2 minutes ago with false memories placed in people's minds. This seems intuitively obvious or true, but it is difficult to muster any evidence for it. So, it's false to think that negligible evidence or the lack thereof requires complete neutrality on an issue. Sometimes truths are manifest apart from evidence (see Bertrand Russell's "knowledge by acquaintance").

jfryejr

If the premises for your arguments are all intuitively true, why not just simply state that belief in god is intuitive. Once that is said, there's no further need for evidence of any kind since you can't prove intuition. Which goes right back to the agnostic/atheist argument of no *proof* of god.

Some people want hard proof. For some, intuition and feeling are good enough. You can run around in circles for days arguing
intuition and get nothing but sore feet.

The fact that men can't create something from nothing is meaningless as men never claimed to be able to do so. You still have to prove that god could create something from nothing, and, in essence, something that is outside of time and the physical universe could just as eaily be classified as nothingness, so god would have to create himself.

Not sure if that last sentence makes sense...

mattdamore

You have a misunderstanding of what it means for something to be an explanation for something else. If SETI researchers discover an engineered signal from outer space then they may conclude that extraterrestrial intelligences are responsible. However, it is not necessary to know how they accomplished their task or what they are made of in order for SETI to make that kind of conclusion. That the premises of kalam end up being true guarantees the truthfulness of its conclusion regardless of what one might think about it. So, you should focus your contentions with the premises, not on how the conclusion might be accomplished -- that will pose an interesting follow-up question once the argument is granted.

In philosopher's writings on the subject, both long and short, they do go to some lengths as to demonstrate why the cause of the universe would be a powerful, personal creator. So, those points would have to be surveyed. But to suggest that "God" is functionally equivolent to "nothingness" is an idea fostered by the jaded relics of the logical positivist movement. In short, assuming that the only existents are physical existents is begging the question.

I do appreciate your inqueries. It's how I stay on my feet and I hope my responses reciprocate that feeling.