(April 13, 2016 at 6:06 pm)Simon Moon Wrote:(April 13, 2016 at 4:53 pm)SteveII Wrote: From the same link:
Objection #4: The first premise is based upon the fallacy of composition. It fallaciously infers that because everything in the universe has a cause, therefore the whole universe has a cause.
Response to #4: In order to understand this objection we need to understand the fallacy of composition. This is the fallacy of reasoning that because every part of a thing has a certain property, therefore the whole thing has that same property. While wholes do sometimes possess the properties of their parts (for example, a fence, every picket of which is green, is also green), this is not always the case. For example, every little part of an elephant may be light in weight, but that does not imply that the whole elephant is light in weight.
Now I have never argued that because every part of the universe has a cause, therefore the whole universe has a cause. That would be manifestly fallacious. Rather the reasons I have offered for thinking that everything that begins to exist has a cause are these:
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 a hat, at least you've got the magician, not to mention the hat! But if you deny premise (1) you've got 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 just pop into being without a cause.
The error he is making here, is that he is not using the physicist's meaning of the term "nothing". Which tends to be different than he way theists define the term.
Nothing, to physicists is not complete nonexistence.
That is utter nonsense. Nothing means "not anything". If a physicist means anything else, than it is something.
Quote:Quote:2. If something can come into being from nothing, then 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 just pop into being from nothing? Why is it only universes that can 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 constrained!
This is quite laughable.
He is trying to refute the accusation of the fallacy of composition, with the fallacy of division.
If the universe popped into existence from nothing (the physicist's definition, not Craig's), doesn't mean we would expect bicycles, root beer or Beethoven to also pop into existence within the universe.
Seriously Craig?!
You misunderstand the answer because you are changing the definition of nothing.
Quote:Quote:3. Common experience and scientific evidence confirm the truth of premise (1). Premise (1) is constantly verified and never falsified. It is hard to understand how any atheist committed to modern science could deny that premise (1) is more plausibly true than false in light of the evidence.[7]
The truth of premise 1 is only confirmed within the universe. When it comes to the universe itself, we don't know if there was a cause or not, no matter how much "common experience" tells us.
So you think that being can come from non-being? That we should reject all of our observations, intuition, and logic and simply say the opposite is just as likely? An inductive argument like this deals with probabilities of the truth of its premises. It should also be noted that your objection is not a rebutting defeater, it us an undercutting defeater--at most you would be diminishing the warrant for the premise.