Since I moved to the Freethought Blogs network, I have a bunch of new readers who aren’t familiar with my greatest hits from my old, pre-FTB blog. So I’m linking to some of them, about one a day, to introduce them to the new folks.
A nifty pull quote:
Many astronomers and astrophysicists think that the question “Where did the universe come from?” might someday be answerable. In fact, many of them strongly suspect that the answer may indeed call into question our basic understanding of cause and effect… in much the same way that Einstein’s theories called into question our basic understanding of matter and energy and space, and Galileo’s theories called into question our basic understanding of the structure of the universe. (For instance: One idea that’s being tossed around is that the beginning of the universe was the beginning, not only of matter and energy, but of space-time itself… and that it therefore makes no sense to talk about what happened “before” time itself began.) They think “Where did physical existence come from?” may be an answerable question… and they’re busily researching possible answers.
The “God did it” answer doesn’t do this. It doesn’t pose possible ways of investigating whether the God hypothesis might be the right answer to this question. It basically just says, “Everything has to have a cause… except God, who by definition can do anything.” It’s a non-answer. It insists that every question have a valid, comprehensible, cause- and- effect answer… except questions about God. It’s like a parent answering every question with, “Because I say so.” It’s what atheists call the “God of the gaps”: it takes any question about the physical world that’s currently unanswered by science, and says, “Oh, we don’t know the answer to that, therefore it must be God.” It’s like taking every empty space in the coloring book, and reflexively filling it in with a blue crayon.
“It’s like taking every empty space in the coloring book, and reflexively filling it in with a blue crayon.”
Exactly. And proposing that “it wasn’t God, we don’t know what it was yet, but it certainly wasn’t God” is like taking every empty space in the coloring book and reflexively filling it in with a red crayon.
Sarah @ #1: Actually, those aren’t equivalent. Here’s why.
1: Most atheists are not saying, “It certainly wasn’t God.” We’re saying, “It almost certainly wasn’t God.”
2: We actually have positive reasons for thinking it probably wasn’t God. Here’s a list of my personal Top Ten.
3 (or actually, I guess 2a would be more accurate, since this is one of my main positive reasons for thinking there’s probably no God): When it comes to answering previously unanswered questions, “physical cause and effect” has turned out to be the answer thousands upon thousands of times. “God” has turned out to be the answer exactly never. Natural explanations of phenomena have been replacing supernatural ones with an overwhelming consistency and the momentum and power of a steamroller. Supernatural explanations of phenomena have replaced natural ones exactly never. Given that this is true, it is reasonable to conclude that any given unexplained phenomenon probably has a natural explanation. (A point I made in this piece that I linked to. Did you actually read it, or are you just responding to the pull quote?)
Sarah:
But that’s not what we actually do. We say something more like “We don’t know what it was yet, but we don’t have any reason to assume we can’t investigate it. Then we do investigate it.
If we were to simply assume that it was God, that would be like saying that we cannot investigate it and then dropping the subject.
I don’t want to put words into Greta’s mouth, but I think the point is that once we say “It was God and God can do anything” we have shut off the possibility of further investigation. It’s effectively saying we’ve reached the limits of where we can/want to go in learning. You may have reached those limits, but not everyone has.
Paul
You aren’t the only one who has had to answer the bad arguments again and again. Even if the argument is bad, it has been presented continually by the likes of William Lane Craig in a manner that seems convincing. Craig presents the argument in a manner that is logically valid giving it a aura of truth. Craig will present his premisses as true even using the term “law” of cause and effect, or the concept of beginning to exist. He will then refuse to yield on the validity of his assertions giving the impression that he has won his point. It is a very slick performance and effectively obscures the fact that “god did it” really answers nothing.
The irritating thing is that arguing at the edge of knowledge is that people that have a rational worldview eventually come up against a point where they have to state “we don’t know”. At that point it is common for theists to shift the burden of proof and proudly assert “then you can’t prove that god did not do it”.
Re-arguing these points repeatedly is just part of the territory.
Sarah (#1):
Actually, the proper extension of the analogy is not colouring in everything in a different colour, but throwing away the blue crayon while not colouring in anything yet.
Also, while “it wasn’t God, we don’t know what it was yet, but it certainly wasn’t God” is something of a strawman caricature of the typical atheist position, it may – for some values of “God” – be a perfectly reasonable position to hold. If we have good reasons for holding that the concept of God on offer is incoherent, then we can quite justifiably rule out that particular God as a possible explanatory hypothesis.
@Greta: “1: Most atheists are not saying, “It certainly wasn’t God.” We’re saying, “It almost certainly wasn’t God.”
That’s like saying “We’re almost certain it wasn’t God…” and then colouring it in red anyway
“2: We actually have positive reasons for thinking it probably wasn’t God. Here’s a list of my personal Top Ten.”
And none of your positive reasons for believing are any better than their positive reasons for believing… certainly neither of you have enough reason on your side to colour in any colour.
“3 [snip]”
I did read some of it, but I’m responding to your post here, with the quote.
Again this argument is like saying “Well we’ve never found anything coloured blue, even though loads of people have said things should be coloured blue, none of them turned out to be. Therefore all of the rest of this should be coloured red even when we don’t know what colour it is.”
It’s not a good argument.
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@Paul: “I don’t want to put words into Greta’s mouth, but I think the point is that once we say “It was God and God can do anything” we have shut off the possibility of further investigation. It’s effectively saying we’ve reached the limits of where we can/want to go in learning.”
And when you say “It not God and God doesn’t exist” you have also shut off the possibility of further investigation. The only accurate answer that does not shut down further investigation is “We don’t know, lets investigate”
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@Ian Walker: “Actually, the proper extension of the analogy is not colouring in everything in a different colour, but throwing away the blue crayon while not colouring in anything yet.”
Nope, that’s agnosticism (in the sense of pure weak agnosticism, we don’t know yet, nor do we know whether we will find out), and it’s a logical position. Thats why the red-crayon atheism is the same as the blue-crayon theism.
No-crayon agnosticism is the only way to go.
“Also, while “it wasn’t God, we don’t know what it was yet, but it certainly wasn’t God” is something of a strawman caricature of the typical atheist position…”
Exactly. Just as “Oh, we don’t know the answer to that, therefore it must be God.” is something of a strawman caricature of the typical religious position.
The fact is neither atheists or theists answer these questions with “God did it” or “God didn’t do it” – not simply like that. Though clearly at a root level all atheists and theists believe that God did it or God didn’t do it and that it is true for anything in the universe, but to suggest that either group is simply colouring in questions they don’t know the answer to and stopping there is absurd and contrary to the evidence. People colour in with their colour in the background then they carry on questioning exactly how it happened (which is irrelevant to the background colour)
That was the subtext of my first comment. At a level where you can call theism “colouring in blue” you can call atheism “colouring in red” – however, as you have pointed out both descriptions are so facile that they are essentially straw-positions, neither atheists nor theists actually do that – except when they are being lazy and don’t care about the specifics involved in that case where they can just assert “God didn’t do that” or “God did it”.
I think Joel #24 in the original discussion raised some good points.
I don’t know of any theologian using such an argument (but I admit that my knowledge of theology is … deficient, to say the least). This is not the argument of Aquinas, this is not what Leibniz said, it’s also not what Craig does (there are more examples, but let it rest here). Indeed, at the moment I’m inclined to yell “A classical straw man‼ This is no one’s argument‼”; but my guess is rather that you took it from some internet discussions, is that correct? If so: discussing with misguided, popular arguments of that sort has its merit, I don’t deny it. But it may create a false impression that the whole case is sillier than it really is. And this is dangerous, since some people may check the sources after all.
[One comment, just in case: I’m not claiming that some variants of the cosmological argument are correct. And I’m not planning to defend the cosmological argument – don’t count on me please 🙂 What I’m saying is that the theologians employing the argument are not as silly as depicted here. That’s all.]
In the form you have given it, the argument looks indeed self-defeating, vulnerable to your objection “Then God also must have a cause, so what caused God?” But such an objection is not valid against Aquinas (who quite obviously didn’t accept the premise “everything that exists has a cause” – his whole point was after all that uncaused First Cause exists). It is not valid against Leibniz (he tried to argue for existence of a necessary being, explaining all contingent things). It’s also not valid against Craig: his argument is “Everything that begins to exist has a cause; the universe began to exist; therefore, the universe has a cause” (this was described by Joel in the original discussion).
I don’t see it. There is always a question “how did God do it”, which can be asked by believers, sometimes with good results for science.
As far as I know, the idea is basically due to St. Augustine 🙂
The crayon analogy is seriously weak and profoundly silly. (I know that contempt does not equal refutation, but the analogy deserves nothing more.)
There is always the possibility that when we stop accepting supernatural explanations for natural states, and continue the investigative process, someone might just stumble on a god or gods (very exciting, indeed!). Until then, as the amount of the universe that remains scientifically unexplained continues to diminish, any omnipotent god is the sum of my stupidity and ignorance. That is the god that believers are adhering to and defending.
It’s a probabilistic one. Millions upon millions of pages of scientific papers versus nothing. There’s a lot of 9’s on that 99+% chance of none.
Could it be wrong? Of course. But proof is the purview of math, not science. A betting man would go for the “not”.
Define “begins” when time itself is one of the things brought it into existence.
Regardless, there’s scientific evidence against that statement.
“It’s a probabilistic one. Millions upon millions of pages of scientific papers versus nothing. There’s a lot of 9′s on that 99+% chance of none.”
No it’s not. We’ve discovered the formula that describes gravity, we know that it operates between masses, we even partially know why – none of that however is explicitly atheistic (any more than it’s theistic) – it could be that the attraction between masses “Just is”, that’s just the way the universe is and there is no input from a Deity, or it could be that the attraction between the masses is determined or maintained by a Deity.
Finding out that G = Mm/r^2 neither confirms nor dismisses any theist or atheist position.
So it’s more like the sum total of scientific papers refuting the existence of God (0) vs the sum total of scientific papers confirming God’s existence (0)
There is no reason to start colouring yet.
Sarah (#6):
So weak agnoticism would throw away the blue crayon – thereby ruling out the possibility of subsequently colouring in anything blue? I’m thinking that we have very different ideas of how the analogy is supposed to work …
Yet God-of-the-Gaps arguments (and arguments which on analysis boil down to God-of-the-Gaps arguments) remain a common staple of apologetics.
#6:
Again, no. It’s “We’ve never found anything coloured blue, even though loads of people have said things should be coloured blue, none of them turned out to be. Therefore whatever colour the rest may turn out to be, we have reason to assume that it will not be blue.”
Or “Everything we’ve found has been coloured red, even though loads of people have said things should be coloured blue. Therefore it is reasonable to assume that the rest will be coloured red as well.”
Thing is, it’s not at all clear what you think red represents here. Is it just any explanation that doesn’t involve a god or gods? Or is it an explanation which rules out gods? Because there’s a difference, and the atheist position just requires the first.
Natural explanations simply ignore God – they have no use of that hypothesis. Greta’s argument as I understand it that unlike God-based explanations, natural explanations have been overwhelmingly successful in the past, and that inductively we may expect them to continue to be so in the future – i.e., that we will continue to have no need of that hypothesis. And that’s not the same as saying that God will never be a viable explanation (although there may be independent reasons for this stronger position).
Let me fix that for you, “Therefore all of the rest of this should be coloured red even when left alone, because we don’t know what colour it is, until we have a clear idea just what color it should be, if any..
In point of fact, the correct analogy would be that Christians want it blue, Hindi green, Islam red, etc., and atheists just want people to stop slapping colors in those places, until there is some real reason to bloody do so. Which, is *definitely* not the silly BS you are arguing.
Sigh.. I hate my toolbar, parts of that where supposed to be slashed out, but apparently that HTML element isn’t supported here. Lets try again.
“Therefore all of the rest of this should be left alone, because we don’t know what colour it is, until we have a clear idea just what color it should be, if any..“
Kenneth Daniels’ book, “Why I Believed”, has a wonderful response to the “God, by definition…” construction:
“I do not find this response satisfying. If we can assert that God is eternal by definition, why not posit the very same thing concerning the natural universe or universes? Also, in the real world, definitions are intended to correspond to some aspect of reality; we do not create our own reality by appealing to unanchored definitions. To illustrate, outside the world of fiction we cannot assert that a beaver by definition is a dam-building rodent that can speak English. We study beavers, learn their characteristics, and define the word beaver according to the features we empirically observe; we do not invent its characteristics through philosophical reflection. Since we cannot study God in this way, we cannot legitimately assert what does or does not define God, if in fact he exists. If a child asks her parents how Santa Claus enters homes without chimneys, and her parents explain that Santa by definition is able to squeeze through vents in the roof, it may temporarily satisfy an uncritical child, but it does not guarantee the plausibility of the Santa hypothesis or solve any real problems.”
Sarah: First, as many people have pointed out: Atheism is not a red crayon. Atheism is no crayon. Atheism is the null hypothesis. And the null hypothesis is exactly what we should be sticking with unless we have good evidence to support another hypothesis.
But second: Even if we concede that atheism is a red crayon… so what? Are we not to reach any conclusions whatsoever, no matter how certain we are or how well- supported it is by evidence, unless we’re 100% positive that we’re right? If that were the case, then except for some mathematical and logical deductions, we’d never be able to reach any conclusions at all. There is a difference between saying, “For these kinds of questions, red has always been the right answer, and there are some excellent reasons to color this space red, so I’m going to do that provisionally until I see some good evidence that it should be blue”… and saying, “I don’t know the answer, so even though I have no good reason to think that this space should be blue, and even though blue has never been the right color, I’m going to color it blue.”
Yes, our conclusions should be provisional. And for the majority of atheists, our atheism IS provisional. We can tell you what evidence would persuade us that we were mistaken and a god or gods really existed. Can you do the same? Can you tell us what would persuade you that you were mistaken, and your god did not exist?
Let me put it this way. A doctor looks at a bad cough and says, “Hm, I don’t know what’s causing this, it could be an allergy or irritation or bacteria or something else I don’t know about — but I feel entirely comfortable ruling out demonic possession.” Is that unreasonable? Does that count as coloring in the coloring book with a red crayon? And even if it is — should the doctor not do that? Should the doctor seriously consider demonic possession as a diagnosis, even though that diagnosis has never once in the history of medicine turned out to be right?
I see no reason why so many atheists prefix “almost certainly” when it comes to a God proposition, whereas we do not do so for a myriad others.
We do not say “I am almost certain there isn’t a dead body in the trunk of my car”, “I am almost certain Rob is not twelve feet tall”, “I am almost certain I can navigate rush hour traffic with my eyes closed”, “I am almost certain there is no Santa Claus”, “I am almost certain that I am not married to Brad Pitt living a double life”, “I am almost certain Elvis Presley is dead”, “I am almost certain you do not have sired 10,000,007 kids”…
Yes, “absence of evidence” is “not absence of evidence”. But we use it liberally for many things. Like no longer looking for WMDs in Iraq.
So, why not simply say “God did not create the universe, there is no evidence for it” and be done?
OK, be humble enough to acknowledge it if you later find that you are wrong.
It is almost arrogant to insist on agnosticism (and anything less than 100% certainty is technically agnosticism) as the superior position, and certainly inconsistent with how we live our lives.
I do not have rats in my attic. How do I know? There is no evidence. Have I had rats in my attic before? Yes. If I now discover that there is a rat in my attic, then what? Then, I’d have been wrong.
Ooops. That has never happened before, right? No one here has ever been wrong, so we must be careful that we are not wrong, but especially when it comes to God?
Face it, if you are a reasonably intelligent, educated person, reasonably curious and call yourself an atheist, you have likely examined most all evidence on offer from a multitude of sources. So what’s the big deal with still giving this God proposition privilege that you do not accord to most other things?
Sorry about the rant, but it happens way too often when some dolt starts with something like the Kalam/cosmological argument and we never get to hear how they go from
“Since the universe began to exist, it has a cause”
to
“That cause is precisely the three-in-one god, born of a virgin, who sacrificed himself on the cross to himself so that his creation may be spared from his own wrath. Also, do not let gays marry”
Science is provisional. Knowledge is provisional. This is known. Let’s stop wasting time in normal conversation debating what “almost certainly” really means. 99.99999%? 99.99999999999997%? How do you calculate it to be not, say, 23.7%? If you do not know, you must conceded that 23.7% or 0.5% is quite likely as well.
There is no God. Deal with it. If I am shown to be wrong, I’ll correct myself.
sqlrob#10
Yes, that’s Grünbaum’s objection. Craig tried to reply here, saying that “x begins to exist” means “x exists at t and there is no time immediately prior to t at which x exists.”
Possibly. I’m not particularly keen on defending the kalaam argument. But just to be sure: which statement exactly and what evidence do you have in mind?
Virtual particles.
And for further uncaused events, radioactive decay.
Sarah, maybe if you could give me a definition of god I could let you know if I’m saving the space for some blue crayon, or if I can eliminate that particular god from my crayola box.
Thanks in advance. (I got a big box, 64 gods, but I can buy more if necessary)
sqlrob
Craig and Sinclair give a following comment:
But there is much debate over the actual existence of virtual particles. […] and most importantly, even on indeterministic interpretations [of quantum mechanics], virtual particles do not come into being out of nothing. They arise from fluctuations of energy contained in the subatomic vacuum.
(Craig & Sinclair in their chapter of “The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology”, 2009)
Now, I don’t know whether their remark is correct or not. (Well, from what I saw at least the first sentence is true.) I don’t have the specialized knowledge which would permit me (perhaps) to decide the issue.
My point is more modest: given the discussions (sometimes quite advanced) concerning cosmological arguments, I don’t think Greta succeeded in “showing exactly how terrible they are” (to use her own words). In fact I don’t even think that they deserve the label “terrible”. My impression is that in some cases the real reason for applying such labels is nothing more than mere impatience on our side.
[On reflection: maybe sometimes presenting the opponent as more stupid than he really is pays off as a strategy? I still don’t like it, but I could take it into consideration 🙂 ]
Ariel (#18):
Yes, Craig equivocates quite shamelessly here. He’s got a sense of “begins to exist” in which the universe can be meaningfully said to have begun to exist, and which so makes his second premise credible. But when you apply the same sense of the term to the first premise (that everything that begins to exist has a cause), we have no reason to accept that premise. We have no experiences of things that begin to exist in this sense except for the universe, and so we have no basis for saying that they have causes. I mean, we can’t assume that the universe has a cause, because that’s exactly the conclusion that we’re trying to reach.
(#21):
This is Craig employing a similar move to the above – he redefines “begins to exist” in some other way (in this case as entailing “coming into being out of nothing”), and then carries on as if both his premises are equally well supported on this definition – when they aren’t. We have no idea if things that “come into being out of nothing” have causes (and some serious questions as to whether this would even make sense), or even if there are any things that “come into being out of nothing” at all.
Ariel (#7):
The problem is that “how did God do it” can be taken in two ways:
(a) It may be asking: What is the underlying mechanism by which God is causally efficacious? Unfortunately, the answer to that seems to be “magic”. God wills that something be the case, and *poof* – it is the case. Theistic explanations typically treat mental or agent causation as irreducibly basic, with nothing more to be said about the “how” once its been invoked. Not much room for a research program here.
(b) It may be asking: What are the secondary or intermediate mechanisms which God sets in motion to realise his creation? This is how you seem to intend the question, but note that the research program that it might give rise to is in all practical respects indistinguishable from a naturalistic research program. It’s no different from asking: What are the mechanisms by which the various phenomena of nature came about? The only way it might be different is if you posit a direct role for God (e.g., nudging evolution along towards some sentient species), but then the “how” question reverts to the investigation-stopping sense (a).
So it seems that the question “how did God do it” is either redundant from the perspective of further enquiry (because the same questions can be asked without reference to God), or results in a genuine end to enquiry, because it arrives at an (allegedly) basic mode of explanation about which no more can be said.
Iain Walker
Oh, now I feel compelled to play a role of devil’s advocate (duh, Craig’s? God’s?), which I didn’t really want … but so be it, I will try (up to a point anyway, the surrender is probably looming close enough :-)). So …
I’m not sure what you mean. Is it about the phrase “immediately prior to t”? In a loose sense we could say of course that there is a time t such that this table exists at t and it doesn’t exist “immediately prior to t”, with “immediately prior to t” meaning: prior up to a specified measurement unit. Why can’t Craig do the same? Why couldn’t he use such a scale and claim that his definition applies both to the universe and to the ordinary objects?
This is simply incorrect. Read again the quoted fragment. He is evidently claiming that virtual particles (if they exist) begin to exist, but he is stressing at the same time that they do not “come into being out of nothing“. Clearly according to him one doesn’t entail the other. You misread this fragment.
Irrelevant. Craig is not claiming anything about objects which “come into being out of nothing”. His only aim is to stress that virtual particles are not like that (by the way, I don’t know whether he is right about it or not). Please read once again the fragment you are trying to analyze.
Oh, there was one more.
Iain Walker#23
I can agree with that. But my remark was an answer to Greta’s words (“the “God did it” answer cuts off further inquiry”). Phrased in your style, my rejoinder to Greta was: the answer “God did it” is not as dangerous as you claim, because it leaves still Iain Walker’s (b) to consider. It may well be redundant in your sense, but the point is that scientific inquiry is not blocked after all. And it’s also not a mere theoretical possibility: we find a lot of it in the history of science.
Ariel (#24):
Actually, in retrospect I seem to have posted in haste, because the formulation “x exists at t and there is no time immediately prior to t at which x exists” retains the ambiguity that Craig exploits. It could mean:
A. “x begins to exist at time t” means “x exists at t and for all earlier times t(n) it is not the case that x exists”
or:
B. “x begins to exist at time t” means “x exists at t and there is no earlier time t(n) at all”
Premise 1 (everything that begins to exist has a cause) is at least superficially plausible under definition A, but we have no grounds to suppose it to be true under definition B. Now given that Craig seems to be curiously wedded to the notion that the Big Bang originated as a singularity, premise 2 (the universe began to exist) is plausible under definition B, but is false under definition A.
I’ve seen Craig equivocate between A and B in other versions of the KCA, and I misread the formulation you quoted as being equivalent to B, when it actually remains ambiguous. Sorry about that.
You are quite right – I misspoke (mistyped?) again. Craig’s claim re virtual particles is of course that they are not examples of things beginning to exist without a cause (and hence that they are not counter-examples to Premise 1).
The problem then is whether Craig can redefine the notion of “cause” in such a way that allows him to say that virtual particles are in fact caused and allows Premise 1 to include universes. And I’m not sure he can. Virtual particles might be said to have a “cause” in that they originate from a pre-existing substrate, but this isn’t applicable to the universe on Craig’s view – on his view, there is no pre-existing substrate, or pre-existing anything. The universe doesn’t have a cause in this sense.
Craig seems to be implicitly arguing that anything that does not come into existence out of nothing has a cause. But this only highlights the problems with saying that something that does come into existence out of nothing (e.g., the universe, in Craig’s version of cosmology) has a cause. Quite apart from the conceptual difficulties, we don’t have enough experience of such things to make that judgement, in which case we have no reason to accept Premise 1.
That’s what I meant to say – or at least should have said, had I been more on the ball. Thanks for the wake-up call.
Ariel (#25):
Yes, but that doesn’t apply to cases where God’s agency is invoked as a direct, proximate explanation for a phenomenon, as an alternative to some natural explanation. And that, as I understood her, was the context in which Greta made the point about cutting off further enquiry.
Although I may be wrong, since my ability to read for comprehension seems to be on the fritz today.
Iain Walker #26
I think that your accusation of equivocation is not fair. You are still making a mistake.
It seems to me that Craig is using A, period. And premise 2, contrary to what you are saying, is still plausible under A, for a silly reason: a general sentence of the form “for all earlier times …” is (vacuously) true if there are no earlier times – you know, the boring stuff about implications with false antecedents (too boring to discuss it :-)). Anyway, I can’t see the ambiguity here.
In view of the above, when granting this to Craig, you grant practically everything. I think you should attack Premise 1 instead.
Good observation and I’m not able to counter it convincingly. The question about the notion of a cause which is needed here seems to me a hard one.
Not only implicitly; there are fragments where he is explicitly saying that this is his motivation behind Premise 1. On this approach, Premise 1 would be like “something just cannot pop into existence out of nothing”.
The question is whether Premise 1 is an empirical principle or not. I’m not sure how Craig wants to treat it; he seems ambiguous about it. Anyway, the two possible lines would be:
(1) It’s an empirical generalization based on observation. Such generalizations surely involve some extrapolation – certainly you would not want to claim that “All ravens can fly” shouldn’t be accepted because we don’t have enough experience of ravens (haven’t investigated all of them)?
[I admit that I give (1) with bad conscience – it’s probably not a very promising line of defense]
(2) Premise 1 is not an empirical generalization, but a metaphysical principle, corresponding (as said above) to the principle “something just cannot pop into existence out of nothing”. Adopting such a principle is a precondition for rational investigation.
#27
I understand, but still the danger is small. The reason is that there is no definite point where God’s agency must be invoked as a direct explanation. In fact this point is moving. In practice the believing scientist can always say “Oh no, no, at this particular point I will still try to employ a naturalistic explanation”. E.g. the believing scientist is not forced by his religious beliefs to principally refuse even to consider the idea of a naturalistic explanation for Big Bang.
The point about pair creation (the aforementioned virtual particles) being uncaused is not that they appear. It’s that they appear _now_.
If you watch in a given space and time how long it takes until the first pair is created, it might take 4 nanoseconds. Or it might take 8 nanoseconds. Or 10 minutes. Or whatever. You can say that ultimately pair creation is a necessary consequence of the initial and boundary conditions of the universe. However, there’s no way you can give a cause for why the pair popped up at precisely that instant and not another, because such creation is _probabilistic_, not deterministic. The “uncaused event” is not “pair creation”, it’s “pair creation at that particular moment in time”. Same deal with radioactive decay: you can calculate a probability that a nucleus will decay over a given interval. What you can’t give is a “cause” for that nucleus happening to decay in a given interval or not.
Ariel (#28):
Rats. I should have known I still hadn’t worded it properly. Let’s try again.
A’. “x begins to exist at time t” means “x exists at t and for all earlier times t(n) it is not the case that x exists and there is an earlier time t’ at which it is not the case that x exists”
That’s a little clunky and can probably be improved upon, but I think finally captures what I meant. The argument then is that Craig’s formulation (and my unsatisfactory initial rendering of A) is ambiguous between something starting to exist within a temporal framework (i.e., there is a time before it starts to exist) and something starting to exist along with a temporal framework (i.e., there being no time before it starts to exist at all). The point then is that Premise 1 looks plausible in the first sense but not in the second, but Premise 2 (given Craig’s additional cosmological assumptions) is only true in the second sense and not in the first.
Only two? I’m not sure we need to treat it either as a generalisation from experience or as a necessary precondition for rational investigation as if the two were mutually exhaustive (or indeed mutually exclusive). It could be more like a methodological principle, assumed in practice to hold in most investigative contexts (e.g., applied to physical phenomena within universes), while allowing that it may not hold in all (e.g., when applied to universes as a whole) and that there may even be good reasons for assuming exceptions. In which case it might function most of the time as a metaphysical principle guiding and motivating our investigations, but we might still be justifiably leery of applying it to cases radically different from our ordinary experience, because its validity is dependent to a large extent on its ongoing utility within that experience.
If someone claims that God initially poofed life into existence, then this doesn’t stop us from investigating how life evolved subsequently. But it is an enquiry-stopper for investigation into how life arose. That’s the point. It’s an enquiry-stopper for the question that the invocation of God’s direct agency is meant to explain. That’s what I read Greta as saying, not that it’s a stopper to all enquiry.
However, if it’s only being invoked as an ultimate explanation, positioned at the end of the explanatory chain wherever that end happens to be, rather than being invoked for any specific phenomenon, then you have a point. And since we are after all discussing the various forms of the cosmological argument here, it may well be applicable to at least some versions of said argument. That doesn’t, of course, make it a good or viable explanation, but yes, under those circumstances it does at least avoid the enquiry-stopper charge.
Iain Walker
Ok, that looks better now. Indeed, the formulation can still be improved a bit, but let’s not bother – I take the meaning as clear. The moral (if any :-)) of our discussion seems to be: Premise 1 looks vulnerable. Additional argument is needed to argue for the claim that the universe itself is one of the objects for which Premise 1 is valid. Craig offers here an intuition of the sort “no object – including the universe – can pop into existence out of nothing”. The strength of his argument is that this basic insight seems quite intuitive indeed, doesn’t it? On the other hand, intuitions are … you know, just intuitions, and their worth can be verified only by further reflection and research. My impression is that (quite possibly) the last word in the whole debate hasn’t been said yet. But as for me, I’m done with defending Craig for now.
Snoof #29
That may be connected with a question raised earlier by Iain: what notion of a cause is needed to make the argument work? The answer is by no means clear; it is also unclear to me whether Craig is really forced to opt for a notion of a deterministic cause. Maybe he could use something like that instead? I’m not sure.
@Greta
If you’re answering the question “what caused this” even with a negative then you’re using a crayon. Otherwise I could declare that the entire picture, everything in reality, “was not caused by Electromagnetism” and then claim I haven’t coloured anything in.
That doesn’t make sense – if I’m making any statement about what caused it then I’m colouring in, the only thing that maps to not colouring in is “I don’t know what caused this” And that is the default position.
We can make conclusions, even when we’re not 100% sure we’re right, but only when we have some evidence that we’re right. What we can never do is make conclusions when we have no evidence at all.
For example – take the red crayon of pure Atheism. Can we ever use that?
Have we ever found any evidence that a Deist God did not create and determine everything, or maintain it as it is? No, there can’t be any evidence against this kind of God, so there is nothing we can colour in Pure Red,
Can we’re colour in the Medium Pink of “It was no God except maybe a Deist God”?
Is there any evidence against an evil Deity? No? Then we can’t colour in Pink.
Can we colour in the Pinkish Orange of “It was no God except maybe a Deist God or an evil God”?
It depends if there’s evidence against every other type of God.
As we’ve already established red has never been the right colour. We’ve never discovered anything about which we can say “This was definitely not caused by even a Deist God”, so anyone who says “red has always been the right answer” is simply wrong.
It’s true that blue has never been the right answer but it is equally true that red has never been the right answer.
The only thing that we have established, over and over again, is “This happens”. We have never established “This is caused by a God” or “This is not caused by a God” so we have never coloured in any colour, so we can never say “We’ve coloured this colour a lot already, we should continue using it” – even if that were a logical position, which it is not.
Can you? Who is this We? PZ Myers can certainly tell us what evidence would persuade him – No Evidence Ever! What would persuade you?
Yup, lots of things, any positive evidence that He does not exist or evidence that the concept was self-contradictory. That was pretty easy.
Can you do the same?
No. We know the majority of causes of bad coughs, and we understand the lungs well, there is plenty of evidence about what causes coughs and what doesn’t.
However if he said “I don’t know what’s causing this but I can rule out that God created everything” it would be unreasonable, as we don’t know the majority of causes of the universe, we do not understand how universes form well, and there is no evidence about what causes universes and what does not.
The same goes if he says “I don’t know what’s causing this but I can rule out that God doesn’t exist” – for exactly the same reasons.
@Iain – No, weak agnosticism does not throw away the blue or the red crayon – it merely does not use them… yet.
That’s not a logical reason.
That’s not a logical reason either, and as I pointed out before we’ve found nothing coloured red the same as we’ve found nothing coloured blue.
“Thing is, it’s not at all clear what you think red represents here. Is it just any explanation that doesn’t involve a god or gods? Or is it an explanation which rules out gods? Because there’s a difference, and the atheist position just requires the first.”
It’s both of them. If you’re saying it does not involve Gods you are ruling out Deities creating or determining it, because that’s a type of involvement.
“Greta’s argument as I understand it that unlike God-based explanations, natural explanations have been overwhelmingly successful in the past, and that inductively we may expect them to continue to be so in the future – i.e., that we will continue to have no need of that hypothesis.
What kind of natural explanations? “This happened naturally and we don’t know whether it involved a God” or “This happened naturally and it did not involve a God”?
The latter has not been overwhelmingly successful in the past – it’s never been shown to be true even once, so no induction can be done with it.
The former is the only thing we’ve discovered, and yes, it seems likely that we will continue to not know whether a Deity is involved in our natural processes.
Ariel (#31):
I’ll try and stop provoking such defenses then (for this thread at least). Thanks for the work out.
Sarah (#33):
Precisely. So the position of throwing away the blue crayon while not colouring in anything is not weak agnosticism – which is what you claimed it was. Reread my #5 and your #6.
No, it’s an inductive reason. The whole argument is inductive, not deductive. I thought that was obvious.
The second formulation presupposes that red corresponds to explanations that do not invoke deities, not explanations that rule them out (whereas the first formulation took red to correspond to the latter). I admit I didn’t make that clear. Apologies for that.
That’s incorrect. You’re confusing an explanation that does not involve invoking gods as part of the explanatory process with those that rule gods out as part of the explanatory process. Greta’s argument only requires the success of the first (i.e., the success of methodological naturalism).
Neither. Natural explanations which make no reference to gods at all as any part of the explanatory hypothesis. Plate tectonics, evolution by natural selection, the nebular hypothesis of the origin of the solar system, the Big Bang, and the germ theory of disease are all examples of successful natural explanations. None of them require any deities.
Unless someone comes up with a coherent, testable model of divine interaction with the world (and which which isn’t qualified to death with ad hoc excuses to protect it from falsification). Until then, “Goddidit” falls into the category of “not even wrong”, and the null hypothesis (that there is no god) remains the default assumption.
@Ian
My mistake, I did not notice you said “throw away” and was answering as if you said “do not use”.
So there are no black swans?
The premise is wrong anyway; we have never found anything to be blue, but neither have we found anything that is not blue, in fact we can’t even test for blue-ness so we can draw no conclusions about whether the next thing will be blue or not.
If “It has been this way so far so we have evidence that it will continue to be this way forever” is a correct application of inductive logic then induction is flawed as a method for arriving at correct conclusions. I am not an expert on inductive logic though so if there is a classic defence of it on this issue please link me to it and I will read it.
In that case it’s agnosticism (weak), it does not preclude deities and I agree the whole thing should be coloured in red. i.e. “We know that A is caused by B but do not know if this process involves a deity”
No, you are misreading me. I said that “If you’re saying it does not involve Gods you are ruling out Deities creating or determining it, because that’s a type of involvement” if she is not saying that it does not involve Gods, just that we have no evidence that it involves Gods (and no evidence that it doesn’t), then she is not ruling out their involvement and she is talking about agnosticism. (Which isn’t a crayon, and should not be filled in, but is not atheism either)
Natural explanations which make no reference to Gods at all are statements of “This happened naturally and we don’t know whether it involved a God” – if they know whether it involved a God or not they have to state it otherwise their explanation is incomplete.
“Unless someone comes up with a coherent, testable model of divine interaction with the world (and which which isn’t qualified to death with ad hoc excuses to protect it from falsification).”
Exactly. Which won’t happen so we will never know whether a God did it or not…
Until then, “Goddidit” falls into the category of “not even wrong”, and the null hypothesis (that there is no god) remains the default assumption.
What? No. Until then “Goddidit” falls into the category of “Unknown veracity, unprovable” along with “Goddidn’tdoit”.
You can keep saying “The null hypothesis is that I am right, and until there is any evidence either way I am right” all you like but that will never change the fact that the default position is actually “I don’t know”, and until there is any evidence either way nobody will ever know and the only people who are wrong will be the ones who claim to have answers.
Sarah (#36):
Firstly, induction is a method for arriving at provisional, probabilistic conclusions that remain open to subsequent refutation. Its correct application does not aim at certainty. “All swans that I and other people have experienced on repeated occasions and under a wide range of circumstances have been white, therefore it is probable that all swans are white” is a good argument. It is provides good epistemic grounds for the conclusion “all swans are probably white”. The fact that not all swans are white does not make the method of reasoning unsound. What it means is that the argument has to be modified to something more like “X% of swans that I and other people have experienced on repeated occasions and under a wide range of circumstances have been white, while Y% have been black, therefore it is probable that X% of all swans are white and Y% are black”. It’s a method of approaching truth by refinements of successive approximations.
Secondly, if you reject induction, then you reject the principles underlying the statistical testing of hypotheses, which take samples of data points as representative of all relevant data points. Indeed, most forms of probabilistic or statistical reasoning are variations on induction.
Thirdly, if you reject induction, then you reject the role of consilience in supporting scientific hypotheses. Do you think that if 10 lines of evidence support a hypothesis, then this is no better than a single line of evidence? Similarly with the notion of reproducibility – if 10 experiments produce the same result, is this no better than only one experiment?
Which misreads what I said. An explanation that does not involve gods simply means “does not involve gods as part of the explanatory process” (i.e., in what epistemologists call the explanans). That does not entail non-involvement in the phenomenon to be explained (i.e., in what epistemologists call the explanandum, which is how you seem to have misread it) – it simply entails that the explanation works fine without assuming any such involvement.
Or weak or negative atheism, as it is also known …
Not quite. They are more statements of the form “X can be explained in terms of natural processes alone and (parenthetically) without any need to invoke a god”. God simply falls by the wayside as explanatorily redundant. Adding “we don’t know whether it involved a God” seems to imply that the participation of a deity is a live issue, but if the natural explanation is a successful one, then it isn’t. We no more need to say “we don’t know whether the evolution of birds involved a God” than we need to say “we don’t know whether the evolution of birds involved treacle”. We can explain the evolution of birds without reference to either.
And if it never happens, we can also continue to rule out God as a viable explanation on methodological grounds.
“Unprovable” (or more correctly, not testable even in principle) is what “not even wrong” means.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_even_wrong
Which I haven’t said at all. I think you misunderstand what a null hypothesis is. It’s the default assumption you use for comparison when testing a positive claim. If you are testing a drug to see if it has any effect, then the null hypothesis is that it does not have any effect. In testing the claim, the null hypothesis is what you are trying to disprove.
However, a self-correction: in the context of this discussion, the appropriate null hypothesis is “Phenomenon X can be explained without invoking God” (since the positive claim would be “Phenomenon X can only be explained by invoking God”). “God does not exist” is the null hypothesis relative to the hypothesis that God does exist.
Thanks, that is a useful explanation of induction. Given inductive logic there is still no evidence against a Deist/some Theist Gods, as I explain above.
““Unprovable” (or more correctly, not testable even in principle) is what “not even wrong” means.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_even_wrong“
So by your logic Atheism is “not even wrong”?
You are using the null hypothesis in a situation it is not applicable to. A null hypothesis can only be invoked if the principle is falsifiable.
For example, if I told you “I might have had breakfast this morning”, barring any physical investigation by you this statement is not falsifiable, for you. Therefore you cannot invoke the null “Sarah did not have breakfast this morning” you have to go with your actual knowledge, “I do not know if Sarah had breakfast this morning”
The same goes for “Phenomenon X can be explained without invoking God” – since you can’t test whether Phenomenon X is being caused, maintained or determined by God, or any other untestable being, you can’t invoke the null hypothesis. You have to go with what you actually know “We do not know whether Phenomenon X occurs at the behest of an untestable Deity”
“Not quite. They are more statements of the form “X can be explained in terms of natural processes alone and (parenthetically) without any need to invoke a god”. God simply falls by the wayside as explanatorily redundant. Adding “we don’t know whether it involved a God” seems to imply that the participation of a deity is a live issue, but if the natural explanation is a successful one, then it isn’t. We no more need to say “we don’t know whether the evolution of birds involved a God” than we need to say “we don’t know whether the evolution of birds involved treacle”. We can explain the evolution of birds without reference to either.”
This isn’t correct. “X can be explained in terms of natural processes alone” is an untestable proposition – as we can’t test whether those ‘natural’ processes were instantated, defined, maintained or in any other way involved a God. God isn’t explanatorily redundant any more than Strings, or SuperStrings are, merely untestable, and unproven.
The ‘natural explanation’ can’t be a successful one, as we can’t test whether it is truly ‘natural’ as there is no test for “Did God cause this/Does God maintain this”
Your treacle example is inapplicable – we know what treacle is – we know how treacle interacts with the world around it and can in principle test whether it was involved in the evolution of birds. If there were a Deity we do not know what he is, we don’t know how he interacts with the world and we cannot in principle test whether He was involved in the evolution of birds. We can also test for the presence/absence of treacle in any situation, therefore confirm/rule out it’s presence, which again, we cannot do with a Deity.