- Everything that begins to exist has a cause.
- The universe began to exist.
- Therefore, the universe has a cause.
This argument sounds so smooth and plausble, unless you've ever taught physics at the undergraduate level or below. It turns out that whenever one applies everyday intuitions to the universe as a whole, you get pretty much everything wrong, and so it is in this case.
Think about what you really mean by "everything that begins to exist has a cause." Consider a rock, a tree, or the internet. The rock formed when molten magma cooled and hardened, and then broke up into little pieces over time. The tree grew up from an acorn by taking in vast amounts of energy and nutrients over many years. The internet was formed over decades by the dedicated labor of thousands of scientists, technicians, engineers, programmers, and the like. All of these things began to exist because of the rearrangement of preexistent matter and energy into new forms within space over a period of time. The causes which brought these new things into being are those particular events and processes that contributed to their formation, working their effects within space and time according to natural law.
Nowhere else in the English language do we ever use the word "cause" to mean anything remotely akin to "an immaterial entity acting outside of space/time to produce new matter/energy out of nothing" and as a sophisticated professor of philosophy, Dr. Craig surely knows this. Yet, he sees fit to slide this slippery equivocation into his leading argument for the existence of a god, and never bothers to mention the difficulties inherent in doing so. Presumably, he is waiting for his opponent to raise the issue on rebuttal, although (oddly enough) that almost never happens.
This is not logical deduction, this is smooth-talking equivocation of the highest order, the sort that should make even Bill Clinton or Bill Kristol blush. Freethinkers who encounter this argument from theistic apologists would do well to point this out.
4 comments:
Dude,
I fail to see the point. Your discussion doesn’t disprove the Kalam formulation, nor undermine it in any way whatsoever. If anything, your examples—the rock, the tree, the internet—demonstrate its validity. The rock, its existence demarcated by a finite beginning in time, came to be; it therefore had a cause: cooling lava, or sedimentary layers deposited over time and squeezed together by enormous pressure, or the chemical/physical processes that change igneous or sedimentary rock into the metamorphic kind. Ditto the tree: its cause was the acorn. Sure, the acorn in turn has a cause—the oak tree that germinated it—but it came to be as the result of a cause, too. Voici et voila, l’internet, which came to be because Al Gore, Jr., is just so gawsh darn brilliant.
As for this tidbit:
Nowhere else in the English language do we ever use the word "cause" to mean anything remotely akin to "an immaterial entity acting outside of space/time to produce new matter/energy out of nothing…Are you serious? OF COURSE we use it this way, when we speak of primary versus secondary causation. Any freshman-level textbook on philosophy does so. Dr. Craig, no doubt, knows this as well. And, I suspect, so do all these freethinkers you call on to rebut him (and which is the likely reason why they don’t).
By the way, is there any possibility that these theistic apologists you assail might be freethinkers, too? Or are we limited to only the one or the other? I only ask because I consider myself a freethinker, and yet often find myself arguing the position of the theistic apologist. But I digress. Back to causation…
Secondary causes are those causes that result indirectly from primary ones. Natural forces may be identified as responsible, say, for turning the acorn into the tree, but since oak trees come only from little acorns and little acorns from other oak trees, unless you have an infinite period of time to allow an infinite cycle of acorn/oak trees, there must have been a point at which the cycle came to be, which then begs the question of where the cycle came from. In Kalam terms, the cycle came to be; the cycle had a cause.
Appeal all you want to natural forces causing the cycle to come to be, but this only begs another question; namely, where the natural forces came from in a temporally finite universe. The natural forces came to be; the natural forces had a cause.
Let’s review: trees, the result of secondary causes; acorns, the same; natural forces, ditto. Secondary—all of ‘em.
No matter how we look at the problem, the issue is inescapable: in a temporal universe, there must have been—or must BE—a primary cause for all secondary causation. In lay terms, that’s only sometimes described as an immaterial entity acting outside of space/time to produce new matter/energy out of nothing. More often, it’s called God. But that’s okay—even an agnostic can recognize the possibility that God exists. It’s what makes him an agnostic and not an atheist.
OF COURSE we use it this way, when we speak of primary versus secondary causation. Any freshman-level textbook on philosophy does so.
Show me where a textbook uses causation in this "first cause" sense outside of the context of cosmological argument and I will surely believe you. Otherwise, it would seem that we have a word which only has this particular meaning in this very peculiar case, and to reason from the things that we know about everyday beginnings and causes to this unique case is a fallacy of composition that is cosmic in scope.
By the way, is there any possibility that these theistic apologists you assail might be freethinkers, too?
I would suppose that nearly anything is possible, but none of the many apologists I've seen or heard fit the definition of freethinker.
I only ask because I consider myself a freethinker, and yet often find myself arguing the position of the theistic apologist.
You may yet prove the rule, as I've rarely heard you resort to religious dogma in your arguments.
...unless you have an infinite period of time to allow an infinite cycle of acorn/oak trees, there must have been a point at which the cycle came to be, which then begs the question of where the cycle came from.
Unless, of course, Darwin was right about how species come about from other species over time.
...but this only begs another question; namely, where the natural forces came from in a temporally finite universe.
Only material things within spacetime may be aptly described as "coming from" somewhere else within space over time. To ask where natural forces "come from" seems a bit of a category error.
No matter how we look at the problem, the issue is inescapable: in a temporal universe, there must have been a primary cause for all secondary causation. In lay terms, that’s only sometimes described as an immaterial entity acting outside of space/time to produce new matter/energy out of nothing.
If the universe is indeed temporally finite, then there cannot have been any causation at all until after t>0, at which time we have matter and energy interacting within space and time. To say something engaged in "timeless causation" is about as coherent as immaterial mass or bodiless extensionality.
Let me clarify that last comment a bit more. It may be valid to reason backwards to a particular state of affairs at or near t=0 but it is completely invalid to infer that someone caused that state of affairs because whenever you come up against a gap in our understanding the default answer should be cautious agnosticism, rather than an epistemically blind leap to "immaterial magical mind mediating by means most mysterious" which is precisely the leap made by apologists in both cosmological and teleological arguments.
It is an interesting question why humans are so apt to impute agency in the face of the unknown, but it is a question for the sociobiologists and anthropologists, not the metaphysicians.
I'm going to try to clarify once again. Let us call those causes which I described in the post (causes which act in space over time to rearrange preexistent matter) "s-causes" and call timeless causes which create new matter/space/time ex nihilo "p-causes" in deference to the primary/secondary dichotomy to you you have alluded. Look now at the deductive argument:
1) Everything that begins to exist has an s-cause.
2) The universe began to exist.
3) Therefore, the universe has a s-cause.
It is still valid, but it doesn't get you where you want to go, that is, a p-cause.
Now, if you note that "began to exist" also carries a different meaning in premise (1) as it does in premise (2). In the first premise, "begins to exist" means that at a given point within space and time a new configuration of pre-existent matter comes into being. Now we have a double equivocation and the whole argument falls apart. You just can't get there from here.
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