"You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."

Stosis: anytime someone uses the word "obvious," they mean, "This is a point you can't argue, because I can't defend it."

*cough*(entropy)*cough*

 

Well, that's the whole foundation of the Kalam (or any) Cosmological Argument.  It's like if we call it obvious enough times, people will accept it... you know?

The Kalam makes the same error as any other argument I've seen involving necessary creators.  It gets things ass-backwards by claiming premises that can only be established after making observations.  I mean... hell...  That's how any argument works.

I think the place where people screw up the cosmological argument is in misunderstanding how and why we can justify a thing as "self-evident."  There are only a small handful of things that are self evident, and they are necessarily so because of the need for their existence prior to even questioning their existence.

My existence is self-evident (to me).  I cannot ask the question "Do I exist" without begging the question.  I have proven my existence by the very act of questioning it, and it can be no other way.

With a creator, it is not so.  All I have to do is conceive of a nonsentient, natural beginning for the universe, and I have proven that god is not self evident.

What the Kalam argument misses is that its "obvious" premises fall to the same fallacious reasoning.  "All that exists has a cause" is not necessarily true.  We can observe interactions in this universe and reason that there are causal relationships between matter/energy, but the argument in question is not talking about what has happened after the universe existed.  It is quite specifically talking about something before it.  Never mind that linear time may not be as um... straightforward... as all that, but the point remains that if we are talking about something existing outside of our universe in any way, we cannot presume to know anything about what is or is not self evident outside of our universe.

In fact, the only thing we can possibly say is that at this time, nothing at all is self evident outside of our universe since absolutely nothing is evident in any way whatsoever.

That being the case, the initial premise for any cosmological argument must be invalid:  1) All that exists has a cause.

It's just a premise out of thin air.  

 

 Yeah, I've never understood how anyone ever thought invoking a contradiction would solve the problem of an unsupported premise.  We learned not to do that in the first week of Logic 101.

 

If Stosis does not respond in a reasonable amount of time, I would like to debate you instead. You are, after all, the author of the post that kickstarted the debate. If not you, then Hamby. If not Hamby, then anyone.

These debates always boil down to this:

What property does God posses that solves the infinite regress? Why can't the universe have this property? Why can't the universe be eternal and without a cause, if God can be?

Just give us a short answer, otherwise why waist time debating?

No you haven't answered the question. All you've done is commit the logical error of assuming the conclusions as premises and created a circular argument.

The laws of thermodynamics do not prove the universe must have a beginning or a cause.

 

Have you had basic philosophy?  If I was four feet taller and existed, then I would exist.  If I were an invisible pink unicorn, either the words "invisible," "pink," and "unicorn" would all have to refer to things that exist, or I would not exist.  If I didn't exist, I wouldn't exist.  It's pretty simple.

How nice.

Do you have any idea how far you've jumped off the deep end here?  You're talking about things that deal with assertions made after the acceptance of existence.  Establishing the existence of something other than "I" is an entirely different matter than establishing the self-refuting nature of existence.  I might be the only existing thing, and I might be bat-shit crazy -- so crazy that I imagine the entire universe to exist.  Even so, my existence is self-evident by virtue of my ability to question my existence.  My state of mind is irrelevant.

Can I just skip ahead to the part where I chide you for not reading something after Descartes?

Somehow, you've managed to convolute two meanings of "existence," and it's screwing you up very badly.  The "invisible pink unicorn" that exists in my brain is a concept.  It is not made of matter/energy.  Though I can be conceptualized, I exist regardless of whether or not anyone does, in fact, conceptualize me.

A "concept" is at least a second-order "thing."  That is, its existence is dependent on "mind."  Consider that if the universe had exactly the same amount of matter/energy that it does now, but there were no "minds" in the universe, there would be no concepts.  Concepts do not add or take away from physical reality (though they can indirectly change physical reality to some extent when they are held by beings capable of altering their environment) and so are not "things" in the sense in which I am a thing.

Your view is wrong.

 

 

 

 

Basic philosophy?  Yes.

I was hoping you'd say how you arrive at those answers, not just what those answers are. 

I'd still like to know how you deal with counterfactuals.  "If you born in Saudi Arabia, would you still be an atheist?"  Does that question have a truth value and what ultimately makes its truth value what it is, even if you weren't born in Saudi Arabia?  How in your view can any counterfactual statement be true if it's conditional part is not actually the case?

 

Are you applying a different standard for testing your own existence than that which you apply to other things?  Doesn't that involve the fallacy of equivocation?

You agreed to the meaningfulness of talking about imaginary things when you said if you were 4 feet taller you'd exist.  Isn't it a fact that a 4 foot taller version of you is simply imaginary and doesn't exist?  And in what sense could anyone taller than you still be you?  Isn't your physical size part of who you are?

It is hard to talk about normal things like sports, ("Our team would have won had the referee been paying attention!" ) without speaking of imaginary places (such as a world where some referees pay attention) just as if they were real.  And if you think physicality is the best criteria for whether something exists, referees that do pay attention are physical, by definition, even if sports fans have never found one.  Likewise, a nonexistant light-year tall lump of matter in the shape of the words, "Made by God!" is physical.  That's by definition, since we are talking about something made of matter, and matter is physical.  Being physical is not a sufficient criteria for something to be actual.

 

 You can do what you'd like, although it would be more interesting if you could also answer the harder questions.

 I am pretty sure though that Karl Popper, Albert Einstein, A. J. Ayer, Bertrand Russel, Ayn Rand, David Lewis, Douglas Hofstadter, David O'Brink, and Roger Penrose are all after Descartes.  

 

 I am right that for you existence just means physicality?  Numbers don't exist?  Ethical absolutes don't exist?  A four foot taller version of you doesn't exist?

 Karl Popper, David Lewis, David O'Brink, and Roger Penrose would certainly disagree with that.  

 Reality isn't an intrinsic quality of the world itself.  There isn't some mystical essense that our world has and all other possible worlds lack and imaginary creatures lack.  There is no magical pixie dust inside our world to make it exist.  The realness of our world isn't something any God can on a whim turn on or off by just flipping a divine switch.  There is no divine clay that when made into the same shape as some possible world, then makes that world suddenly become actual.  There's no divine filing cabinet where possible worlds are filed away and where all the worlds in one drawer are magically real while those in the other drawer are mere unused options for other ways worlds can be.  Rather, actual worlds and possible worlds are just different instances of the same thing, differing only in their contents and configuration.  What makes our world actual for us is, and could only ever be, just one thing - simply that it is OURS.

 The imaginary unicorn in my brain is my recognition of what physically exists in an alternative world.  "Invisible pink" is a contradiction, though, and doesn't exist in any world.

 

 Minds discover concepts that exist to be found.  Minds didn't cause there to be an infinity of prime numbers, we simply discovered proof that there are.  Concepts exist independently of whether they are ever discovered.  If you read Karl Popper, you'll find he included them in in what he called "the third world."

 

 Which boils down to merely saying that some things are like you in a particular way that concepts are not.  When Karl Popper refers to things existing in his third world, he's pointing to a manner in which concepts are like you.  But he felt that in order for concepts to be like you in some manner, they'd have to exist.

 

 I respect you, and really appreciate your opinion and your having taken the time to respond.  Thank you.

Notice, though, that I've avoided ever saying your view is wrong.  Maybe existence is to philosophy as the parallel postulate is to geometry.  Maybe there are rational and logically consistent versions of philosophy that understand "existence" in radically differing ways.  Platonists and non-Platonists are probably both right, but only under differing sets of definitions. 

 

 

 

 

I still don't buy into my existence being "self-evident".  Maybe I am misunderstanding your definition of "self-evident."

For me, in order for our existence to be self-evident, we'd need to have a fair and workable definition of existence prior to showing that it obvious we fit the definition.  But in practice, philosophers cheat by using a definition of existence (or of actuality) that is from the start contrived to ensure that they themselves qualify to be part of the set of entities it specifies.

Some philosophers (like David Lewis, who I've yet to find any disagreement with) have adopted a usage where all possible entities are said to exist, but only entities that are in a particular manner more like us (being our worldmates) are considered actual.  His definitions can be followed objectively and are useful.  But again, in this scheme, our actuality is established by definition, rather than being a fact one can discover or reason to.

My problem is that I can't see why people find something that is true by mere virtue of a definition to be surprising. But that's what people imply when they seek reasons for why the world exists.  I agree that I exist, because I am necessarily part of the set of all possible entities.  And I agree that I am actual, because I am necessarily maximally like myself, and am necessarily my own worldmate.  But neither of those conclusions are surprising or demand any mystical explanation for why they are true.   Among all possible worlds, it is simply inevitable that one of them would have someone like me in it.

 

 

The law of identity doesn't define existence.  Nonexisting things are identical to themselves just as existing things are.  And while the law of identity says things can have characteristics, nonexisting things can have characteristics.   The law of noncontradiction implies that something can't exist and non-exist at the same time, regardless of what we mean by exist, but doesn't rule out everything possible existing or nothing at all existing, or any subset of the set of all possible things existing at the expense of others.  The law of the excluded middle implies an entity either exists or it doesn't, but still doesn't tell us which is which.   None of those principles you cited have anything to do with how to determine what exists and what doesn't.  Also, there are several logically consistent formal systems of mathematical logics where the law of the excluded middle isn't required - thus these axioms (at least the third, and debatably the second) are not quite as essential as you make them out to be.

 

 

What you're missing is that existence must precede definition.  You're getting ontology backwards.  We must know that there is "something" before we begin discussing what "something" is.

 

No sir, but we do have to know what numbers are before we can assign properties to them.

Are you saying that we know physicality is real because physicality exhibits objective truth independent of our minds? That the entities we physically perceive aren't mere mental creations, but truths independent of our minds that we explore? But the entities we encounter via conceptualization are also in a similar manner independent of our minds. That certain concepts must imply others, and that certain formulations of concepts are viable when others formulations are not, those appear to external truths that we have no choice over. Sure, ideas come in and out of our minds from our choosing to focus our attention on them, but our physical experiences also depend on our choice of where to go and what to lend our attention to. And the world of ideas is just objective as the physical world, in that we have an expectation of other minds exploring both those worlds to encounter a lot of the same entities that we do.

But it's merely an assertion, for which I'm still asking for evidence, that these two worlds are fundamentally different in kind. If one doesn't require a supernatural explanation for the world of ideas, why would one insist on a supernatural explanation for the physical world? (I am not saying Hambydammit is asking for a supernatural explanation - he's not. I am tying the conversation back to other people's assertions and my whole motivation for commenting on these Kalam Cosmological Argument threads in the first place.)

Somewhere among the vast space of possible concepts, there is an entity isomorphic to our physical world, containing entities isomorphic to us. I just invoke Occam's razor and take it as a philosophical axiom, that those entities are us. There's no need to believe in two identical copies of the same thing.

But we can't have any observation without having certain tools of reason. And those tools, like a pair of binoculars we can't get clean, necessary have a specks in them right where we are trying to observe. So we can't be sure if what we feel we are observing isn't just an artifact of our methods.

"I am" (or the more polite "we are") is something I can agree to only if I take it to mean much less than most other people appear to be using it to mean. For other people seem to be seeking an explanation for why, as if the proposition is surprising. If I try to understand "I am" in any way that is surprising, I get an understanding that I am not sure is true.

If "I am" is necessarily true, the claim appears to lack any usefulness or significance. If it has usefulness and explanatory power, it is because we use it in a system of thought that is built from taking one of more arbitrary axioms in addition to the starting axioms of our logic. The axioms of identity, noncontradiction, and excluded middle, alone without another axiom, is insufficient for our purposes here. Adding just the starting axioms and symbols of even higher mathematical logics, provides many benefits, but is still not sufficient. Other axioms are needed before the reasoning can be put to use.

If among those other axioms we have that points exists, and that between any two points a straight line exists, we get a system of thought that could turn out to be a geometry. But to turn around and ask for an explanation for WHY points and lines exist, and getting all theological about it - I find that ridiculous. And we shouldn't think that the geometry we get is they only possible one. We get the geometry we get because we pick the axioms we do.

If among those other axioms we have that "I am", and that "I have perceptions" we've started developing an ontology. But to turn around and ask for an explanation for WHY I exist and have perceptions and getting all theological about it - I find that ridiculous. And we shouldn't think that the ontology we get is they only possible one. We get the ontology we get because we pick the axioms we do.

If you are trying to say "I am" is somehow a special statement because any useful ontology must have it be true - then is "there are points" special in exactly the same way, because any geometry must have it be true?

The study of counterfactuals has been a major cornerstone leading many published philosophers to reconsider how they think and speak about existence and actuality.

But anyway, it seems like we are peeling an onion. When I discard everything I read you to say is irrelevant, I'm finding nothing remains. If there is something else there that you are trying to point to, it's not apparent to me.

You're welcome to refer me to other articles online.

My disagreement with you was just that you got adversarial and said I was wrong, when I still don't see how.  In actual practice, I am not sure if I significantly disagree with you on any practical issue, except maybe what's the best way to talk about what we believe.  I too was getting the feeling that we're just talking past each other.  I respect you a lot and know you are knowledgable and rational.  I almost always agree with and appreciate your posts in other threads here.  So being on the opposite side of an argument from you felt out of place.

 

My disagreement with Descartes' "I think therefore I am" was merely that one can't use "I think" as a means to justify the claim that one is actual.  That's because we can consider nonactual entities with any property, including thinking, or having a subjective feeling of actuality.  In contrast, an ontology that just takes "I am actual" as a postulate, being honest that it can't be proved, I have no problem with.  Such ontologies are necessary to have.   That we can't avoid the necessity to accept a certain proposition as a postulate, doesn't change that it's a postulate.   It doesn't magically elevate the postulate to the status of an observation.

 

My disagreement with others is that I can't understand why they find their existance surprising or needing some explanation, whether it's supernatural or not.  Does anyone want to defend that?