Disproving Odin - An Experiment in arguing with a theist with Theist logic

[The Grand Nudger]

Was there a before?

[Nay_Sayer]

Was there a before?

Duh. But Steve has no idea what it really was like then, I do. AMA

[Edwardo Piet]

There is no category error because only you are limiting the premise to be material things. There are a large number of things that do no have material causes:

1. The thing that makes you "you".
2. Mathematical objects.
3. Ideas, novels, and symphonies
4. Language
5. Classes, properties, descriptions

How many of these exist apart from our material universe ?

Round about...... none of them.

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So, if we can't conceive of such a reality, why would we deny the premise "anything that begins to exist has a cause" is a lot more likely true than not?

Everything that begins to exist does have a cause... but there's absolutely no reason for the first cause to be God.

And, furthermore, the totality of existence itself doesn't begin to exist. It is the first cause, if causality (or anything) is going to make sense at all.

What has this got to do with disproving Odin by the way?

[polymath257]

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I'm sure you are frustrated.  You have at least two category errors.  Whenever this is pointed out to you, you return to the Aristitileon categories of cause which are at least in part the cause of your category error.

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No. There is no "category error" unless the premise only applies to one category and not the other. That is not the case here. 

1. Everything that begins to exist has a cause.
2. The universe began to exist.
3. Therefore, the universe has a cause.

Just because you can come up with categories, your "category error" charge is nonsense unless there is a category that somehow does not have a causal principle. Is there a category that has no causal principle? 

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1. What Do You Mean By Exist?

The first catagory error is equating the existence of physical objects, energy, with the existence of ideas. These are two very different meanings of the word "exist."  To see how different they are, all you have to do is ask where does it exist?  Physical objects have an identifiable location.  Where is my pencil, or where's the dog  are rational questions. Where is the English language? Where is The Pythagorean Theorem?   Or where is Beethoven's Fifth are not.  At best you might say Engish is spoken in these places, or Pythagoras's  Theorim is set out in my math book, or my score of the Fifth is over there on the desk.  But that's only physical places where the ideas are recorded.  They don't exist except as recorded in a brain or someother physical object.  In the sense that your pencil exists, ideas don't exist at all.  It's as if instead of asking for a pencil, you asked for pencilness.

The trouble with talking about the existense of ideas goes beyond the fact that they must be recorded.  To exist they must also be understood by someone.  Consider for example the possibility that if DNA were taken to represent a letter system in Hitite, English, or some language not yet spoken but which will be spoken in the future, that a sequence of DNA somewhere would spell out an intelligible sentence, maybe even a poetic one, such "eyes like liquid fire."   Would you say that that poem existed before someone worked out the "meaning" of that sequence? I wouldn't.  But I would have no trouble saying that the DNA sequence itself existed whether someone sequenced it or not.

The universe potentially poses a third kind of existence.  Where is the universe?  Well, unless there is something outside it, the answer is it's not in a place, it is the collective of all places and things. When we ask where, we are asking where in the universe?  To ask where is the universe is an as odd a question as where is the Pythagorean Theorem.  But unlike the theorem, the universe obviously  has  a physical existence and it's existence is not contingent on someone's knowing about it.

These two or three uses of the word exist are so different that using the word existence to mean both the existence of physical objects and the existence of ideas is a category error.

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As you might learn from Neo, your use of the word "existence" is not fully developed. The fact that we can use 'exist' in separate ways does nothing to the KCA because all that meant is that anything that begins to exists (in any senses of the word) has a cause of its existence. 

The universe does not has a special kind of existence. It is a unique object, but that does not require a special category of existence. It either exists or does not exist. Asking "where" is just a nonsensical question that does not apply--much the same as what was it like 12 hours before the big bang. 

For the twelfth time, it is an objective feature of reality that everything that begins to exist has a cause of its existence. There are no exceptions and it seems that existence without a causal principle is not even coherent. You avoid answering this point because you think there has got to be something wrong with the form argument because you don't like the conclusion. There is nothing wrong with the argument. 

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 2.  What Do You Mean By Begin to Exist?

Here's where the multiple meanings of the word exist begin to create real havoc.  You and Craig insist that elephants don't appear out of nothing.  This is because elephants, have, as Aristotle would say, a material cause, i.e. they are made of something.  All physical objects are.  It's not the creation of an elephant that's  startling, it's the creation of the matter out of which the elephant is made. Elephants made out of material not previously existing in the universe would indeed be unprecedented.

This is because all physical objects have a material cause in the Aristitileon sense of the word, that is to say they are made of something.  And when we say something begins to be an elephant we mean that the matter out of which the elephant is made took the form of an elephant.  We don't mean new matter popped into existence and became an elephant.

The universe,  is physical in that it is made of material, meaning that in the Aristitileon sense, it has a material cause.  But you state that unlike the matter that makes up an elephant, the matter that makes up the universe did not exist prior to the universe.  That is an entirely different meaning of to begin to exist.  It is in fact the very kind of beginning to exist that you keep telling me elephants do not ever do.  And  also the very kind of begin to exist appears to occur at the  subatomic level which you say does not actually happen because it is too improbable.

Ideas on the other hand have no material cause in the Aristotelian sense.  That is to say that they have no material substance in that they are not made of anything only recorded in things.  You don't propose that a poem won't suddenly appear in my backyard because poems don't appear anywhere at all.  Poems  don't exist the way elephants do. But even though a poem is not made of something physical, it is created by something physical.  A poem not conceived or recognised by a brain (including artificial brains like computers) would simply not be in any sense of the word to exist.  It comes into being when it is recognized by someone as a poem.

So, just as you have conflated multiple meanings of exist, you have gone on to conflate multiple meanings of  of the phrase "begin to exist."

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x begins to exist if and only if x exists at some time t and there is no time t* prior to t at which x exists.

This can be used for ALL real objects and abstract objects. Any further differentiations you want to make about beginning to exist is unnecessary. You seem to want to because you think it makes a difference to the argument. You can't show an exception or even reason into an exception, there is not category error or special pleading. The premise is sound. 

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 3. What Do You Mean By Cause?

Not surprisingly using  multiple meanings for exist, and begin to exist leads to multiple kinds of causes for existence.  This is exacerbated by your insistence on using Aristotle's categorisation of causes as the be all end all way to describe cause.  

Aristotle predates Newton by a millennium. Of his terms, formal cause has long since been abandoned. We no longer say that an octave is caused by a 2:1 ratio.  Rather we say that the 2:1 ratio describes the octave.  Ratios do not cause anything.  They do describe the relationship between things.  And although we speak of the purpose for things we no longer talk about a ball having a purpose of getting to the bottom of a ramp. End purpose is only relevant to things created by a sentient being for a purpose.  An extraordinarily small portion of the present shape of things in the universe was formed for a purpose even though most of the objects used by humans were formed by humans for a pupose.  Purpose is an attribute assigned by people, an idea attached to the object as it were.

So, with regard to the types of beginning to exist discussed above, we know all physical objects in the universe which like an elephant are created out existing matter have a material cause (it's definitional). Physical objects at the human scale also have what Aristotle called an agency cause, or a sufficient cause, tellingly, also called a moving cause.  That is to say, an elephant is in it's particular place and in it's particular shape because of forces outside of itself.  In the case of physical objects, like an  elephant or a ball, or a mountain those outside forces are physical forces acting on the physical material that makes up the object. And really it's not a cause  but a myriad of material and moving causes.  

This does not necessarily hold true at the subatomic level where, while everything still is made of something, some particles appear not to be made from preexisting material.  And they appear to move without outside force.  If they have a cause, it's a very different meaning than the cause we mean when we look for the cause of an elephant. It's not even clear if cause is a relevant term.  You could say they have a material cause in the Aristitileon sense but that isn't really more that stating that they physically exist.

If, as you profess, the universe is not made of preexisting material and consists of matter that wasn't previously something else, then it too does not have cause in the way an elephant does.  What kind of cause is it that makes objects appear out of nothing?  

Ideas have no material cause in the Aristitileon sense as they are not made of anything.  They have no moving cause either as they have on material to be acted upon by outside forces.  Yet to the extent they can be said to exist, it is only because they can be recorded in physical objects and understood by physical beings.  They created and maintained by thought.  I suppose you could say they have an end cause.  But they also have a physical cause in that they are created by physical activity in  brains and communicated by physical means.

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Again, all that is needed is that everything shows some type of cause. You cannot limit it to a material cause, so you fail to establish a category error or special pleading. This objection fails with the rest of them. 

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4. Innapropriately Conflating Different Of Meanings With A Single Term is Category Error.

You have at least two different meanings of exist, at least two meanings of begin to exist, and many meanings of cause used in you proposition.  Saying l mean all of those doesn't solve the category error.

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Nope. You unnecessarily created the distinctions, I didn't. Again, no category error because Premise (1) applies to all categories--so I am not treating them differently. 

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If I say

All pets pant,
Goldfish are pets
Therefore goldfish pant

The problem is not solved by saying pets includes both dogs and goldfish, and panting includes all forms of breathing whether by mouth or by gills.  When talking about categories animals for purposes of animal physiology pets in an inherently bad category.  And using pant when what you mean is breath, is disingenuous.

The difference between physically existing and the existence of ideas; the difference between the creation of new matter and reforming of existing matter; and the difference between reshaping matter, having ideas and making new matter appear; are too dissimilar to be usefully refered to by the same names in formal proofs.

[Edited for many but probably far from all typos.]

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Your little example is an affirming the consequent fallacy. That is not the form of the KCA so I really can't see your point. 

Answer this: are you going to claim that some sort of causal principle is NOT an objective feature of reality and seems absolutely necessary for any existence? Yes or No.

Well, I would first dispute that everything that begins to exist has a cause. In particular, there are quantum events where things begine to exist without cause. There are also many more situations where the contributory causes for an event are not sufficient for the event to occur (only probabilities are determined, not the event itself)

Next, by your definition of 'begin to exist', the universe did NOT 'begin to exist'. The point is that time is part of the universe, so there was never a *time* when the universe did not exist. Now, there may well have been a first instant of time, but even if this is the case, time itself is uncaused and the universe is co-existent with time, so it is also uncaused.

Finally, I reject the Aristotelian concepts of causality. they are badly out of date and need to be revised in the face of 'new' physics, say from Newton onward.

[polymath257]

That’s true the elephant did not begin to exist until some matter took the form of an elephant. But the elephant’s existence is more than just the matter of which it is made. In fact, the matter out of which it is made will change as the elephant grows from conception through its maturity. And upon death the matter will remain even after the elephant has ceased to exist. That’s all we have been saying. The existence of the elephant began at some point and ended at some later point.

Any theory of existence must account for something, like an elephant, to persist in its existence despite undergoing change. Limiting yourself to only material and efficient causes cannot account for either.

Unfortunately, that’s all I have time for today, JennyA. I wish I had time to explain more about intelligible objects.

But the elephant consists of nothing other than the matter of which it is made and the processes that this matter undergoes. Your argument is, at the extreme, a version of the Ship of Theseus. It is a matter of our classification and the continuity of causal links rather than anything inherent in the object itself.

Again, Aristotelian philosophy was a good beginning, but it is outdated. We have learned a few things in the last 2300 years.

My basic position is that everything supervenes on the physical: once we know everything about the physical situation, we know everything there is to know. So, ideas are processes in our physical brains, with commonality between brains sufficient to say when two different brains have the 'same idea'. Conventions and language are, again, shared ideas in the brains of people holding to those conventions or languages. Mathematics is a type of formal language and, again, is a common set of ideas shared and hence ultimately supervenes on the physical.

The notions of causality in Aritotelianism are also outdated. For one thing, final causes only eists when there are minds that can plan. So the vast majority of things do not have final causes at all. Formal causes are simply shapes and not reasonably called causes at all. Material causes are, in essence, simply composition, and are again not really causes at all. So efficient causes are the only aspect that is close to something meaningful at all.

But the problem is that there are usually several contributory causes, not a single efficient cause. Furthermore, it is quite possible for the full collection of contributory causes to be insufficient for the event to occur. There is, in addition to any causes, a further randomness in the universe which is non-causal in nature. So, the idea that everything *must* have a cause is faulty. If your 'reason' dictates that everything that begins to exist must have a cause, then your reason is faulty and needs to be brought up to date with modern discoveries.

[Astreja]

My ex-wife claimed that Odin spoke to her in late May 2011. From that point, she started losing weight and got a tattoo and started smoking because she claimed that Odin said she needs to be her real person. Ugh, she couldn't lose weight and put a cute dress on for me, she had to do it for some imaginary friend.

Have you considered wearing an eye patch and getting a couple of pet ravens?  

[Whitewolf]

Odin would kick all other gods asses.

[Angrboda]

Quantum level particles.

RR already responded to this silly example that keeps coming up over and over and over:

Quantum mechanics merely describe what takes place at the quantum level.  It makes no reference to causes, but that does not imply that there are no causal entities involved.
Feser hypothesizes that perhaps Oerter understands the law of causality to refer to some sort of deterministic cause, and since quantum mechanics are supposedly indeterministic (a disputed interpretation), the law of causality could not apply.  Feser notes that “[t]he principle of causality doesn’t require that.  It requires only that a potency be actualized by something already actual; whether that something, whatever it is, actualizes potencies according some sort of pattern –deterministic or otherwise — is another matter altogether.”

The fact of the matter is that quantum mechanics has not identified causeless effects or invalidated the causal principle.  For any event to occur it must first have the potential to occur, and then have that potential actualized.  If that potential is actualized, it “must be actualized by something already actual,”[2] and that something is what we identify as the cause. https://theosophical.wordpress.com/2012/...principle/

But  setting that aside, each of my categories has a different kind of cause.  Placing the universe in the right category tells you what kind of cause to look for.  If the universe physically exists, you need a physical cause.  If it began to exist before time and space, than "cause" makes no sense. Cause and effect requires time.

First, notice that you are invoking a causal principle for the universe (in bold). You have just agreed with Premise 1. You seem to be objecting to PRem

Second, cause and effect do not require time. If anything, matter/motion/change is needed for time to exist (if not the cause of time itself). 

Third, you are right, saying that the universe began to exist before time and space makes not sense. That's why we don't say that. When the universe began to exist, so would time--simultaneously. 

Fourth, at some point, you run out of physical causes as you go back because it is impossible for there to have been an infinite amount of causes that have already elapsed in order to get to the start of our universe.

Rather than complain about my analysing what is meant by existence, I suggest YOU define it for purposes of the KCA. 

And, yes, there are things that happen at the quantum level that appear to be without cause.  Before your first premise  can be accepted, you'll need to explain quantum level causation.


Are you being deliberately obtuse?  The point is not when, but what counts as beginning to exist.  An elephant is born out of existing matter.  Other than those quantum particles you keep ignoring, what do you know of that is ever made without preexisting material?  I don't think anything made out of stuff already in existence can be compared to the appearance of new things not made out of preexisting stuff. Why should we make that leap?

Something begins to exist when it becomes more than just its component parts and/or separate from the cause of its existence. An elephant begins to exist when takes shape in the womb. A chair becomes a chair when it can serve the purpose of a chair. An idea begins to exist when it has sufficient content to convey meaning. Arguing about stages of completion is semantics and entirely subjective. The principle is always there--at one point you didn't have x and and another point you obviously have x. 

Regarding your "preexisting stuff" and "leap", we are very clearly talking about prior to the universe. Why would we limit ourselves to a component of the causal principle that very obviously has to do with the atoms and molecules within our universe. Imposing a material cause restriction when there are many examples of things that do not have material causes is not justifiable. Additionally, through inductive reasoning, we can clearly see that an infinite chain of material causes is impossible. There is no such thing as an actual infinite by successive addition. There must be an immaterial cause at some point in the past chain.  

The universe is material.  Name a single material thing without a material  cause. Hint, there are those pesky particles.  But if you ignore them, then we are back to all material things need a material cause.

Again with the "in the universe" restrictions. The conversation is about before the universe.

I think the following article is relevant, but I haven't backtracked through your argument with Jenny here to be sure. Regardless, I think it's worth your time.

Craig, Kalam, and Quantum Mechanics: Has Craig Defeated the Quantum Mechanics Objection to the Causal Principle?

[Amarok]

RR already responded to this silly example that keeps coming up over and over and over:



First, notice that you are invoking a causal principle for the universe (in bold). You have just agreed with Premise 1. You seem to be objecting to PRem

Second, cause and effect do not require time. If anything, matter/motion/change is needed for time to exist (if not the cause of time itself). 

Third, you are right, saying that the universe began to exist before time and space makes not sense. That's why we don't say that. When the universe began to exist, so would time--simultaneously. 

Fourth, at some point, you run out of physical causes as you go back because it is impossible for there to have been an infinite amount of causes that have already elapsed in order to get to the start of our universe.


Something begins to exist when it becomes more than just its component parts and/or separate from the cause of its existence. An elephant begins to exist when takes shape in the womb. A chair becomes a chair when it can serve the purpose of a chair. An idea begins to exist when it has sufficient content to convey meaning. Arguing about stages of completion is semantics and entirely subjective. The principle is always there--at one point you didn't have x and and another point you obviously have x. 

Regarding your "preexisting stuff" and "leap", we are very clearly talking about prior to the universe. Why would we limit ourselves to a component of the causal principle that very obviously has to do with the atoms and molecules within our universe. Imposing a material cause restriction when there are many examples of things that do not have material causes is not justifiable. Additionally, through inductive reasoning, we can clearly see that an infinite chain of material causes is impossible. There is no such thing as an actual infinite by successive addition. There must be an immaterial cause at some point in the past chain.  


Again with the "in the universe" restrictions. The conversation is about before the universe.

I think the following article is relevant, but I haven't backtracked through your argument with Jenny here to be sure.  Regardless, I think it's worth your time.

Craig, Kalam, and Quantum Mechanics: Has Craig Defeated the Quantum Mechanics Objection to the Causal Principle?

Good article 

But Steve is committed to spewing Craigs nonsense till death .Because actual physics creates problems for his fables .

[Abaddon_ire]

RR already responded to this silly example that keeps coming up over and over and over:



First, notice that you are invoking a causal principle for the universe (in bold). You have just agreed with Premise 1. You seem to be objecting to PRem

Second, cause and effect do not require time. If anything, matter/motion/change is needed for time to exist (if not the cause of time itself). 

Third, you are right, saying that the universe began to exist before time and space makes not sense. That's why we don't say that. When the universe began to exist, so would time--simultaneously. 

Fourth, at some point, you run out of physical causes as you go back because it is impossible for there to have been an infinite amount of causes that have already elapsed in order to get to the start of our universe.


Something begins to exist when it becomes more than just its component parts and/or separate from the cause of its existence. An elephant begins to exist when takes shape in the womb. A chair becomes a chair when it can serve the purpose of a chair. An idea begins to exist when it has sufficient content to convey meaning. Arguing about stages of completion is semantics and entirely subjective. The principle is always there--at one point you didn't have x and and another point you obviously have x. 

Regarding your "preexisting stuff" and "leap", we are very clearly talking about prior to the universe. Why would we limit ourselves to a component of the causal principle that very obviously has to do with the atoms and molecules within our universe. Imposing a material cause restriction when there are many examples of things that do not have material causes is not justifiable. Additionally, through inductive reasoning, we can clearly see that an infinite chain of material causes is impossible. There is no such thing as an actual infinite by successive addition. There must be an immaterial cause at some point in the past chain.  


Again with the "in the universe" restrictions. The conversation is about before the universe.

I think the following article is relevant, but I haven't backtracked through your argument with Jenny here to be sure.  Regardless, I think it's worth your time.

Craig, Kalam, and Quantum Mechanics: Has Craig Defeated the Quantum Mechanics Objection to the Causal Principle?

I am going to cite Betteridge. Any headline ending with a question mark is sufficiently answered by the word "No".