(July 10, 2014 at 2:19 pm)FatAndFaithless Wrote:(July 10, 2014 at 1:50 pm)SteveII Wrote: What would my deep-thinking atheist friends say to the Cosmological Argument
1. Whatever begins to exist has a cause.
2. The universe began to exist.
3. Therefore, the universe has a cause.
I'm sure you heard each premises argued before.
Yes, we've heard this before. About a billion times. And it's about as convincing as waving your arms at nature and saying "goddidit".
But, taking your points in order:
1. Whatever begins to exist has a cause.
A bald assertion. Additionally, 'cause' is a very ill-defined word. Causes can have intent (such as me throwing a ball to you, I caused the ball to move through my conscious action) and causes can be mindless (such as erosion of a hillside causing a rock to roll down the side of the hill). You really need to define your terms very well when talking about this stuff, since similar words can have huge differences in their significance.
The causal princple in and of itself has been criticized by many, Hume for example, who suggests that the causal principle is something that we've empirically deduced, but cannot be applied writ large to things that we haven't or can't experience. Others raise objections based on quantum physics. On the quantum level, the connection between cause and effect, if not entirely broken, is to some extent loosened. For example, it appears that electrons can pass out of existence at one point and come back into existence elsewhere. One can neither trace their intermediate existence nor determine what causes them to come into existence at one point rather than another. Neither can one precisely determine or predict where they will reappear; their subsequent location is only statistically probable given what we know about their antecedent states.
Your first premise is, again, a bald assertion.
2. The universe began to exist.
Here's a quick rundown of the universe as we know it and how we believe it most probably "began". Since the universe is expanding as the galaxies recede from each other, if we reverse the direction of our view and look back in time, the farther we look, the smaller the universe becomes. If we push backwards far enough, we find that the universe reaches a state of compression where the density and gravitational force are infinite. This unique singularity constitutes the beginning of the universe—of matter, energy, space, time, and all physical laws. It is not that the universe arose out of some prior state, for there was no prior state of the universe as we now udnerstand it. THis also does not mean that there was a theologian's favorite "nothingness", since that's yet another ill-defined term (many theologians would call nothingness "non-existence", which means that we could not measure it, have no example of it to observe, and in no way can make statements about its nature or past). Since time too comes to be, one cannot ask what happened before the initial event. Neither should one think that the universe expanded from some initial ‘point’ into space. Since the Big Bang initiates the very laws of physics, one cannot expect any physical explanation of this singularity; physical laws used to explain the expansion of the universe no longer hold at any time before time = 0.
3. Therefore, the universe has a cause.
This is supposedly your conclusion, but your two premises are so flawed that this conclusion doesn't even have to be addressed because it's built on such crap.
However, I like typing, so here goes.
If we were to concede your first two points, then yes, the universe would have to have some sort of 'cause'. However, you have yet to define what cause means, whether this cause would be intentional (such as me throwing a ball) or simply an outcome of circumstance (a rock rolling down a hill naturally). There is absolutely no logical pathway from 'the universe has a cause' to 'God did it'. You're avoiding the huge problems of proving a god is possible, proving a god exists, proving that he has the ability to create a universe, and proving that our universe in particular was in fact created by him.
The premises are flawed, the conclusion is based on flawed premises AND the tacking on of a God to the end of it without and justification is flawed further.
(Credit to Stanford University, paraphrased some stuff from their philosophy library)
For the purposes of this argument, I see no distinction between your two possibilities of a cause. If it is a person, then we would conclude that it is God, if it another event, then we can just move back one step until we find out what caused the first event.
Everything has a cause is an empirically deduced conclusion. I am not aware of anything that would suggest otherwise, so I think it is much more plausible than not.
Quantum theory does not theorize matter from nothing (defined as not anything).
Are you arguing that time did not exist so we can't discuss what was before the universe? I don't see how this affect the question of cause of event 1 following t=0.
If premise 1 and 2 are true, a cause that never began to exist is needed. God is a plausible candidate.
