That’s all aptly said.

IMO, I don’t think Loke is sane. I think he is delusional to the point of being incapable of rational comprehension or discourse. And I base this not just one some of the very weird things in his book, but also on my own personal live salon debate with him where it was very clear he cannot understand arguments against him and will never change a belief no matter what evidence is presented him. He would not even acknowledge points made five minutes prior but would forget and have to be reminded that he is repeating himself and what he is saying was already refuted five minutes ago and not recovered in the interim.

I don’t think it is possible to have a rational conversation with him and I do not believe his philosophical judgment is at all trustworthy.

I responded three times, but each time he simply said that I had failed to refute the KCA. But I never needed to refute the KCA. I only needed to show that my own position is logically coherent. The KCA only holds under the premises he himself has set, it is a game he plays entirely on his own terms, defended by nothing more than verbal and definitional maneuvers. The two positions are no longer even on the same level of discussion. Therefore, I stopped responding.

To waste my revision time for medical exams, just to respond to a “professor” who wants to win a debate against a student… 

I think I am the only one that he think his KCA can win.
To waste time that is not worth it.

They commit this fallacy again when they assert “causality is not only a physical law, it is a metaphysical proposition that’s fundamental to reality itself.” Um. Is it? That’s precisely the question being begged. If you just assume causality is “a metaphysical proposition that’s fundamental to reality itself” you are presuming a conclusion to be proved. Since causality is not logically necessary, it must be contingent. There is no third option.

But the real problem here is that it spreads the same disease I caught Premise 4 was infected with to Premise 1, which kills the entire host:

If causality exists without God (because it’s “fundamental to reality itself”) then all sorts of other things can exist without God. We then don’t need God to explain the universe. It can then be produced by any other thing that’s coincidentally just “fundamental to reality itself,” like quantum physics or the like, This is, basically, all actual cosmological science in a nutshell: proposing hypothetical fundamental physics as first cause.

The theist will cry foul and say “you can’t just declare something fundamental to reality itself!” And then we’ll hold up a mirror to them and remind them: “Then neither can you.” And this “causality is fundamental to reality” presupposition goes in the waste basket.

You cannot prove the law of causality pre-exists the universe. So its existence still has to be explained. If your hypothesis to explain it is “it just is necessarily true and therefore cannot be contingent and therefore requires no cause” then you’ve just entered the Stalking Horse fallacy: if you get to play that game, then so do we, and it’s all a wash.

That’s why the Cosmological Argument cannot survive on that tactic. Your only chance is to go all in and admit the law of causality is contingent, not necessary, and thus also needs to be explained. But then everything follows as I describe it.

The only way to escape this fate is to prove (formally prove, not handwave or assert) that the law of causality is logically necessary. Which no one has ever done. And you can’t rest an argument on a premise that doesn’t yet exist.

You are correct. The theist of course is by that device trying to exempt God from his own assertion, by saying God has no beginning, so he doesn’t need a cause. Which is, as you note, no a secure supposition (if the universe was past eternal, wouldn’t it still need a cause—an explanation of why it exists—and so likewise God?).

But this maneuver also raises the problem that they have defined “begin” in such a way that their God does begin to exist (he does not exist before t=1 and only exists where there is t, so he is a temporal object that begins at the same time as everything else). They want to handwave this away with vague assertions of God’s “timelessness” that make no coherent sense (he still can’t exist before time, and so he exists at every time t, and if we walk back to the first t and look beyond, God does not exist before that, just like nothing else does: see The Argument from Non-Locality). So in what sense can God not “begin” to exist in exactly the same way the rest of everything does?

They will then, when cornered with this, dodge to “Oh, I mean ontological first cause, not temporal first cause” but that then exposes the game: if all they mean is that there has to be a fundamental substrate of existence (something that merely does not have any further explanation but explains everything else, like Superstring theory says of spacetime), then there is no longer any persuasive reason why it has to be a god (maybe it is, indeed, just spacetime itself, from which all laws and properties geometrically arise). “But where did spacetime come from?” then gets you to “But where did God come from?” and the argument eats itself.

The lesson is that the KCA is just a prima facie bit of bullshit that allows endless retreats into more bullshit when any part of it is challenged, such that as long as the theist can keep you on the ropes of endlessly circular labyrinths of bullshit, they can “wear you down” into just agreeing with the conclusion. Or so they think, because that’s what happened to them. They were browbeaten into just agreeing with it because, as believers, they are already pliably cognitive dissonant. Doubters are never persuaded because they see right through the schtick because they know to expect all theism is schtick.

Based on observation, I might reasonably conclude that all crows have wings and that all crows are black. Nevertheless, I would not be justified is saying “all crows that are black have wings” rather than “all crows are black and have wings,” because the former—true though it might be—implies that I have some reason to think that a non-black crow might not have wings. In fact, I know nothing of non-black crows or wingless crows, and I have no basis to posit any particular connection between wingedness and blackness.

Even if it were reasonable for me to conclude that everything has a cause outside itself and that everything has a beginning, I don’t see how I get from there to “everything that has a beginning has a cause outside itself.” The “that” implies some knowledge of the connection between causedness and beginningness, which would require some knowledge of uncaused things and things without beginnings.

The “that” strikes me as apologetic sleight-of-hand.

Indeed I discussed your take in another earlier article on this.

(P1) Every material object that began to exist has a cause.
(P2) The universe is a material object that began to exist.
(C) The universe has a cause for its existence.

The crucial part is that of “began to exist”.

Although that’s true (and worth following up as you do), we should also note the other side of the problem thus created: “the universe” is here now only a subset of everything that exists. Which collapses the KCA as an argument for God.

For example, spacetime empty of mass/energy is not being included, and therefore becomes a viable first cause. Which nixes the hidden “P3” that only God remains as possible cause (e.g. “the first cause is either personal or material”). Likewise in actual cosmological science: that the first cause is simply a physical principle (some law of physics or uncollapsed wave-function or “pure potential” or an inevitable zero-point energy of any false vacuum). Neither are “material objects.” Yet also neither is a “person.” And both are being exempted from P1.

Even if we say the first cause is a dimensionless point of mindless spacetime potential—so, a spacetime empty even of spacetime as well as mass/energy, since the amount is zero even if there is necessarily a geometric “point” where this zero amount of spacetime exists, per my Argument from Non-Locality—the KCA premises and conclusion are all met and still no God results. Everything begins with a dimensionless point of mindless spacetime potential.

The “material object” insert only avoids the problem that if “begins to exist” simply means had a first time of existing before which it did not exist, then God logically necessarily began to exist, and thus falls victim to the KCA rather than gets proved by it. But that just replaces God with anything that began to exist when nothing before it existed. Which could be anything. So the KCA gets rid of the need of God altogether.

But any material object that started to exist is just … the re-arrangement of previously existing material objects. Material objects change their state all the time. … And so on, you won’t find a counterexample.

And to help you out here against the inevitable commenter who will say “but, quantum mechanics”: in QM even spontaneous particles are themselves a change of state from a prior uncollapsed quantum state. The quantum field itself causes (and thus precedes) all virtual particles, and hence even virtuals that become actuals (as in Hawking radiation), and this prior field-state does have a nonzero energy. So presumably quantum fields get included in P1.

To explain “everything” we have to explain where quantum fields and their properties come from (like, their tendency to generate particles, and only certain ones and not others, and only in certain ways and not others, etc.). So that still is subject to your formulation.

But what then of potential fields? They have no “actual” energy yet. Is a potential a “material object”? Does it require a cause? Not by this reasoning, since a mere potential does not need to be a reshaping of a prior potential. It can simply be the “buck stops here” first thing, whereas material objects (actualized things) need something to bring them about. This is really why the question comes down to “Why does the first thing have to have thoughts and feelings?”

It’s the “thoughts and feelings” part that is being illicitly smuggled in. There are plenty of “first causes” conceivable that aren’t intelligences. “God” is just a potential that theists assign thoughts and feelings to. But any potential would serve the same function. Thoughts and feelings are superfluous. This is why real cosmological science has never had any need of that idea.

All you can argue for with the KLC is that the universe consists of matter that existed prior to the universe forming.

Or rather, that there was a first cause that was not itself “an arrangement of matter.”

It does not get us to “it had thoughts and feelings.”

At most it gets us to “it was a potential not an already-actualized state of matter/energy.”

And it only gets there if the second premise is true (which we have no reason to believe, since it could as well have been ongoing forever: we actually do not know there was a “first ever” mass/energy arrangement) and the first premise is true (which we have no reason to believe, because the “all we’ve ever seen” argument is a category fallacy: we’ve never seen a universe start, so only seeing how a universe continues cannot tell us about how a universe starts—a self-sustaining system will behave differently than what originates that self-sustaining system, so we cannot infer things about the latter from the former, particularly when “the rule of causality itself” is the thing we are purporting to explain the origin of, which origin logically cannot be a prior “rule of causality itself”).

So the KCA is hosed at every premise and its conclusion. It can never get to “God.”

Because existence cannot be caused.

Or another way of putting it is:

If God’s own existence can be self-causing or uncaused, then so can any other first cause’s existence be self-causing or uncaused.

There is nothing about a thing (an entity or principle or potential) being self-causing or uncaused that requires it have thoughts and feelings. There is no way to get from “there must have been one uncaused thing that caused everything else” to “that uncaused thing has a mind” (much less also a litany of magical superpowers). That there must be an uncaused first cause if there was a first thing is an uninformative tautology. It just restates the premise that something was first. It does not tell you anything else about that first something. That we can’t even establish that there was a first thing is just an additional problem. Because even if we could know there was one, we cannot from that fact alone know that it had thoughts, feelings, or superpowers. So the argument goes nowhere.

All immaterial things we know — ideas, concepts, numbers etc. — are spaceless and timeless and, therefore, cannot cause anything to happen, because they are static.

This isn’t strictly true. They clearly exist at all times, not at no times. And thus they could be causing everything all the time (this is the inevitable consequence of hard Platonism that hard Platonists scramble to implausibly deny all the time: if Platonic ideas don’t cause anything, then there is no reason to believe they exist, as they then don’t do anything and aren’t needed to explain anything; whereas if we have a reason to believe they exist, they must be doing something that they are needed to explain, which is simply the same thing as saying they cause something).

I don’t think we need any of that. I’m an Aristotelian, not a Platonist: all concepts are potentials, and potentials exist everywhere at all times because the possibility of their actualization is inherent in every physical place and time. But that’s the same thing in effect: concepts are not spaceless and timeless. They are the opposite: they exist at every place and time, as a potential outcome of that place and time.

Theists do not know what they are talking about if they use terms like “nothing”, “random”, “cause”, “matter”, “energy” and so on.

Or, they do, but keep changing what those things mean as it suits them, in order to avoid the consequences of being consistent.

[it os an] arbitrary assumption that nonexistence of matter is the state of nature

Also true.

If nonexistence is the natural state, why does god exist?

Also true.

And if God can “just exist for no reason,” so can anything less ambitious but just as sufficient to explain everything else. Thoughts and feelings (much less superpowers) are simply superfluous ad hoc epicycles we can always do without.

This is why the KCA, like the fine-tuning argument, rests on a hidden fallacy: that we are allowed to just “presume” God (exactly as defined) “logically necessarily exists” (so as to escape needing a reason, hence a cause, for his existence). But no one has ever succeeded in proving that. And if we get to just assume it instead, then we get to assume it of anything else that isn’t God. The KCA then falls to a Stalking Horse fallacy. There really just is no way to salvage it.

There must be some natural laws presupposed that allow god to act.

Indeed. And if those laws can exist uncaused and unexplained, so can any other laws. So again, no “God” is needed as the first cause. We can dump all the excess, unwarranted baggage (thoughts, feelings, superpowers) and just stick with the laws by themselves. They can do all the work ever needed.

I think that this will lay the KLC to rest.

Amen.

First, I created a stronger version of the argument. Because, as Dr. Richard Carrier noted, if we include physical laws, we get a logical contradiction. And did any number start to exist?

First, definition: God is a being that created all matter (and energy, which, for this argument, is treated as equivalent, see Einstein).

The definition implies that god is not made of matter. This aligns well with theistic assumptions. The modified argument:

(P1) Every material object that began to exist has a cause.
(P2) The universe is a material object that began to exist.
(C) The universe has a cause for its existence.

The crucial part is that of “began to exist”. Take any example of things beginning to exist: Throw a stone in the water, waves begin to exist, caused by the stone. Paint a picture, at some point in time, the painting starts to exist. And so on. Every material object we know of started to exist at some point in time. This is independent of the idea that time started to exist or not, and if that had a cause or not.

But any material object that started to exist is just … the re-arrangement of previously existing material objects. Material objects change their state all the time. If you paint a picture on a canvas, the canvas must exist before you start to paint. Otherwise, you would paint on nothing. The colors you use, you might have mixed them together shortly before you start, but the material must have existed a long time before you even have been born. The stone you throw in the water, and the water, must have existed before you throw the stone, otherwise, you won’t get waves as a result. And so on, you won’t find a counterexample.

In the theistic worldview, the universe started to exist out of nowhere. How often did humans experienced that something started to exist out of nowhere, out of nothing? Exactly zero times, as far as we know, that never happened. The matter for the colors must have existed for a very long time, no matter how you create your color. This is even true if you use digital paintings, all the matter used to display your painting existed for billion of years.

The universe, if it started to exist, is unlike all examples you can find for something that started to exist. As far as our experience goes, nothing started to exist out of nothing.

“Began to exist” is just a play on words. It sounds like we are talking about the same, but we do not:

(P1) Every material objects that starts to exist is caused by the re-arrangement of pre-existing matter.
(P2) If the universe started to exist like all we experience, the matter of the universe must have existed before it was arranged into something new.

But claiming that it came “out of nothing” is totally different. All you can argue for with the KLC is that the universe consists of matter that existed prior to the universe forming. It is a non-sequitur to conclude that a being has created all the matter, the argument tells you the exact opposite. Just because “began to exist” is used with two entirely different meanings.

The argument has the same structure as:

Strawberries taste like strawberries. This red thing over here looks like a strawberry, so it must taste the same.

Which is nonsense, of course, just like the KLC.

Theists tend to not define their terms, like god. My definition for god might be the only one monotheists can agree upon.

It gets worse, because the assumption is based on “magical thinking”. This goes as follows:

Some event happens → Poof! Magic! → something else happens because of this.

But we pretty well know how causation works. If A is the cause of B, there are the following pre-assumptions that must be made. If a single one of this is violated, there is no causation.

(1) A is a material object that must exist before the causation happens.
(2) B is a material object that must exist before the causation happens.
(3) A and B must be local in spacetime, which means, they must be near each other.
(4) Time is needed for any causation to happen.
(5) A must transfer energy to B, and because of the law of the conservation of energy, B must transfer the same amount of energy back to A.

What you think is, “Poof! Magic!” is the transfer of energy.

A changes the state of B, and B changes the state of A. There is no pure effect, only interactions. Existence is not a state, it is the pre-condition that an object can have a state of being.

Now, if god exists and is an immaterial being, condition 1. is violated. If the universe or that from which it comes does not exist, condition 2 is violated. Condition 3 is violated, because an immaterial being has no position in spacetime. If god creates by transferring energy, and energy and matter are equivalent, where does that energy comes from? It presupposes the existence of matter/energy, and that will either lead to an infinite regress of material objects with no god, or an infinite regress with god, which means, you just have doubled the infinite regresses. Because energy cannot be transferred back to an immaterial being, condition 5 is violated as well. Condition 5 might not be violated, but that would mean that material objects can change the state of an immaterial being, somehow, through some magic.

If ONE condition is not met, we cannot speak of causation. Now there are 4–5 conditions not met, so clearly, god cannot be the cause of the universe, because existence cannot be caused. There is no such thing as “cause of existence”, that there is one is based on not knowing how causation works and what it is. Plus, if god is immaterial, there is no time, and without time, god has no time to create time. All immaterial things we know — ideas, concepts, numbers etc. — are spaceless and timeless and, therefore, cannot cause anything to happen, because they are static. Time is defined by material objects in space, to have time, or space (spacetime), you have to presuppose the existence of matter.

Of course, the error is that you can make some wild assumptions, and if no one can prove that your claim is false, it is true. No, that isn’t the case because the assumption is meaningless, nonsense, and of course you can neither prove nor disprove nonsense. Not that it is necessary to disprove nonsense. I have shown you that the claim that “the existence of the universe must have a cause” is pure nonsense, and that’s all that is necessary to debunk the claim.

Theists do not know what they are talking about if they use terms like “nothing”, “random”, “cause”, “matter”, “energy” and so on.

Problems are not solved by inventing a magic cause in a non-existing realm. The issue of the existence of the universe, which is based on the arbitrary assumption that nonexistence of matter is the state of nature, might not even be a difficulty at all. If nonexistence is the natural state, why does god exist? And how does it come that he can act by creating the world? There must be some natural laws presupposed that allow god to act. If there are no logical rules that allow that god somehow (magically) can act, then there are no rules that whatever god wills to happen will happen. God cannot make these rules, because then you have an infinite regression: How is it possible that god can make the rule that whatever he wills will happen? And so on. So anyway you must presuppose that there are natural laws, independent of god, that allow god to act. Which means, that for natural laws of any kind, god is superfluous.

I think that this will lay the KLC to rest.

Indeed the possibiliter fallacy is indeed an old standard across all apologetics. But I am more charitable in this case.

Craig and Swamidass disagree on a lot so it’s not entirely parallel. But taking Craig as the example: I don’t take him as attempting to claim science has proved his theory, but rather that science has failed to refute it, i.e. “it is possible” to reconcile the Bible with the data and “therefore” if we have some other reason to trust the Bible (enter: all standard apologetics and holy spirit epistemology here), then we can trust the Bible without claiming scientists are lying or something. It’s really just an explicit cognitive dissonance resolver.

This is silly to us (who don’t see the point in believing things you can’t prove with evidence are probably true, not just “possibly” true). But to people who believe “faith” is a valid justification for belief, it’s a sensible internal reform. It’s the same thing that happened when OECs abandoned YEC by finally allowing the Bible to be read nonliterally. To us, a waste of time (who cares what a primitive book full of armchair drunk uncling by rampant savages says?). But to them, the only way to save their religion from the universal acid of scientific evidence.

I understand. It is a hairbrained idea. It is also a possibiliter ergo possibiliter fallacy. Swamidass’s data is wrong, according to Coyne, but let us just grant Swamidass’s data, arguendo. This just means that it is just about possible that Adam and Eve could have been Homines Heidelbergenses. There is still no evidence that this is the case! It is just about possible, though. I see this in apologetics a lot: arguing towards what is just about possible, instead of arguing towards what is probable, and evidenced. Apologetics is more about, these days, explaining away the lack of evidence, rather than providing evidence. Why don’t we have the evidence that we would expect to have if the claims of Christianity are true? In steps Mr. Apologist to explain away this shortfall!

And as bizarre as Craig’s idea is, it is still the official teaching of the Catholic Church, the biggest sect of Christianity, that humanity is descended from a single pair called Adam and Eve. Most Catholics, even the priests, and arguably even the current and previous Pope do not believe in official Church teaching. However, the conservatives do. If one were to grill a Conservative Catholic on this, then he would probably default to William Lane Craig’s idea that Adam and Eve were a single pair Homines Heidelbergenses that God breathed a soul into.

No. I haven’t written about that. It’s just too silly to require reply.

But it is remarkable for Craig abandoning literalism. His embrace of old earth and guided evolution is not new, but he did used to waffle on that, too (he used to avoid the conversation). But to abandon literalism is actually a contract violation (it violates Talbot and HCU doctrine). So I guess he gets a pass for sheer prestige.