William Lane Craig and the Kalam Cosmological Argument

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Originally Posted by MorpheusSandman

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.

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When I mentioned "character" I was thinking more of how their personal behavior appears to the audience: good or bad posture, kind of attitude they have, whether they present themselves as egotistical or not--stuff like that.

Actually, I don't enjoy the debate format, but it does provide structure and it guarantees that it wraps up in a reasonable time.

The debate I've most enjoyed which was less formal was between Deepak Chopra and Leonard Mlodinow called War of the Worldviews.

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Originally Posted by MorpheusSandman

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.

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If that is what you believe, then I agree with you. Chance doesn't cause anything.

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Originally Posted by MorpheusSandman

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.

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I don't know how that works either.

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Originally Posted by MorpheusSandman

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.

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In his most recent book, Paranormal, which was his autobiography Moody mentioned a woman who saw an apparition of her dead son, if I remember correctly, after going through one of the scrying techniques he offered. She asked him if she could touch him, figuring she probably shouldn't, but he didn't seem to mind. He gave her a hug and lifted her off her feet.

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Originally Posted by YesNo

When I mentioned "character" I was thinking more of how their personal behavior appears to the audience:

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Well, yeah, that's part of it too. Most of his opponents could use some basic instruction on how to present themselves to an audience.

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Originally Posted by YesNo

Chance doesn't cause anything.

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Right, especially things that have no cause and happen just by (not because of) chance. ;)

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Originally Posted by YesNo

I don't know how that works either.

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Then keep in mind the link I gave you about fake explanations. Because just because if feels metaphysically intuitive doesn't mean it's even remotely close to the right answer.

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Originally Posted by YesNo

In his most recent book, Paranormal, which was his autobiography Moody mentioned a woman who saw an apparition of her dead son...

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That's all well and good, but I'm still not sure what it has to do with answering what the cause of the OBE phenomenon is. Like I said, such stories establish that there's a phenomenon to begin with, not what the explanation for it is.

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Originally Posted by MorpheusSandman

Then keep in mind the link I gave you about fake explanations. Because just because if feels metaphysically intuitive doesn't mean it's even remotely close to the right answer.

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The phrase "metaphysically intuitive" means to me "unexamined cultural assumption". It is something learned and then assumed to be true.

I am reading Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan's Acquiring Genomes: A Theory of the Origins of Species based on a side issue that KillCarneyKlans and OrphanPip brought up in this thread.

I didn't realize that I had the neodarwinist cultural assumption that "random mutation is the major source of evolutionary change, that natural selection acts upon". I am beginning to see that neodarwinism is a side issue at best. Also I tended to view evolution as starting only 560 million years ago ignoring the microscopic life that began a couple billion years earlier. I am now seeing that that microscopic life is key to any evolutionary theory. I think I'm beginning to understand more why Eldredge is so opposed to the "selfish gene" concept.

Another unexamined cultural assumption is beginning to bite the dust for me.

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Originally Posted by YesNo

Another unexamined cultural assumption is beginning to bite the dust for me.

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It's an unexamined cultural assumption to assume Neo-Darwinism is an unexamined cultural assumption. It came about because of all the evidence for it, and it took evolutionary biologists a good long time to get it to become accepted as much as it is. I'd hardly call it an "unexamined cultural assumption". I haven't read the book in question, but I do know that Margulis is a respected name in the field. Although, I somehow doubt she's trying to dismantle the whole of natural selection and Neo-Darwinism. That microbiology has a role to play in evolution is undeniable, but I think this is likely like the gradualism/equilibrium concept in that it's a false dichotomy. It doesn't have to be either/or.

Sorry double post happened accidentally somehow.

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Originally Posted by MorpheusSandman

It's an unexamined cultural assumption to assume Neo-Darwinism is an unexamined cultural assumption. It came about because of all the evidence for it, and it took evolutionary biologists a good long time to get it to become accepted as much as it is. I'd hardly call it an "unexamined cultural assumption". I haven't read the book in question, but I do know that Margulis is a respected name in the field. Although, I somehow doubt she's trying to dismantle the whole of natural selection and Neo-Darwinism. That microbiology has a role to play in evolution is undeniable, but I think this is likely like the gradualism/equilibrium concept in that it's a false dichotomy. It doesn't have to be either/or.

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Margulis was a respected name, but her ideas are highly marginal. What kept her a margin of respectability is a moderate commitment to real science and testable hypotheses. Although, she got increasingly crazy as time went on, becoming an HIV/AIDS denialist and 9/11 truther.

Margulis suffered from an unfortunate blindness about natural selection, that I think derives from her commitment to the Gaia hypothesis, she imagined life as a cooperate web like super organism, so she had trouble accepting evolution as a mutation and competition driven process. Her ideas about symbiotic evolution are almost entirely rejected, except for a few instances like the origins of the mitochondria and chloroplast.

The evidence supporting mutation and natural selection as the primary, of many, mechanisms of evolutionary change is very strong.

Thanks for the info, OrphanPip. :)

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Originally Posted by OrphanPip

Margulis was a respected name, but her ideas are highly marginal. What kept her a margin of respectability is a moderate commitment to real science and testable hypotheses. Although, she got increasingly crazy as time went on, becoming an HIV/AIDS denialist and 9/11 truther.

Margulis suffered from an unfortunate blindness about natural selection, that I think derives from her commitment to the Gaia hypothesis, she imagined life as a cooperate web like super organism, so she had trouble accepting evolution as a mutation and competition driven process. Her ideas about symbiotic evolution are almost entirely rejected, except for a few instances like the origins of the mitochondria and chloroplast.

The evidence supporting mutation and natural selection as the primary, of many, mechanisms of evolutionary change is very strong.

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Unfortunately, OrphanPip, I'm finding her book convincing, as well as Niles Eldredge's rejections of the "selfish gene". Do you have any references that might lead me to think otherwise?

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Originally Posted by YesNo

Unfortunately, OrphanPip, I'm finding her book convincing, as well as Niles Eldredge's rejections of the "selfish gene". Do you have any references that might lead me to think otherwise?

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There are substantial problems with Margulis' hypothesis, it lacks evidence and some of its substantial predictions do not pan out.

Her idea is not entirely ridiculous, as endosymbiosis played a major role in the evolution of eukaryotes. It is after all the defining feature of Eukarya that they have organelles descended from the endosymbiotic relationship between the progenitor of eukaryotes and bacteria, with strong evidence that the progenitor of eukaryotes was possibly descended from an archaean. There are also numerous instances of horizontal gene transfer between archaea and bacteria that creates another means for genetic change.

However, the major problem occurs when you get into the sexually reproducing eukaryotes: fungi, animals, and plants. These eukaryotes sometimes have gene exchange with viruses (that often incorporates bits of DNA from hosts) and occasionally retroviruses promote mutations or incorporate bits of DNA into their hosts' genome. However, because of the existence of germ cells these instances of genetic change do not have any lasting effects on eukaryotic species. Moreover, mutation occurs routinely in the production of gametes, and we have numerous examples of mutation leading to major changes in organisms. Natural selection has far more explanatory power, and it has produced many more predictions that have been tested in the literature.

Symbiotic evolution, or symbiogenesis, has a long history in the Lysenkoist tradition of biology originating from Soviet Russia. The Lysenkoist were forced to view genetics as a "fascist" science, and thus had to reject Darwinian evolution (those who objected loss their jobs or ended up shot). Margulis' ideas have been tried historically, and have failed, to account for the evidence we see around us. The Lysenkoist predictions lead to disastrous agricultural policies in the USSR and China that contributed to mass starvation. Selective breeding (operating off of predictions based on Darwinian natural selection) has proven extremely successful.

Margulis is not so extreme as Lysenko, in that she accepts mutation and natural selection as existing processes in evolution. However, there is simply no evidence for the broad reaching claims of her symbiotic evolutionary theory. Neodarwinism is the dominant view in biology precisely because it has stood up to tests. There is merit in thinking about lateral gene exchange in some microorganisms, but mutation and natural selection remain the best explanations of how evolution occurs.

Eldredge would agree, since he also views mutation and natural selection as the major driver of evolution. His position is based on the emphasis on the unit of selection, whether it is the individual (as Eldredge and Darwin emphasized), the gene (Dawkins et al.), or the species (group selection now rejected by any legitimate biologists).

Thanks, OrphanPip. I'll keep this in mind as I go through her book.

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Originally Posted by YesNo

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...

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How do you know it's a finite object? the standard models of cosmology allow for space being infinite. If space was created at the big bang why could it not have been created as infinite?

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Originally Posted by MorpheusSandman

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.

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First, you said Craig was equivocating and committing compositional fallacies (though you dressed it up with set theory jargon), and those are "flaws of logic"--regardless of what you pretend to have meant. Moreover, any "serious flaw" would necessarily be one of logic. If you think the fact that you can question one of the premises of an argument demonstrates a serious flaw, then you must think every argument ever made has "serious flaws". The truth is that, insofar as logic is concerned, you don't seem all that informed, and most of your complaints seem to have been plucked from second-rate atheist web sites. The compositional objection even had the dishonor of appearing in Craig's popular article "The World's Worst Objections to the Kalam" which basically dealt with various "objections" that appeared online that no atheist philosopher would ever make.

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Originally Posted by MorpheusSandman

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.

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"Could definitely?" Talk about shifty language. That you--who do not understand metaphysics in the slightest--think Craig--who is a PhD philosopher--is unwittingly engaged in elementary blunders of logic is absurd. You know, this entire concession would be far more palatable if you hadn't dressed it up in a way to try and save face. You were wrong. I know it, you know it, and anyone who familiar with fallacies of equivocation knows it.

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Originally Posted by MorpheusSandman

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.

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This is simply a lie. You listed equivocation as the first in your little list of "serious flaws". Frankly, I think you're just trying to save face after I called your bluff and you couldn't produce an actual equivocation.



There's absolutely no equivocation in the argument you present from Craig.

I would, however, like to present you with a fairly good, practical example of a fallacy of equivocation--one with which I'm sure you'll be familiar.

Morpheus: 1. A fallacy of equivocation, which means to use different meanings of the same word in a single argument fallaciously, is a "serious flaw."
Morpheus: 2. When Craig says "From nothing, nothing comes" he commits a fallacy of equivocation, which means <insert some non-standard, bizarre, inexplicable definition that requires Morpheus to write a 1,000-word essay just to try and explain it>.
Morpheus: Therefore, Craig is guilty of committing a "serious flaw".

That's right. You're actually equivocating on "equivocate".

So are we done with #1 and ready for #2?

Edit: initially, I had some rather harsh criticisms for the quote you selected, but then I realized that they would be interpreted as having been directed at Craig rather than as I intended. Suffice it to say that your selection, in no way, demonstrates what you're claiming.

It seems that you now claim that all you ever meant to say is that people misunderstand what Craig means by "nothing". Besides this not being anything close to a "serious flaw" in general or equivocation in particular, I think it is absolutely false. Whenever a child says he wants "nothing" for dinner, he demonstrates precisely what Craig means. The child isn't saying that he wants to eat a cubic foot of air or a quantum vacuum; he's saying he wants not a thing to eat.

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Originally Posted by stuntpickle

The compositional objection even had the dishonor of appearing in Craig's popular article "The World's Worst Objections to the Kalam" which basically dealt with various "objections" that appeared online that no atheist philosopher would ever make because they are so absurd.

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I search for and watched Craig's talk, 10 Worst Objections to the Kalam Cosmological Argument: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sfsYhWNMYr4

Thanks for mentioning this. Craig's talk seems to me to be one of the best lectures on logic I have ever heard.

The 10th argument was one where he quoted Dawkins as accepting the Kalam argument but with Dawkins claiming that the Kalam argument doesn't imply that this cause has all the attributes of the Christian God. Craig then said that he never claimed it did, only that the Kalam argument implied an efficient cause of the universe. The idea this left me with is that when Dawkins accepted the Kalam argument with the restrictions he made, he contradicted his own atheism.

Stunt,

In your last several responses to me you have completely failed to address any of my arguments and have instead preferred to shift the debate over one concerning logic. You seem to miss that that if *I* have misunderstood what Craig meant by "nothing," then I am not the only one. You can sit here and blame me (and others) for not getting what Craig meant when he "clearly" wasn't equivocating, or you can admit that his own examples lead us to the wrong conclusion about what "nothing" he was referring to. If you really want to talk about fallacies, you've mentioned Craig's credentials I don't know how many times now. That he knows what he's talking about isn't even in dispute, it's what he's communicating to others that's in dispute. That he knows there are multiple associations with the word nothing, and yet he uses examples that do not illustrate his concept of nothingness, should be strikes against him. But you are so intent on pounding on my inability to grasp logic (and, apparently, everyone else's) that you refuse to see that.

Yes, I linked to and quoted from Craig's own video about the "10 worst objections to the Kalam," and I believe he hangs himself with what I quoted and for the reasons I gave. Why don't you address those reasons and stop beating around the bush with what you think I said or what you think I think? A child wanting "nothing" for dinner is clearly not the same "nothing" Craig is talking about, because the child can only eat tangible material. So his nothing is "I don't want any tangible material to eat" not "I want a complete absence of anything to eat." That you have repeated this same type of argument twice, but fail to grasp that someone handing me "nothing" and a child wanting "nothing" to eat is still not Craig's "nothing" is ironic to the extreme.

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Originally Posted by MorpheusSandman

In your last several responses to me you have completely failed to address any of my arguments ...

.Why don't you address those reasons and stop beating around the bush with what you think I said or what you think I think?

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Let's get something straight: I'm not at all interested in debating the existence of God with you. I've already told you this. The reasons are many. For one, I don't think you're particularly prepared for such a discussion, nor do I think you are willing to concede any point I don't force you to. I suspect you are fundamentally dishonest insofar as this discussion goes, not only with me, but with yourself. Moreover, I'm not convinced that you possess the requisite understanding to judge when this or that point has been properly adjudicated. Essentially, I'm saying I believe you are so entirely hostile to this subject in general that no real discussion can occur. My only interest in this discussion is to demonstrate that the Kalam does not have "serious flaws" as you claim.

I'm not beating around the bush; you're moving the goalposts. YOU listed three points YOU thought best demonstrated the "serious flaws" of the Kalam. You could have said anything you wanted. You took your best swing, and you missed entirely. YOU are the one who said Craig was equivocating. This isn't some straw man you're being forced to defend, but rather it is the foremost "flaw" at the top of your list. It turns out (surprise, surprise) that the only "flaw" was in your thinking. Now that this has been made so abundantly clear that not even you can deny it, you prefer to change the subject.

Now you prefer to discuss how Craig is "misleading" people. Well, guess what? You had your shot at complaining. The complaint department is now closed. This conversation has convinced me that you are absolutely unpersuadable and committed to generating pointless complications to frustrate the discussion. I suspected as much after reading your first couple of posts, in which you veered from one worldview to the next, and I thought to myself, "Well, Stunt, how do you squash an average obfuscator?" The answer, of course, is "Get him to commit."

And commit you did. Oh, you're trying to run from what you said, but I won't let you escape. There's only one way to talk to someone who jumps around incessantly just to avoid the actual discussion, and that's with him on a leash.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LlnSfr2DBGw

You ready for #2?