A good place to start is reading arguments for creationism, morality, the fine-tuning of the universe, the ontological argument, irreducible complexity.. here's a website that breaks down some of the arguments and their premises: http://www.reasonablefaith.org/the-new-atheism-and-five-arguments-for-god
Start a thread in the Religion forum, and I will happily explain where and how every one of these arguments fails. For here, I'll just say that these are all old, old arguments that atheistic philosophers (as well as the more responsible theistic ones) have been bored by for centuries, and the refutations are well known. 1 through 4 rest on unsupportable premises, and 5 on some slightly more involved logical equivocation.
I'd be interested to hear the refutations to these 5 arguments. For convenience's sake, the arguments are:
1. The cosmological argument from contingency
2. The kalam cosmological argument based on the beginning of the universe
3. The moral argument based upon objective moral values and duties
4. The teleological argument from fine-tuning
5. The ontological argument from the possibility of God's existence to his actuality
Without providing actual refutations at the moment, I'd like to point out some severe errors (severe as in a professional philosopher should be ashamed of himself for making them) that William Lane Craig commits in the linked article.
Section 1.1
Craig makes an appeal to intution: if you detected the presence of an object and someone asserted that object was uncaused, you'd think he was crazy. Well, why would you think that? It's question-begging. You'd only call someone crazy for making the assertion if the premise were true, but here we're questioning whether or not the premise is true. (Ironically, Craig immediately goes on to accuse some hypothetical straw-atheist of this error while blatantly committing it himself.)
Speaking of that, Craig accuses a straw-atheist who argues that the universe is uncaused because there is nothing outside of it of question-begging. This accusation is based on equivocation. There are two definitions of "universe" that Craig equivocates between: what we might call the "metaphysical universe," which includes everything that metaphysically exists, including God if he exists -- and what we might call the "physical universe," which is the bubble of spacetime that is timelike connected to us here on Earth.
If you taboo the word "universe" from this conversation (and also from everything else Craig says, if you want to see a master equivocator in action) you can see that in the metaphysical sense of that word, the straw-atheist is obviously correct: tautologically, nothing can exist outside of the set of everything that exists. And in the physical sense of the word, the straw-atheist is wrong, but so, then, is Craig: we don't need a transcendent, uncaused, timeless, blah blah blah anymore -- all we need is a slightly bigger bubble of spacetime.
Section 1.2
Craig's argument here is appallingly bad. He repeatedly makes the mistake of listing a set of cases that are not logically exhaustive, then simply ignoring the gaps. Here's one way of being an atheist: "I think the physical universe has an explanation for its existence, but that explanation is not God." That case is totally unaccounted for in Craig's argument about the straw atheist. Oops.
He makes the same mistake again later: he asserts that only an "abstract object" or an "unembodied mind" meet the criteria for being able to create the universe. Well, what about an "unembodied non-mind" or even an "embodied mind?"
2.1
Again, Craig makes question-begging appeals to intuition. "To suggest that things could just pop into being uncaused is literally worse than magic." Well, it is if you believe this premise. If you don't (and you shouldn't, because, well, quantum mechanics) then it's not. Craig doesn't seem to understand that merely saying everyone who disagrees with you is crazy does not constitute an affirmative argument.
2.3
Numerous equivocations on "universe." It's a fun exercise to taboo it throughout this entire section.
3.1
Craig literally does not even present an affirmative argument. Not even a bad one. He just points out that some people might believe it, and not even plausibly at that. Atrocious.
3.3
It is always amusing to watch religious philosophers struggle with the Euthyphro dilemma. Craig somehow manages to impale himself on both horns at once, which you would think would be impossible.
4.1
Non-exhaustive case analysis again. Another possibility: one or more of the physical constants are actually logically necessary, but we haven't discovered why yet. (Leonard Susskind believes all the physical constants are logically necessary and that the ultimate theory of physics will include no tunable constants.)
4.2
Besides the fact that it's pointless to elaborate on a logically non-exhaustive case analysis, we've got a unique departure from the usual Craig pattern of uncritically embracing human intuition: here he rejects the human intuition that tells us that unlikely things do indeed happen, pointing out that we plebes simply lack his refined conceptions concerning the statistical likelihood of the universe. (This whole thing, by the way, is of course an instance of the fallacy of retrospective improbability)
A few preliminary words before we roll up our sleeves and get into the arguments:
First and most importantly, I am not here trying to prove that God does not exist. I am here showing why these five particular arguments fail to prove that God exists. Many of my refutations will take the form of, "Maybe this claim Craig makes is true, but maybe it isn't." This may seem like a weak counterargument, like you can rebut it by saying "But maybe it is true! You haven't proven it isn't!" But I'm not trying to prove it isn't true. I don't need to prove it isn't true. The way deductive argument works, Craig fails to prove God's existence if there is even the possibility that his premises are false. If his premises are merely possible, then his argument at best shows that God is merely possible. And most atheists, including myself and even Richard Dawkins, concede that God is possible. Craig wants to prove that God is actual, and for him to do that, his premises must actually be true. "Maybe" does not suffice for him. If I were trying to prove God's nonexistence, "maybe" would not suffice for me either, but again, that's not what I'm trying to do.
This limited scope of my goals does mean I'm leaving open the possibility that some other argument not given by Craig might prove God's existence. That said, it is generally good philosophical practice to be suspicious of any argument that, like Craig's, runs on a priori (or "armchair") reasoning and purports to prove some material fact about existence and nonexistence or cause and effect. The strong consensus among modern philosophers is that this is simply impossible. The arguments about the problem get involved and contentious, and I'm not going to go into them here. But to get a sense of it, ask yourself whether you can sit in an armchair and, reasoning purely from first principles, prove the existence of the moon. You can't. Armchair reasoning can get you from abstract to abstract, leading to great truths of mathematics and logic. By no means am I denigrating the armchair method; it is essential for this. But you can't get from these abstract truths to concrete facts about particular things. And, as vast and powerful as God allegedly is, that does not change his status as a concrete particular thing. Craig doesn't want to prove something about the abstract idea of godhood; he wants to prove that there is a God. And the sense is that to prove there is a God, like proving there is a moon, he would have to engage in empirical reasoning - scientific observation of the world. Now, like I said, the logical rigor of this distinction between abstract armchair stuff and concrete material stuff is contentious, so I'm not going to claim that there is no way some argument could somehow jump the gap and prove God's existence. But no argument - about God or anything else - has successfully jumped the gap yet. And this is a good reason to approach any argument that purports to do so from a position of extreme skepticism.
Okay. Let's do this.
1. The cosmological argument from contingency
(1) Everything that exists has an explanation of its existence, either in the necessity of its own nature or in an external cause.
(2) If the universe has an explanation of its existence, that explanation is God.
(3) The universe exists.
(4) Therefore, the universe has an explanation of its existence (from 1, 3).
(5) Therefore, the explanation of the universe’s existence is God (from 2, 4).
Let's start with (1). This premise is dense with problems. I'll divide it into two parts:
(1a) Everything that exists has an explanation of its existence.
(1b) The explanation of a thing's existence is either in the necessity of its own nature or in an external cause.
(1a) is the backbone of Craig's argument. As such, it is very odd that he does not even try to give us compelling reason to accept it. He can only appeal to our intuitions: "This claim, when you reflect on it, seems very plausibly true." But as we have discovered to our chagrin in modern physics, our intuitions about the ways the world works are often misleading or nonsensical when dealing with phenomena beyond our everyday experience, like quantum mechanics. Craig ridicules this as "taxicab logic", but beyond ridicule gives us no reason why we shouldn't do it - and ignores the confirmed fact that, at least some of the time, we must. Surely an operation that is sometimes necessary cannot be fallacious. The problem lies only in Craig's expectation that the rule of explanation (proposed by him in the first place) must be adhered to universally.
Craig goes on to say that "it seems that premise 1 is more plausibly true than false, which is all we need for a good argument", which I was shocked to read coming from a trained professional philosopher. No, Dr. Craig, plausibility is not all you need. You are trying to construct a deductive proof of God's existence, a path along which we are led step by step through inevitable logic to a conclusion that cannot be doubted. For your proof to be sound, your premises don't just need to be "plausible", they need to be true. I hear a car driving by right now. It is plausible that this car is red, because many cars are red. But I certainly have not proven that the car is red. It is a live possibility that the car is not red, and it will remain a live possibility until I provide persuasive reasoning that it must be red.
With that hole (conceded expressly by Craig! I still can't believe it) the premise, and the whole argument, are dead already. If it's possible that not everything has an explanation, then it's possible that the universe has no explanation, thus it's possible that there is no God. We could stop here. But we've only discussed the first half of the first premise, so let's keep going. In (1b), Craig says that an explanation must be of one of two kinds: necessity or external cause. To begin with, whenever someone says that there are only n kinds of a thing, we should always ask "Why only n? Why not others?" If no reason is apparent, we are dealing with a false dilemma (or trilemma or whatever). It may be that the universe has some explanation we don't yet understand that is neither necessity nor cause; the possibility has not been ruled out.
And both necessity and cause are problematic as Craig's two varieties of explanation. Necessity just plain is not an explanation at all. If I assert the Pythagorean Theorem, and you ask why it's true, and I say "It's true because it's necessary", then I have explained nothing at all. Your obvious next question is, "Why is it necessary?" The explanation of the Pythagorean Theorem is its proof. The proof is necessary, but that's a description we give it after examining it, not a property that imbues it beforehand and makes it true. (We will discuss this again when we get to the ontological argument, where the misconception of necessity does a lot more work.)
As for causation, Craig is just plain equivocating here. Cosmological arguments traditionally start out not with "everything has an explanation" but rather "everything has a cause"; Craig's own formulation of the Kalām argument does this. And as such, there exist many many counterarguments that pick holes in the principle of causation. We'll get to a few of those when we get to the Kalām argument. For this argument, the switch from "cause" to "explanation" is clearly intended to bypass some of the problems of causation. And this is not in and of itself a disingenuous move; it's done a lot when formulating various problems in metaphysics, and there's no reason to commit yourself to the concept of causation with all its baggage when all you're really looking for is an explanation. But here, Craig is just slipping from explanation right back into causation. Causation is what he really wants; starting with "explanation" is just a token evasion of the problems.
Okay. On to premise (2)!
I'm getting tired of writing, so it's fortunate for me that the problem with (2) is much more straightforward: Craig's only justification for it is a blatant strawman. "So what does the atheist almost always say in response to the contingency argument? He typically asserts the following: If atheism is true, the universe has no explanation of its existence." Maybe some atheists do assert that, but I've never heard it. More to the point, I'm not asserting it. Craig is right that the assertion is logically synonymous with premise (2), but all that means is that he is setting up his straw atheist to agree with him from the outset. Consider instead a more reasonable atheist assertion: "We do not know the explanation of the universe's existence." This cannot be contraposited into (2). So I do not accept (2). I am given no reason whatsoever to accept (2). Craig's only reasoning only applies to people who already accept (2) - who, again, are mostly of the fibrous agricultural byproduct persuasion.
Now, if you believe the universe exists, you accept (3). And (4) and (5) do follow from (1), (2), and (3). So other than the aforementioned problems, the Cosmological Argument from Contingency runs just fine. I will note in passing, though, that this argument has established no properties for God. Even if you accept it, it only says that he is the explanation for the universe. It does not say that he feels benevolent towards humans, performs miracles, or had a son about two thousand years ago. It does not even say that he exists in the present. Maybe God created the universe and then immediately disappeared. Or maybe he was around for most of the universe, but he disappeared yesterday. This runs counter to most of our intuitions about what God is like, but the proof doesn't say anything about those intuitions. It leaves open all possibilities.
I think that's enough for now. Join me next time when we look at the Kalām Cosmological Argument!
2. If the universe has an explanation of its existence, that explanation is God.
wut.
Like, seriously, that can be read two ways and they're both absurd.
Interpretation 1: He's saying that we are naming the explanation — which I assume he means cause — of the universe "God," regardless of what that explanation might be.
Interpretation 2: He's saying that if there's an explanation for the universe, then it MUST be the Christian explanation.
Interpretation #2 is begging the question. He's outright saying, "If there's an answer, it must be the Christian answer." And, no. No, you don't get to declare yourself the winner at the beginning of an argument without providing any logical basis for your argument in a rational discussion. That's begging the question. It's also obnoxious. If the Giants declared themselves the winners of the World Series, would we have to give them the title? No, because they gotta beat the Royals first, because you have to actually prove things before we accept them to be true.
And Interpretation #1 is silly because...
Besides that, premise 2 is very plausible in its own right. For think of what the universe is: all of space-time reality, including all matter and energy. It follows that if the universe has a cause of its existence, that cause must be a non-physical, immaterial being beyond space and time. Now there are only two sorts of things that could fit that description: either an abstract object like a number or else an unembodied mind. But abstract objects can’t cause anything. That’s part of what it means to be abstract. The number seven, for example, can’t cause any effects. So if there is a cause of the universe, it must be a transcendent, unembodied Mind, which is what Christians understand God to be.
... that's NOT what we understand Christian God to be. It is AN ASPECT of what we understand Christian God to be, but there's more to Christian God than that. I can't say that because something is a mammal, I've proved it to be a human being. It could be a ferret for all we know, and ferrets ain't people! [Citation needed]
Even if we took as given that a "transcendent, unembodied Mind" exists, that still doesn't make said Mind the Christan God, because there's WAY more being claimed about Christian God in Christianity than just "God is a transcendent, unembodied Mind." So even if you named the cause of the universe "God," it wouldn't be the God of Christianity unless you proved it had all the other qualities of the God of Christianity aside from "created the universe."
Also, Stephen Hawking would argue against the idea of an outside creator being necessary to create the universe, saying that instead it's possible the universe could have spontaneously created itself. I'm not saying he's right, and I certainly don't understand the basis for his statements, but he's apparently challenged the assertion that such a thing necessarily follows, so there's that.
EDIT:
1. Everything that begins to exist has a cause.
2. The universe began to exist.
3. Therefore, the universe has a cause.
That does not prove the Christian God, or any interpretation of God, was necessarily the cause.
1. I've clearly missed the 'quantum mechanics' boat - why do you guys (or gals) bring it up, and how does it relate to causality?
2. Blinking Spirit, I get the feeling that the second paragraph in your post is pretty important, but I'm not sure I completely understand it. Is what you are saying essentially, 'In order to prove God exists, there must be empirical evidence for it' like there is for the moon? Would it conceivably be possible to make an a priori argument for 'God (or the moon, or whatever) probably exists'? And if so, what degree of probability are we talking about here? I'm fairly confused about this point in general, so if anyone can spell it out for me it would be much appreciated.
1. I've clearly missed the 'quantum mechanics' boat - why do you guys (or gals) bring it up, and how does it relate to causality?
Matter at the quantum scale routinely violates Hume's criteria for causation. Consider the humble incandescent light bulb brightening your room, which, though discovered through the means of classical physics, is ultimately a quantum device which operates by way of spontaneous emission. You might at first think that the light bulb is a perfectly causal device; after all, every time you close the switch, it casts light -- there is a "constant union betwixt the cause (application of current) and effect (emission of light)."
However, the reason you perceive it as causal is because of the vast number of atoms in the filament. The light bulb appears causal for the same reason that a billionaire playing a billion roulette tables simultaneously is so nearly certain to win some of his money back that the chance of that not happening isn't worth mentioning. If you had a "single-atom light bulb" whose filament consisted of only one tungsten atom, you would find it to be a singularly acausal device. The "constant union betwixt the cause and effect" would be broken. In fact, there is a nonzero probability that you could wait until the heat death of the universe after flicking on the switch and your single-atom light bulb would still not light up.
What we've learned from modern physics is that the more you "zoom in" on the world, the less the traditional concept of causation applies. In a very deep sense, the universe (according to the current most accepted picture) is best thought of as the conjunction of enormously many uncaused phenomena which, taken together and scaled up to the level of ordinary human perception, appear causal because of statistical averaging.
Private Mod Note
():
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
A limit of time is fixed for thee
Which if thou dost not use for clearing away the clouds from thy mind
It will go and thou wilt go, never to return.
1. I've clearly missed the 'quantum mechanics' boat - why do you guys (or gals) bring it up, and how does it relate to causality?
Matter at the quantum scale routinely violates Hume's criteria for causation. Consider the humble incandescent light bulb brightening your room, which, though discovered through the means of classical physics, is ultimately a quantum device which operates by way of spontaneous emission. You might at first think that the light bulb is a perfectly causal device; after all, every time you close the switch, it casts light -- there is a "constant union betwixt the cause (application of current) and effect (emission of light)."
However, the reason you perceive it as causal is because of the vast number of atoms in the filament. The light bulb appears causal for the same reason that a billionaire playing a billion roulette tables simultaneously is so nearly certain to win some of his money back that the chance of that not happening isn't worth mentioning. If you had a "single-atom light bulb" whose filament consisted of only one tungsten atom, you would find it to be a singularly acausal device. The "constant union betwixt the cause and effect" would be broken. In fact, there is a nonzero probability that you could wait until the heat death of the universe after flicking on the switch and your single-atom light bulb would still not light up.
What we've learned from modern physics is that the more you "zoom in" on the world, the less the traditional concept of causation applies. In a very deep sense, the universe (according to the current most accepted picture) is best thought of as the conjunction of enormously many uncaused phenomena which, taken together and scaled up to the level of ordinary human perception, appear causal because of statistical averaging.
Another example is this: all across the universe, even in a complete vacuum, particle-antiparticle pairs will pop in and out of existence, randomly, with no cause. Notice I didn't say "no apparent cause." It's known that they have no cause; they are simply a consequence of Heisenberg uncertainty.
(1) Everything that begins to exist has a cause.
(2) The universe began to exist.
(3) Therefore, the universe has a cause.
We should notice a problem right off the bat: Craig's formal argument does not conclude that God exists. He merely says, "Once we reach the conclusion that the universe has a cause, we can then analyze what properties such a cause must have and assess its theological significance." As we will see, he will get around to talking about why this cause must be God in his informal discussion in the conclusion section. Now, making an argument informally rather than formally does not make it wrong - obviously, since I'm writing my own arguments here informally - but when a philosopher loves making formal arguments as much as Craig does and starts making one, but then switches to informality halfway through, that is reason to be suspicious. Why would he do that?
But let's start at the beginning. Premise (1): "Everything that begins to exist has a cause." Why? According to Craig, it "seems obviously true - at the least, more so than its negation." Again we're running into his bizarre misconception that his premises only need to be "plausible" for his arguments to prove the existence of God. We discussed this earlier, so now let's just note that this argument has already failed and move on. Craig then says that the opposite belief, that uncaused things are possible, is "literally worse than magic". Well, I'm not sure about his use of the word "literally", but it would have to be worse than magic in his eyes, wouldn't it, since magic is what his position rests on. (If I may be permitted a dig in return for the ones being thrown at me.) And regardless of the magic issue, Craig's dismissal of the possibility of uncaused things is perfunctory at best. He objects that "it’s inexplicable why just anything and everything do not come into existence uncaused from nothing." As in the previous argument, he's equivocating between "explanation" and "cause". It remains open that there could be an explanation for things coming into existence or failing to do so that is non-causal. And if we accept that all explanations must be causal, then yes, it is inexplicable - but this is only a problem if you think everything needs an explanation/cause, which is precisely what this possibility is denying. So even then, Craig is just begging the question.
But maybe all that is just me pulling some logical sleight-of-hand. Lord knows that's easy enough - Craig does it extensively. So let's look at science. We have actually discovered that things come into and leave existence without cause in the quantum-mechanical realm. What is actual cannot be impossible. Craig completely ignores this fact. Other advocates of the Kalām argument have commented on it, however, and usually they say something to the effect that the cause of quantum fluctuations is the physical law. But if this is a valid "cause", why couldn't the cause of the universe be some other physical law, not yet discovered? Where did the physical law come from, and why? I don't know, but it doesn't have to be God. We don't even have any reason to suspect that physical laws began to exist in the way the physical universe did, so the Kalām argument just falls flat on that possibility.
But let's set that aside, and grant for the sake of argument that the universe must have had a cause of the sort Craig wants to believe. In his conclusion section, he discusses (again, in an odd switch to informality) why this cause must be God. He starts by heaping some abuse on Daniel Dennett's countertheory, that the universe is self-caused. I don't know much about this theory, and Craig is more interested in mocking it than presenting it fairly, so I won't bother trying to defend it. However, I will note that Craig's incredulous "It would have to exist before it existed!" implies that he sees time naïvely as a straight arrow from past to future. I'm no physicist, but I know enough about general relativity to be dangerous - and more, apparently, than Dr. Craig. Time is flexible. It is not immediately obvious why it could not loop back on itself. Indeed, the possibility is discussed enough in theoretical physics that there is a name for the phenomenon: the closed timelike curve. Now, there are a host of physical and philosophical complications surrounding the possibility of a causal loop. I'm skeptical myself that this is a good candidate for the cause of the physical universe. But it is viable enough that Craig cannot justifiably dismiss it offhand, using only his personal intuitions about the nature of time. They alone do not make a proposition "logically incoherent", and they don't establish that the cause of the universe must stand outside space and time. (Side note: I avoid the words "transcend" and "transcendental" like the plague. They are far too laden with connotations.)
And what would it mean to stand outside of space and time, anyway? Craig argues that anything timeless must be unchanging. But this seems problematic because a cause needs to change in order to cause something; at the very minimum, it must lose the property "not the cause of the universe" and gain the property "the cause of the universe". And if we look at Craig's Christian God, he changes a lot, for instance going from "not incarnate" to "incarnate in Jesus" to "not incarnate" again. Parallel changes can be pointed out for other proposed gods. As for space, Craig argues for immateriality because "material things are constantly changing at the molecular and atomic levels". First of all, this isn't true; the atomic level is not the lowest level of the material universe, and some subatomic particles seem to be unchanging, particularly those like photons that move at the speed of light and therefore really are timeless after a fashion. And as Craig has pointed out, timelessness precludes change. If the cause of the universe were timeless, it would be unchanging even if it were ordinary matter that were somehow pulled out of time. In time, the matter would be changing, but outside of time, there is no time for it to change in. So you cannot draw conclusions about the material nature of the cause of the universe from the premise that the cause must be timeless.
And again, if it is timeless, it is unclear how it could cause the universe or do anything else. Causation requires a temporal relationship: the cause comes before the effect. This is, in some formulations, the actual definition of time. Craig himself seems to acknowledge this in his objection to Dennett, saying that the universe must have come before itself in order to have caused itself. But if the universe must have come before the universe to cause the universe, then anything else that caused the universe must also have come before the universe, and therefore must be in time. In attempting to place his desired cause of the universe outside of time, Craig is forgetting his own argument.
Now, how many causes of the universe are there, and do they themselves have causes before them? Craig invokes Ockham's Razor to claim there must only be one uncaused cause. But this is not what Ockham's Razor does. Ockham's Razor says that we should not assume there are more entities than are necessary to explain what we observe. It does not say that there cannot be more entities. If we find a bowl of soup on the counter, it is sufficient to theorize that one chef made it. But this theory might be wrong. There might have been more. Ockham's Razor certainly does not prove anything to the contrary. Furthermore, Craig's reasoning for why the cause must be without beginning and uncaused is that if it had a beginning and were caused, there would have to be another cause before it. He is taking the desired minimum number of causes (one) and determining from that what the facts must be, which is precisely the reverse of what Ockham's Razor mandates. He doesn't even give a strong reason why we shouldn't accept the possibility of an infinite regress; he just asserts that that would be a bad thing.
What are the powers of the cause? Let's start by noticing that even by framing the question in these terms Craig is presuming the cause must be some sort of intelligence. You don't say that a rock or a sun or a singularity has "powers". They don't make choices and perform actions. So Craig is getting ahead of himself here. But let's reinterpret "powers" to mean "phenomena that it is possible for an object to cause". I think this gets at what Craig is going for without implying personhood prematurely. Now, Craig says, "This entity must be unimaginably powerful, if not omnipotent, since it created the universe without any material cause." But this is nonsense. We have proof of exactly one "power": the causation of the universe. Attributing any further "powers" to the cause is completely speculative. It's an especially dramatic leap to say that the thing might have all the "powers".
Is the cause a person? Craig cites the properties of timelessness and immateriality, and refers back to his assertion that "there are only two sorts of things that could fit that description: either an abstract object like a number or else an unembodied mind." In response, I will refer back to my admonition that "whenever someone says that there are only n kinds of a thing, we should always ask 'Why only n? Why not others?' If no reason is apparent, we are dealing with a false dilemma". And this is an absolutely shameless false dilemma. Craig does not even attempt to convince us that no other sorts of timeless, immaterial things are possible. Until he does, we need waste no time entertaining his claim.
Craig's second argument that the cause must be a person is more interesting. He notices an apparent problem: "The cause is in some sense eternal and yet the effect that it produced is not eternal but began to exist a finite time ago. How can this happen?" As a solution, he proposes that this is possible if the cause has a mind and free will, and therefore can choose to create the universe at a particular time. But there are two issues here.
The first is that he is affirming the consequent. His logic is "If the cause is a person, we can have a finite universe; we have a finite universe; therefore the cause is a person." As any student of logic can tell you, this is a fallacious form. Craig makes a token attempt to avoid the issue by asserting that personhood is the only solution to the eternity problem. This would make his logic valid, but he does provide any argument for it. As far as we know, there may be any number of other solutions, and therefore there is no reason to believe that the cause must be a person.
The second issue is that it's not as obvious as Craig makes it sound that a mind and free will would serve as a solution to the eternity problem. The only minds of which we have any direct observations are our own, and they are finite, material, temporal, and caused. Skirting the great free will debate, both sides of it acknowledge that our actions do not spring spontaneously from nothing, which is what Craig is asking us to believe of his cause. If one of us were disembodied and pulled out of time, we could not make any decisions or perform any actions. So if the cause is capable of doing this, it must have some property beyond being a mind that allows it to do so, which means being a mind is not really the solution to the eternity problem - that other property is. Furthermore, when we make decisions, that is a mental change we undergo, yet Craig flatly denies that his cause must undergo this change when it makes the decision to create the universe. It seems incoherent to be able to make a decision without changing; certainly the topic is worthy of more argument than Craig gives it. Even if he's right about that, though, it's yet another difference between this mind and the minds we actually know anything about. If Craig has to draw so many differences between regular minds and the hypothetical cause-mind, his case that a mind is a good candidate for cause of the universe becomes less and less plausible. He might as well nominate anything else and say that thing has all these special properties that let it do what he wants it to do.
To conclude, then:
(a) we should not be so quick to believe that the universe must have a cause; and
(b) even if it does have a cause, we have no reason to believe that cause has any of the properties Craig is trying to attribute to it.
Next up: the Moral Argument. I anticipate that post will be shorter but bloodier - he says less, and what he does say is really stupid.
Another example is this: all across the universe, even in a complete vacuum, particle-antiparticle pairs will pop in and out of existence, randomly, with no cause. Notice I didn't say "no apparent cause." It's known that they have no cause; they are simply a consequence of Heisenberg uncertainty.
Would you mind elaborating on the "known to have no cause" part of this? I've not studied quantum mechanics, so this is all fascinating to me.
Is what you are saying essentially, 'In order to prove God exists, there must be empirical evidence for it' like there is for the moon?
It's not quite that strong; it's a little more open-minded. It's rather, "If someone claims they have proven that God or the moon or any other concrete entity exists without empirical evidence, we should examine their argument very skeptically."
Other philosophers would strengthen it to what you said, but again, the arguments for doing this are somewhat contentious and beyond our scope here which is already quite large enough.
Would it conceivably be possible to make an a priori argument for 'God (or the moon, or whatever) probably exists'?
Classical a priori arguments are not probabilistic. If you look at a proof of the Pythagorean Theorem, it does not and cannot conclude that the Theorem is probably true. Either it definitely, absolutely, inescapably proves it is true, or it does not prove anything at all. Probability only comes into play once you start reasoning empirically - and once you do, your conclusion is never absolute. Putting a number on the probability is, again, contentious and beyond our scope here, and I wouldn't be the best person to discuss it in any case. But I will point you in the direction of Bayesian inference if you're interested in it.
Private Mod Note
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Vive, vale. Siquid novisti rectius istis,
candidus inperti; si nil, his utere mecum.
Another example is this: all across the universe, even in a complete vacuum, particle-antiparticle pairs will pop in and out of existence, randomly, with no cause. Notice I didn't say "no apparent cause." It's known that they have no cause; they are simply a consequence of Heisenberg uncertainty.
Would you mind elaborating on the "known to have no cause" part of this? I've not studied quantum mechanics, so this is all fascinating to me.
Even having taken multiple semesters of quantum mechanics in college, I find these concepts very hard to explain in simple prose. And I'll add that while quantum mechanics is one of the most rigorously tested and verified branches of science, it is extremely counterintuitive, so if you have no experience with it, you're not going to believe anything I say because it will just seem totally wrong. So let me just preface this with a quote from my favorite physicist and Nobel laureate:
"I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics." - Richard Feynman
The basic discovery beind QM is that everything in the universe is a wave. An electron, for example, is not actually a particle located at a particular point in space. Instead, it's a wave function with a higher probability of being located at certain places than others. At any given moment, it has some probability of "teleporting" to any place (or time) in the universe. These quantum "teleportation" effects (usually called "tunneling") are something that we can observe in everyday technologies. For example, old CRT television tubes work on this principle. They send a beam of electrons from a cathode to the TV screen. But from a classical physics perspective, the electrical potential of the tube shouldn't be high enough to rip the electrons out of copper atoms at the anode. The electrons have to tunnel or teleport a small distance to get out. And they do.
The fact that everything behaves like a wave has several important consequences that can be proven mathematically. One is called the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle ("HUP"). People often characterize the HUP as being about measurement; they'll say something like "the more accurately you measure the momentum of a particle, the less accurately you know its position" or something like that. But the HUP isn't limited to measurement, it's actually a fundamental property of the universe. It would be more accurate to say that the HUP puts a limit on how accurately these properties can be defined or that HUP describes how much uncertainty is inherent in the relationship between properties.
Another consequence of QM is that all of space is "quantized" into what you can think of as tiny little "pixels" of reality. In other words, even empty space isn't continuous, it has this detectable structure of minuscule pixels that are smaller than atoms. This isn't just a simplifying assumption or anything like that, this is, demonstrably, how reality works.
So let's get down to the particles: each of these "pixels" of space also obeys the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, even if it is an apparently "empty" pixel. The consequence of this is that we can never be sure that any given pixel is in fact empty. There is always a chance, at any given point in time, that the pixel will randomly take on an energy value greater than zero, and this energy will then manifest itself as a particle-antiparticle pair. These pairs come into being for no "reason" whatsoever. They are a pure consequence of the fact that the property of each pixel is uncertain.
This is all provable mathematically, but we also have real-life experiments that show this happens, such as the force observed in the Casimir effect.
Thanks BS, that makes sense. I'm actually somewhat familiar with Bayesian estimation and prior/posterior distributions and such, but have never seen it applied to philosophy.
The basic discovery beind QM is that everything in the universe is a wave. An electron, for example, is not actually a particle located at a particular point in space. Instead, it's a wave function with a higher probability of being located at certain places than others. At any given moment, it has some probability of "teleporting" to any place (or time) in the universe. These quantum "teleportation" effects (usually called "tunneling") are something that we can observe in everyday technologies. For example, old CRT television tubes work on this principle. They send a beam of electrons from a cathode to the TV screen. But from a classical physics perspective, the electrical potential of the tube shouldn't be high enough to rip the electrons out of copper atoms at the anode. The electrons have to tunnel or teleport a small distance to get out. And they do.
Again, my physics knowledge is limited, so I want to clarify: I thought quantum mechanics only worked at the quantum level, and as you get to different energy levels/sizes, physics changes completely.
Yes and no. It's a resolution thing. It'd be like one pixel of the apple you were eating was slightly out of place. Whose going to notice that while you're eating it? The effects are still happening, but if you've got an extreme number of particles are bound up in an apple you aren't going to be able to notice the changes. Things work pretty intuitively until you get into really really small or really really big things. At our regular level of operations the little quantum ****ery that happens isn't going to change where an apple is since all of these probabilistic things leave you with a bunch of apple particles. The apple isn't going to teleport the same way a single particle does because would require an insanely high number of particles to act in a particular way at the same time over a distance that, from a quantum perspective, insane. A single particle at the quantum level? Yeah. Likewise, at the very very big level (planets and stuff) then these little changes can add up and then we get weird things happening.
As I understand it, its like, for everyday life we have Newtonian physics which works pretty well, but it wasn't working so hot for planets and some other stuff so then we get Einstein's physics, which then didn't work at super small levels, so we have quantum mechanics. Or something. I dunno.
Again, my physics knowledge is limited, so I want to clarify: I thought quantum mechanics only worked at the quantum level, and as you get to different energy levels/sizes, physics changes completely.
Not so. Observed classical behavior is the result of classical measuring devices (like your eyeballs) averaging quantum behavior over a large ensemble of particles. There are a series of theorems in quantum mechanics that prove this. The most basic such theorem is Ehrenfest's theorem, which says that Newtonian motions are the average of quantum motions.
In the interest of full disclosure, I must point out that physicists haven't yet been able to explain gravity as the average of a quantum phenomenon -- but all other known phenomena are explained this way.
Ok, help me out on this then: I thought that once you get into very large things, quantum theory no longer works, which is where general relativity comes in. I also was under the understanding that these two theories are, at least under the current understanding, mutually incompatible with one another.
My understanding was that quantum theory is something that works at this energy level, vs. relativity was something that works at this energy level, and it's getting a theory that works for every energy level that's been the confounding thing.
Also, two questions about everything in the universe being a wave:
1. Does that understanding still work when applied to things much larger than quanta — like, you know, our size? Like, there's been mention here that Newtonian physics still ends up pretty much working because we're so large and comprised of so many particles that there's a reason that we don't just teleport randomly, right? Well if that's the case, then does uncertainty really apply to objects as large as we are, and if not, does it really make sense to think of ourselves as waves?
2. So what's all this then about light needing to be thought of as a particle as well as a wave?
Ok, help me out on this then: I thought that once you get into very large things, quantum theory no longer works, which is where general relativity comes in. I also was under the understanding that these two theories are, at least under the current understanding, mutually incompatible with one another.
My understanding was that quantum theory is something that works at this energy level, vs. relativity was something that works at this energy level, and it's getting a theory that works for every energy level that's been the confounding thing.
No. Forget this business about "energy level." If there were no such thing as gravity in the universe, the standard model of quantum theory would explain every observed phenomenon at every energy level, from Casimir forces all the way up to bulk matter-antimatter annihilation.
The issue is that the Standard Model and relativity explain completely different classes of phenomena. Suppose we're making observations of a star system. Relativity says nothing about how the star produces light, but everything about why they hold planets in orbit. The Standard Model tells us how the star produces light, but not why it holds things in orbit. The "obvious" idea is to stick them together and get one theory that explains everything about the star. However, when you attempt to glue these things together in the "obvious" way to get a theory that explains every observed phenomenon, the mathematics blows up and you get infinite answers to problems that should have simple, finite solutions.
This is not as bad as it sounds, because gravity is an incredibly weak force. We can do pure standard quantum theory, completely ignoring gravity and treating it as if it didn't exist, and get things like working light bulbs, cellular phones, nuclear reactors, and so forth. We only need quantum gravity when dealing with cosmological phenomena where gravity contributes significantly to what's happening, like, say, black holes, galactic nuclei, the Big Bang, cosmic inflation, et cetera. (Here you might be forgiven for becoming confused, because these are all high-energy phenomena. I say again, it's not high energy that's the problem, it's high gravity. The Large Hadron Collider produces high-energy phenomena that are completely explained by quantum theory, because though it's high-energy, it's low-gravity.)
These high-gravity phenomena are all important things, to be sure, but if you aren't studying one of those specific things, then chances are that either quantum physics or gravity is "good enough" by itself to explain what's going on.
Also, two questions about everything in the universe being a wave:
In my humble opinion, bitterroot shouldn't have said this. It isn't true. Better to say that everything in the universe is a quantum object that is completely different from any classical phenomenon (including particles and waves) but which has some properties coming from the theory of particles and some properties coming from the theory of waves. Watch this Feynman lecture to get a better explanation.
1. Does that understanding still work when applied to things much larger than quanta — like, you know, our size? Like, there's been mention here that Newtonian physics still ends up pretty much working because we're so large and comprised of so many particles that there's a reason that we don't just teleport randomly, right? Well if that's the case, then does uncertainty really apply to objects as large as we are, and if not, does it really make sense to think of ourselves as waves?
Yes, it makes sense to think of ourselves as quantum objects. Specifically, we are (the superposition of a bunch of) de Broglie waves. (Yes, de Broglie called them waves, but they are not, strictly speaking, waves.)
2. So what's all this then about light needing to be thought of as a particle as well as a wave?
(1) If God does not exist, objective moral values and duties do not exist.
(2) Objective moral values and duties do exist.
(3) Therefore, God exists.
Craig's defense of his two premises is short enough that I'll just quote it in full:
What makes this argument so compelling is not only that it is logically airtight but also that people generally believe both premises. In a pluralistic age, people are afraid of imposing their values on someone else. So premise 1 seems correct to them. Moral values and duties are not objective realities (that is, valid and binding independent of human opinion) but are merely subjective opinions ingrained into us by biological evolution and social conditioning.
At the same time, however, people do believe deeply that certain moral values and duties such as tolerance, open-mindedness, and love are objectively valid and binding. They think it’s objectively wrong to impose your values on someone else! So they’re deeply committed to premise 2 as well.
That's it. That's what he has to say about two of the longest-standing controversies in philosophy. "People generally believe this." And not only is this an insufficient defense, it's not even correct. People do not generally believe this. It is once again a straw man he has set up to agree with him from the outset. If you do not happen to be one of these hypothetical "people" who believe what he says they believe, then his argument is completely unpersuasive, and he is not even trying to persuade you. Even if this weren't a straw man, even if people really did generally believe this, Craig would just be making an appeal to popularity. But of course, many of the things that people generally believe turn out to be false. So this would not justify Craig's premises either.
But the reason people don't generally believe this is that the straw man's logic doesn't follow even on casual inspection. The proposition I'll call (P), "Moral values and duties are not objective realities... but are merely subjective opinions", is not synonymous with and does not imply premise (1), "If God does not exist, objective moral values and duties do not exist", as he expects it to. In classical logic, an implication statement "If A then B" is equivalent to a disjunction "not A or B". So premise (1) can be rewritten "Either God exists, or objective moral values and duties do not exist". And this is clearly nowhere near (P). (P) does say that objective moral values and duties do not exist, but it's not a disjunction; it says nothing about the existence or nonexistence of God. As far as (P) is concerned, objective moral values and duties do not exist even if God does exist. So in fact, if (P) has a relationship to any of Craig's premises, it's as a direct negation of (2). (P) says that objective moral duties and values do not exist; (2) says they do. Thus, far from saying that his straw man believes two premises that imply the existence of God, Craig is really only saying that his straw man believes two contradictory propositions.
He then attaches the name of "Richard Dawkins" to his strawman and uses this contradiction to attack his adversary. He says that the only way to resolve the contradiction is to accept God's existence. But that doesn't resolve the contradiction, because again, (P) doesn't say anything about God to use as an escape clause! And the Dawkins he cites is not contradictory in the way his straw man is. In fact, at first glance I see two different ways Dawkins' statements might be compatible which Craig has simply overlooked - and of course there may be more.
The first way Craig really walks right into. He himself belabored the distinction between objective morality and subjective morality at the beginning of his argument. And not one of Dawkins' cited moral claims states or implies that it must objective. It may simply be the case that Dawkins is a consistent subjectivist, and in his subjective judgment compassion is good, original sin is bad, homophobia is bad, and so on. Craig notices this possibility only enough to say that it's "hard to believe", and he does this by putting some monstrous words in Dawkins' mouth: "I don’t think that child abuse and homophobia and religious intolerance are really wrong! Do whatever you want - there's no moral difference!" But it would be nonsensical for anyone, subjectivist or objectivist, who judges child abuse to be wrong would say "I don't think that's wrong!" Yes, he does think that it's wrong - that's what it means to make a judgment. So this is another strawman of Craig's, and an especially disgusting one.
The second way is, admittedly, a little subtler, but not so subtle that Craig may be forgiven for missing it. It rests on an equivocation he is making between "objective morality", a particular set of behavioral imperatives that are true independent of the opinions of the agents performing them, and what we might call "ultimate morality", a single grand purpose coming to us from the will of a Creator at the beginning of the universe. The two concepts are not equivalent. Clearly. Yet when Craig reads Dawkins denying that there is a single grand purpose coming to us from the will of a Creator at the beginning of the universe, he misinterprets it as Dawkins denying that there is a set of independently true behavioral imperatives. It could easily be the case that there is a set of independently true behavioral imperatives which say compassion is good, original sin is bad, homophobia is bad, and so on, but that it has a source other than divine purpose. One only has to take a passing glimpse at the canon of moral philosophy to find shelves and shelves of secular and atheist philosophers proposing non-divine theories of objective morality, and Craig seems inexplicably to have forgotten this. Examining all the forms of secular moral realism is the task of a lifetime and far beyond the scope of this thread. To make a long story short, Dawkins could be accepting premise (2) but rejecting premise (1).
I don't know which way Dawkins would go. I am not he, my positions are not his, and I neither know nor care enough about his positions to make that call for him. What I'm really doing here is not so much defending Dawkins as pointing out Craig's rampant mistakes in interpretation and failures in anticipation.
Finally, Craig discusses the Euthyphro dilemma. However, I'm going to skip this section - not because his reasoning is sound (it really, really isn't), but because this post is getting long enough and the issue is only tangentially relevant to Craig's original argument. At most the Euthyphro dilemma casts into doubt his premise (1), which we've already got plenty of other reasons for doubting. Craig's proposed third alternative to the dilemma is well discussed elsewhere. I'll only note here that it's pretty rich of him to complain about false dilemmas after all he's done.
Next up: the Teleological Argument. A.k.a. the Long, Boring Argument. Forgive me if it takes a while for me to work up the time and energy for this one.
Thanks, Crashing00, that really helps a lot. And I'll have to find the time to watch that video, right now I'm out the door.
Although, not to be a smartass, but there's one thing you said I would like to ask about:
All important things, to be sure, but if you aren't studying one of those specific things, then chances are that either quantum physics or gravity is "good enough" by itself to explain what's going on.
But would that not also be true of Newtonian physics then?
Like, I guess my problem is, isn't it kind of bad if quantum mechanics requires ignoring one of the fundamental forces of the universe in order to make it work? That seems concerning to me.
Also, out of curiosity, you explained the problem with quantum mechanics when it comes down to gravity. What are the shortcomings of relativity? I'm going to go ahead and guess, "Does not work with quanta," but can you elaborate?
Although, not to be a smartass, but there's one thing you said I would like to ask about:
All important things, to be sure, but if you aren't studying one of those specific things, then chances are that either quantum physics or gravity is "good enough" by itself to explain what's going on.
But would that not also be true of Newtonian physics then?
Yes, in fact there are a wide class of phenomena that you only need classical physics to explain to within an epsilon of tolerance. However, that class excludes some important things that people living in civilized cultures ought to know about, whereas the class of phenomena that can only be explained using quantum gravity is a good deal more rarefied.
Think of it this way: imagine you've got a five-year-old son. Let's say you know everything about quantum physics and relativity, but not quantum gravity. Well, then there's only one question about the world a typical five-year-old might ask you that you won't be able to answer correctly, and that's The Big One: "where did everything come from?" You need quantum gravity (and maybe even more physics beyond that) for that. Every other question he is likely to ask, you can answer to within the highest accuracy that can be measured by mankind.
On the other hand, suppose you are ignorant of quantum physics and relativity, but you know everything about classical physics. Well, your five-year-old son is going to grow up to have a very poor understanding of the physical world, because there are a lot of simple questions he can ask you that you will either be unable to answer or to which you will give observably wrong answers. You won't be able to explain why the Sun is hot, why light bulbs light up, how modern clocks work, how computers work, how wireless telecommunications work, et cetera.
So if you don't know quantum gravity, you're ignorant of some things. And I don't want to downplay that; there is a reason why physicists are working so frantically on the problem. But if you only know classical physics, you're ignorant of most things. And there's a difference there that's more than just quibbling -- it's important.
Like, I guess my problem is, isn't it kind of bad if quantum mechanics requires ignoring one of the fundamental forces of the universe in order to make it work? That seems concerning to me.
If your concern is "there are still important unanswered questions, so I think we need to continue refining our theoretical picture," then that's great! Your concern is widely shared and agreed upon. If your concern is "that must mean this is all bull***** and William Lane Craig's arguments still have merit" then, well, no. Incompleteness in scientific theories does not create a hidey-hole for people that make up nonsense.
Also, out of curiosity, you explained the problem with quantum mechanics when it comes down to gravity. What are the shortcomings of relativity? I'm going to go ahead and guess, "Does not work with quanta," but can you elaborate?
Well, I don't like the use of the word "shortcoming" here. It's not a "shortcoming" of, say, algebraic number theory that it doesn't explain where babies come from. It was never meant to explain that. But I think I know what you mean.
Relativity explains the following phenomena:
1) That the background against which physical processes take place is a combination of space and time that obeys the axioms of Riemannian geometry.
2) How the geometry of spacetime deforms in the presence of mass.
3) How things move in deformed geometry.
4) How the motion of something changes when you change the coordinate system in which you measure it.
Moreover, it explains all of those phenomena with the maximum accuracy human beings can measure them. We put an atomic clock on a plane, flew it at supersonic speeds, and found that the clock slowed down by exactly as much as relativity said it would. We sent up a satellite to measure the frame dragging of Earth's gravity field and found that the spacetime around Earth is warped in precisely the unique way that relativity says it is. And so forth. So it has no shortcomings in that it explains everything it claims to explain with as much accuracy as we can obtain.
So any "shortcomings" in the sense that I think you mean consist of its failure to explain things it does not claim to explain. It's not as simple as "it doesn't explain quanta," although it doesn't -- it's an entirely continuous theory. I already gave one example -- relativity doesn't explain nuclear fusion, or why stars make light. For another example, relativity is a theory of motion -- not a theory of interaction. So it can't (and doesn't try to) explain what happens when, say, you mix an acid and a base.
I feel like the mistake you're making is that you think quantum theory explains everything that happens at small scales and relativity explains everything that happens at big scales. This is not the case. They explain two different classes of phenomena. It happens that gravity tends to become a dominant force at the cosmological scale, making relativity more important there -- but that's because it explains gravity, not because the cosmological length scale is big.
EDIT: If you have further questions about quantum theory, I'd like to suggest a new thread, because quantum theory is really only related to Craig's claims about causation and we're now discussing things that are very tangential to that.
Bear with me here, but I'm not so sure I understand the refutation of the moral argument. This is probably the argument for the existence of God I hear the most, so I want to make sure I understand.
(1) If God does not exist, objective moral values and duties do not exist.
Does this premise not have better support out there than what Craig gives it? As you say, this is an 'old, old argument', and as a general rule I'm more interested in understanding these arguments and where they break down than understanding where Craig's particular presentation of them falls flat.
Is the long and short of why this premise doesn't hold because there is a distinction between objective morality and ultimate morality? Would you point me toward a couple non-divine theories of objective morality?
(2) Objective moral values and duties do exist.
Did you address this premise somewhere, and I just missed it? Not that you are obliged to prove every single premise false; one false premise kills the argument. I'm just interested to hear a response (from anyone) to this one, and am genuinely concerned I flat out missed it in Blinking Spirit's post.
Next up: the Teleological Argument. A.k.a. the Long, Boring Argument. Forgive me if it takes a while for me to work up the time and energy for this one.
There's no rush! Thanks for working through these at any speed and in any depth at all.
(1) If God does not exist, objective moral values and duties do not exist.
Does this premise not have better support out there than what Craig gives it?
Well, one could hardly do worse.
Among the variations of the Moral Argument I've encountered, the best in my judgment is Immanuel Kant's in his Critique of Practical Reason. He argues that, if objective morality exists, that is ultimately the same as saying that moral agents are obliged to bring about the summum bonum, the perfect good - all moral imperatives are just tiny pieces of that great goal. He then invokes the principle of "ought implies can" - what is obligatory cannot be impossible - to deduce that the summum bonum must be possible to achieve. But human beings certainly lack the power to achieve the summum bonum on their own, so there must be some other moral agent out there who has that power. This agent must be vastly powerful and vastly benevolent - must, in short, closely match the description of the entity we commonly refer to as "God". In particular, objective justice demands that good people be rewarded and bad people be punished, but this often does not happen to people while they are alive, so the agent we're describing must have the power to create and enforce an afterlife.
Before going into where Kant goes wrong, it's worth noting a couple of things. Firstly, Kant doesn't make God the source of morality but rather a logical consequence of it. This is unusual for arguments from morality, but in my opinion makes the premise stronger: the standard response of "Why can't there be some other source for morality?" doesn't work on it, since it will conclude God must exist regardless of morality's source. Secondly, Kant argues in his Critique of Pure Reason that no a priori argument can prove the existence of God - he's one of the most prominent philosophers I was alluding to in my own discussion of a priori argumentation above. So he does not actually advance the argument from morality in its full-blown form, concluding that God must definitely exist. He's saying something more nuanced: all moral thought requires the assumption that God exists.
The first point of attack against Kant is to question the principle of "ought implies can". That has far-reaching implications, though, so many philosophers may not want to do it. Second is to question whether objective morality really implies the summum bonum thing. Maybe the moral imperatives are more modest, and really do only place goals that are within the capability of mere mortals; consider the imperative "Do the most good that it is possible for you to do." Third is to argue that the ability to make progress towards the perfect good is sufficient to satisfy the "ought implies can" principle. And fourth is to speculate that maybe the summum bonum is within the reach of humans after all, perhaps through sufficiently advanced science or perhaps for some other reason.
For my money, the fourth attack is easily the most fun, but the second and third are the most persuasive (they are sort of two sides of the same coin).
Is the long and short of why this premise doesn't hold because there is a distinction between objective morality and ultimate morality?
Yes. As we saw above, Kant tried to avoid it by not making God the source of morality, but I think his argument fails because the summum bonum is still an ultimate morality; that's basically the way my second and third attacks hit it.
EDIT: Wait, I take that back. One of the other things proponents of the argument from morality like to do is to advance one of the arguments for moral nihilism to establish that there is no possibility of an objective morality, then turn around and say "A morality given by God solves this!" So here they are attempting to use the distinction between objective morality and ultimate morality. The problem is that they're giving the distinction more power than it actually has: nihilist arguments apply to ultimate morality too. Nihilism says "There is no morality at all", and ultimate morality is still a kind of morality.
Would you point me toward a couple non-divine theories of objective morality?
Deontology, utilitarianism, and virtue ethics are the three major branches of secular moral philosophy. In their standard formulations they are all realist, although I believe there are non-realist variants of all three (and, for that matter, theist versions).
Did you address this premise somewhere, and I just missed it?
Yeah, sorry if I wasn't clear about this. Craig treated the two premises as a package deal - "people generally believe both premises" - so so did I. Premise (2), like (1), is defended by an appeal to popularity with no other justification, and an atheist or agnostic could simply reject it.
But in practice, of course, many atheists and agnostics do affirm the existence of objective morality, so (1) is the real problematic straw man.
The problems with the whole "objective morality" argument are that its claims are so unsupported and its words so fuzzy that it's more challenging to explain all the problems with it than many less-flawed arguments.
First, the arguments asserts that objective morality exists without any support other than saying people generally believe in objective morality. Argumentum ad populum is a logical fallacy. Craig should know this.
Second, what criteria is required for something to be Objectively Wrong or Objectively Right? This is an important distinction, because it reveals that Craig's appeal to popularity itself rests on an equivocation. If we define something as "objectively wrong" based on whether god says it's right or wrong - god is absolutely necessary. However, a lot (hopefully most) of people that Craig appeals to in believing that Rape or Murder is objectively wrong no matter the culture in question don't say this is because god says so. They appeal to external criteria. For example, many people get into arguments with religious people and say things like "if god told you to rape a child, does that make it right?" Clearly, they're arguing about objective morality in terms of external criteria that has nothing to do with whether god says it's right or not. Many people hold up the bible's endorsement of slavery as wrong and many appologists spend time trying to excuse it. If the only "objective morality" that mattered was "god says so" - then where would the argument be?
However, if there's external criteria that determines whether something is right or wrong - then god, by definition, isn't necessary to explain it. To try and get around this, the more brazen appologists try to claim that since this can be termed a moral "law" and that laws require "lawgivers", and we don't count for some reason - it must be god doing it. Obviously, this is a ridiculous word game.
The argument from objective morality is simply broken.
I'd be interested to hear the refutations to these 5 arguments. For convenience's sake, the arguments are:
1. The cosmological argument from contingency
2. The kalam cosmological argument based on the beginning of the universe
3. The moral argument based upon objective moral values and duties
4. The teleological argument from fine-tuning
5. The ontological argument from the possibility of God's existence to his actuality
Just looking to understand. Thanks in advance.
Section 1.1
Craig makes an appeal to intution: if you detected the presence of an object and someone asserted that object was uncaused, you'd think he was crazy. Well, why would you think that? It's question-begging. You'd only call someone crazy for making the assertion if the premise were true, but here we're questioning whether or not the premise is true. (Ironically, Craig immediately goes on to accuse some hypothetical straw-atheist of this error while blatantly committing it himself.)
Speaking of that, Craig accuses a straw-atheist who argues that the universe is uncaused because there is nothing outside of it of question-begging. This accusation is based on equivocation. There are two definitions of "universe" that Craig equivocates between: what we might call the "metaphysical universe," which includes everything that metaphysically exists, including God if he exists -- and what we might call the "physical universe," which is the bubble of spacetime that is timelike connected to us here on Earth.
If you taboo the word "universe" from this conversation (and also from everything else Craig says, if you want to see a master equivocator in action) you can see that in the metaphysical sense of that word, the straw-atheist is obviously correct: tautologically, nothing can exist outside of the set of everything that exists. And in the physical sense of the word, the straw-atheist is wrong, but so, then, is Craig: we don't need a transcendent, uncaused, timeless, blah blah blah anymore -- all we need is a slightly bigger bubble of spacetime.
Section 1.2
Craig's argument here is appallingly bad. He repeatedly makes the mistake of listing a set of cases that are not logically exhaustive, then simply ignoring the gaps. Here's one way of being an atheist: "I think the physical universe has an explanation for its existence, but that explanation is not God." That case is totally unaccounted for in Craig's argument about the straw atheist. Oops.
He makes the same mistake again later: he asserts that only an "abstract object" or an "unembodied mind" meet the criteria for being able to create the universe. Well, what about an "unembodied non-mind" or even an "embodied mind?"
2.1
Again, Craig makes question-begging appeals to intuition. "To suggest that things could just pop into being uncaused is literally worse than magic." Well, it is if you believe this premise. If you don't (and you shouldn't, because, well, quantum mechanics) then it's not. Craig doesn't seem to understand that merely saying everyone who disagrees with you is crazy does not constitute an affirmative argument.
2.3
Numerous equivocations on "universe." It's a fun exercise to taboo it throughout this entire section.
3.1
Craig literally does not even present an affirmative argument. Not even a bad one. He just points out that some people might believe it, and not even plausibly at that. Atrocious.
3.3
It is always amusing to watch religious philosophers struggle with the Euthyphro dilemma. Craig somehow manages to impale himself on both horns at once, which you would think would be impossible.
4.1
Non-exhaustive case analysis again. Another possibility: one or more of the physical constants are actually logically necessary, but we haven't discovered why yet. (Leonard Susskind believes all the physical constants are logically necessary and that the ultimate theory of physics will include no tunable constants.)
4.2
Besides the fact that it's pointless to elaborate on a logically non-exhaustive case analysis, we've got a unique departure from the usual Craig pattern of uncritically embracing human intuition: here he rejects the human intuition that tells us that unlikely things do indeed happen, pointing out that we plebes simply lack his refined conceptions concerning the statistical likelihood of the universe. (This whole thing, by the way, is of course an instance of the fallacy of retrospective improbability)
Which if thou dost not use for clearing away the clouds from thy mind
It will go and thou wilt go, never to return.
First and most importantly, I am not here trying to prove that God does not exist. I am here showing why these five particular arguments fail to prove that God exists. Many of my refutations will take the form of, "Maybe this claim Craig makes is true, but maybe it isn't." This may seem like a weak counterargument, like you can rebut it by saying "But maybe it is true! You haven't proven it isn't!" But I'm not trying to prove it isn't true. I don't need to prove it isn't true. The way deductive argument works, Craig fails to prove God's existence if there is even the possibility that his premises are false. If his premises are merely possible, then his argument at best shows that God is merely possible. And most atheists, including myself and even Richard Dawkins, concede that God is possible. Craig wants to prove that God is actual, and for him to do that, his premises must actually be true. "Maybe" does not suffice for him. If I were trying to prove God's nonexistence, "maybe" would not suffice for me either, but again, that's not what I'm trying to do.
This limited scope of my goals does mean I'm leaving open the possibility that some other argument not given by Craig might prove God's existence. That said, it is generally good philosophical practice to be suspicious of any argument that, like Craig's, runs on a priori (or "armchair") reasoning and purports to prove some material fact about existence and nonexistence or cause and effect. The strong consensus among modern philosophers is that this is simply impossible. The arguments about the problem get involved and contentious, and I'm not going to go into them here. But to get a sense of it, ask yourself whether you can sit in an armchair and, reasoning purely from first principles, prove the existence of the moon. You can't. Armchair reasoning can get you from abstract to abstract, leading to great truths of mathematics and logic. By no means am I denigrating the armchair method; it is essential for this. But you can't get from these abstract truths to concrete facts about particular things. And, as vast and powerful as God allegedly is, that does not change his status as a concrete particular thing. Craig doesn't want to prove something about the abstract idea of godhood; he wants to prove that there is a God. And the sense is that to prove there is a God, like proving there is a moon, he would have to engage in empirical reasoning - scientific observation of the world. Now, like I said, the logical rigor of this distinction between abstract armchair stuff and concrete material stuff is contentious, so I'm not going to claim that there is no way some argument could somehow jump the gap and prove God's existence. But no argument - about God or anything else - has successfully jumped the gap yet. And this is a good reason to approach any argument that purports to do so from a position of extreme skepticism.
Okay. Let's do this.
1. The cosmological argument from contingency
Let's start with (1). This premise is dense with problems. I'll divide it into two parts:
(1a) is the backbone of Craig's argument. As such, it is very odd that he does not even try to give us compelling reason to accept it. He can only appeal to our intuitions: "This claim, when you reflect on it, seems very plausibly true." But as we have discovered to our chagrin in modern physics, our intuitions about the ways the world works are often misleading or nonsensical when dealing with phenomena beyond our everyday experience, like quantum mechanics. Craig ridicules this as "taxicab logic", but beyond ridicule gives us no reason why we shouldn't do it - and ignores the confirmed fact that, at least some of the time, we must. Surely an operation that is sometimes necessary cannot be fallacious. The problem lies only in Craig's expectation that the rule of explanation (proposed by him in the first place) must be adhered to universally.
Craig goes on to say that "it seems that premise 1 is more plausibly true than false, which is all we need for a good argument", which I was shocked to read coming from a trained professional philosopher. No, Dr. Craig, plausibility is not all you need. You are trying to construct a deductive proof of God's existence, a path along which we are led step by step through inevitable logic to a conclusion that cannot be doubted. For your proof to be sound, your premises don't just need to be "plausible", they need to be true. I hear a car driving by right now. It is plausible that this car is red, because many cars are red. But I certainly have not proven that the car is red. It is a live possibility that the car is not red, and it will remain a live possibility until I provide persuasive reasoning that it must be red.
With that hole (conceded expressly by Craig! I still can't believe it) the premise, and the whole argument, are dead already. If it's possible that not everything has an explanation, then it's possible that the universe has no explanation, thus it's possible that there is no God. We could stop here. But we've only discussed the first half of the first premise, so let's keep going. In (1b), Craig says that an explanation must be of one of two kinds: necessity or external cause. To begin with, whenever someone says that there are only n kinds of a thing, we should always ask "Why only n? Why not others?" If no reason is apparent, we are dealing with a false dilemma (or trilemma or whatever). It may be that the universe has some explanation we don't yet understand that is neither necessity nor cause; the possibility has not been ruled out.
And both necessity and cause are problematic as Craig's two varieties of explanation. Necessity just plain is not an explanation at all. If I assert the Pythagorean Theorem, and you ask why it's true, and I say "It's true because it's necessary", then I have explained nothing at all. Your obvious next question is, "Why is it necessary?" The explanation of the Pythagorean Theorem is its proof. The proof is necessary, but that's a description we give it after examining it, not a property that imbues it beforehand and makes it true. (We will discuss this again when we get to the ontological argument, where the misconception of necessity does a lot more work.)
As for causation, Craig is just plain equivocating here. Cosmological arguments traditionally start out not with "everything has an explanation" but rather "everything has a cause"; Craig's own formulation of the Kalām argument does this. And as such, there exist many many counterarguments that pick holes in the principle of causation. We'll get to a few of those when we get to the Kalām argument. For this argument, the switch from "cause" to "explanation" is clearly intended to bypass some of the problems of causation. And this is not in and of itself a disingenuous move; it's done a lot when formulating various problems in metaphysics, and there's no reason to commit yourself to the concept of causation with all its baggage when all you're really looking for is an explanation. But here, Craig is just slipping from explanation right back into causation. Causation is what he really wants; starting with "explanation" is just a token evasion of the problems.
Okay. On to premise (2)!
I'm getting tired of writing, so it's fortunate for me that the problem with (2) is much more straightforward: Craig's only justification for it is a blatant strawman. "So what does the atheist almost always say in response to the contingency argument? He typically asserts the following: If atheism is true, the universe has no explanation of its existence." Maybe some atheists do assert that, but I've never heard it. More to the point, I'm not asserting it. Craig is right that the assertion is logically synonymous with premise (2), but all that means is that he is setting up his straw atheist to agree with him from the outset. Consider instead a more reasonable atheist assertion: "We do not know the explanation of the universe's existence." This cannot be contraposited into (2). So I do not accept (2). I am given no reason whatsoever to accept (2). Craig's only reasoning only applies to people who already accept (2) - who, again, are mostly of the fibrous agricultural byproduct persuasion.
Now, if you believe the universe exists, you accept (3). And (4) and (5) do follow from (1), (2), and (3). So other than the aforementioned problems, the Cosmological Argument from Contingency runs just fine. I will note in passing, though, that this argument has established no properties for God. Even if you accept it, it only says that he is the explanation for the universe. It does not say that he feels benevolent towards humans, performs miracles, or had a son about two thousand years ago. It does not even say that he exists in the present. Maybe God created the universe and then immediately disappeared. Or maybe he was around for most of the universe, but he disappeared yesterday. This runs counter to most of our intuitions about what God is like, but the proof doesn't say anything about those intuitions. It leaves open all possibilities.
I think that's enough for now. Join me next time when we look at the Kalām Cosmological Argument!
EDIT: Jump to my other rebuttals.
1. The Cosmological Argument from Contingency
2. The Kalām Cosmological Argument
3. The Moral Argument
4. The Teleological Argument
5. The Ontological Argument
candidus inperti; si nil, his utere mecum.
wut.
Like, seriously, that can be read two ways and they're both absurd.
Interpretation 1: He's saying that we are naming the explanation — which I assume he means cause — of the universe "God," regardless of what that explanation might be.
Interpretation 2: He's saying that if there's an explanation for the universe, then it MUST be the Christian explanation.
Interpretation #2 is begging the question. He's outright saying, "If there's an answer, it must be the Christian answer." And, no. No, you don't get to declare yourself the winner at the beginning of an argument without providing any logical basis for your argument in a rational discussion. That's begging the question. It's also obnoxious. If the Giants declared themselves the winners of the World Series, would we have to give them the title? No, because they gotta beat the Royals first, because you have to actually prove things before we accept them to be true.
And Interpretation #1 is silly because...
... that's NOT what we understand Christian God to be. It is AN ASPECT of what we understand Christian God to be, but there's more to Christian God than that. I can't say that because something is a mammal, I've proved it to be a human being. It could be a ferret for all we know, and ferrets ain't people! [Citation needed]
Even if we took as given that a "transcendent, unembodied Mind" exists, that still doesn't make said Mind the Christan God, because there's WAY more being claimed about Christian God in Christianity than just "God is a transcendent, unembodied Mind." So even if you named the cause of the universe "God," it wouldn't be the God of Christianity unless you proved it had all the other qualities of the God of Christianity aside from "created the universe."
Also, Stephen Hawking would argue against the idea of an outside creator being necessary to create the universe, saying that instead it's possible the universe could have spontaneously created itself. I'm not saying he's right, and I certainly don't understand the basis for his statements, but he's apparently challenged the assertion that such a thing necessarily follows, so there's that.
EDIT:
That does not prove the Christian God, or any interpretation of God, was necessarily the cause.
1. I've clearly missed the 'quantum mechanics' boat - why do you guys (or gals) bring it up, and how does it relate to causality?
2. Blinking Spirit, I get the feeling that the second paragraph in your post is pretty important, but I'm not sure I completely understand it. Is what you are saying essentially, 'In order to prove God exists, there must be empirical evidence for it' like there is for the moon? Would it conceivably be possible to make an a priori argument for 'God (or the moon, or whatever) probably exists'? And if so, what degree of probability are we talking about here? I'm fairly confused about this point in general, so if anyone can spell it out for me it would be much appreciated.
Matter at the quantum scale routinely violates Hume's criteria for causation. Consider the humble incandescent light bulb brightening your room, which, though discovered through the means of classical physics, is ultimately a quantum device which operates by way of spontaneous emission. You might at first think that the light bulb is a perfectly causal device; after all, every time you close the switch, it casts light -- there is a "constant union betwixt the cause (application of current) and effect (emission of light)."
However, the reason you perceive it as causal is because of the vast number of atoms in the filament. The light bulb appears causal for the same reason that a billionaire playing a billion roulette tables simultaneously is so nearly certain to win some of his money back that the chance of that not happening isn't worth mentioning. If you had a "single-atom light bulb" whose filament consisted of only one tungsten atom, you would find it to be a singularly acausal device. The "constant union betwixt the cause and effect" would be broken. In fact, there is a nonzero probability that you could wait until the heat death of the universe after flicking on the switch and your single-atom light bulb would still not light up.
What we've learned from modern physics is that the more you "zoom in" on the world, the less the traditional concept of causation applies. In a very deep sense, the universe (according to the current most accepted picture) is best thought of as the conjunction of enormously many uncaused phenomena which, taken together and scaled up to the level of ordinary human perception, appear causal because of statistical averaging.
Which if thou dost not use for clearing away the clouds from thy mind
It will go and thou wilt go, never to return.
Another example is this: all across the universe, even in a complete vacuum, particle-antiparticle pairs will pop in and out of existence, randomly, with no cause. Notice I didn't say "no apparent cause." It's known that they have no cause; they are simply a consequence of Heisenberg uncertainty.
We should notice a problem right off the bat: Craig's formal argument does not conclude that God exists. He merely says, "Once we reach the conclusion that the universe has a cause, we can then analyze what properties such a cause must have and assess its theological significance." As we will see, he will get around to talking about why this cause must be God in his informal discussion in the conclusion section. Now, making an argument informally rather than formally does not make it wrong - obviously, since I'm writing my own arguments here informally - but when a philosopher loves making formal arguments as much as Craig does and starts making one, but then switches to informality halfway through, that is reason to be suspicious. Why would he do that?
But let's start at the beginning. Premise (1): "Everything that begins to exist has a cause." Why? According to Craig, it "seems obviously true - at the least, more so than its negation." Again we're running into his bizarre misconception that his premises only need to be "plausible" for his arguments to prove the existence of God. We discussed this earlier, so now let's just note that this argument has already failed and move on. Craig then says that the opposite belief, that uncaused things are possible, is "literally worse than magic". Well, I'm not sure about his use of the word "literally", but it would have to be worse than magic in his eyes, wouldn't it, since magic is what his position rests on. (If I may be permitted a dig in return for the ones being thrown at me.) And regardless of the magic issue, Craig's dismissal of the possibility of uncaused things is perfunctory at best. He objects that "it’s inexplicable why just anything and everything do not come into existence uncaused from nothing." As in the previous argument, he's equivocating between "explanation" and "cause". It remains open that there could be an explanation for things coming into existence or failing to do so that is non-causal. And if we accept that all explanations must be causal, then yes, it is inexplicable - but this is only a problem if you think everything needs an explanation/cause, which is precisely what this possibility is denying. So even then, Craig is just begging the question.
But maybe all that is just me pulling some logical sleight-of-hand. Lord knows that's easy enough - Craig does it extensively. So let's look at science. We have actually discovered that things come into and leave existence without cause in the quantum-mechanical realm. What is actual cannot be impossible. Craig completely ignores this fact. Other advocates of the Kalām argument have commented on it, however, and usually they say something to the effect that the cause of quantum fluctuations is the physical law. But if this is a valid "cause", why couldn't the cause of the universe be some other physical law, not yet discovered? Where did the physical law come from, and why? I don't know, but it doesn't have to be God. We don't even have any reason to suspect that physical laws began to exist in the way the physical universe did, so the Kalām argument just falls flat on that possibility.
But let's set that aside, and grant for the sake of argument that the universe must have had a cause of the sort Craig wants to believe. In his conclusion section, he discusses (again, in an odd switch to informality) why this cause must be God. He starts by heaping some abuse on Daniel Dennett's countertheory, that the universe is self-caused. I don't know much about this theory, and Craig is more interested in mocking it than presenting it fairly, so I won't bother trying to defend it. However, I will note that Craig's incredulous "It would have to exist before it existed!" implies that he sees time naïvely as a straight arrow from past to future. I'm no physicist, but I know enough about general relativity to be dangerous - and more, apparently, than Dr. Craig. Time is flexible. It is not immediately obvious why it could not loop back on itself. Indeed, the possibility is discussed enough in theoretical physics that there is a name for the phenomenon: the closed timelike curve. Now, there are a host of physical and philosophical complications surrounding the possibility of a causal loop. I'm skeptical myself that this is a good candidate for the cause of the physical universe. But it is viable enough that Craig cannot justifiably dismiss it offhand, using only his personal intuitions about the nature of time. They alone do not make a proposition "logically incoherent", and they don't establish that the cause of the universe must stand outside space and time. (Side note: I avoid the words "transcend" and "transcendental" like the plague. They are far too laden with connotations.)
And what would it mean to stand outside of space and time, anyway? Craig argues that anything timeless must be unchanging. But this seems problematic because a cause needs to change in order to cause something; at the very minimum, it must lose the property "not the cause of the universe" and gain the property "the cause of the universe". And if we look at Craig's Christian God, he changes a lot, for instance going from "not incarnate" to "incarnate in Jesus" to "not incarnate" again. Parallel changes can be pointed out for other proposed gods. As for space, Craig argues for immateriality because "material things are constantly changing at the molecular and atomic levels". First of all, this isn't true; the atomic level is not the lowest level of the material universe, and some subatomic particles seem to be unchanging, particularly those like photons that move at the speed of light and therefore really are timeless after a fashion. And as Craig has pointed out, timelessness precludes change. If the cause of the universe were timeless, it would be unchanging even if it were ordinary matter that were somehow pulled out of time. In time, the matter would be changing, but outside of time, there is no time for it to change in. So you cannot draw conclusions about the material nature of the cause of the universe from the premise that the cause must be timeless.
And again, if it is timeless, it is unclear how it could cause the universe or do anything else. Causation requires a temporal relationship: the cause comes before the effect. This is, in some formulations, the actual definition of time. Craig himself seems to acknowledge this in his objection to Dennett, saying that the universe must have come before itself in order to have caused itself. But if the universe must have come before the universe to cause the universe, then anything else that caused the universe must also have come before the universe, and therefore must be in time. In attempting to place his desired cause of the universe outside of time, Craig is forgetting his own argument.
Now, how many causes of the universe are there, and do they themselves have causes before them? Craig invokes Ockham's Razor to claim there must only be one uncaused cause. But this is not what Ockham's Razor does. Ockham's Razor says that we should not assume there are more entities than are necessary to explain what we observe. It does not say that there cannot be more entities. If we find a bowl of soup on the counter, it is sufficient to theorize that one chef made it. But this theory might be wrong. There might have been more. Ockham's Razor certainly does not prove anything to the contrary. Furthermore, Craig's reasoning for why the cause must be without beginning and uncaused is that if it had a beginning and were caused, there would have to be another cause before it. He is taking the desired minimum number of causes (one) and determining from that what the facts must be, which is precisely the reverse of what Ockham's Razor mandates. He doesn't even give a strong reason why we shouldn't accept the possibility of an infinite regress; he just asserts that that would be a bad thing.
What are the powers of the cause? Let's start by noticing that even by framing the question in these terms Craig is presuming the cause must be some sort of intelligence. You don't say that a rock or a sun or a singularity has "powers". They don't make choices and perform actions. So Craig is getting ahead of himself here. But let's reinterpret "powers" to mean "phenomena that it is possible for an object to cause". I think this gets at what Craig is going for without implying personhood prematurely. Now, Craig says, "This entity must be unimaginably powerful, if not omnipotent, since it created the universe without any material cause." But this is nonsense. We have proof of exactly one "power": the causation of the universe. Attributing any further "powers" to the cause is completely speculative. It's an especially dramatic leap to say that the thing might have all the "powers".
Is the cause a person? Craig cites the properties of timelessness and immateriality, and refers back to his assertion that "there are only two sorts of things that could fit that description: either an abstract object like a number or else an unembodied mind." In response, I will refer back to my admonition that "whenever someone says that there are only n kinds of a thing, we should always ask 'Why only n? Why not others?' If no reason is apparent, we are dealing with a false dilemma". And this is an absolutely shameless false dilemma. Craig does not even attempt to convince us that no other sorts of timeless, immaterial things are possible. Until he does, we need waste no time entertaining his claim.
Craig's second argument that the cause must be a person is more interesting. He notices an apparent problem: "The cause is in some sense eternal and yet the effect that it produced is not eternal but began to exist a finite time ago. How can this happen?" As a solution, he proposes that this is possible if the cause has a mind and free will, and therefore can choose to create the universe at a particular time. But there are two issues here.
The first is that he is affirming the consequent. His logic is "If the cause is a person, we can have a finite universe; we have a finite universe; therefore the cause is a person." As any student of logic can tell you, this is a fallacious form. Craig makes a token attempt to avoid the issue by asserting that personhood is the only solution to the eternity problem. This would make his logic valid, but he does provide any argument for it. As far as we know, there may be any number of other solutions, and therefore there is no reason to believe that the cause must be a person.
The second issue is that it's not as obvious as Craig makes it sound that a mind and free will would serve as a solution to the eternity problem. The only minds of which we have any direct observations are our own, and they are finite, material, temporal, and caused. Skirting the great free will debate, both sides of it acknowledge that our actions do not spring spontaneously from nothing, which is what Craig is asking us to believe of his cause. If one of us were disembodied and pulled out of time, we could not make any decisions or perform any actions. So if the cause is capable of doing this, it must have some property beyond being a mind that allows it to do so, which means being a mind is not really the solution to the eternity problem - that other property is. Furthermore, when we make decisions, that is a mental change we undergo, yet Craig flatly denies that his cause must undergo this change when it makes the decision to create the universe. It seems incoherent to be able to make a decision without changing; certainly the topic is worthy of more argument than Craig gives it. Even if he's right about that, though, it's yet another difference between this mind and the minds we actually know anything about. If Craig has to draw so many differences between regular minds and the hypothetical cause-mind, his case that a mind is a good candidate for cause of the universe becomes less and less plausible. He might as well nominate anything else and say that thing has all these special properties that let it do what he wants it to do.
To conclude, then:
(a) we should not be so quick to believe that the universe must have a cause; and
(b) even if it does have a cause, we have no reason to believe that cause has any of the properties Craig is trying to attribute to it.
Next up: the Moral Argument. I anticipate that post will be shorter but bloodier - he says less, and what he does say is really stupid.
EDIT: Jump to my other rebuttals.
1. The Cosmological Argument from Contingency
2. The Kalām Cosmological Argument
3. The Moral Argument
4. The Teleological Argument
5. The Ontological Argument
candidus inperti; si nil, his utere mecum.
Other philosophers would strengthen it to what you said, but again, the arguments for doing this are somewhat contentious and beyond our scope here which is already quite large enough.
Classical a priori arguments are not probabilistic. If you look at a proof of the Pythagorean Theorem, it does not and cannot conclude that the Theorem is probably true. Either it definitely, absolutely, inescapably proves it is true, or it does not prove anything at all. Probability only comes into play once you start reasoning empirically - and once you do, your conclusion is never absolute. Putting a number on the probability is, again, contentious and beyond our scope here, and I wouldn't be the best person to discuss it in any case. But I will point you in the direction of Bayesian inference if you're interested in it.
candidus inperti; si nil, his utere mecum.
Even having taken multiple semesters of quantum mechanics in college, I find these concepts very hard to explain in simple prose. And I'll add that while quantum mechanics is one of the most rigorously tested and verified branches of science, it is extremely counterintuitive, so if you have no experience with it, you're not going to believe anything I say because it will just seem totally wrong. So let me just preface this with a quote from my favorite physicist and Nobel laureate:
The basic discovery beind QM is that everything in the universe is a wave. An electron, for example, is not actually a particle located at a particular point in space. Instead, it's a wave function with a higher probability of being located at certain places than others. At any given moment, it has some probability of "teleporting" to any place (or time) in the universe. These quantum "teleportation" effects (usually called "tunneling") are something that we can observe in everyday technologies. For example, old CRT television tubes work on this principle. They send a beam of electrons from a cathode to the TV screen. But from a classical physics perspective, the electrical potential of the tube shouldn't be high enough to rip the electrons out of copper atoms at the anode. The electrons have to tunnel or teleport a small distance to get out. And they do.
The fact that everything behaves like a wave has several important consequences that can be proven mathematically. One is called the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle ("HUP"). People often characterize the HUP as being about measurement; they'll say something like "the more accurately you measure the momentum of a particle, the less accurately you know its position" or something like that. But the HUP isn't limited to measurement, it's actually a fundamental property of the universe. It would be more accurate to say that the HUP puts a limit on how accurately these properties can be defined or that HUP describes how much uncertainty is inherent in the relationship between properties.
Another consequence of QM is that all of space is "quantized" into what you can think of as tiny little "pixels" of reality. In other words, even empty space isn't continuous, it has this detectable structure of minuscule pixels that are smaller than atoms. This isn't just a simplifying assumption or anything like that, this is, demonstrably, how reality works.
So let's get down to the particles: each of these "pixels" of space also obeys the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, even if it is an apparently "empty" pixel. The consequence of this is that we can never be sure that any given pixel is in fact empty. There is always a chance, at any given point in time, that the pixel will randomly take on an energy value greater than zero, and this energy will then manifest itself as a particle-antiparticle pair. These pairs come into being for no "reason" whatsoever. They are a pure consequence of the fact that the property of each pixel is uncertain.
This is all provable mathematically, but we also have real-life experiments that show this happens, such as the force observed in the Casimir effect.
And when you try to figure this quantization into what Einsteinian relativity says about spacetime, the math explodes.
Fun!
To be clear: they are "smaller than atoms" by approximately the same magnitude that atoms are smaller than the Solar System.
candidus inperti; si nil, his utere mecum.
candidus inperti; si nil, his utere mecum.
As I understand it, its like, for everyday life we have Newtonian physics which works pretty well, but it wasn't working so hot for planets and some other stuff so then we get Einstein's physics, which then didn't work at super small levels, so we have quantum mechanics. Or something. I dunno.
Not so. Observed classical behavior is the result of classical measuring devices (like your eyeballs) averaging quantum behavior over a large ensemble of particles. There are a series of theorems in quantum mechanics that prove this. The most basic such theorem is Ehrenfest's theorem, which says that Newtonian motions are the average of quantum motions.
In the interest of full disclosure, I must point out that physicists haven't yet been able to explain gravity as the average of a quantum phenomenon -- but all other known phenomena are explained this way.
Which if thou dost not use for clearing away the clouds from thy mind
It will go and thou wilt go, never to return.
My understanding was that quantum theory is something that works at this energy level, vs. relativity was something that works at this energy level, and it's getting a theory that works for every energy level that's been the confounding thing.
Also, two questions about everything in the universe being a wave:
1. Does that understanding still work when applied to things much larger than quanta — like, you know, our size? Like, there's been mention here that Newtonian physics still ends up pretty much working because we're so large and comprised of so many particles that there's a reason that we don't just teleport randomly, right? Well if that's the case, then does uncertainty really apply to objects as large as we are, and if not, does it really make sense to think of ourselves as waves?
2. So what's all this then about light needing to be thought of as a particle as well as a wave?
No. Forget this business about "energy level." If there were no such thing as gravity in the universe, the standard model of quantum theory would explain every observed phenomenon at every energy level, from Casimir forces all the way up to bulk matter-antimatter annihilation.
The issue is that the Standard Model and relativity explain completely different classes of phenomena. Suppose we're making observations of a star system. Relativity says nothing about how the star produces light, but everything about why they hold planets in orbit. The Standard Model tells us how the star produces light, but not why it holds things in orbit. The "obvious" idea is to stick them together and get one theory that explains everything about the star. However, when you attempt to glue these things together in the "obvious" way to get a theory that explains every observed phenomenon, the mathematics blows up and you get infinite answers to problems that should have simple, finite solutions.
This is not as bad as it sounds, because gravity is an incredibly weak force. We can do pure standard quantum theory, completely ignoring gravity and treating it as if it didn't exist, and get things like working light bulbs, cellular phones, nuclear reactors, and so forth. We only need quantum gravity when dealing with cosmological phenomena where gravity contributes significantly to what's happening, like, say, black holes, galactic nuclei, the Big Bang, cosmic inflation, et cetera. (Here you might be forgiven for becoming confused, because these are all high-energy phenomena. I say again, it's not high energy that's the problem, it's high gravity. The Large Hadron Collider produces high-energy phenomena that are completely explained by quantum theory, because though it's high-energy, it's low-gravity.)
These high-gravity phenomena are all important things, to be sure, but if you aren't studying one of those specific things, then chances are that either quantum physics or gravity is "good enough" by itself to explain what's going on.
In my humble opinion, bitterroot shouldn't have said this. It isn't true. Better to say that everything in the universe is a quantum object that is completely different from any classical phenomenon (including particles and waves) but which has some properties coming from the theory of particles and some properties coming from the theory of waves. Watch this Feynman lecture to get a better explanation.
Yes, it makes sense to think of ourselves as quantum objects. Specifically, we are (the superposition of a bunch of) de Broglie waves. (Yes, de Broglie called them waves, but they are not, strictly speaking, waves.)
Watch the Feynman lecture.
Which if thou dost not use for clearing away the clouds from thy mind
It will go and thou wilt go, never to return.
Craig's defense of his two premises is short enough that I'll just quote it in full: That's it. That's what he has to say about two of the longest-standing controversies in philosophy. "People generally believe this." And not only is this an insufficient defense, it's not even correct. People do not generally believe this. It is once again a straw man he has set up to agree with him from the outset. If you do not happen to be one of these hypothetical "people" who believe what he says they believe, then his argument is completely unpersuasive, and he is not even trying to persuade you. Even if this weren't a straw man, even if people really did generally believe this, Craig would just be making an appeal to popularity. But of course, many of the things that people generally believe turn out to be false. So this would not justify Craig's premises either.
But the reason people don't generally believe this is that the straw man's logic doesn't follow even on casual inspection. The proposition I'll call (P), "Moral values and duties are not objective realities... but are merely subjective opinions", is not synonymous with and does not imply premise (1), "If God does not exist, objective moral values and duties do not exist", as he expects it to. In classical logic, an implication statement "If A then B" is equivalent to a disjunction "not A or B". So premise (1) can be rewritten "Either God exists, or objective moral values and duties do not exist". And this is clearly nowhere near (P). (P) does say that objective moral values and duties do not exist, but it's not a disjunction; it says nothing about the existence or nonexistence of God. As far as (P) is concerned, objective moral values and duties do not exist even if God does exist. So in fact, if (P) has a relationship to any of Craig's premises, it's as a direct negation of (2). (P) says that objective moral duties and values do not exist; (2) says they do. Thus, far from saying that his straw man believes two premises that imply the existence of God, Craig is really only saying that his straw man believes two contradictory propositions.
He then attaches the name of "Richard Dawkins" to his strawman and uses this contradiction to attack his adversary. He says that the only way to resolve the contradiction is to accept God's existence. But that doesn't resolve the contradiction, because again, (P) doesn't say anything about God to use as an escape clause! And the Dawkins he cites is not contradictory in the way his straw man is. In fact, at first glance I see two different ways Dawkins' statements might be compatible which Craig has simply overlooked - and of course there may be more.
The first way Craig really walks right into. He himself belabored the distinction between objective morality and subjective morality at the beginning of his argument. And not one of Dawkins' cited moral claims states or implies that it must objective. It may simply be the case that Dawkins is a consistent subjectivist, and in his subjective judgment compassion is good, original sin is bad, homophobia is bad, and so on. Craig notices this possibility only enough to say that it's "hard to believe", and he does this by putting some monstrous words in Dawkins' mouth: "I don’t think that child abuse and homophobia and religious intolerance are really wrong! Do whatever you want - there's no moral difference!" But it would be nonsensical for anyone, subjectivist or objectivist, who judges child abuse to be wrong would say "I don't think that's wrong!" Yes, he does think that it's wrong - that's what it means to make a judgment. So this is another strawman of Craig's, and an especially disgusting one.
The second way is, admittedly, a little subtler, but not so subtle that Craig may be forgiven for missing it. It rests on an equivocation he is making between "objective morality", a particular set of behavioral imperatives that are true independent of the opinions of the agents performing them, and what we might call "ultimate morality", a single grand purpose coming to us from the will of a Creator at the beginning of the universe. The two concepts are not equivalent. Clearly. Yet when Craig reads Dawkins denying that there is a single grand purpose coming to us from the will of a Creator at the beginning of the universe, he misinterprets it as Dawkins denying that there is a set of independently true behavioral imperatives. It could easily be the case that there is a set of independently true behavioral imperatives which say compassion is good, original sin is bad, homophobia is bad, and so on, but that it has a source other than divine purpose. One only has to take a passing glimpse at the canon of moral philosophy to find shelves and shelves of secular and atheist philosophers proposing non-divine theories of objective morality, and Craig seems inexplicably to have forgotten this. Examining all the forms of secular moral realism is the task of a lifetime and far beyond the scope of this thread. To make a long story short, Dawkins could be accepting premise (2) but rejecting premise (1).
I don't know which way Dawkins would go. I am not he, my positions are not his, and I neither know nor care enough about his positions to make that call for him. What I'm really doing here is not so much defending Dawkins as pointing out Craig's rampant mistakes in interpretation and failures in anticipation.
Finally, Craig discusses the Euthyphro dilemma. However, I'm going to skip this section - not because his reasoning is sound (it really, really isn't), but because this post is getting long enough and the issue is only tangentially relevant to Craig's original argument. At most the Euthyphro dilemma casts into doubt his premise (1), which we've already got plenty of other reasons for doubting. Craig's proposed third alternative to the dilemma is well discussed elsewhere. I'll only note here that it's pretty rich of him to complain about false dilemmas after all he's done.
Next up: the Teleological Argument. A.k.a. the Long, Boring Argument. Forgive me if it takes a while for me to work up the time and energy for this one.
EDIT: Jump to my other rebuttals.
1. The Cosmological Argument from Contingency
2. The Kalām Cosmological Argument
3. The Moral Argument
4. The Teleological Argument
5. The Ontological Argument
candidus inperti; si nil, his utere mecum.
Although, not to be a smartass, but there's one thing you said I would like to ask about:
But would that not also be true of Newtonian physics then?
Like, I guess my problem is, isn't it kind of bad if quantum mechanics requires ignoring one of the fundamental forces of the universe in order to make it work? That seems concerning to me.
Also, out of curiosity, you explained the problem with quantum mechanics when it comes down to gravity. What are the shortcomings of relativity? I'm going to go ahead and guess, "Does not work with quanta," but can you elaborate?
Yes, in fact there are a wide class of phenomena that you only need classical physics to explain to within an epsilon of tolerance. However, that class excludes some important things that people living in civilized cultures ought to know about, whereas the class of phenomena that can only be explained using quantum gravity is a good deal more rarefied.
Think of it this way: imagine you've got a five-year-old son. Let's say you know everything about quantum physics and relativity, but not quantum gravity. Well, then there's only one question about the world a typical five-year-old might ask you that you won't be able to answer correctly, and that's The Big One: "where did everything come from?" You need quantum gravity (and maybe even more physics beyond that) for that. Every other question he is likely to ask, you can answer to within the highest accuracy that can be measured by mankind.
On the other hand, suppose you are ignorant of quantum physics and relativity, but you know everything about classical physics. Well, your five-year-old son is going to grow up to have a very poor understanding of the physical world, because there are a lot of simple questions he can ask you that you will either be unable to answer or to which you will give observably wrong answers. You won't be able to explain why the Sun is hot, why light bulbs light up, how modern clocks work, how computers work, how wireless telecommunications work, et cetera.
So if you don't know quantum gravity, you're ignorant of some things. And I don't want to downplay that; there is a reason why physicists are working so frantically on the problem. But if you only know classical physics, you're ignorant of most things. And there's a difference there that's more than just quibbling -- it's important.
If your concern is "there are still important unanswered questions, so I think we need to continue refining our theoretical picture," then that's great! Your concern is widely shared and agreed upon. If your concern is "that must mean this is all bull***** and William Lane Craig's arguments still have merit" then, well, no. Incompleteness in scientific theories does not create a hidey-hole for people that make up nonsense.
Well, I don't like the use of the word "shortcoming" here. It's not a "shortcoming" of, say, algebraic number theory that it doesn't explain where babies come from. It was never meant to explain that. But I think I know what you mean.
Relativity explains the following phenomena:
1) That the background against which physical processes take place is a combination of space and time that obeys the axioms of Riemannian geometry.
2) How the geometry of spacetime deforms in the presence of mass.
3) How things move in deformed geometry.
4) How the motion of something changes when you change the coordinate system in which you measure it.
Moreover, it explains all of those phenomena with the maximum accuracy human beings can measure them. We put an atomic clock on a plane, flew it at supersonic speeds, and found that the clock slowed down by exactly as much as relativity said it would. We sent up a satellite to measure the frame dragging of Earth's gravity field and found that the spacetime around Earth is warped in precisely the unique way that relativity says it is. And so forth. So it has no shortcomings in that it explains everything it claims to explain with as much accuracy as we can obtain.
So any "shortcomings" in the sense that I think you mean consist of its failure to explain things it does not claim to explain. It's not as simple as "it doesn't explain quanta," although it doesn't -- it's an entirely continuous theory. I already gave one example -- relativity doesn't explain nuclear fusion, or why stars make light. For another example, relativity is a theory of motion -- not a theory of interaction. So it can't (and doesn't try to) explain what happens when, say, you mix an acid and a base.
I feel like the mistake you're making is that you think quantum theory explains everything that happens at small scales and relativity explains everything that happens at big scales. This is not the case. They explain two different classes of phenomena. It happens that gravity tends to become a dominant force at the cosmological scale, making relativity more important there -- but that's because it explains gravity, not because the cosmological length scale is big.
EDIT: If you have further questions about quantum theory, I'd like to suggest a new thread, because quantum theory is really only related to Craig's claims about causation and we're now discussing things that are very tangential to that.
Which if thou dost not use for clearing away the clouds from thy mind
It will go and thou wilt go, never to return.
Does this premise not have better support out there than what Craig gives it? As you say, this is an 'old, old argument', and as a general rule I'm more interested in understanding these arguments and where they break down than understanding where Craig's particular presentation of them falls flat.
Is the long and short of why this premise doesn't hold because there is a distinction between objective morality and ultimate morality? Would you point me toward a couple non-divine theories of objective morality?
Did you address this premise somewhere, and I just missed it? Not that you are obliged to prove every single premise false; one false premise kills the argument. I'm just interested to hear a response (from anyone) to this one, and am genuinely concerned I flat out missed it in Blinking Spirit's post.
There's no rush! Thanks for working through these at any speed and in any depth at all.
Among the variations of the Moral Argument I've encountered, the best in my judgment is Immanuel Kant's in his Critique of Practical Reason. He argues that, if objective morality exists, that is ultimately the same as saying that moral agents are obliged to bring about the summum bonum, the perfect good - all moral imperatives are just tiny pieces of that great goal. He then invokes the principle of "ought implies can" - what is obligatory cannot be impossible - to deduce that the summum bonum must be possible to achieve. But human beings certainly lack the power to achieve the summum bonum on their own, so there must be some other moral agent out there who has that power. This agent must be vastly powerful and vastly benevolent - must, in short, closely match the description of the entity we commonly refer to as "God". In particular, objective justice demands that good people be rewarded and bad people be punished, but this often does not happen to people while they are alive, so the agent we're describing must have the power to create and enforce an afterlife.
Before going into where Kant goes wrong, it's worth noting a couple of things. Firstly, Kant doesn't make God the source of morality but rather a logical consequence of it. This is unusual for arguments from morality, but in my opinion makes the premise stronger: the standard response of "Why can't there be some other source for morality?" doesn't work on it, since it will conclude God must exist regardless of morality's source. Secondly, Kant argues in his Critique of Pure Reason that no a priori argument can prove the existence of God - he's one of the most prominent philosophers I was alluding to in my own discussion of a priori argumentation above. So he does not actually advance the argument from morality in its full-blown form, concluding that God must definitely exist. He's saying something more nuanced: all moral thought requires the assumption that God exists.
The first point of attack against Kant is to question the principle of "ought implies can". That has far-reaching implications, though, so many philosophers may not want to do it. Second is to question whether objective morality really implies the summum bonum thing. Maybe the moral imperatives are more modest, and really do only place goals that are within the capability of mere mortals; consider the imperative "Do the most good that it is possible for you to do." Third is to argue that the ability to make progress towards the perfect good is sufficient to satisfy the "ought implies can" principle. And fourth is to speculate that maybe the summum bonum is within the reach of humans after all, perhaps through sufficiently advanced science or perhaps for some other reason.
For my money, the fourth attack is easily the most fun, but the second and third are the most persuasive (they are sort of two sides of the same coin).
Yes. As we saw above, Kant tried to avoid it by not making God the source of morality, but I think his argument fails because the summum bonum is still an ultimate morality; that's basically the way my second and third attacks hit it.
EDIT: Wait, I take that back. One of the other things proponents of the argument from morality like to do is to advance one of the arguments for moral nihilism to establish that there is no possibility of an objective morality, then turn around and say "A morality given by God solves this!" So here they are attempting to use the distinction between objective morality and ultimate morality. The problem is that they're giving the distinction more power than it actually has: nihilist arguments apply to ultimate morality too. Nihilism says "There is no morality at all", and ultimate morality is still a kind of morality.
Deontology, utilitarianism, and virtue ethics are the three major branches of secular moral philosophy. In their standard formulations they are all realist, although I believe there are non-realist variants of all three (and, for that matter, theist versions).
Yeah, sorry if I wasn't clear about this. Craig treated the two premises as a package deal - "people generally believe both premises" - so so did I. Premise (2), like (1), is defended by an appeal to popularity with no other justification, and an atheist or agnostic could simply reject it.
But in practice, of course, many atheists and agnostics do affirm the existence of objective morality, so (1) is the real problematic straw man.
candidus inperti; si nil, his utere mecum.
First, the arguments asserts that objective morality exists without any support other than saying people generally believe in objective morality. Argumentum ad populum is a logical fallacy. Craig should know this.
Second, what criteria is required for something to be Objectively Wrong or Objectively Right? This is an important distinction, because it reveals that Craig's appeal to popularity itself rests on an equivocation. If we define something as "objectively wrong" based on whether god says it's right or wrong - god is absolutely necessary. However, a lot (hopefully most) of people that Craig appeals to in believing that Rape or Murder is objectively wrong no matter the culture in question don't say this is because god says so. They appeal to external criteria. For example, many people get into arguments with religious people and say things like "if god told you to rape a child, does that make it right?" Clearly, they're arguing about objective morality in terms of external criteria that has nothing to do with whether god says it's right or not. Many people hold up the bible's endorsement of slavery as wrong and many appologists spend time trying to excuse it. If the only "objective morality" that mattered was "god says so" - then where would the argument be?
However, if there's external criteria that determines whether something is right or wrong - then god, by definition, isn't necessary to explain it. To try and get around this, the more brazen appologists try to claim that since this can be termed a moral "law" and that laws require "lawgivers", and we don't count for some reason - it must be god doing it. Obviously, this is a ridiculous word game.
The argument from objective morality is simply broken.
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