(July 6, 2012 at 1:56 pm)CliveStaples Wrote:

(July 6, 2012 at 1:45 pm)ktulu Wrote: Well, it is question begging because premise 1 breaks all things down into things that begin to exist, and things that do not begin to exist. In order for the argument to not be question begging, the subset of things that do not begin to exist needs more elements other then "THE CAUSE". Otherwise your argument becomes:

1. Everything that begins to exist, except for THE CAUSE has a cause.
2. The universe began to exist (due to THE CAUSE)
3. Therefore the universe has THE CAUSE.

I can kick KCA around more if you want to in a different thread, I don't want to douchjack this thread.

No, that's not true. Say that the set of things that "begin to exist" is B, and everything else is in B'. Let Q(x) be the proposition "x has a cause".

According to your argument, if B' = {THE CAUSE}, then (1) becomes:

1. For all x in B, except for THE CAUSE, Q(x)

But this is not question begging; there is no exception being made for THE CAUSE, since THE CAUSE is not in B.

And how do you know that THE CAUSE doesn't begin to exist?

lol,
very good self refutation on the last line.
If THE CAUSE began to exist it would be x.
The argument is question begging because you are not trying to prove that the universe has A CAUSE, but that the universe has THE CAUSE.
You cannot use the thing you attempting to prove in your premise. You arrive at a self contained circular mambo jumbo.

(July 6, 2012 at 2:12 pm)Rhythm Wrote: -without a known cause-

No, Mystic, it isn't becoming potent again because it falls on it's face in entirely the same place for entirely the same reasons. It is perceived to be becoming potent again because people are selling it again, to folks like yourself.

Why does anything need to be eternal? Who needs this? What needs this?

As I said, if you believe existence can pop out of non-existence, then this argument fails. I said it makes use of the intuition, "from nothing, nothing follows".

Every argument for God makes some use of intuition related to God except for the teleological argument (which doesn't prove God, but just a Designer).

In this case, it's intuitive that God couldn't pop out of nothing to existence, but must be eternal. We know this about God, and the Kalam argument is making use of this intuition about God.

(July 6, 2012 at 2:12 pm)MysticKnight Wrote: What you guys aren't realizing is that the premise that use to be disputed is "the universe began to exist". Atheists long before scientific evidence came up, would state the universe is eternal.

Now we have scientific evidence that the universe has a beginning. So this argument is becoming potent again. In fact, big bang theory didn't dismiss universe being eternal. However, right now, scientists are concluding that the universe must have had beginning or there wouldn't be planets, suns, etc.. it would be total darkness. That is if you say there is an infinite past.

Something needs to be eternal.

well, we technically don't have "evidence". (Hubble is doing cartwheels in his grave). We have a scientific theory that explains what we're observing around us. There are many unanswered questions about the big bang model. It is by far the most plausible explanation, but we don't have scientific evidence.

If anything needs to be eternal, you would have to give it the least amount of properties in form of assumptions. Quantum foam is likely the one thing that is eternal.

From nothing, nothing follows isn't actually intuition amigo. I'm sorry...did you just say that you knew something about god...you mean an actual god, like poof there you go from the storybooks.....somehow I doubt that.

There isn't scientific evidence that the last big bang was the beginning of the universe, but there is scientific evidence, that the universe must have had a beginning.

(July 6, 2012 at 2:25 pm)MysticKnight Wrote: There isn't scientific evidence that the last big bang was the beginning of the universe, but there is scientific evidence, that the universe must have had a beginning.

what? lol I'm having difficulty following you. Do you care to cite any scientific sources?

I'm also unclear as to what you mean by the universe having a beginning, especially if you're not referring to the "Big Bang"

(July 6, 2012 at 2:29 pm)ktulu Wrote:

(July 6, 2012 at 2:25 pm)MysticKnight Wrote: There isn't scientific evidence that the last big bang was the beginning of the universe, but there is scientific evidence, that the universe must have had a beginning.

what? lol I'm having difficulty following you. Do you care to cite any scientific sources?

I'm also unclear as to what you mean by the universe having a beginning, especially if you're not referring to the "Big Bang"

This is from another forum:

Quote:Eminent physicist Alexander Vilenkin recently presented the results of a new paper at an event in Cambridge in honour of Stephen Hawking's 70th birthday: Essentially, modern physics points to a beginning of creation. We already knew this with the Big Bang Theory, but Vilenkin and others have shown that even with multiverse and cyclical theories, you just physically can't avoid a beginning. The New Scientist reports the results:

Why physicists can't avoid a creation event


The big bang may not have been the beginning of everything – but new calculations suggest we still need a cosmic starter gun

YOU could call them the worst birthday presents ever. At the meeting of minds convened last week to honour Stephen Hawking's 70th birthday - loftily titled "State of the Universe" - two bold proposals posed serious threats to our existing understanding of the cosmos.
One shows that a problematic object called a naked singularity is a lot more likely to exist than previously assumed (see "Naked black-hole hearts live in the fifth dimension"). The other suggests that the universe is not eternal, resurrecting the thorny question of how to kick-start the cosmos without the hand of a supernatural creator.

While many of us may be OK with the idea of the big bang simply starting everything, physicists, including Hawking, tend to shy away from cosmic genesis. "A point of creation would be a place where science broke down. One would have to appeal to religion and the hand of God," Hawking told the meeting, at the University of Cambridge, in a pre-recorded speech.

For a while it looked like it might be possible to dodge this problem, by relying on models such as an eternally inflating or cyclic universe, both of which seemed to continue infinitely in the past as well as the future. Perhaps surprisingly, these were also both compatible with the big bang, the idea that the universe most likely burst forth from an extremely dense, hot state about 13.7 billion years ago.

However, as cosmologist Alexander Vilenkin of Tufts University in Boston explained last week, that hope has been gradually fading and may now be dead. He showed that all these theories still demand a beginning.

His first target was eternal inflation. Proposed by Alan Guth of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1981, inflation says that in the few slivers of a second after the big bang, the universe doubled in size thousands of times before settling into the calmer expansion we see today. This helped to explain why parts of the universe so distant that they could never have communicated with each other look the same.

Eternal inflation is essentially an expansion of Guth's idea, and says that the universe grows at this breakneck pace forever, by constantly giving birth to smaller "bubble" universes within an ever-expanding multiverse, each of which goes through its own initial period of inflation. Crucially, some versions of eternal inflation applied to time as well as space, with the bubbles forming both backwards and forwards in time.

But in 2003, a team including Vilenkin and Guth considered what eternal inflation would mean for the Hubble constant, which describes mathematically the expansion of the universe. They found that the equations didn't work (Physical Review Letters, DOI: 10.1103/physrevlett.90.151301). "You can't construct a space-time with this property," says Vilenkin. It turns out that the constant has a lower limit that prevents inflation in both time directions. "It can't possibly be eternal in the past," says Vilenkin. "There must be some kind of boundary."

Not everyone subscribes to eternal inflation, however, so the idea of an eternal universe still had a foothold. Another option is a cyclic universe, in which the big bang is not really the beginning but more of a bounce back following a previous collapsed universe. The universe goes through infinite cycles of big bangs and crunches with no specific beginning. Cyclic universes have an "irresistible poetic charm and bring to mind the Phoenix", says Vilenkin, quoting Georges Lemaître, an astronomer who died in 1966. Yet when he looked at what this would mean for the universe's disorder, again the figures didn't add up.

Disorder increases with time. So following each cycle, the universe must get more and more disordered. But if there has already been an infinite number of cycles, the universe we inhabit now should be in a state of maximum disorder. Such a universe would be uniformly lukewarm and featureless, and definitely lacking such complicated beings as stars, planets and physicists - nothing like the one we see around us.
One way around that is to propose that the universe just gets bigger with every cycle. Then the amount of disorder per volume doesn't increase, so needn't reach the maximum. But Vilenkin found that this scenario falls prey to the same mathematical argument as eternal inflation: if your universe keeps getting bigger, it must have started somewhere.

Vilenkin's final strike is an attack on a third, lesser-known proposal that the cosmos existed eternally in a static state called the cosmic egg. This finally "cracked" to create the big bang, leading to the expanding universe we see today. Late last year Vilenkin and graduate student Audrey Mithani showed that the egg could not have existed forever after all, as quantum instabilities would force it to collapse after a finite amount of time (arxiv.org/abs/1110.4096). If it cracked instead, leading to the big bang, then this must have happened before it collapsed - and therefore also after a finite amount of time.

"This is also not a good candidate for a beginningless universe," Vilenkin concludes. "All the evidence we have says that the universe had a beginning."

http://www.newscient...tion-event.html

NOTE: He doesn't say 'some of the evidence we have' or 'on balance the evidence shows', rather he says 'ALL of the evidence'. And that's not even taking into account philisophical arguments.

(July 6, 2012 at 2:16 pm)ktulu Wrote: lol,
very good self refutation on the last line.
If THE CAUSE began to exist it would be x.
The argument is question begging because you are not trying to prove that the universe has A CAUSE, but that the universe has THE CAUSE.
You cannot use the thing you attempting to prove in your premise. You arrive at a self contained circular mambo jumbo.

But the argument doesn't assert that THE CAUSE doesn't have a cause.

Remember, it's:

(1) For all x in X, Q(x).
(2) y is in X.
(3) Therefore, Q(y).

Now, maybe the cause of y, let's call it c, is also in X. Then you'd have Q©. Where's the contradiction? It isn't circular reasoning; neither Q© nor ~Q© was assumed in (1) or (2); neither was Q(y).

Beings to exists. (a)
Has a Cause. (b)

A -> B
is the same as saying

Not B -> Not A

This is basic logic people.

So Not B (Doesn't have a cause) implies (Not A) doesn't have a beginning.

(July 6, 2012 at 2:32 pm)CliveStaples Wrote:

(July 6, 2012 at 2:16 pm)ktulu Wrote: lol,
very good self refutation on the last line.
If THE CAUSE began to exist it would be x.
The argument is question begging because you are not trying to prove that the universe has A CAUSE, but that the universe has THE CAUSE.
You cannot use the thing you attempting to prove in your premise. You arrive at a self contained circular mambo jumbo.

But the argument doesn't assert that THE CAUSE doesn't have a cause.

Remember, it's:

(1) For all x in X, Q(x).
(2) y is in X.
(3) Therefore, Q(y).

Now, maybe the cause of y, let's call it c, is also in X. Then you'd have Q©. Where's the contradiction? It isn't circular reasoning; neither Q© nor ~Q© was assumed in (1) or (2); neither was Q(y).

causation is a temporal phenomena. Time is a property of y, therefore Q(y) makes no sense. You are looking for a completely different animal.

Let's change back to English.

Back to my original observation.
1. Everything that begins to exist has a cause.
this obviously breaks things down into two categories. Things that begin to exist, and things that DO NOT begin to exist.

here's the argument
1. Everything that begins to exists, except for THIS ONE THING THAT DOES NOT begin to exist, has a cause
2. The universe begins to exist (since it is the container of all things, it was caused by THIS ONE THING THAT DOES NOT begin to exist)
3. Therefore the universe has a cause. (implication being that it is THIS ONE THING THAT DOES NOT begin to exist)

you really cannot see the question begging? you should see the logic gymnastics that Craig Lane performs on this point. Talk about things that make you go hmmmmmmmm....

---

(July 6, 2012 at 2:38 pm)MysticKnight Wrote: Beings to exists. (a)
Has a Cause. (b)

A -> B
is the same as saying

Not B -> Not A

This is basic logic people.

So Not B (Doesn't have a cause) implies (Not A) doesn't have a beginning.

I'm not sure how this helps you in any way, but I'm sure you will impress me with a mindblowing punchline.