William Lane Craig and the Kalam Cosmological Argument

[mal4mac]

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/no...ess/#ProMulNot
...

Is anyone reading all this? I'm not. I think a forum discussion should involve the give and take of argument, not someone standing up and giving a long lecture. Why not make *one* substantial point KCK, and let the argument roll on... oops three posts in a row, time to eat my own words, I'll stop there....

[MorpheusSandman]

(Craig) is mirroring the physicists results back to them with his religious twist.

I think that's a rather positive and simple way to look at it. Again, I stick with the idea that he cherry-picks quotes and conclusions that he can retroactively fit into his worldview. It's basically hindsight bias, and it's why physicists/cosmologists aren't impressed. You can't move from a point of "we don't know" to "we know!" based on nothing but word games.

The problem of doing an infinite number of even mental events is at the heart of the axiom of choice in mathematics. One cannot assume that is logically permitted without the explicit axiom, at least that is how I remember it.

And I'm not quite sure what you're trying to say here...

Perhaps it was a multiverse outside our space and time that caused our universe to exist... If he is correct about that theorem, even the multiverse had a beginning and we are caught in the same problem.

FWIW, I think the multiverse is more damaging to the teleological ("fine-tuning") argument than it is the Kalam. The teleological argument really relies on ours being the only universe out there for its rhetoric to impress. If we're just one of countless universes, then we shouldn't be surprised to find ourselves in one that supports life. But, yes, even multiverse seems to take us back to a beginning, but the nature of that beginning is what we're debating now.

Part of their worldview, if I understand it, has been validated.

Well, that's like saying that the psychic's powers have been validated when they correctly predict if a pregnant woman will have a boy or a girl; it was 50/50 from the beginning: either the universe began or it didn't, and things beginning is more metaphysically intuitive for us, so they went with that. They also went with a lot of other metaphysically intuitive things that turned out to be completely wrong. The record of Holy Texts predicting the future of scientific discoveries is rather abysmal, if we're going on a case-by-case basis.

I think the idea of God that you have and the one that I have are different. I suspect it doesn't even correspond to Craig's idea of God. I may be wrong, but I suspect that you are right about the God you are describing. It does not exist.

These Gods not only explain the origin of the universe but also of our and other species consciousness. In that sense it is the simplest explanation.

God explains everything without explaining anything, which is precisely the problem. It covers up ontological complexity (what such a god-like being would entail mathematically or in terms of AI programming) with linguistic simplicity. Yudkowsky once put this very eloquently in saying that "anger" seems very simple to us because we simply feel it, but to try and program in anger is infinitely more difficult than programming in "gravity" which is just a simple mathematical formula, but is completely counter-intuitive to how our minds understand the universe. That's the gist of the thing: there are some things that seem very simple to us because they reflect our natures back to us. We understand without really understanding. Then there are things that seem very complex to us, like math, because they don't reflect our natures back to us. Yet we call these latter things "complicated" and "complex" when, in reality, most mathematical formulas are much simpler than the workings of the human brain. In much the same way, God *seems* like a very simple concept until you really, actually think about how complex such a being would have to be to exist at all.

Anyway, what I said about the conjunction fallacy still applies to God. If we can explain the universe by natural means that already exist, then that's much simpler than having to add an external variable (whose existence is unknown) to the mix. It's no different than phlogiston. Phlogiston sounds like a very simple answer. Very easy to understand. But the very fact that one doesn't know if it exists means it's less likely to be the cause of something that already exists.

To quote that article: "Fake explanations don't feel fake. That's what makes them dangerous."

As the Christians claim, we are made in the image of God.

As the atheist claims, God is made in our image, and it is a fact that people mind project onto reality all the time, so what's the argument that God just isn't another one of those times?

[MorpheusSandman]

Stuntpickle,

I think this is what most of the first half of your last post is stating: Rather than “nothing” being equated by classical philosophers as “empty space,” “nothing” was instead equated with “the absence of any thing,” and “nothing comes from nothing” was an a priori statement made regarding this imagined “complete absence nothing” which I’ll call CAN from now on.

Firstly, I have my doubts about whether CAN was really the only way in which nothing was originally thought of. If “existence” was equated with tangible, sensible material (as I’m pretty sure it was), then “non-existence” was equated to the absence of tangible, sensible material. One might label this “nothing” and think that it was really CAN based on their ignorance, but it still seems to me that if you asked such people “would you define nothing as the absence of all tangible, sensible reality (living creatures, earth, water, stars, sun, etc.)?” they probably would’ve said “yes.” Which means that all that would’ve been left was “empty space” (you could’ve asked them about that instead: “is empty space nothing?” and I think they would’ve said “yes” just as well).

But let’s ponder on CAN for a moment anyway. It seems to me that CAN is just an example of a human brain inventing categories to which nothing in reality belongs (no external referent) and pretending not only that this category is real, but that it would obey certain rules and laws. So, we can imagine CAN, whether CAN does (or can) exist or not, and we can go further and state something like “nothing comes from CAN,” without ever even having observed CAN, which strikes me as positively silly. It’s as if one is programming in the rules of a video game that exists only in their mind.

Back to the Kalam and Craig. When Craig argues for the first premise, “nothing from CAN” (let’s call that NFC) is often invoked. But, dear reader, I ask you: what in the world does a rule invented for an empty set in our brain have anything to do with external, material reality? And why if NFC is so important does Craig constantly refer to examples of things coming from other things inside material reality? How does NFC argue for the first premise? Nobody has ever argued that everything we have observed beginning to exist seems to have a cause (except maybe virtual particles) and that all of those things came from something that was pre-existing. But that has nothing to do with NFC, that has to do with our empirical observations, and “everything has a cause” is only considered a law because it’s been empirically reinforced time after time. That we may have found something that refutes that would seem to be reason to begin doubting its metaphysical truthfulness, rather than invoking NFC that seems to have nothing to do with it in the first place.

Perhaps you’re correct in that Craig has never equivocated on nothing meaning NFC in print, but I’m mostly familiar with his debates, and in those debates when he argues for P1 he always uses examples from material reality, that such-and-such things don’t appear out of nothing. But shouldn’t Craig stress before he says such a thing that he’s not talking about “empty space” nothing to his audience? Because I bet if you asked most people not up on their quantum vacuums if they considered empty space nothing they’d say “yes”. In fact, go ask your average Joe if they think “nothing” actually exists in external reality, and, if they say yes (I’m guessing most will), ask them what they think of as “nothing.” Even if I accept Craig is always using “nothing” to mean “CAN,” that stresses all the more why he should specify that to his lay audiences at his debates rather than just rattling off “NFC” and then giving examples from material reality. That’s, at best, extremely dishonest.

You say that Krauss is equivocating, but I’d argue he’s actually using a very, very common assocation/referent for the word “nothing”. Perhaps it’s only you that assumed when he said “nothing” he meant CAN, rather than QV, and he was never equivocating at all (perhaps Krauss quite simply mistook Craig's CAN for QV to begin with). As clear as it may make things, you can’t stop people from associating “nothing” with “empty space”, and you can’t say Krauss is equivocating when that’s a perfectly legitimate referent for “nothing” in many people’s minds. Plus, let’s not forget, there is a rhetorical power to words, and if “nothing” can be equated with “empty space,” then it’s all the more remarkable to prove that that “nothing” is actually a great deal of “something” that can produce the entire universe. It seems to me that to fuss over the use of nothing in such an instance is to miss the magnitude of the facts of what’s being claimed.

One final point: You say Craig says “outside of time,” but “outside” itself implies space, which wouldn’t have existed then either.

[Mutatis-Mutandis]

Is anyone reading all this? I'm not. I think a forum discussion should involve the give and take of argument, not someone standing up and giving a long lecture. Why not make *one* substantial point KCK, and let the argument roll on...

I've been thinking this exact thought while looking over Carney's posts. I'm not sure he gets what forums are for. No one is going to read those dissertations.

[OrphanPip]

Sounds like to me, evolutionists or darwinists if you prefer ... aren't to big on publishing material that ... "raise significant challenges to key tenets" ... that being "something that had to happen before the process of biological evolution could begin" ... The Ohio State Board of Education, 44 peer-reviewed scientific articles, the National Center for Science Education and multiple other sub-organizations closely tied to education contacted 26 of the scientific authors, representing 34 of the 44 scientific peer-reviewed papers, which were needed to constitute the thesis ... none of which "considered that their research provided evidence against evolution." ... But more than that actually confirms through those scientific methods that previous presumptions of evolutionary theory in the light of the "Biological Abacus" for the lack of a better word are inheritantly wrong and misleading ... this is nothing but a double standard and a scientific ponze scheme ... [but both party's if you wanna call it that are to blame

This is a typical rhetorical strategy of the Discovery Institute, claim there is an institutional bias towards their non-science that explains why they can't get any respect in legitimate scientific publications. And then they point to legitimate science and twist it to confirm their ID hypothesis (which is unfalsifiable and thus not a scientific hypothesis according to modern science), even though they clearly misunderstand the science they quote (but the more cynical part of me knows full well that the likes of Dembski and Behe know full well that they are misleading their audiences).

To understand how pathetic these arguments are you have to consider that the number of legitimate scientific articles supporting evolutionary theory number in the thousands every year, and the ID crowd have to mine all of these to find a handful of publications they delusionally believe support their position (or in a few cases they have been implicated in fraudulently getting their own stuff published) despite the actual authors of the papers refuting it.

And all of this depends on the layman audience not understanding the scientific process. A weakness in one hypothesis does not demonstrate a strength in an alternate hypothesis. The ID crowd would have us believe that when someone raises a question about certain models of natural selection under certain conditions that this somehow validates ID or invalidates all of evolutionary theory.

The book itself is almost 600 pages in length, the last 100 contain footnotes, bibliography and index. [Sounds like a reference book to me ?!?] In the 150 years since 1859 the dominant scientific establishment has, it is fair to say, fully embraced the “materialistic naturalism” model generally and specifically as applied to origins. Signature in the Cell proposes to revisit the origins controversy particularly in light of the discovery over 50 years ago of DNA and the enormous advances in our knowledge of cellular biology and information theory since then ... While the book chronicles and explains a host of issues, I was fascinated by the discussion of random chance and the assembly of the minimum amount of proteins necessary for “simple” life to function ... If Meyer stopped here and simply asserted that “since undirected, random chance cannot produce even one protein (given the entire resources of the universe) then life must be attributable to an Intelligent Designer,” he would be guilty of something that he strenuously denies: relying on a “God of the gaps” argument. Meyer does not do this. Instead, he explains “abductive reasoning” which enables one to come up with the “best explanation” ... In short, “God of the gaps” argues from ignorance whereas “Inference to the Best Explanation” argues from knowledge.

The weakness of this reasoning is quite obvious. First of all, Meyers relies heavily on out of date research on RNA and Amino Acids to support his arguments, which itself should be a red flag that he has to selectively ignore new evidence in biology to make his argument hold up. Secondly, his information theory is old hat and has long been refuted by mathematicians. I don't want to get into a point by point discussion of how Meyers misrepresents current knowledge about origins of life research.

Here is a full rebuttal of Meyers "information" nonsense by Computer Science professor Jeffrey Shallit, of the University of Waterloo:
http://recursed.blogspot.ca/2009/10/...on-theory.html

Meyer has been peddling the same old BS for years, and it is always the same. He is also a well known liar.

Well, whether Dawkin's or Meyer's for that matter is a sham or in my words a ponze schemer ... wouldn't it be great if the some world's most pre-eminent scientists and debaters each clash for there respective magisterium, by whom they were groomed to become? I never seen Dawkins backed down so easily?

No, Meyer is neither a scientist nor a respected anything. Moreover, he is a well known BSer and mouthpiece for the Discovery Institute who spends most of his time promoting their products and fostering conspiracy theories. Dawkins is completely right to go nowhere near anyone from the DI.

[stuntpickle]

Morpheus,

With all due respect, I'm beginning to think you're the worst of all possible things: unpersuadable. When I stopped being an atheist about five years ago, it was precisely because people like you demonstrated the inadequacy of my own worldview and, moreover, my own obstinance.

You demonstrate that you have difficulties with what exactly it is that constitutes metaphysics or a technically valid argument, yet you speak on these very same subjects as though you were an authority. You start out propounding some variety of empiricism and then quickly hop off into postmodern obfuscation. A discussion with you about the "serious flaws" in the Kalam is complicated by that you can't see the serious flaws in your own assertions, nor do you seem willing. Let me be clear: these flaws I'm referring to have nothing to do with whether God exists, but concern your own capacity to formulate believable statements--not to mention a reasonable arguments.

Your whole attempt to salvage this one point about Craig's equivocation is simply a rehash, at length, of previous errors. Consider:

Perhaps you’re correct in that Craig has never equivocated on nothing meaning NFC in print, but I’m mostly familiar with his debates, and in those debates when he argues for P1 he always uses examples from material reality,

You concede the argument, but then you take the concession right back with a straw man fallacy and a plain misstatement of fact that we've already covered. Of course, Craig is guilty of equivocating in neither print nor public debate since he's had a first year logic course. The guy's a PhD philosopher for Chrissake, and you seem convinced against all reasonable evidence that he's made some simpleton's error. Craig's most common example of coming into being is that of himself, in the Cartesian sense, and thus has nothing to do with sensory experience of the material world. And even if he had only used material examples of coming into being, it would not follow that his concept of "nothing" is ruined. But this is all beside the point since none of this would constitute equivocation even if you were 100% right, which you probably aren't.

I've tried to explain to you what equivocation is, and apparently you have not understood. You have resisted all reasonable corrections and insist that Craig is equivocating, and so I throw the gauntlet down.

Until you produce a sourced example of Craig committing a fallacy of equivocation, I will consider you ignorant of the facts. You choose. No more lengthy irrelevancies about semiotics. We needn't discuss Saussure to point out an elementary flaw of logic. The only thing that you can possibly provide to make your point is a quote with an apparent equivocation and a link to the source material. It should be a fairly easy operation without you having to explain some far-off triviality. A fallacy of equivocation involves the speaker/writer confusing two different meanings of the same term in a single argument--not a speaker/writer making a statement and then you descrying the nature of the equivocation through your crystal ball.

A fallacy of equivocation, FYI, generally takes the following form:

1. A1=B
2. A2=C
Therefore, A1=C

What you don't understand, I don't think, is that even if Craig were absolutely incorrect about the nature of "nothing", it would NOT constitute equivocation. It would simply be an error of fact. You are trying to suggest that Craig can never accurately use "nothing" because of some obscure misunderstanding. But this is irrelevant because to commit the fallacy of equivocation, Craig would need to be able to use both the right meaning and the wrong one in the same argument. Your position refutes itself.

BTW, I don't care if you think Craig has made an error of fact. My only goal is to disabuse you of the notion that the Kalam has "serious flaws" of logic. Any error in this instance other than equivocation is simply unimportant since your strategy seems to be to endlessly generate errors.

Stay on topic, and please provide the equivocation in question.

[YesNo]

I think that's a rather positive and simple way to look at it. Again, I stick with the idea that he cherry-picks quotes and conclusions that he can retroactively fit into his worldview. It's basically hindsight bias, and it's why physicists/cosmologists aren't impressed. You can't move from a point of "we don't know" to "we know!" based on nothing but word games.

It doesn't matter whether Craig "cherry-picks" his points or not, he has made these points many times in the past. His opponents should be prepared to respond to them since the points come from the fields of their alleged expertise.

FWIW, I think the multiverse is more damaging to the teleological ("fine-tuning") argument than it is the Kalam. The teleological argument really relies on ours being the only universe out there for its rhetoric to impress. If we're just one of countless universes, then we shouldn't be surprised to find ourselves in one that supports life. But, yes, even multiverse seems to take us back to a beginning, but the nature of that beginning is what we're debating now.

There could be many universes. The question is whether something made a conscious choice to create them or not. The multiverse is set up to find some explanation for our universe that involves chance and not choice.

Well, that's like saying that the psychic's powers have been validated when they correctly predict if a pregnant woman will have a boy or a girl; it was 50/50 from the beginning: either the universe began or it didn't, and things beginning is more metaphysically intuitive for us, so they went with that. They also went with a lot of other metaphysically intuitive things that turned out to be completely wrong. The record of Holy Texts predicting the future of scientific discoveries is rather abysmal, if we're going on a case-by-case basis.

I said the Big Bang validates part of the Judeo-Christo-Islamic religion. It does not validate all parts of these religions. However, I think it completely invalidates creationism as well as atheism. These two positions are the big losers with the confirmation of the Big Bang.

The Big Bang may invalidate parts of the Indian shramanic, non-vedic religions such as Jainism or Buddhism. It does not, however, invalidate all parts of these shramanic religions.

I think the idea of God that you have and the one that I have are different. I suspect it doesn't even correspond to Craig's idea of God. I may be wrong, but I suspect that you are right about the God you are describing. It does not exist.

I don't claim that the God I'm interested in the the same as the God Craig believes in, nor do I claim that we agree on a definition of God. The God I'm interested in is essentially consciousness. So if consciousness doesn't exist neither do we.

[MorpheusSandman]

It doesn't matter whether Craig "cherry-picks" his points or not, he has made these points many times in the past. His opponents should be prepared to respond to them since the points come from the fields of their alleged expertise.

Listen, I don't disagree that if his opponents are willing to debate him they SHOULD be more prepared than they typically are, but I still insist that simply makes them bad debaters and not WRONG. My point about Craig cherry-picking is that it prevents a very biased, selective, and skewered view of the subjects he's discussing, because there's too much technical nuance to just throw conclusions out there and then twist them to fit into an argument. It's telling that most of those whom he quotes doesn't even agree with his conclusions, often saying so in the same books he quotes from. Of course, he never presents THOSE parts of the arguments.

The multiverse is set up to find some explanation for our universe that involves chance and not choice.

Correct, and if the multiverse/many-worlds is correct, then it does seem like chance would have to be involved. But we already know chance is involved in something like evolution, so I don't know why we should think the universe wouldn't be subject to it.

However, I think [The Big Bang] completely invalidates... atheism.

How so? Atheism would have had to have made claims about how the universe began for TBB to invalidate it.

The Big Bang may invalidate parts of the Indian shramanic, non-vedic religions such as Jainism or Buddhism. It does not, however, invalidate all parts of these shramanic religions.

So if consciousness doesn't exist neither do we.

But what the hell is consciousness anyway? Is it another thing that has a direct referent, or it just another metaphysical intuition?
That's what I keep trying to stress in this thread; there are a lot of things that feel naturally right to us, concepts like "nothing" and "free will" and "consciousness," but saying they feel right is a very different thing than saying what they actually are and if they actually exist in the way we think of them as. One reason I subscribe to reductionism is it prevents this kind of ontological obscurity where we refer to complex phenomena as one thing, rather than the many things that they often are. That consciousness refers to a process in our brains/mind is fine, but as to exactly what that entails biologically is another matter entirely.

[MorpheusSandman]

What you don't understand, I don't think, is that even if Craig were absolutely incorrect about the nature of "nothing", it would NOT constitute equivocation. It would simply be an error of fact… My only goal is to disabuse you of the notion that the Kalam has "serious flaws" of logic.

I wanted to address this first:

1. I never said the Kalam had “serious flaws” of logic. You added the “of logic” addendum. I merely said “seriously flaws,” and, to me, errors of facts are “flaws” as “serious” as any errors of logic.

2. I already conceded that I could definitely be wrong that Craig is knowingly equivocating, but I drew this inference based on his own arguments, of which I quote below. If I was wrong about how Craig was using nothing, then I suspect many people are wrong about it, and I don’t think you can blame us for being wrong based on how Craig makes the argument.

To elaborate briefly on 2.: Craig is a very careful and powerful rhetorician, and I highly suspect that if he isn’t equivocating then he’s being more than a bit dishonest with how he presents his “ex nihilo” argument. Because he should know that when you use examples from material reality, where there is always “something” so far as we can and have observed, that people will equate “nothing” with being related to whatever material examples that are given. The fact that we as people regularly equate nothing with merely the absence of some things (like you said in your “nothing is what everyone just showed you”), then it is not fair to use the absence of some things as an argument for “nothing from CAN”. It creates natural equivocations in the minds of audiences, if not in the mind of the user, and that either makes the user knowingly manipulative, or ignorantly mistaken. I’m not sure how you get around that.

You concede the argument, but then you take the concession right back with a straw man fallacy and a plain misstatement of fact that we've already covered. Of course, Craig is guilty of equivocating in neither print nor public debate since he's had a first year logic course… Until you produce a sourced example of Craig committing a fallacy of equivocation, I will consider you ignorant of the facts.

I think you misunderstood the majority of my previous post. My point wasn’t necessarily that Craig was equivocating, but merely that’s what his arguments can create in the minds of audiences who likely have a very different notion of “nothing” than the philosophical one of CAN. If Craig always has CAN in mind when discussing nothing, he should be more diligent about making this clear, and one way to do that would be to STOP using examples from material reality. When he says “Surely an Eskimo village can’t come into existence out of nothing!”* most people will think “yes, that’s right, if nobody was around to build a village then it wouldn’t just appear on its own in Alaska!” What they will think about isn’t an Eskimo village popping into being where there’s CAN, but rather they’ll think of “nothing” as, say, everything in Alaska sans an Eskimo village.

*The video of him using examples from material reality is here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jXu1H_3y5vI (starting at 21:00).

Allow me to quote Craig:

“I have never argued that because every part of the universe has a cause the whole universe has a cause. That would be manifestly fallacious. Rather the reasons I’ve offered for thinking P1 is true are:

1. Something cannot come from nothing

To claim that something can come into being out of nothing is worse than magic. When a magician pulls a rabbit out of the hat, at least you have the magician, not to mention a hat; but to deny P1 you have to think that the whole universe just appeared at some point in the past for no reason whatsoever; but nobody sincerely believes that things, say, a horse, or an Eskimo village can pop into being without a cause.

2. If something can come into being from nothing, it becomes inexplicable why just anything or everything doesn’t come into being from nothing.

Think about it; why don’t bicycles, and Beethoven, and root beer come into being out of nothing. Why is it only universes that only pop into being from nothing. What makes nothingness so discriminatory? There can’t be anything about nothingness that favors universes for nothingness doesn’t have any properties. Nor can anything constrain nothingness since there isn’t anything to be restrained.

3. Common experience and scientific evidence confirm the truth of P1

P1 is constantly verified, and never falsified. It’s hard to understand how any atheist committed to modern science could deny that P1 is more plausibly true than false in light of the evidence. Now know well that the 3rd reason is an appeal to inductive reasoning, not reasoning by composition. It’s drawing an inductive inference about all the members of a class of things based on a sample of a class. Inductive reasoning undergirds all of science and is not to be confused by reasoning by composition, which is a fallacy.”

What jumps out of me about this whole spiel is that, one, not once does Craig make it explicit that he is using “nothing” to refer to “CAN,” (EG, would he include abstract laws? How is virtual energy even legitimately a thing? How about space and time itself? How are those “things”?) and, two, whenever he discusses his reasoning for why nothing comes from nothing he uses examples from material reality (horse, Eskimo village, bicycles, Beethoven, and root beer), of which we only know of them they came from a lot of something else. So I still insist that what I initially claimed was right: that Craig seems to use the “everything we know of in material reality comes from something, so nothing can come from CAN,” which simply doesn’t seem to follow. How is it that we use our observance of material reality, where something is always there, to argue that nothing comes from CAN when there may never have been CAN to begin with?

The other problem with this is that everything that’s observed is observed within the constraints of spacetime, within the constraints of everything the universe brought into existence. So while Craig may be right that the arguments for P1 is inductive reasoning, we have a very good reason for being skeptical that this induction holds outside of the universe. Why? Because everything observed obeys the laws that the universe brought into existence, and without that universe there, there’s absolutely no reason to think these laws would hold. Likewise, the “common experience” and “scientific evidence” he refers to only addresses things inside material reality, inside the universe, and nothing outside of it.

To treat the universe in the same way one would treat root beer and Beethoven and Eskimo villages is patently absurd, and the fact that Craig uses these examples seems equivocal to me; if not in his own mind, then in what he engenders in the minds of his audience. He wants them to draw on their “intuitions” that things inside material reality don’t happen without causes, and that this consistency of experience holds for the universe itself, whose existence is predicated on a very different set of laws that seem innately counter-intuitive to us to begin with. His entire second point is built on rhetorical questions, and the answer is simple: those things don’t come into existence “from nothing” because there is no “nothing” for them to come into existence from! Again, it’s no different than asking “why doesn’t Beethoven pop into being from glorckenspiel?” The answer is that glorckenspiel has no external referrent, the same way nothing has in this case. We couldn’t see anything coming or not coming from a state of existence that is not possible to be experienced.

And let me just say this about his: “I have never argued that because every part of the universe has a cause the whole universe has a cause.” Really? Because that seems exactly like what he’s doing to me. Eskimo villages and Beethoven and root beer and (every part of the universe we’ve observed) has a cause, therefore the universe itself has a cause. What’s the difference?

[YesNo]

Listen, I don't disagree that if his opponents are willing to debate him they SHOULD be more prepared than they typically are, but I still insist that simply makes them bad debaters and not WRONG. My point about Craig cherry-picking is that it prevents a very biased, selective, and skewered view of the subjects he's discussing, because there's too much technical nuance to just throw conclusions out there and then twist them to fit into an argument. It's telling that most of those whom he quotes doesn't even agree with his conclusions, often saying so in the same books he quotes from. Of course, he never presents THOSE parts of the arguments.

The question is are Craig's opponents simply bad debaters or is Craig right and there is no reasonable response to his challenge? It is not Craig's fault, in any way, that he is presenting a challenge his opponents can't adequately answer. It is their fault they can't answer it.

Correct, and if the multiverse/many-worlds is correct, then it does seem like chance would have to be involved. But we already know chance is involved in something like evolution, so I don't know why we should think the universe wouldn't be subject to it.

The existence of a multiverse in itself is not important. Something conscious could have chosen to create many universes with life. Although it is not going to be easy for anyone to test the multiverse theory, a critical part of that theory is that if we happen to find another universe that has life anywhere on it, the chance argument would be destroyed just as surely as if there were no other universe but ours.

How so? Atheism would have had to have made claims about how the universe began for TBB to invalidate it.

The Big Bang takes us to a beginning of the universe, including space and time. Physics cannot go beyond the first quantum of time. By the Kalam argument the universe, which is a finite object, needs a cause. If atheists cannot find a cause that is based on chance, whatever caused the universe to come into existence was based on choice. Once you have choice you have consciousness to make that choice. That means you have a God of some sort which completely invalidates atheism because atheism claims such Gods do not exist. The stakes are high here for atheism.

But what the hell is consciousness anyway? Is it another thing that has a direct referent, or it just another metaphysical intuition?
That's what I keep trying to stress in this thread; there are a lot of things that feel naturally right to us, concepts like "nothing" and "free will" and "consciousness," but saying they feel right is a very different thing than saying what they actually are and if they actually exist in the way we think of them as. One reason I subscribe to reductionism is it prevents this kind of ontological obscurity where we refer to complex phenomena as one thing, rather than the many things that they often are. That consciousness refers to a process in our brains/mind is fine, but as to exactly what that entails biologically is another matter entirely.

The reason I find consciousness key is because of my preference for choice rather than chance regarding the Big Bang. If a choice was made in creating the universe there was some kind of consciousness involved to make that choice. That puts consciousness outside space and time which confirms what people report with near-death and shared-death experiences. They sense a timelessness and a non-local sense of space. Describing God from a perspective of consciousness allows us to scientifically study whatever might have caused the Big Bang and permits us to go beyond where physics can go.

[MorpheusSandman]

The question is are Craig's opponents simply bad debaters or is Craig right and there is no reasonable response to his challenge? It is not Craig's fault, in any way, that he is presenting a challenge his opponents can't adequately answer. It is their fault they can't answer it.

They're bad debaters, it's that simple. There are an enormous amount of reasonable responses to Craig's claims even in the literature he quotes from. But, look, that video alone is 30 minutes long and it only addresses the first premise. Not even that, it addresses a few arguments for the first premise. You can't spend 30 minutes debunking arguments for one premise in a debate in which Craig presents 5 different arguments. Why? Because if you do, Craig will call you on your "drops" (debate term) and claim he won the argument.

It's not Craig's fault that he's presenting challenges to his opponents that they can't answer, but it is his fault for insisting on a live debate format that maximizes the strengths of his arguments and presentation and minimizes the ability to fully investigate any counter-argumnts. And, btw, Craig does INSIST on this format. Many previous debaters have commented about how the only way Craig would accept an invitation for a debate or a discussion is if they followed his chosen format. Why do you suppose he does this? Maybe it's because he knows it's next to impossible to refute all of his arguments within the constraints of his chosen debate format. Richard Carrier smartly claimed that it takes twice as long to refute a claim as it does to make it, but I think he really underestimated the amount of time it takes to parse claims on subjects to which there's no agreement like the origin of the universe. The fact that Craig can present in 4 minutes what a mountain of contradicting scientific literature has been written is proof positive that he's simplifying and obscuring the issue to a great degree. There's no way to compress that much controversy and information into 4 minutes and think it's going to be thorough.

But, with that aside, yes, it's his opponents' fault that they don't come prepared with well-manicured arguments that refute his claims and present their own in as concise and economical a manner as possible. Almost nobody that debates him seems versed AT ALL in the techniques of debate. None of them call out Craig for his drops, none of them frame the argument, none of them make attempts to challenge Craig in the same way he challenges them (and by "challenges," I'm talking about those "if my opponent can't refute X, then their position is untenable"). They spend all of their time on their heels trying to dig beneath Craig's over-simplifications of very complex and controversial subjects, and they "lose debates" because they simply can't manage their time and arguments with Craig's laser-like like speed, economy, and precision.

The existence of a multiverse in itself is not important. Something conscious could have chosen to create many universes with life.

Again, what the multiverse does is quash the notion that our universe is somehow special. If ours was the only one then it would be terribly unlikely that it just happen to be able to support life. But if it's the case that there are many universes, then it wouldn't be so amazing that we found ourselves in one that was able to support life. Again, it defeats fine-tuning, but not the Kalam.

The Big Bang takes us to a beginning of the universe, including space and time. Physics cannot go beyond the first quantum of time. By the Kalam argument the universe, which is a finite object, needs a cause. If atheists cannot find a cause that is based on chance...

TBB takes us to the beginning of OUR universe, and spacetime in OUR universe. I'm not entirely sure what you mean by "physics can't go beyond the first quantum of time." QP existing in a completely massless state would be one in which time and space is an incoherent concept, and it's possible that one fluctuation could contain within it, eg, a kind of quantum gravity that would pull everything into it, creating spacetime along with all matter. This would necessarily be "by chance" as all quantum fluctuations are.

There are certainly other theories besides this one, fwiw. See that video that presents some of them.

The reason I find consciousness key is because of my preference for choice rather than chance regarding the Big Bang.

But, really, what is that "preference" based on? So far, when we look down on the smallest level all we see is randomness, probability, and chance, so where's the evidence for which to prefer choice?

Describing God from a perspective of consciousness allows us to scientifically study whatever might have caused the Big Bang and permits us to go beyond where physics can go.

Firstly, I don't see how you think science could study such a thing, and how it's possible for science to go "beyond where physics can go." If you mean that science can study OUR consciousness, then you're talking neurobiology, and I don't think there's anything in neurobiology that mirrors the origins of the universe. I already gave you a link discussing NDEs and other "out of body" experiences. They may not be literally out of body at all.

[YesNo]

It's not Craig's fault that he's presenting challenges to his opponents that they can't answer, but it is his fault for insisting on a live debate format that maximizes the strengths of his arguments and presentation and minimizes the ability to fully investigate any counter-argumnts.

People who lose should start accepting responsibility for their loses. It is as simple as that.

Craig can insist on any format he desires. It is not his "fault" he wins, it is to his credit that he wins these debates.

But, with that aside, yes, it's his opponents' fault that they don't come prepared with well-manicured arguments that refute his claims and present their own in as concise and economical a manner as possible. Almost nobody that debates him seems versed AT ALL in the techniques of debate.

I agree with that. However, Craig does not win all the debates he engages in. I don't think he won the debate with Bart Ehrman on the resurrection of Jesus: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FhT4IENSwac

Why didn't he win this debate? It was not because Ehrman was a better debater than he was. Craig was the better debater. It was because in this case the evidence was on Ehrman's side.

Again, what the multiverse does is quash the notion that our universe is somehow special. If ours was the only one then it would be terribly unlikely that it just happen to be able to support life. But if it's the case that there are many universes, then it wouldn't be so amazing that we found ourselves in one that was able to support life. Again, it defeats fine-tuning, but not the Kalam.

I just want to make sure you are not missing something. The problem is not whether there are many universes or not. There may be. That is irrelevant. But if there are many universes, I think the estimate is that 10^500 do not support life. Now if it happens that even one of them besides our own does support life, then the chance argument is destroyed.

One might be able to make a similar case for life arising by chance on the earth. We know that life did start on earth, but what are the odds that it did so by chance? That should give us a clue as to how many planets we should find with life on them or not. If we find more than that with life on them, the chance argument is destroyed.

TBB takes us to the beginning of OUR universe, and spacetime in OUR universe. I'm not entirely sure what you mean by "physics can't go beyond the first quantum of time." QP existing in a completely massless state would be one in which time and space is an incoherent concept, and it's possible that one fluctuation could contain within it, eg, a kind of quantum gravity that would pull everything into it, creating spacetime along with all matter. This would necessarily be "by chance" as all quantum fluctuations are.

How do you know anything is by chance? What chance means in these contexts is that one does not know what the cause is.

There are certainly other theories besides this one, fwiw. See that video that presents some of them.

But, really, what is that "preference" based on? So far, when we look down on the smallest level all we see is randomness, probability, and chance, so where's the evidence for which to prefer choice?

Again, how do you know anything is by chance? And what does it mean to say that something occurred by chance except that one doesn't really know what caused it?

Firstly, I don't see how you think science could study such a thing, and how it's possible for science to go "beyond where physics can go." If you mean that science can study OUR consciousness, then you're talking neurobiology, and I don't think there's anything in neurobiology that mirrors the origins of the universe. I already gave you a link discussing NDEs and other "out of body" experiences. They may not be literally out of body at all.

The fact that you gave me a link doesn't mean that I accept everything in that link. Those out of body experiences may literally be out of body.

[MorpheusSandman]

People who lose should start accepting responsibility for their loses... Craig can insist on any format he desires.

But surely you can see how he stacks the deck all in his favor. It's like someone that insists on only ever playing on their home court. I'm not saying that his opponents shouldn't be more prepared, that they shouldn't accept responsibility for losing, but merely that Craig does, undoubtedly, arrange everything so that he has the greatest chance of winning, and I don't find that much better than the general laziness that his opponents display. They may be ignorant and inept with regards to the format, but Craig is knowingly manipulating the format to his advantage knowing it will put his opponents at a disadvantage.

The problem is not whether there are many universes or not. There may be. That is irrelevant. But if there are many universes, I think the estimate is that 10^500 do not support life.

But what difference does it matter what the number is of those that don't support life if we have no clue how many there are? There could be 1,000,000 times that number of universes or worlds and, again, if that's the case then it was likely inevitable that we would be the result of one of them. Our mind boggles at seemingly impossibly small numbers, but we should consider those numbers in the context of how many trials there were for such a thing to come about. That's just probability 101. You can deal any single hand of poker and calculate the incredibly small probability that the hand would've unfolded THAT particular way, but it means nothing if you don't consider how many trials there were before that one hand actually happened.

How do you know anything is by chance? What chance means in these contexts is that one does not know what the cause is.

QP is innately probabilistic, and when you’re dealing with probabilities, you’re in the realm of chance. You can make the argument that we simply don’t know what causes a wave to collapse, but that it has a case, but I’d like to see you argue that to any of the physicists who flat out say that it’s random chance. I mean, there are determinist schools of thought that claim that there is a mechanism behind this and we merely observe one outcome that was already decided by some unknown mechanism, but even then; what is the mechanism? Further, how can cause exist outside of time and space when our entire understanding of cause is bounded up in predictions that are carried out in both?

The fact that you gave me a link doesn't mean that I accept everything in that link.

What in that link don’t you accept? The fact that most of the famous out-of-body claims have been distortions and lies, or that the scientific claims surrounding them have been eschewed? The simple fact is that there’s no solid evidence that consciousness can exist outside of body/brain. The fact that we can experience something akin to an OBE doesn’t mean that’s literally what it is, and it’s remarkable that with all of the reports of such things that there’s never been any hard data to support it. I once saw a special where one hospital inserted a digital scroll above an operating table so if a patient ever did have an OBE they would be able to read what was on the scroll and report it to the doctors after they woke up. Nobody has yet been able to read it. What does that tell you?

[YesNo]

But surely you can see how he stacks the deck all in his favor. It's like someone that insists on only ever playing on their home court. I'm not saying that his opponents shouldn't be more prepared, that they shouldn't accept responsibility for losing, but merely that Craig does, undoubtedly, arrange everything so that he has the greatest chance of winning, and I don't find that much better than the general laziness that his opponents display. They may be ignorant and inept with regards to the format, but Craig is knowingly manipulating the format to his advantage knowing it will put his opponents at a disadvantage.

When Craig is courteous during the debate and clearly presents his side to the audience, he is in a sense setting up his opponents to make a mistake. There is nothing wrong with this. I admire his cool. It is what his opponents should do in return. Someone might see that as Craig "manipulating the format to his advantage", but he is really just letting his opponents' characters work against them and to his advantage.

QP is innately probabilistic, and when you’re dealing with probabilities, you’re in the realm of chance. You can make the argument that we simply don’t know what causes a wave to collapse, but that it has a case, but I’d like to see you argue that to any of the physicists who flat out say that it’s random chance. I mean, there are determinist schools of thought that claim that there is a mechanism behind this and we merely observe one outcome that was already decided by some unknown mechanism, but even then; what is the mechanism?

I have no problem with chance being used to model the occurrence of events. My only problem is with claiming chance causes events to happen. My interest here is in things like radioactive decay which has no cause to my knowledge but seems to work consistently enough to be used as a clock in certain circumstances.

Further, how can cause exist outside of time and space when our entire understanding of cause is bounded up in predictions that are carried out in both?

I don't know how that happens, but the only clue that I have is if a choice is made, then consciousness of some sort exists outside of space and time--this is way beyond claiming our consciousness can leave our bodies, but similar to it.

What in that link don’t you accept? The fact that most of the famous out-of-body claims have been distortions and lies, or that the scientific claims surrounding them have been eschewed? The simple fact is that there’s no solid evidence that consciousness can exist outside of body/brain. The fact that we can experience something akin to an OBE doesn’t mean that’s literally what it is, and it’s remarkable that with all of the reports of such things that there’s never been any hard data to support it. I once saw a special where one hospital inserted a digital scroll above an operating table so if a patient ever did have an OBE they would be able to read what was on the scroll and report it to the doctors after they woke up. Nobody has yet been able to read it. What does that tell you?

What I would accept as evidence is what comes from Raymond Moody who originally coined the term "near-death experience". Since I am not an expert, if you can convince him that the out of body experience is not literally an out of body experience, I will entertain it.

[MorpheusSandman]

Someone might see that as Craig "manipulating the format to his advantage", but he is really just letting his opponents' characters work against them and to his advantage.

I don't think it's their "characters" that work against them, unless by "character" you mean their lack of preparation. Many of his opponents have offered to simply have a discussion on these topics, but Craig always insists on the debate format. As much as I love debate in general, I also understand where many of his opponents are coming from in recognizing the constraint the form itself puts on getting to the bottom of issues that are this big. I wish Craig would simply be willing to sit down and discuss one subject and allot enough time to do more than just skim the surface of various conclusions that have been reached by certain theorists.

My only problem is with claiming chance causes events to happen.

Chance isn't an active mechanism so it can't "cause" anything, it just means thing HAPPEN at complete random. I know such a thing is completely counter-intuitive to us, but we should be getting used to the way the universe works being counter-intuitive by now.

the only clue that I have is if a choice is made, then consciousness of some sort exists outside of space and time

It sounds nice until you start to consider how conscious thought could possibly exist outside of time. Doesn't the very act of thought require time? Even if I suppose that NDEs do represent real OBEs, then even then if a person is thinking they are thinking inside of time, and they can't think for eternity before they wake up.

What I would accept as evidence is what comes from Raymond Moody who originally coined the term "near-death experience".

AFAIK, Moody was mostly documenting the phenomenon, not offering and testing theories as to how it worked. Again, I said several pages back that I don't dispute that people experience something that feels as if they're out of their body, but what I do dispute is that this is ACTUALLY them being out of their body. I wish the digital scroll concept would be implemented in hospitals everywhere because, eventually, someone would have an OBE and if they were really out of their body they would be able to read the scroll and report back. I know there have been no readings at the one hospital where it was implemented.