The First Cause? Prime Mover Argument

[Alex K]

- Individual events at the quantum level don't seem to have a cause. What we know about fundamental physics would suggest that universes like ours can simply occur in the same random fashion in which nuclear decays occur. Your notion of a mover seems to hinge on a classical concept of causality which is not valid any more.

Mybold.


I heartily approve of your use of the word 'seem' in the first sentence but I have to differ with 'suggest' in the second.
If A is random and B is random then they are not linked in any way.  Any association between them is contrived and unsupported.  For QM randomness to 'suggest' universe creation 'seems' to claim knowledge of causality of the universe outside the universe whose unknowability has already been cited elsewhere in this thread.

My point wasn't that this somehow proves that the creation of universes is random. It's the other way around - if someone claims that the creation of universes obeys some classical rules of causation, they make a positive claim - usually they try justify it via an inductive conclusion from the things within the universe to the universe as a whole. While this inductive reasoning is in itself specious, you can further undermine it by pointing to the fact that even its premise does not hold. Therefore, we lose any basis of claiming that this "everything is caused" business applies to the universe as a whole. This loss of justification is good enough for me to say "suggests" because it allows us to reject the positive claim and revert to the null hypothesis, but you may substitute a different word if you wish.

And as (seems to me) you are the most professional physicist on the forum,

I don't know what you mean by most professional. It's my training and I get paid for it.

I find it troubling that you would use a quote and graphic of Dr. Strangelove for your avatar.  Not only Christians are afraid of people more educated than they are.  

You are a bit too literal-minded then. If a German scientist (an unimportant one, granted) has an avatar alluding to an obvious satire of an irresponsible immoral German scientist, one would usually assume that the person uses it with an ironic self-conscious attitude, and not as an endorsement of the views that are satirized. If I sported an avatar of Wernher von Braun, you would have a point. But then, I wouldn't dare use the image of such an American hero for such worldly purposes.

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