Steven Carr

William Lane Craig has an axion 'Everything that begins to exist has a cause.' ,Leaving aside his implied claim of omniscience in knowing about the origins of everything that has ever existed, can we agree that a person's decision to do something is something that began to exist?

So what caused my freewill decision to start this topic?

According to Craig, all my freewill decisions were caused.

Boshko

well quantum mechanics destroyed that idea pretty well, uncaused things happen trillions of time a second.

Philosoft

And, Craig's axiom entirely corrupts the phrase, "begins to exist." Not one of us has ever seen any matter begin to exist.

case

And end almost as quickly. But these uncaused events still require energy. It also might be worth adding that trying to use quantum mechanical analogies to describe the macro world is always a tricky issue. Seemingly, paritcles can travel faster than light by QM standards, but I doubt that anyone would take seriously anyone who said that they could travel faster than light.

Automaton

case, what point are you trying to make? So what? It merely shows that this application of traditional causality is in principle wrong.
They also require space. The whole point is the uncaused nature of them.
I don't know where you think this was done... And anyway, Big Bang cosmology dictates that once the entire "macro" world was really not so "macro" once.
You mean tachyons, particles with imaginary mass? This isn't technically FTL, and their existence is still extremely speculative.
Straw-man.

Silent Dave

Hey, that's pretty good -- I haven't heard that one before. But I think I can anticipate a response:

"Well, when I say that everything that begins to exist has a cause, I mean everything NATURAL, of course. Freewill decisions come from the soul, which is supernatural, and therefore don't count."


Dave

eh

It's too bad Craig has never bothered to crack open a book on General Relativity, or even the Big Bang for that matter. Any reading on either subject shows how Craig's argument is ripped to shreads.

luvluv

I don't think quantum mechanics does all of the things you guys are trying to make it do. Are we sure, for example, that these entities pop into existence or could it perhaps be that they pop into our observance?

And, by the way, throwing away causality has repurcussions far beyond the cosmological argument. It would also mean throwing out much of modern science and much of the foundation for the atheist position.

How, for example, can you say that the entire universe could pop into existence out of nothing, yet a few loaves of bread and a few fishes cannot? If you toss out the principle of causality, how can you deny any miraculous occurance?

Asha'man

We don’t throw away causality, that would be overly simplistic, and really rather stupid.

We refine our understanding of causality. We apply a limitation of scope to its application. Just like the laws of thermodynamics only apply to closed systems, laws of causality only apply to macroscopic statistical systems.

Causality is clearly preserved when large numbers of particles are observed, and behavior is described by summing the behavior of all particles involved. However, individual particles are still free to violate causality. One electron is perfectly free to quantum tunnel three feet to the left, but my entire refrigerator is never going to move in such a fashion. A single virtual particle may materialize in the vacuum of space, but an entire pizza will never appear inside my teleporting fridge.

However, once you realize that causality is mostly a statistical phenomenon, you can examine cases where the statistics break down. Modern theories of the Big Bang are just such a study, a single un-caused vacuum fluctuation on the quantum scale could have expanded into the macroscopic (and statistical) universe we now see.

luvluv

Well, we know that these uncaused fluctuations could apply to matter but what about space? If I understand correctly before the big bang there was neither matter nor space-time. It was created at the big bang event. Do we know that matter can create space?

And do we really know that the quantum laws apply to all small things? Perhaps they only apply to electrons and smaller objects. I think it's incorrect to say that the entire universe was ever the equivalent of an electron even if it was that small. It had all the matter in the universe present in a space the size of the electron. Surely something more than just your average quantum fluctuation was going on with the creation of the universe and it is probably premature to say that quantum fluctuations "destroy" the kalaam argument. You need to demonstrate how first. Why did the first quantum fluctuation create a universe, and we've never seen any other quantum fluctuation create anything any bigger than an atom? The popping into existence of an electron is so different from the popping into existence of the universe that it makes the popping into existence of fish fairly tame by comparison.