(April 7, 2016 at 7:55 pm)Simon Moon Wrote: Just listened to this last night.
Scott Clifton pretty much destroys William Lane Craig's cosmological argument.
I was pretty good at refuting this argument before this, but I never heard the approach he uses when he talks about "sufficient causes" and "material causes".
https://youtu.be/vjtWLU9t0gs
Not even close.
WLC's formulation is
(1) Everthing that begins to exist has a cause.
As to the charge of being vague, it leaves the question of efficient or material causes to the arguments in support of the premises (which he has literally written books on).
Clifton claims that our experience tells us:
(1*) Every physical thing that begins to exist has a material cause.
In his published and peer reviewed work, WLC outlines 3 arguments for (1):
(i) Something cannot come from nothing.
(ii) If something can come into being from nothing, then it becomes inexplicable why just anything or everything doesn’t come into being from nothing.
(iii) Common experience and scientific evidence confirm the truth of premise (1).
He goes on to point out that only the third is an inductive reason so the main grounds in support of the premise are metaphysical. Clifton's support for (1*) seems to be (iii), but if all the eggs are in that basket though, that might even be on shaky ground because of current cosmological theories (most don't allow for "stuff" to be available for use in creating a universe)
Premise (2) The universe began to exist, does not seem to be challenged by Clifton.
So how about the cause?
(3) The universe had a cause.
(3*) The universe had a material cause (stuff from which it was made).
You will get an infinite regress of events if the cause of the universe was a material object. In addition, the scientific evidence supports an absolute beginning of all matter and energy, space and time a finite time ago. WLC concludes:
"So we have really good grounds for affirming the immateriality of the First Cause. The origin of the universe requires, then, an efficient cause of enormous power which created physical time, space, matter, and energy. It is an instance of efficient but not material causation. If this is thought to be metaphysically impossible, then some compelling, overriding argument needs to be given for that conclusion. I have yet to encounter such an argument."
http://www.reasonablefaith.org/must-ever...z45XfsH9uk