We are here debating the Kalam Cosmological Argument from a deistic rather than theistic perspective. Carlo Alvaro is taking the affirmative; Richard Carrier the negative. See our initial entry for all the details, including an index to all entries yet published.
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Dr. Alvaro’s argument is indeed formally valid:
- (1) All things that begin to exist came into existence by something else.
- (2) The universe [I assume Alvaro means ‘reality’] is something that began to exist.
- (3) Therefore, the universe came into existence by something else.
But is it sound? Are these premises more likely true than false?
No.
The first problem Alvaro faces is that his premises are contrary to established science. The second problem Alvaro faces is that none of this gets to anything describable as a god.
I. Science Supersedes Philosophy
We cannot claim to have reached a scientific conclusion without doing the science. Alvaro is claiming to reach scientific conclusions; moreover, conclusions contrary to already-existing science. That is not a legitimate epistemic procedure. Premises born of it are always more likely false than true. To turn that around requires doing sufficient science to establish the premise.
Science has not established Premise 2. It is instead established in cosmological science that (1) we cannot know the Big Bang is the first moment of time or reality, and that (2) there could be an infinite prior series of Big Bangs or other states of existence.[1] There is therefore no evidence establishing Premise 2 is probable.
Alvaro incorrectly says “the big bang theory proves that time, space, and energy came into being about 13.7 billion years ago.” All scientists now reject this because it was based on physics now disproved (the original Hawking-Penrose theorem, disproved by quantum mechanics [2]). We can no longer know that temporal reality began with our Big Bang.
Science has also not established Premise 1. That is a claim to a physical law. Yet it is not logically necessarily true, and therefore must necessarily be only contingently true. But if it is only contingently true, it is logically possible for there to be states of affairs not subject to it. It is therefore logically impossible that ‘all’ things that begin to exist must come into existence by something else. Premise 1 is therefore logically impossible and therefore false.
Moreover, the state of affairs of there being nothing that is as yet caused to exist is precisely one of the states of affairs in which Premise 1 will not yet apply, because no contingent laws exist to apply. Premise 1 therefore can never be true when Premise 2 is true. Before Premise 1 comes into existence (so as to govern all subsequent reality), any other state of affairs could exist, such as one in which things cause themselves or come to exist spontaneously.
II. There Is No God in This Syllogism
If this conclusion is avoided by tautologically defining ‘something else’ to include spontaneously arising from any state of affairs different from the one resulting—such as the absence of Premise 1 producing the emergence of Premise 1—then we can satisfy the entire syllogism with a mindless mechanism, and the whole argument fails to produce any god as a conclusion. Indeed, we can deduce from the absence of Premise 1 precisely this outcome, so that no other explanation of existence is needed.[3]
Alvaro’s unstated ‘Premise 4’ that he deferred for the future—that only some kind of moral intelligence (rather than a mindless, amoral mechanism) can count as the “something else” in Premise 3—is therefore also false. Even if the universe (or all contingent reality) began to exist, and something different than it caused it to exist, that “something different than it” can be any state of affairs, such as the simplest physical state logically possible (whether substantive, as in most past-finite cosmological models in science today; or non-substantive [4]). There is no logical entailment that it have an intelligence or morals, any more than a photon does. Nor is there is any evidence that it did.
In that sense Alvaro’s argument is simply a tautology: that any first state of everything will be different than any subsequent state of everything. All atheists agree with this.
III. Actual Infinities Are Logically Possible
Alvaro attempts to defend Premise 2 by claiming actual infinities (at least probably) cannot exist. This is another antiscientific position. Scientists and mathematicians have all established that there is no logical contradiction in an actual infinity and that actual infinities exist everywhere.[5] Even your fingernail consists of an actual infinity of geometric points; and many cosmological theories involve realized infinities.
Alvaro objects to the conclusion of all mathematicians and scientists because he thinks infinities are absurd. But lacking absurdity is not a truth condition. Any absurd thing can be nevertheless true. Camus says life is absurd. It nevertheless still exists. Alvaro needs to show that an actual infinity is logically impossible. Otherwise, it is by definition logically possible. There is no other state of affairs.
Alvaro cannot establish this by pointing out that actual infinities cannot be formed by successive addition, because a past infinity is not a product of successive addition. Successive addition assumes a beginning (a point from which counting begins); but that is precisely what does not exist in a past-infinity. And Alvaro cannot establish it by pointing out that a person can never reach the bottom of infinite stairs, because no one has to. No one is claiming our point in time is the end of all time, so we are not at ‘the bottom’ of those stairs. When there are infinite stairs, every stair exists. We can therefore be located on any one of them; we do not have to have walked from anywhere if we came into existence there.
Alvaro’s entire approach here is folly. Because anything you supposedly “can’t” do to an actual infinity would have to also be impossible to do to a conceptual infinity; but the latter has been disproved for every possible argument he could advance. That’s why all scientists and mathematicians agree with me. So you have to show an infinity to be logically impossible. Otherwise, that which is logically possible is necessarily also physically possible: simply instantiate the concept one-to-one with any real thing. There is nothing about an infinity of things that can make it any less capable of existing than an infinity of ideas. So if the latter is possible, so is the former.
IV. Conclusion
There is no empirical evidence for Premise 2, and it is rejected as unprovable by most actual experts in cosmology today. The argument fails on that fact alone. But even if we grant Premise 2, Premise 1 fails. For if time, space, and the laws of physics began (Premise 2), then so did all contingent laws—like Premise 1. Which means the first cause was not subject to it. So both premises cannot be true.
So even if we grant Premise 2 (and there is no reason to), still the only question that remains is what the first state of it all was. That then caused everything else; and that will then be a different thing from what transpired, just as desires differ from the neurons that cause them. But there is no evidence that thing has to be intelligent or moral. Premise 3 therefore cannot get to any god.
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Endnotes
[1] For scientific studies confirming both points, see my entries in the cosmological section of the Carrier-Marshall Debate.
[2] See the Wikipedia entry on the Hawking-Penrose Singularity Theorems and see Leah Crane, “Quantum Effects Cloak Impossible Singularities with Black Holes,” New Scientist (2017).
[3] See What If We Reimagine ‘Nothing’ as a Field-State?
[4] Substantive first-cause models include the Krauss model and the Vilenkin model; for a non-substantive model, see Nothing as a Field-State, which describes the scientific model proposed in Maya Lincoln and Avi Wasser, “Spontaneous Creation of the Universe Ex Nihilo,” Physics of the Dark Universe (2013).
[5] See the videos Physicists & Philosophers Debunk the Kalam Cosmological Argument (featuring Penrose, Hawking, and Guth, among others) and Physicists and Philosophers Strike Back; and as well my discussion and citations in the cosmological section of the Carrier-Marshall Debate.
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Dr. Carrier presents his rebuttal as follows:
The first and second premises of the Kalam cosmological argument are false, namely, that 1) Everything that begins to exist does so by virtue of something else, and 2) The universe began to exist. The first premise is false because it is not necessarily true, and the second is likewise false because it has not been established by science.
Even if the second premise were true, the first would be false as a result, since nothingness would precede the laws of physics and would not be subject to them, nor therefore to the principle of sufficient reason.
That concludes Dr. Carrier’s main remarks.
Regarding the second premise:
Given the uncertainty that the question raises, let’s assume we don’t know whether the universe began to exist or not and have to decide based on logic and data considered undeniable. Well, it is undeniable that, in the universe, one state follows another, otherwise, we would find ourselves in an eternal “now”. This succession is either finite or infinite. If it is finite, the universe began to exist. If it is infinite, acknowledging that we have conceded that time is divided into discrete elements, called “moments” or “states of affairs”, and we find ourselves in a certain moment or state of affairs, this entails that the previous moments or states of affairs have ended. Now, if they have ended, they were not infinite, so there is no infinite causal regression.
The above can be illustrated with the following example: someone who says “I will not give you a penny unless I have given you a dime before, and I will not give you a dime unless I have given you a penny before” will never give us either a penny or a dime.
Regarding the first premise:
Let’s now see if the first premise, the principle of sufficient reason, has been correctly invalidated by Dr. Carrier. In his reasoning, he proposes that we should only admit as a universal principle, applicable to all possible universes, one that is necessarily true in a logical sense. Therefore, if we were to prove that the principle of sufficient reason is necessarily true, Dr. Carrier would have no choice but to accept the premise as valid.
In this sense, it must be noted that the impossible and the necessary depend only on their own notion, so they remain always invariable, installed in non-being and being respectively. However, what is caused depends on a foreign notion that joins it, which is why it goes from non-being to being and from being to non-being, that is, it is subject to change and is neither impossible nor necessary. Thus, the classic cosmological argument can be formulated based on these premises:
What has a cause owes its being to another being.
The impossible cannot be. Therefore, it does not owe its being to another being nor has a cause.
The necessary cannot not be. Therefore, it either exists by another necessary being or by itself. If it exists by another necessary being, it is less necessary than that being, since it is needed by it and is not necessitating. But this cannot be maintained, given that there are no degrees in necessity, as there are none in impossibility. Also, something cannot have its being by itself and by another. Therefore, a necessary being is by itself. Therefore, it does not owe its being to another being nor has a cause.
From the above it follows that:
1) What is neither impossible nor necessary has a cause, that is, owes its being to another being.
2) What changes is neither impossible nor necessary.
3) Consequently, what changes has a cause, that is, owes its being to another being.
Dr. Carrier appears inconsistent in rejecting the principle of sufficient reason for considering it not necessarily true (although we have seen that it is) and instead positing principles that are not necessarily true, such as the existence of something like “the simplest physical state logically possible”. This assumes that there is a maximum simplicity in the physical when precisely the opposite occurs: everything physical undergoes mutation, so it necessarily has parts and is not maximally simple. The maximally simple or absolutely one is, by definition, what is outside nature, beyond space and time, that is, God.
Dr. Carrier also maintains that it is the theist’s burden of proof to demonstrate that an infinite succession is logically impossible. Although we have already shown that it indeed is, Carrier remains skeptical of this kind of argumentation and objects that, to be in a certain state of affairs, we do not need to have gone through all the previous states of affairs. Ironically, this presupposes that, instead of the causal chain of events, a miraculous force has been responsible for our being in time without proceeding from it.
But let’s overlook this absurdity and provide Dr. Carrier with the proof he demands. It is not ours; it is from Avicenna. He writes:
In the aggregate of an infinite series of causes and effects, either all members of the series will be effects, or some of them will not be effects.
If all were effects, they would all have a possible existence, as they depend on a cause and not on themselves, so, since they exist by another, they necessarily presuppose an uncaused cause outside the series.
And if not all were effects, at least one of them would be an uncaused cause, from which it follows that the series would not be infinite, contrary to what has been assumed.
Therefore, Dr. Carrier’s attempt to refute the Kalam argument, although ingenious, does not achieve its aim of destroying the premises that lead to the conclusion he seeks to avoid. And since he admits that the syllogism is formally valid, with the premises remaining intact, its conclusion must also be upheld.
Do care to observe that I did not make exactly that argument here. I did not say nothing at all precedes the laws of physics. I said nothing contingent precedes the laws of physics. That means all necessary things will nevertheless precede them and thus exist. Which will be more than nothing, if any something’s existence is logically necessary.
This is exactly Alvaro’s position as well, since he is positioning a god before the laws of physics, on the basis of it being logically necessary. All I am pointing out is that he cannot establish that on these premises.
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Not in any sense pertinent to ordinary English language. Every element of an infinite series need not be identical. Thus you can still have change, and thus many different sequential “nows” exactly as we experience. Infinity does not preclude that.
That is not necessarily the case. Alvaro and I have not engaged on this, but the Hartle–Hawking model is both finite and past eternal (time loops back on itself and is thus a complete loop, which could in principle be traveled round and round eternally, if time travel were possible, which technically it is for light and antimatter). I am for simplicity’s sake classifying that in our entries so far as a self-causing model. It may or may not come up in our debate.
This depends on what you mean.
Human awareness of time (the experience of “now”) is broken into units of about half to a twentieth of a second, but there is a lot more time than that (there are moments much much smaller). Actual time is broken into units of approximately a 10^44th of a second, but that is only because the ability to measure time fails at that scale (it becomes blurry), and this could be because time is wrapping into smaller collapsed dimensions called Calabi-Yau spaces, in which case time is continuous and infinitely divisible, but at our scale can only be measured to the diameter of those spaces.
All we really need are the consciousness units, and those are quite large and indeed operate step-by-step like an infinite flight of stairs. But since the world wasn’t made for us, time just happens to be quantized to a much smaller scale than necessary. And that again is a steps-of-stairs model. Unless interdimensionality is masking a time continuum, and only in that case is time infinitely divisible and thus consists of infinite steps of zero time length relative to each other, just like the area on your fingernail is divided into infinite points of zero diameter relative to each other.
In none of these cases is stepwise time disallowed.
If you want to dive further into the area you are actually discussing, which is the debate between A-Theory and B-Theory of time, start with my article on the ontology of time and follow up with the sources there cited (including my more thorough discussion of how presentism emerges from B-Theory in Sense and Goodness without God).
The upshot is that you have no valid objection to anything I have argued here. Presentism does not contradict B-Theory and therefore is not evidence against past eternality.
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I actually have not even touched on the PSR. All my models satisfy it (even past eternalism is explicable by nothing-theory, as I explain in the linked articles, producing a sufficient reason for every observation). So there is no need of rejecting it, although I have no particular use for it either.
You might have missed it, but my paragraph beginning “If this conclusion is avoided by tautologically defining…” is based on PSR theory. We can get Premise 1 to be true if we admit that a state entailing spontaneous creation counts as a cause (and hence a sufficient reason). This is the entire basis of my own nothing-model.
It’s just that the Kalam requires rejecting this interpretation of Premise 1, because a sufficiently explicable spontaneous generation of existence is the very thing the Kalam proponent is trying to eliminate (unsuccessfully).
The upshot is that there is no interpretation of Premises 1 and 2 on which both can be true at the same time. The Kalam is therefore always incoherent.
Your attempt to reword the premises has no effect on this observation (including your recourse to obsolete medieval vocabulary; the science of transfinite sets has vastly advanced since then, rendering all medieval thought now moot).
Even Dr. Alvaro knows better than to make this false claim. All experts in transfinite mathematics confirm that there has never been a demonstration of the logical impossibility of actual infinities. See my cited and linked references.
So, no. You have never “shown that it indeed is.” That is my point: the consensus of experts agrees with me that that has never happened.
I am starting to suspect you have no sound concept of what it means to establish something is “logically impossible.” This may plague the rest of your understanding as well, since you seem to stumble over a lack of understanding of what that means even with respect to the first premise.
There are several demonstrations that conclude the logical impossibility of an infinite causal succession in act. I have proposed one, formulated by Avicenna, which you have not deemed worthy of consideration.
But there’s more. John Peckham has two demonstrations in this sense.
First argument against the eternity of the universe
All the past was future. The entirety of the past is past. Thus, at one time or another, it was future. But when all time was future, it was at the beginning of its being and duration, for it lacked a past. Therefore, time had a beginning, and the universe had a start.
To refute the argument, one would have to maintain that the first premise, “All past was future”, is false. But it does not seem to be. A past that has not been future before has always been in act. However, this is not the nature of time, which passes from potentiality to act, as does also movement.
Second argument against the eternity of the universe
Let’s assume a world with an infinite past, which has never begun to exist, and an infinite future, which will never cease to exist. Take a moment on any given day and call it A. We can refer to all the time preceding moment A as “Past A,” and all the time following it as “Future A.” Similarly, take another moment on a later day and call it B. Let us then refer to all the time preceding moment B as “Past B,” and all the time following it as “Future B.” If we superimpose Past A over Future A, neither will exceed the other, since both are infinite, and there is no reason to presuppose a greater number of past days than a greater number of future days. For the same reason, Past B and Future B will be equal to each other. However, Past B is greater than Past A, as the latter is a part of the former. And, since Past A and Future A are equal, it follows that Past B is also greater than Future A. Now, Past B and Future B are equal. Consequently, Future B is greater than Future A. But this is impossible, since Future B, which originates from a moment later than A, is part of Future A. As this reasoning results in the part being greater than the whole, which constitutes an absurdity, it must be concluded that the premise leading to this paradox, namely, the eternity of the world, is false.
Third argument against the eternity of the universe
There is a third demonstration, and this one is mine (A Stone in the Lake, arguments 20 and 24), or at least I am not aware that it has been formulated before:
If everything has a cause, then the whole has a cause. This cause is either not part of the whole or is part of the whole.
If the cause of the whole is not part of the whole, the whole is not the whole, which is absurd.
But if the cause of the whole is part of the whole, then the part is superior to the whole, given that the cause is always superior to the effect. This contradicts the axiom according to which the whole is always superior to the part.
Consequently, it is false that everything has a cause. Therefore, it is false that there is an infinite causal succession in act.
If someone were to doubt that the appropriate cause is always superior to the effect, they must consider that, if there is more in the effect than there is in the cause, what is extra in the effect would come from nothingness, and nothingness would be a concurrent cause of the effect, which makes no sense.
They should also contemplate that, if nothing can give being to itself, because nothing is superior to itself, but the cause gives being to its effect, it follows that the cause is always superior to the effect, since it can do what the effect can never do.
No, there are not.
See my citations and quotations of the literature in my Marshall debate (e.g. here and here).
That is not a formally valid syllogism. Nor is it sound. It’s just a list of unproven suppositions. That’s why modern mathematicians are not impressed with it. It’s in the junkyard of obsolete medieval ideas. Modern mathematics is vastly more advanced, particularly on the question of the coherence of transfinite sets.
Not a scientist or a mathematician.
And the syllogism you attribute to him is again neither formally valid nor sound.
Indeed it is laughably circular. As soon as he says “But when all time was future…” he has presupposed his conclusion in his premises. On past eternalism, the condition “all time was future” never exists in that set.
You really need to be sharper than this. You are being taken in by a con.
Um. That all past was future is false is by definition past eternalism. That is literally what past eternalism is. You cannot presuppose the set to be impossible to argue the set is impossible.
This is like saying I have to prove the set of all mammals lacks a lizard. By definition it lacks a lizard. I do not have to prove that it does. You are the one who would have to prove that the set of all mammals would contain a lizard. And this is precisely the proof no one has ever produced and why all contemporary mathematicians deny this claim that infinite sets are logically impossible.
All the other arguments you list are likewise sham arguments.
You do not appear to understand what logical necessity is or even how to produce a formally valid argument, much less validate its soundness.
For example, that cause-whole argument relies on what is known as Russell’s paradox, arguments from which have long since been refuted (particularly by modern set theory): the premise is void because it posits a logically impossible set, therefore any argument depending on that premise is automatically unsound.
That Peckham doesn’t know this demonstrates he knows nothing at all about the history of transfinite mathematics and thus is wholly unqualified to even have an opinion in the matter. That you were so easily taken in by an amateur making a bad argument is a bad sign. You need to check things more carefully before falling for them. Gullibility is not a virtue. Please learn how to vet the validity and soundness of an argument; and how to research the past history of the matter being argued.
I don’t want to be impolite to my host, but not engaging with the substance of the arguments presented and dismissing them with fallacies of authority, ad hominem, and other dialectical trash, while also ignoring the responses to potential objections anticipated in the argument itself, is precisely the modus operandi of a con.
Avicenna’s argument is not “a list of unproven suppositions”. The statement “In the aggregate of an infinite series of causes and effects, either all members of the series will be effects, or some of them will not be effects” is valid by the law of excluded middle. And the subsequent analysis is a logical deduction from these two exclusive possibilities:
If all were effects, they would all have a possible existence, as they depend on a cause and not on themselves, so, since they exist by another, they necessarily presuppose an uncaused cause outside the series.
And if not all were effects, at least one of them would be an uncaused cause, from which it follows that the series would not be infinite, contrary to what has been assumed.
I will not dwell on Peckham’s arguments since you have made no effort to present a valid critique of them. The charge of circular reasoning is laughable, as I have already shown that to invalidate the premise according to which “All the past was future” one would have to assume that the past has always been in act, meaning it has never passed and has always been present, which does not correspond with the nature of time nor with the very notion of “past”.
My argument against an infinite causal succession does not directly invoke the same logical structure as Russell’s paradox. Instead, it explores the implications of universal causality on the existence of a cause for the universe as a whole, leading to a contradiction under the assumption that everything must have a cause. The paradox in the argument is not about self-membership or the formation of sets but about the relationship between parts and wholes in the context of causality. Your response does not directly invalidate the argument, but rather shifts the discussion to a different domain (set theory) where the premises and conclusions of the original argument do not directly apply.
In a word, it seems you are eager to leave the discussion even before it starts. I could present more arguments in the same line, but it holds no interest for me to engage in such superficial dialogue with someone who either fails to grasp them or aims to mislead us with tricks.
You still have not presented a formally valid syllogism, nor a sound one. Which confirms my suspicion that you do not even know how to do that.
And the way you rhetorically frame your inability to defend Peckham suggests you are not actually taking any of this seriously. You are simply engaging in apologetics, not a genuine understanding of how logic works.
So I’m calling it.
Produce a formally valid and sound syllogism or GTFO.
If the universe began at a point in time, its past is finite. Conversely, if it has no endpoint, its future is boundless. Within the block universe theory, which posits that all time exists simultaneously, we face the dilemma of envisioning a reality that is simultaneously finite and infinite, a contradiction.
Thus, eternalism is tenable—or perhaps conceivable—solely under the condition of an infinite past. Yet, how can one claim that the concept of an infinite past derives from eternalism, when, indeed, the reasoning unfolds in the opposite manner?
You will necessarily have to proceed in the opposite direction and demonstrate that an infinite past can be conceived without contradiction, despite violating Ockham’s principle (“entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity”) and being foreign to all human experience, which is always finite.
Well, the demonstration you have outlined is astonishingly weak. You say: since we can conceive an infinity of ideas, we can also conceive an infinity of moments; therefore, an infinite past can be upheld, entailing no contradiction whatsoever.
The difference is that ideas exist in an ideal region, without succession, and time is only time if one state of affairs follows another. Otherwise, how does your universe differ from the Being of Parmenides? For what reason should we assert that there is a multiplicity of observable events—a presupposition that underlies all natural science—if, in reality, nothing happens and everything is one?
Now, if states of affairs succeed one another, it is true that “All the past was future,” because a past that has never been future is a past that has never begun to be and will never cease to be, that is, it is an entity to which nothing precedes and nothing follows.
However, if the entire future has already occurred even though we do not perceive it, it will be false that the cause produces the effect, since all parts of the universe will necessarily be connected by metaphysical necessity rather than united by virtue of an intelligible physical law. And with this, all our knowledge of nature is destroyed and reduced to mere fiction.
Therefore, even if the eternity of the world were not logically contradictory (although it can be demonstrated that it is), it would be an absolutely superfluous and mystical hypothesis that we could only assume at the expense of discarding all scientific knowledge.
That is not necessarily true. See other comment.
Ditto.
I do not see how you get “simultaneously finite and infinite” from block theory. An infinite series is simply an infinite series. You can’t wish it away by saying there is only one infinite series and since one is a finite number therefore it is not an infinite series. That is joke logic.
It can be. All contemporary mathematicians and scientists agree. There has never been a demonstration of any contradiction. Infinite series are logically possible and therefore physically possible. Just instantiate the logical set’s elements one-to-one with physical objects. Nothing in logic prevents that.
I don’t think you know what you are talking about here. In modern relativity theory causality is a geometric relation on the asymmetrical axis of time. So causality is unaffected by block theory. That is why block theory is the position now held by all modern physicists: it is logically entailed by the observations of relativity theory (see The Ontology of Time).
And still no syllogism. So you have doubly confirmed you do not know what logical validity is and are incapable of even producing a formally valid syllogism.
So from now on I am ignoring you. Until you do what I ask and actually produce an actual syllogism that is actually formally valid and sound.
Until that happens, you do not know what you are talking about and you are not saying anything worth the bother of reading at this point.
You covered every point, in particular that philosophy has failed to produce any physics or cosmological discovery. Those arguments mean nothing without the mathematics to back them up. One weird stance from Dr. Alvaro is disproving actual infinities but then wanting an actually infinite god.
(1) I don’t think Alvaro has ever proposed an infinite god. His god appears to be quite finite (insofar as any quantity in relation to it can be measured anyway, e.g. when he says god is eternal he does not mean infinite in the time dimension but spanning zero time—his god does not exist in time at all).
(2) It isn’t strictly true that philosophy has failed to produce any physics or cosmological discovery, given that science is philosophy, just with better data (see Is Philosophy Stupid?). For example, Krauss’s nothing-cosmology is flat-out philosophy—no one has ever produced any empirical data confirming it and thus elevating it to the status of a scientific fact. It’s just much better philosophy than most apologetical cosmology is.
If we colloquially mean by the demarcation between science and philosophy simply that—the matter of whether something has been scientifically confirmed or not—then “philosophy has never done that” is tautologically true (true by definition) and thus too trivial to remark upon. Obviously once we get the data confirming a theory, it becomes science. But it always begins in philosophy.
The real difference is that philosophers (e.g. theoretical physicists) who propose sound cosmological theories (1) are actually experts in the relevant known facts and the required maths (they are not amateur cosmological philosophers) and (2) don’t claim to have proved theories they have merely proposed. So they would never use their theories as factual premises to prove something else, like “god exists” (other than, again, hypothetically).
I don’t have a great deal to add here. I am glad Dr. Carrier pointed out the impossibility of Dr. Alvaro’s thought experiment about an infinite staircase. I didn’t bring it up after his first arguments as I had other questions I found more important.
I do want to flesh out why the thought experiment fails, though. Here was the original:
Now, I agree that the intuitive response to this is that it is absurd. No one could walk down infinite steps to reach the bottom. But the conclusion from this (true infinities are impossible) simply does not follow.
Firstly, for this to be a true analogy to an infinite past cosmos, there CANNOT be a top or bottom step (whichever you analogize to the “beginning” of the cosmos). The analogy fails because it introduces its own contradiction where the past infinite universe does not (strictly describing a past with no beginning, and then putting a beginning into the analogy).
Second, the reason an infinite staircase is impossible is variable, and therefore the strict conclusion that infinites are impossible is not demonstrated. Stairs are physical things that exist in spacetime. An infinite amount of physical matter cannot fit in a finite space. That doesn’t prove all infinities are impossible, only that a specific infinity is impossible (putting an infinity of spacetime-dependent matter inside a finite space).
You could instead view it like a sort of Zeno’s Paradox, where we infinitely divide the space between the ground and main lobby (like the numbers between 1 and 2). While this is possible for a number line, physical things seem to have smallest possible units (subatomic particles, strings, whatever your preferred quantum theory states). So, unlike numbers, physical things may simply not be infinitely divisible. So again, the contradiction is not in infinities themselves, but only a specific kind of infinity within spacetime.
Time would not be analogous here. If you take the A theory approach, there is only the present moment, and therefore only a discreet spacetime is ever required (no contradiction with finite space). The past and future do not exist, so there is no contradiction in saying that every discreet now has a prior and later state. If you take a B theory approach, then you view time as not being dependent on a finite space (as all discreet times exist simultaneously, so too is space infinite). Again, no contradiction is available that would be analogous to an infinite staircase (where infinite space or division does NOT exist).
I concur with your analysis.
For example:
Indeed this all depends on contingencies. For example, the statement that “an infinite amount of physical matter cannot fit in a finite space” is really just a restatement of the Pauli exclusion principle, which entails “matter” (particles or fields with a nonzero rest mass) has a nonzero volume. The geometric limitation then follows. But many particles (photons, for example) are not subject to the Pauli exclusion principle and thus can be stacked infinitely in a finite space. So you can have an infinite amount of energy in a finite space. Thus the limitation only follows from the specific definition of matter.
Likewise, we do not actually know there even is a finite space. The spatial extent of the universe could now be infinite (as some cosmological models entail). And time can be past infinite even for a finite space. And so on.
The problem with the Kalam is that it requires its premises to always be true. But if there are conditions in which they aren’t true, then the argument fails to produce its conclusion. But all arguments for its premises require positing contingent conditions (e.g. infinite stairs with a first and last step, which is not a logically necessary condition, and therefore the example has no pertinence to establishing Premise 2, because it is disanalogous to what Premise 2 needs to be the case).
This is self-contradictory and is thus one of the fundamental incoherences of the argument.
Likewise your point about the contingent possibility of matter that cannot be infinitely divided: what is then meant by divided?
Geometrically, matter can always be infinitely divided. That’s why the irreducible Planck length is nonzero: the smallest possible division of space appears to be around 10^33rd of a meter. But that means there are an infinity of geometric points spanning one Planck length that sum to 10^-35 meters, a nonzero value. That infinite sums can be finite is a basic principle of calculus and has been formally proved so there is no issue with that (this is BTW the solution to Zeno’s paradoxes: infinite spans of space can be crossed in infinite spans of time, so there is no division problem for movement: because time is also being divided along with space, and their ratio always remains finite and the same).
So if all one means is that matter cannot be physically divided further than 10^33rd of a meter, one is positing specific contingent conditions that are not logically necessary; there are therefore conditions in which the limitation doesn’t exist (like dividing matter geometrically rather than physically, or a physical world without a Planck length limitation).
Your point about A and B theory is also sound.
Indeed, because the laws of probability entail that all any continuously repeated nonzero probability approaches 100% as t approaches infinity, there will never be any span of time infinitely long even on past eternalism: a Big Bang like event will always reset and scramble the information, starting a new span of informational time that will in turn end eventually the same way. So all spans of time are finite.
The sequence of those isolated time segments can then be infinite without any concern over why infinite information has not accumulated into ours (e.g. why we have not reached an infinite entropy state etc.). This is true on A and B theory, and is partly even confirmed by physical observations.
So none of the “predictions” claimed for past eternalism that are supposed to refute it are actually predicted by it. And there is no logical barrier to it. So there is no way to exclude it (or even render it improbable), as Premise 2 requires we do.
This all sounds like word salad to me. A philosophical argument is specious at best. It’s why we have paradoxes. They are mental exercises to explore. I’d like to know, where in the world do we get the idea everything must have a cause. There is no law that states this. It is an assumption to think everything has a cause. Things can be a result of the conditions. Water freezes when’s its temperature falls below a certain point. Temps fluctuate. Obviously, the temp drops, it causes ice to freeze. To change states from liquid to solid. It’s a transfer of energy not so much a cause. It certainly doesn’t indicate anything magical, or a need for a God to move it along.
Since we don’t know what “caused” the Universe to expand, the Kalam argument jumps to, it must be God. Why? I believe it is our inherent nature, when we have a lack of knowledge, we fill the gap with a God, so we can get back to important stuff like hunting and gathering.
I might add, the Kalam argument, doest really tell us anything. It suggests, since we don’t know, it must be God. But it doesn’t tell us anything other than to say Goddidit. Not who or what that God is. Where and when this God existed, how it came into existence, how it caused the universe to expand, and was it the first cause? I could say, a larger universe caused our God to exist, who then created our Universe. So ergo, the 1st cause wasn’t God but a prior Universe. Just like larger stars give birth to smaller ones, so to our Universes. Why not? We cannot prove there isn’t more than one universe and we cannot disprove larger Universes do not break down into smaller ones.
The Kalam argument assumes a God as a first cause for absolutely no reason other than the person making the claim wants it to be God. Honestly, it’s a pretty crappy, weak, philosophical argument, in my humble opinion.
“Where in the world do we get the idea” is what Dr. Alvaro is providing answers for in his entries. Whether they are good answers is a separate question.
But that the Kalam is either incoherent or vacuously trivial is the point I will be arguing in my entries. Either there is no way to have both premises be true at the same time, or the conclusion simply states the innocuous fact that “if everything began the first state of it will be in some sense different from subsequent states of it,” which no one denies (least of all atheists).
How one gets “intelligence” as a property of the first state is still not addressed by Dr. Alvaro, but he promises to get to it in his third entry (in his second entry, which just went live). But that’s the only thing that would count as a god in any relevant sense. Otherwise it’s just physics.