They can't and don't, science being a branch/outgrowth/child of philosophy. Though perhaps when you say "laws of philosophy" you mean something else...?
Well their is a great deal of them that think the universe can come into existence uncaused. You are a philosophy student maybe you have heard the maxim somewhere in your studies that whatever begins to exist needs a cause as explanation for its existence.
Faced with the evidence of a finite universe they are left to deny things like causality all in the hope of not believing in the inconvenient truth that God does exist.
Maybe we should start a new thread for such a conversation so that we do not hijack this one.
As a philosophy student, I am of course familiar with the claim that whatever begins to exist needs a cause. But this isn't a law of philosophy. It's not something that we unquestioningly accept and are required to follow. It is in fact one of the key points of contention in the cosmological argument for the existence of God; there are arguments both for and against it. Until it is soundly proven, scientists - and all the rest of us - can and should be open to the possibility that some things are uncaused.
Which brings us to what science does and does not say. And here you need quite a bit of setting straight. Scientists do not hope that God does not exist. That's ridiculous. Many scientists in fact believe that God does exist, and those who don't are simply making conclusions where the evidence seems to take them. The fundamental purpose of science is to discover truth. And this, in fact, is why it follows philosophical laws, because those laws are the mental tools that help us discover truth. If the existence of God is the truth, then that is what scientists hope to find - and, thanks to good scientific practice in accordance with the laws, that is what they will find (if they find anything). To actively deny a truth is the height of unscientific behavior, and for you to accuse the scientific community as a whole of doing this is both ignorant and insulting. Science is not your opponent, unless you are opposed to truth.
Private Mod Note
():
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Vive, vale. Siquid novisti rectius istis,
candidus inperti; si nil, his utere mecum.
"If you're Havengul problems I feel bad for you son, I got 99 problems and a Lich ain't one." - FSM
"In a world where money talks, silence is horrifying."
Well it most assuredly can't defy the laws of logic. In fact, science based in math is even more restrictive than basic logic since not only does it have to follow the aforementioned logic, but the real world as well.
As a philosophy student, I am of course familiar with the claim that whatever begins to exist needs a cause. But this isn't a law of philosophy. It's not something that we unquestioningly accept and are required to follow. It is in fact one of the key points of contention in the cosmological argument for the existence of God; there are arguments both for and against it. Until it is soundly proven, scientists - and all the rest of us - can and should be open to the possibility that some things are uncaused.
I think there is a serious flaw in claiming that everything has a cause because eventually the proponent will run into Richard Dawkin's objection to the Watchmaker Analogy. If pull the chain all the way back to the the ever elusive "First Cause," we have to assume that we've reached an uncaused "thing." To speak as a theist for a moment, say that everything has a cause and that cause is God already separate separates God into a category of "uncaused existences" or whatever we want to call it (I personal vote for "Uncasuals" because it has a ring to it, and I don't feel like looking for a more technically term at the moment). In terms of religion, the most basic question ultimately boils down to, "Does the first cause have sentience?"
Summary, the statement "Everything has a cause" is a vicious infinite regress. Unless we want to get into ludicrous storytelling and say God and the angels decided to count to three and cause each other exist on three.
Additional Comment because this board needs automerge:
Since I doubt bakgat will provide a definition for us to work with, I'll ask what is your operating definition of "Laws of Philosophy." I ask because in my five years in Philosophy, I don't recall (I have a nagging feeling you'll shake something loose when you tell me) the term "Law of Philosophy," phrases like Philosophical Framework, Philosophy theories, etc. But not "law."
I think there is a serious flaw in claiming that everything has a cause because eventually the proponent will run into Richard Dawkin's objection to the Watchmaker Analogy. If pull the chain all the way back to the the ever elusive "First Cause," we have to assume that we've reached an uncaused "thing." To speak as a theist for a moment, say that everything has a cause and that cause is God already separate separates God into a category of "uncaused existences" or whatever we want to call it (I personal vote for "Uncasuals" because it has a ring to it, and I don't feel like looking for a more technically term at the moment). In terms of religion, the most basic question ultimately boils down to, "Does the first cause have sentience?"
To be fair, the good apologists are well aware of this issue - it is pretty obvious, after all. Any atheist who expects that Dawkins beat Aquinas with an argument that any undergrad can come up with is fooling himself. The phrasing that bakgat lifted from (I assume) William Lane Craig - "Anything that has a beginning has a cause" - is a first step in an apologetic workaround. But there are atheist/agnostic objections to this, and apologetic responses to that, and so on and so forth. And the dance continues. My point is just that causation, in any formulation, is not an unquestionable law of philosophy and not something you can fault scientists for rejecting.
If they even do reject it. They're actually much more attached to causation than are philosophers. Leibniz and Hume, two of Europe's greatest philosophers, both theists, came at the notion of causation from very different directions, and both called it into serious question. Science, in contrast, relies on the assumption of causation to work: experiments would be unreliable if sometimes things just happened for no reason. So if you ask a typical scientist what caused the universe, the answer almost certainly will not be "nothing", but rather a big, fat, honest "I don't know".
Since I doubt bakgat will provide a definition for us to work with, I'll ask what is your operating definition of "Laws of Philosophy." I ask because in my five years in Philosophy, I don't recall (I have a nagging feeling you'll shake something loose when you tell me) the term "Law of Philosophy," phrases like Philosophical Framework, Philosophy theories, etc. But not "law."
Me neither.
Private Mod Note
():
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Vive, vale. Siquid novisti rectius istis,
candidus inperti; si nil, his utere mecum.
As a philosophy student, I am of course familiar with the claim that whatever begins to exist needs a cause. But this isn't a law of philosophy. It's not something that we unquestioningly accept and are required to follow. It is in fact one of the key points of contention in the cosmological argument for the existence of God; there are arguments both for and against it. Until it is soundly proven, scientists - and all the rest of us - can and should be open to the possibility that some things are uncaused.
Well the real question is can nothing create something. To give a example if you can imagine a vacuum. What do you think BS is the chances that in this vacuum a car will spontaneously come into existence without any sort of cause making it so?
You might wait a eternity before you see this car come into existence uncaused. It just is not how our universe works.
Lets take this example towards cosmology. If the universe has a beginning (Like many scientist think) what are we left with.
Either we can deny the tenants of causality and believe that nothing can indeed produce something and even something as grandiose as a life sustaining universe.
OR
We can decide that causality is a valid concept and try to discern what exactly this cause of the universe is. If we can get to this point in the conversation we should really start to read some Aquinas. His arguments to discern what these causes are began at a finite universe and adherence to causality.
We are so blessed as humans today. The fact that the universe has a beginning is something Aquinas had to believe as a matter of faith. Nowadays science can give us more agreeable reasons to believe that.
The use of the term "beginning" with regard to the universe is spurious. Time itself does not extend backwards past the big bang. So really, the universe has always existed, where always means "for all time". It just happens that the extent of time itself is finite, and thus the universe has a finite age.
If the universe is of finite age then there is at least a very short open or closed interval of time such that the universe did not exist prior to this time, so I don't see why you couldn't call this a "beginning".
That's ridiculous. What does it mean to be "prior" to the beginning of time?
We might say that the universe has an earliest point, but that does not imply that there was a "beginning" - to begin implies a transition from not existing to existing, and such a transition implies the existence of a time before time, which is nonsensical.
Either we can deny the tenants of causality and believe that nothing can indeed produce something and even something as grandiose as a life sustaining universe.
The tenets of causality as they were understood at the time of Aquinas, and as most people believe them today, are demonstrably false. Einstein and Planck wiped them away at a stroke. What causes spontaneous emission in quantum systems? You can go ahead and get back to me after you claim your Nobel Prize.
As smart as Aquinas was, he wasn't even close to smart enough to guess all of the bizarre things we know about the universe today.
We are so blessed as humans today. The fact that the universe has a beginning is something Aquinas had to believe as a matter of faith. Nowadays science can give us more agreeable reasons to believe that.
We are, indeed, "blessed" in a sense -- we know that if the universe had a beginning, then that beginning was very weird, happening at the quantum scale -- where the notion of causality that Aquinas accepted is, as Wolfgang Pauli would have put it, "not even wrong."
But this just means that Aquinas had an excuse for the physical holes in his arguments -- ignorance -- an excuse that anyone who wants to defend Aquinas seriously today can no longer claim.
If the universe is of finite age then there is at least a very short open or closed interval of time such that the universe did not exist prior to this time, so I don't see why you couldn't call this a "beginning".
Einstein's axiom -- "time is what clocks measure" -- shows us that this cannot be true. Time is unmeasurable at the Planck scale. Any clock you could build out of Planck-scale matter would encase itself in a gravitational event horizon and you couldn't look at it to see what the time was.
Well the real question is can nothing create something. To give a example if you can imagine a vacuum. What do you think BS is the chances that in this vacuum a car will spontaneously come into existence without any sort of cause making it so?
Nonzero, actually, according to the extremely-well-verified theories of quantum physics.
You might wait a eternity before you see this car come into existence uncaused. It just is not how our universe works.
But so far no convincing argument has been produced which says that no universe can work this way. In other words, causation is not a principle that can be produced philosophically, a priori. It requires a posteriori observation, science. And it only applies to stuff in this universe, not necessarily the process that created this universe. What you're saying is like saying that because a car runs on an internal combustion engine, a car assembly line must also run on an internal combustion engine.
Either we can deny the tenants of causality and believe that nothing can indeed produce something and even something as grandiose as a life sustaining universe.
Which is, as far as we know, perfectly possible. We cannot reject possibilities just because we don't like the consequences.
We can decide that causality is a valid concept and try to discern what exactly this cause of the universe is. If we can get to this point in the conversation we should really start to read some Aquinas. His arguments to discern what these causes are began at a finite universe and adherence to causality.
I'm not going to pretend that most cosmologists have read Aquinas. They haven't. They've got better things to do. They're trying to figure out what they can about the origins of the universe with cutting-edge math and physics, not with clunky Medieval Aristotelian logic. Aquinas' arguments may not be as infantile as Dawkins thinks they are, but they still don't hold up to modern scientific standards of reasoning. (Or philosophical standards, for that matter.)
What struck me is how often he says stuff of the form "The cause of the universe must be X or Y, and it can't be X, so it must be Y" without giving adequate explanation for why it must be X or Y and not something else entirely. And, of course, he is very, very much trying to confirm his preexisting belief that there is a God. You condemn scientists for wanting to believe there is no God, which isn't true, but you don't condemn Aquinas (and yourself, for that matter) for wanting to believe there is a God, which is. How is that good philosophy?
Private Mod Note
():
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Vive, vale. Siquid novisti rectius istis,
candidus inperti; si nil, his utere mecum.
Actually, a first moment would be exactly what one would mean when referring to a beginning of time. There is no need for a past.
I might call it a "start" of time. However, in my view a beginning, especially in the context of causality, implies a past, because there is a transition from existing to not existing, and there must therefore be a past in which to not exist.
There are accounts of the universe "prior" to the big bang such as the Hawking-Hartle state according to which the big bang marks the beginning of time, but space existed "prior" to it. So I think your view may be too simplistic.
Doesn't that theory also assert that there is no "beginning" of the universe? If anything, it seems to support my position.
Perhaps I'm not understanding it correctly, but my reading is that time is essentially merged with space during the Planck epoch. It does not so much assert that space existed "before" time, but rather that during the Planck epoch, space and time were merged.
Say, how does one learn to read the minds of people who have been dead for nearly a century?
Since Thomas Aquinas has been dead for over seven centuries, and bakgat is still alive, I'm not sure whom you're referring to. As for reading their minds, it is through that oldest and best verified means of telepathy available to us: language. Neither is what you'd call coy about his religious convictions.
Private Mod Note
():
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Vive, vale. Siquid novisti rectius istis,
candidus inperti; si nil, his utere mecum.
They propose a "beginning" in the sense of a four-dimensional object close to the big bang, the point at which time begins. This can very much take the role of a starting point for the universe.
So, I don't dispute that there's potentially a first moment in time. All I'm saying is that it doesn't make sense to talk about what happens before that, and it especially doesn't make sense to talk of what might have caused that first moment, since causality is generally understood to operate forward in time.
To my mind, the phrase "time begins" implies there is a transition between "no time" and "time", and given that a transition necessarily involves time, this is nonsense. If there was no time, there could be no transition. Instead, the only coherent options are that time extends back infinitely, or that time has a first moment, but does not "begin", and is not preceded by anything.
When bakgat uses the term "beginning", he is doing so specifically in the context of asking what caused that beginning, which involves assuming something exists prior to it. This is what I find incoherent.
There are accounts of the universe "prior" to the big bang such as the Hawking-Hartle state according to which the big bang marks the beginning of time, but space existed "prior" to it. So I think your view may be too simplistic.
My understanding is that space was created by the Big Bang, and continues to expand today.
While "Aquinas believes in God" is obvious, it's far from fair to conclude that because there are instances that look like Aquinas is ignoring alternatives just to end up with "and tada, God exists and I am right".
Those were two discrete critiques of Aquinas: (1) that he is not exhaustive in ruling out alternatives; and (2) that he is a confirmed Christian, which is not in and of itself damning (being ad hominem) but which by bakgat's stated standards ought to be grounds for suspicion. The former may or may not be related to the latter. I suspect it is. But it doesn't really matter.
Private Mod Note
():
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Vive, vale. Siquid novisti rectius istis,
candidus inperti; si nil, his utere mecum.
To be fair, the good apologists are well aware of this issue - it is pretty obvious, after all. Any atheist who expects that Dawkins beat Aquinas with an argument that any undergrad can come up with is fooling himself. The phrasing that bakgat lifted from (I assume) William Lane Craig - "Anything that has a beginning has a cause" - is a first step in an apologetic workaround. But there are atheist/agnostic objections to this, and apologetic responses to that, and so on and so forth. And the dance continues. My point is just that causation, in any formulation, is not an unquestionable law of philosophy and not something you can fault scientists for rejecting.
If they even do reject it. They're actually much more attached to causation than are philosophers. Leibniz and Hume, two of Europe's greatest philosophers, both theists, came at the notion of causation from very different directions, and both called it into serious question. Science, in contrast, relies on the assumption of causation to work: experiments would be unreliable if sometimes things just happened for no reason. So if you ask a typical scientist what caused the universe, the answer almost certainly will not be "nothing", but rather a big, fat, honest "I don't know".
I'm well away a high school student could pick apart Richard Dawkins (oh Lord, if I had a dollar every time I had to undercut someone using Dawkins's straw man of Aquinas, I'd have $3), but he does underscore just how ingrained the assumptions involving induction are within not just observation, but everything, as Hume outlines.
And of course science (as is the average person) is more attached to causality than philosophers because science is about finding the causes of Y called X. If one does not assume causality exists, then we run into strange cases like perhaps the action of hitting a nail with a hammer is not the cause of nails being hammered into boards, and ultimately, science wouldn't work like people tend to want it to because finding a correlation is not as desirable as declaring you've found a causal link.
Since I doubt bakgat will provide a definition for us to work with, I'll ask what is your operating definition of "Laws of Philosophy." I ask because in my five years in Philosophy, I don't recall (I have a nagging feeling you'll shake something loose when you tell me) the term "Law of Philosophy," phrases like Philosophical Framework, Philosophy theories, etc. But not "law."
Me neither.
That's not a definition.
The problem with abstract wording is that what you're basically asking is, "Can Science defy something that somebody made up without connecting it to anything else I understand." To which I reply with this.
Well the real question is can nothing create something. To give a example if you can imagine a vacuum. What do you think BS is the chances that in this vacuum a car will spontaneously come into existence without any sort of cause making it so?
Oh bakgat, even though I agree with the direction, I have to agree with Blinking Spirit on this one. Your example only showed that if we wait for an eternity, a complete car will not spontaneously appear in a vacuum. Science is no where near as... simplistic... as that. You haven't proven your case.
What struck me is how often he says stuff of the form "The cause of the universe must be X or Y, and it can't be X, so it must be Y" without giving adequate explanation for why it must be X or Y and not something else entirely. And, of course, he is very, very much trying to confirm his preexisting belief that there is a God. You condemn scientists for wanting to believe there is no God, which isn't true, but you don't condemn Aquinas (and yourself, for that matter) for wanting to believe there is a God, which is. How is that good philosophy?
What struck me about Aquinas is that he himself admitted his philosophy was wrong during his life time... this confession was supposedly his last words if I remember correctly.
But the Hawking Hartle state very much involves a transition from a universe without time to a universe with time.
I think you're over simplifying. The state still has a time dimension to it, it's just not separated from the spatial dimensions. It would be incorrect to say that there is some sort of temporal transition from time-less to time.
At it's core, though, Hawking-Hartle supports my position beautifully. It's a proposal which acknowledges that asking about how time "begins" is meaningless, and substitutes a boundary-less model in which the initial state does not "arise" from anything else.
What am I then to make when people like Alexander Vilenken talks about how scientist cannot avoid a creation event? Here is a link to Stephen Hawking's website where you can find a article on why the universe has indeed a beginning.
So what is it then. Does the universe have a beginning and a end or does it not. Stephen Hawking seems to think so. You can feel free to tell me why he is wrong. He does seem to be well informed when it comes to issues of this sort.
I can only take your eminent physicist word for it.
Why exactly can something not transcend the physical universe? That is naturalism for you, but why is this such a fact that people can tell me that nothing can exist prior to the universe existing?
Do people actually have a argument as to why I should take the position of naturalism or do they just assume it without argument.
Oh bakgat, even though I agree with the direction, I have to agree with Blinking Spirit on this one. Your example only showed that if we wait for an eternity, a complete car will not spontaneously appear in a vacuum. Science is no where near as... simplistic... as that. You haven't proven your case.
Ok let me ask you then if you want to discard the principle of causality can you give any me any examples of nothing creating something. I have given it some thought and I cannot think of a example. Feel free to enlighten me.
Here is two quotes from a well known British Empiricist that I think aids this discussion
'Tis a general maxim in philosophy, that whatever begins to exist, must have a cause of existence. This is commonly taken for granted in all reasonings, without any proof given or demanded. 'Tis suppos'd to be founded on intuition, and to be one of those maxims, which tho' they may be deny'd with the lips, 'tis impossible for men in their hearts really to doubt of.2 - David Hume
Whatever is produc'd without any cause is produc'd by nothing, or in other words, has nothing for its cause. But nothing can never be a cause, no more than it can be something, or equal to two right angles. By the same intuition that we perceive nothing not to be equal to two right angles, or not to be something, we perceive, that it can never be a cause; and consequently must perceive, that every object has a real cause of its existence.5 - David Hume
But my point is that transitions din't need to be temporally, like time emerging from a space that lacks it.
Sure. I can have a piece of paper that transitions from white to black. That transition isn't temporal. However, causality is temporal. When we look at a transition from the perspective of finding its cause, we're looking for a temporal transition.
As a philosophy student, I am of course familiar with the claim that whatever begins to exist needs a cause. But this isn't a law of philosophy. It's not something that we unquestioningly accept and are required to follow. It is in fact one of the key points of contention in the cosmological argument for the existence of God; there are arguments both for and against it. Until it is soundly proven, scientists - and all the rest of us - can and should be open to the possibility that some things are uncaused.
Which brings us to what science does and does not say. And here you need quite a bit of setting straight. Scientists do not hope that God does not exist. That's ridiculous. Many scientists in fact believe that God does exist, and those who don't are simply making conclusions where the evidence seems to take them. The fundamental purpose of science is to discover truth. And this, in fact, is why it follows philosophical laws, because those laws are the mental tools that help us discover truth. If the existence of God is the truth, then that is what scientists hope to find - and, thanks to good scientific practice in accordance with the laws, that is what they will find (if they find anything). To actively deny a truth is the height of unscientific behavior, and for you to accuse the scientific community as a whole of doing this is both ignorant and insulting. Science is not your opponent, unless you are opposed to truth.
candidus inperti; si nil, his utere mecum.
Im having a bit of a problem seeing what the true issue is.
"In a world where money talks, silence is horrifying."
Ashcoat Bear of Limited
candidus inperti; si nil, his utere mecum.
Does ethics have any laws?
I think there is a serious flaw in claiming that everything has a cause because eventually the proponent will run into Richard Dawkin's objection to the Watchmaker Analogy. If pull the chain all the way back to the the ever elusive "First Cause," we have to assume that we've reached an uncaused "thing." To speak as a theist for a moment, say that everything has a cause and that cause is God already separate separates God into a category of "uncaused existences" or whatever we want to call it (I personal vote for "Uncasuals" because it has a ring to it, and I don't feel like looking for a more technically term at the moment). In terms of religion, the most basic question ultimately boils down to, "Does the first cause have sentience?"
Summary, the statement "Everything has a cause" is a vicious infinite regress. Unless we want to get into ludicrous storytelling and say God and the angels decided to count to three and cause each other exist on three.
Additional Comment because this board needs automerge:
Since I doubt bakgat will provide a definition for us to work with, I'll ask what is your operating definition of "Laws of Philosophy." I ask because in my five years in Philosophy, I don't recall (I have a nagging feeling you'll shake something loose when you tell me) the term "Law of Philosophy," phrases like Philosophical Framework, Philosophy theories, etc. But not "law."
candidus inperti; si nil, his utere mecum.
~~~~~
To be fair, the good apologists are well aware of this issue - it is pretty obvious, after all. Any atheist who expects that Dawkins beat Aquinas with an argument that any undergrad can come up with is fooling himself. The phrasing that bakgat lifted from (I assume) William Lane Craig - "Anything that has a beginning has a cause" - is a first step in an apologetic workaround. But there are atheist/agnostic objections to this, and apologetic responses to that, and so on and so forth. And the dance continues. My point is just that causation, in any formulation, is not an unquestionable law of philosophy and not something you can fault scientists for rejecting.
If they even do reject it. They're actually much more attached to causation than are philosophers. Leibniz and Hume, two of Europe's greatest philosophers, both theists, came at the notion of causation from very different directions, and both called it into serious question. Science, in contrast, relies on the assumption of causation to work: experiments would be unreliable if sometimes things just happened for no reason. So if you ask a typical scientist what caused the universe, the answer almost certainly will not be "nothing", but rather a big, fat, honest "I don't know".
Me neither.
candidus inperti; si nil, his utere mecum.
Is science a subset of philosophy?
Is philosophy a subset of science?
Can you distinguish why one is a subset of the other?
Does it matter, or is this purely a debate on linguistics?
Well the real question is can nothing create something. To give a example if you can imagine a vacuum. What do you think BS is the chances that in this vacuum a car will spontaneously come into existence without any sort of cause making it so?
You might wait a eternity before you see this car come into existence uncaused. It just is not how our universe works.
Lets take this example towards cosmology. If the universe has a beginning (Like many scientist think) what are we left with.
Either we can deny the tenants of causality and believe that nothing can indeed produce something and even something as grandiose as a life sustaining universe.
OR
We can decide that causality is a valid concept and try to discern what exactly this cause of the universe is. If we can get to this point in the conversation we should really start to read some Aquinas. His arguments to discern what these causes are began at a finite universe and adherence to causality.
We are so blessed as humans today. The fact that the universe has a beginning is something Aquinas had to believe as a matter of faith. Nowadays science can give us more agreeable reasons to believe that.
That's ridiculous. What does it mean to be "prior" to the beginning of time?
We might say that the universe has an earliest point, but that does not imply that there was a "beginning" - to begin implies a transition from not existing to existing, and such a transition implies the existence of a time before time, which is nonsensical.
The tenets of causality as they were understood at the time of Aquinas, and as most people believe them today, are demonstrably false. Einstein and Planck wiped them away at a stroke. What causes spontaneous emission in quantum systems? You can go ahead and get back to me after you claim your Nobel Prize.
As smart as Aquinas was, he wasn't even close to smart enough to guess all of the bizarre things we know about the universe today.
We are, indeed, "blessed" in a sense -- we know that if the universe had a beginning, then that beginning was very weird, happening at the quantum scale -- where the notion of causality that Aquinas accepted is, as Wolfgang Pauli would have put it, "not even wrong."
But this just means that Aquinas had an excuse for the physical holes in his arguments -- ignorance -- an excuse that anyone who wants to defend Aquinas seriously today can no longer claim.
Einstein's axiom -- "time is what clocks measure" -- shows us that this cannot be true. Time is unmeasurable at the Planck scale. Any clock you could build out of Planck-scale matter would encase itself in a gravitational event horizon and you couldn't look at it to see what the time was.
Which if thou dost not use for clearing away the clouds from thy mind
It will go and thou wilt go, never to return.
Nonzero, actually, according to the extremely-well-verified theories of quantum physics.
But so far no convincing argument has been produced which says that no universe can work this way. In other words, causation is not a principle that can be produced philosophically, a priori. It requires a posteriori observation, science. And it only applies to stuff in this universe, not necessarily the process that created this universe. What you're saying is like saying that because a car runs on an internal combustion engine, a car assembly line must also run on an internal combustion engine.
Which is, as far as we know, perfectly possible. We cannot reject possibilities just because we don't like the consequences.
I'm not going to pretend that most cosmologists have read Aquinas. They haven't. They've got better things to do. They're trying to figure out what they can about the origins of the universe with cutting-edge math and physics, not with clunky Medieval Aristotelian logic. Aquinas' arguments may not be as infantile as Dawkins thinks they are, but they still don't hold up to modern scientific standards of reasoning. (Or philosophical standards, for that matter.)
What struck me is how often he says stuff of the form "The cause of the universe must be X or Y, and it can't be X, so it must be Y" without giving adequate explanation for why it must be X or Y and not something else entirely. And, of course, he is very, very much trying to confirm his preexisting belief that there is a God. You condemn scientists for wanting to believe there is no God, which isn't true, but you don't condemn Aquinas (and yourself, for that matter) for wanting to believe there is a God, which is. How is that good philosophy?
candidus inperti; si nil, his utere mecum.
I might call it a "start" of time. However, in my view a beginning, especially in the context of causality, implies a past, because there is a transition from existing to not existing, and there must therefore be a past in which to not exist.
Doesn't that theory also assert that there is no "beginning" of the universe? If anything, it seems to support my position.
Perhaps I'm not understanding it correctly, but my reading is that time is essentially merged with space during the Planck epoch. It does not so much assert that space existed "before" time, but rather that during the Planck epoch, space and time were merged.
Yes. That comment was more by way of an aside.
Since Thomas Aquinas has been dead for over seven centuries, and bakgat is still alive, I'm not sure whom you're referring to. As for reading their minds, it is through that oldest and best verified means of telepathy available to us: language. Neither is what you'd call coy about his religious convictions.
candidus inperti; si nil, his utere mecum.
So, I don't dispute that there's potentially a first moment in time. All I'm saying is that it doesn't make sense to talk about what happens before that, and it especially doesn't make sense to talk of what might have caused that first moment, since causality is generally understood to operate forward in time.
To my mind, the phrase "time begins" implies there is a transition between "no time" and "time", and given that a transition necessarily involves time, this is nonsense. If there was no time, there could be no transition. Instead, the only coherent options are that time extends back infinitely, or that time has a first moment, but does not "begin", and is not preceded by anything.
When bakgat uses the term "beginning", he is doing so specifically in the context of asking what caused that beginning, which involves assuming something exists prior to it. This is what I find incoherent.
My understanding is that space was created by the Big Bang, and continues to expand today.
You mean St. Anselm, Mr. Ontological Argument, died 1109? Or perhaps Elizabeth Anscombe, Ms. Aquinas-plus-Wittgenstein, died 2001?
Those were two discrete critiques of Aquinas: (1) that he is not exhaustive in ruling out alternatives; and (2) that he is a confirmed Christian, which is not in and of itself damning (being ad hominem) but which by bakgat's stated standards ought to be grounds for suspicion. The former may or may not be related to the latter. I suspect it is. But it doesn't really matter.
candidus inperti; si nil, his utere mecum.
And of course science (as is the average person) is more attached to causality than philosophers because science is about finding the causes of Y called X. If one does not assume causality exists, then we run into strange cases like perhaps the action of hitting a nail with a hammer is not the cause of nails being hammered into boards, and ultimately, science wouldn't work like people tend to want it to because finding a correlation is not as desirable as declaring you've found a causal link.
That's not a definition.
The problem with abstract wording is that what you're basically asking is, "Can Science defy something that somebody made up without connecting it to anything else I understand." To which I reply with this.
Oh bakgat, even though I agree with the direction, I have to agree with Blinking Spirit on this one. Your example only showed that if we wait for an eternity, a complete car will not spontaneously appear in a vacuum. Science is no where near as... simplistic... as that. You haven't proven your case.
Allegedly. If you're in tune with how the entire universe works, then you're far ahead of me.
Additional Comment:
Also bakgat, could you please give a definition for your use of "Laws of Philosophy?" I'm having difficulty knowing what you you mean.
What struck me about Aquinas is that he himself admitted his philosophy was wrong during his life time... this confession was supposedly his last words if I remember correctly.
candidus inperti; si nil, his utere mecum.
~~~~~
I think you're over simplifying. The state still has a time dimension to it, it's just not separated from the spatial dimensions. It would be incorrect to say that there is some sort of temporal transition from time-less to time.
At it's core, though, Hawking-Hartle supports my position beautifully. It's a proposal which acknowledges that asking about how time "begins" is meaningless, and substitutes a boundary-less model in which the initial state does not "arise" from anything else.
http://www.hawking.org.uk/the-beginning-of-time.html
So what is it then. Does the universe have a beginning and a end or does it not. Stephen Hawking seems to think so. You can feel free to tell me why he is wrong. He does seem to be well informed when it comes to issues of this sort.
I can only take your eminent physicist word for it.
Why exactly can something not transcend the physical universe? That is naturalism for you, but why is this such a fact that people can tell me that nothing can exist prior to the universe existing?
Do people actually have a argument as to why I should take the position of naturalism or do they just assume it without argument.
Ok let me ask you then if you want to discard the principle of causality can you give any me any examples of nothing creating something. I have given it some thought and I cannot think of a example. Feel free to enlighten me.
Here is two quotes from a well known British Empiricist that I think aids this discussion
Sure. I can have a piece of paper that transitions from white to black. That transition isn't temporal. However, causality is temporal. When we look at a transition from the perspective of finding its cause, we're looking for a temporal transition.
But this isn't causality, it's logical entailment. Unless it is your position that causality is equivalent to logical entailment?
Which if thou dost not use for clearing away the clouds from thy mind
It will go and thou wilt go, never to return.