RE: Self-evident truth is a thing
May 9, 2014 at 12:51 pm
(This post was last modified: May 9, 2014 at 12:51 pm by Simon Moon.)
(May 8, 2014 at 9:30 pm)Avodaiah Wrote: So a while back, I started a thread defending the Kalam argument. Eventually I got pretty busy and ended up letting the thread expire, but it ended up being mostly about the difference between making a bare assertion and stating a self-evident truth.
The Kalam does presuppose a couple things. It presupposes that nothing can never equal something (which is why everything that has a beginning has a cause) and that anything that moves has a starting point and an ending point (why everything in the universe must have a beginning).
These are not scientific laws, brought about by testing things time and time again and getting a consistent answer. These are mathematical and logical laws, laws that we know because it would be completely impossible for them to be any other way, and the kind of truths that the scientific method itself is based on. If nothing can equal something, then what's the point of looking for a cause for natural phenomena? They could just happen randomly for no reason. Or if motion does not require a starting and ending point, then why would anyone want to know how the history of anything, or how something was before it changed in some way? The fact is that these questions only make any sense because of self-evident truth, which is what a lot of arguments, including the Kalam, are based on.
Can we not agree on this?
The Kalam CA fails for quite a few other reasons than the presuppositions that you state.
The modus ponens of the argument is flawed. It contains several fallacies that invalidate it, before the premises are even taken into consideration.
In particular, Kalam contains the fallacies of: equivocation, affirming the consequent, composition.
You'd believe if you just opened your heart" is a terrible argument for religion. It's basically saying, "If you bias yourself enough, you can convince yourself that this is true." If religion were true, people wouldn't need faith to believe it -- it would be supported by good evidence.
