This is a bit tinfoil hat.

In terms of the debate, though, you are confusing “universe” with “time, space, and matter.” The latter can predate the universe, and in all relevant models (like eternal inflation and even the BGV theorem), it does—precisely because of quantum collapse, as I explain in the debate (which it seems you did not actually read and thus don’t actually have an informed opinion on).

In the BGV model, for example, classical universe nesting can go billions and billions of universes back (as proved by Susskind, cited in this debate), and ends in a quantum spacetime singularity. But that can be the collapsed state of a previous nesting of universes. And indeed, that may happen in our future: a region of spacetime might collapse to such small a scale (as with our Big Bang, far smaller than “a human”), that matter dissolves and space and time become fuzzy, but then explode forward into a new classical spacetime. It can have been doing this since eternity past. There is no evidence it wasn’t. So we cannot use a premise that denies it, without tyhe premise being speculative, which entails the conclusion is only speculative, and therefore nothing has been proved.

That you think points like this are too complicated for you to follow and “therefore” must not be substantive speaks only to your laziness and refusal to actually bother to understand anything pertinent to this debate.

Dr. Alvaro,

I appreciated your willingness to debate Dr. Carrier. I think you gave good reasons for the Kalam and Dr. Carrier likes to word salad and Gish Gallop with his incessant TLDR links to his own work that no normal human has the time nor energy to deal with.

I am convinced of the Kalam (I am also a Christian) and Dr. Carrier really had nothing of substance against it. IMO even if you throw out P1 there is still an universe to explain and based on current cosmology it definitely points to a finite beginning of all TIME, SPACE, and MATTER. As you clearly point out with your reference to Mithani and Vilenkin’s paper there is no avoiding the beginning of the universe and String Theory or GUT isn’t going to change that as quantum collapse is not avoidable.

I know Dr. Carrier likes to use Ethan Siegel’s articles, here is one I find interesting

https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2021/08/25/how-small-was-the-universe-at-the-start-of-the-big-bang/

“The Universe, at the earliest stages we can ascribe a “size” to it, could have been no smaller than roughly the size of a human being.”

Hmmm the size of a human being, let me think about this…..

Colossians 1:16

16 For by him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities—all things were created through him and for him.

I actually think Siegel has a better attitude then Dr. Carrier where he says:

“By its very nature, inflation wipes our Universe clean of any information that came before it, imprinting only the signals from inflation’s final fractions-of-a-second onto our observable Universe today. To some, that’s a bug, demanding an explanation all its own. But to others, this is a feature that highlights the fundamental limits of not only what’s known, but what’s knowable. Listening to the Universe, and what it tells us about itself, is in many ways the most humbling experience of all.”

Atheists can say I don’t know or they need to explain the cause of the universe. I agree with you God is a good answer and more plausible then literally NOTHING and it is not a god of the gaps type argumentation despite what atheists say. I think Siegel and you are right lets listen to what the universe is telling us about the beginning and also have a level of humility.

-Steele

That is not what Pearl showed. I think you need to ante up and actually start quoting and citing him before misrepresenting him; then I can show you the context you are leaving out to distort the information you are trying to sell here.

The fact of the matter is that we don’t have to choose anything. Pearl demonstrated that certain structural (ontologically real) relationships are causal and not merely perceived. It does not matter which ones we are interested in or document, nor does it matter whether we choose to look at distant (mediated) or proximate (unmediated) causal relationships within the same causal system.

That mediated causal relationships can be very complex is not an argument against their being ontologically real. I can only assume you do not know what you are talking about, or you are being deliberately disingenuous.

Is 20th-century lung cancer, Pearl’s example, caused by cigarette smoking, tobacco company promotion, a Walter Raleigh investment scheme, co-opted Native American customs, or plants evolving addictive nicotine? Yes to all; you must choose. Different purposes construct different causes. Nature admits only a continuously evolving present as a product of the instant past, and no purpose.

Nature doesn’t bother.

I can’t tell what you think you are saying. The relationship is not invented. The mechanical procedures we use to measure it are, but you seem to be confusing them, like someone conflating numbers with the quantities they signify.

You might be clumsily trying to convey the fact that we choose which relationships to map based on accessibility. So, Newtonian mechanics are an accurate approximation of objectively real causal systems, but we can never array them to account for literally every variable, from microvariations in local gravity to every single atomic collision from an atmosphere being passed through, so we just choose not to because the results are “close enough” for government work, as they say. But this does not make the causal system unreal. We are not inventing it. We are just being lazy in documenting and measuring it.

For more on this point see:

All Godless Universes Are Mathematical

Dynamical evolution proceeds without us, by continuous variation. We impose Newtonian, E-M, Schroedinger, GR, Navier-Stokes, traffic flow, dose-response, whatever model helps us organize measureables to a comprehensible pattern. Nature doesn’t bother.

Causation is a pattern we seek to discover in a model in order to efficiently predict and, ideally, control future events. Perfect causation minimizes input required to produce a result. Overeating causes obesity, but biological energy dynamics are more complex than we understand.

Nature just is. Models are made. Pearl causation is an emergent feature of a model. But often we demand of candidate models that they preserve causation that emerged from a simpler model.

It doesn’t matter what we “agree” on. Physical causation continues apace. Even when we aren’t around. Even when we don’t know it’s happening. This is what Pearl proved: causal relationships exist no matter whether we know of them, categorize them, preferentialize them—or even exist.

We will all agree, with numerical precision, on a causative relationship iff we have agreed on the parameter-space boundaries defining effects of interest and candidate causes. But there is no objective procedure to pick those boundaries. In practice we guess, and vary them until we get a valid causation or give up. Evolution does the same.

Whether such abstract relationships as causation and theorems are discovered or invented is a matter of preference. Platonists will insist on the former.

You keep switching positions here. Pearl disproved what you said at first; then you claimed you said something else that Pearl does not address; I then pointed out that that is moot to what Pearl did indeed prove; now you reverse course and make a completely new claim that Pearl specifically did refute.

I am getting dizzy. Please pick a lane.

For now, I have to respond to this completely new statement of yours: now you are claiming that causation doesn’t exist because we choose which causal relations to attend to. That is a fallacy. Pearl proved the relations exist regardless of whether we notice them or choose to study them. Causal systems are objectively real. And this can be proved with epistemic probability calculations.

I ran a toy calculation in The End of Christianity the result of which was that any real calculation would put the final odds on theism far below trillions to one against.

To run the same for Deism requires an actual defined theory to compare, i.e. someone has to actually articulate what they are proposing “by” Deism (Alvaro, for example, made several incoherent statements about this that made it impossible to ascertain what it is he is even claiming).

For example, do we only mean by Deism a theory that makes no predictions whatever? (And therefore cannot have any evidence against it even in principle?) Or something more substantive than that?

In the minimalist case (a theory that cannot even in principle contradict any evidence whatsoever), we have a middle-order Cartesian Demon running afoul of empirical and logical priors, which alone entails a final odds below billions to one. Add any predictions, so that evidence now starts to directly count against it, and those odds only decline from there.

Because there are no differential odds favoring any known theism or deism (see, for example, A Hidden Fallacy in the Fine Tuning Argument).