3:10:03 should be unpalatable* 😅 1:26:42 it's not actually clear that this principle is simpler than the Kalam's causal principle, since this principle has entailments or commitments that the Kalam's causal principle doesn't (e.g., requiring causes of concrete objects that don't begin to exist). Still, though, it's *also* not clear that the principle *more complex* than the Kalam's causal principle, since the latter *also* has entailments or commitments that the former doesn't (e.g., requiring causes of non-objects (like events, processes, states of affairs, etc.) that begin to exist). In any case, our central point here is simply that the principle in question is equally supported by induction and abduction, and that's clearly true! So our criticism here stands.🙂
Why do you think there is no relevant difference between laws requiring cause to begin to exist and physical things requiring cause to begin to exist (1:53:35)
@@muhammedshanushan3931 (1) I didn’t claim that there’s no relevant difference at the time stamp. (2) I address the ‘systems themselves’ popping into existence uncaused later in the section on the argument from chaos after the video with RR
@@MajestyofReason 1) At 1:53:35 you said without answering the question ‘what is the relevant difference’ the explanatory power of explanation will be diminished But later when in comes to transfer principle ,you said merely suggesting there is no relevant difference is not enough , does the question ‘what is the relevant difference ?’ diminish transfer principle as well ?
@@MajestyofReason 2)well that explained popping into existence, but not going out of existence (see 1:50:15 when RR says there is no relevant difference between beginning and ceasing)
Probably the best longest video by a philosophy TH-camr and I haven’t seen it yet. Kidding. I’m excited. I’m currently reading your actualism paper. Philosophy-tubing is looking like an attractive secondary career path if grad school doesn’t work out for me.
Part 3, chaos 2:06:02 this section asks the question, why think that only God exists timeless with no cause and not other random timeless uncaused things. I think this gets back to the inductive point. We see a stable, unified universe. We infer from what we do see back to what we don't see, the source of it all. Not guess at what could be that's not compatible with what we see. This makes chaos still be a valid point for me. 2:10:08 if the initial state of the universe was timeless and therefore uncaused, maybe that could be granted. But did it have a reason for why it changed states? If it was timeless lifeless thing, what initiated it to cause the change? A living God makes more sense to me for starting the whole thing in motion in the first place, because being alive has the property of motion, or at least capacity for it.
I don’t understand your second point. The universe may have been unstable by nature and had to change state. Or something forced it, and it can be any force, intelligent or not. And this change did not take place in time, as there was no time, but in something else.
@chefchaudard3580 Can there be change without time? Change has a before and after. The point is, if the initial was timeless, then what got it to its next state? A timeless thing can't be chaotic, it has to be either unified and static or in a unified stable motion forever and ever, or else it's not timeless or eternal. If something external changed it, what kind of thing has that power? A mind and personal, or mindless and impersonal? How can one mindless domino fall over and knock over the other dominoes?
@@collin501 which dimensions existed « before » the Big Bang? Certainly not the time as we know it (an arrow pointing to the future). Maybe a « time » with an arrow pointing to the past, or some other dimension that cannot be called « time », as it has not many of the properties of the time as we know it, but allows changes nonetheless. We simply don’t know, but there are many hypothesis that don’t involve a god of any sort. And maybe nothing « external » changed it. It can entirely be something « internal », because it was unstable, or simply it had to change. You assume too much. We cannot rule out many hypothesis, so going for one is just wishful thinking.
@chefchaudard3580 if you had an arrow pointing to the past, you would have something future in reference to that past and change. Time is simply to mark change in reference to something that has not changed. One thing changes in reference to something else, and you have a before and after. But I agree I do make assumptions, but I think they are reasonable ones. I'm not saying I have proof that my belief is the only possibility. In the end, it has to intuitively make sense even if I don't have proof. And it goes well beyond just contemplating first cause theories. But if I review the possibilities, I factor several other things in. Does a Creator with a mind and will make sense as an ultimate first cause? Yes. And given the character of our nature, we fit well with a Creator. We are able to contemplate His existence. It is natural for humans to worship and have religious experiences. It seems healthy for the mind to have a trusting relationship with God. It's a relational thing, not a scientific proof. Maybe we'll never have the scientific proof. But it seems reasonable and there are no big red flags with science and philosophy. Without red flags to say, it's all delusional, I'm happy to put my faith in God and find relational and testimonial evidence. That's my approach.
@@collin501 the arrow of time is not my hypothesis. It is from the physicist Sean Caroll and it has to do with entropy. th-cam.com/video/vmlyQ0PjLzY/w-d-xo.htmlsi=_RyHASZ3V6n27gwC The « God » hypothesis does not work for me because : - it does not answer any question. How did God create a universe? Which physics does He use for that? Which physics does He live in? We have nothing comparable we can build any hypothesis on. It is the opposite of the scientific method, which asks that we go from evidence to hypothesis, not start with the conclusion. - it does not correspond to anything we see in our universe. There is no magic in our universe, everything seems to be constrained by our 4 dimensions, the 3 forces, entropy, etc… there is no need for a God to explain anything so far, we have no sign there is one. - you need to assume too much things for the God hypothesis to work : discard all other hypothesis, which are, for most of them, as good an explanation. And this is already unjustified and unacceptable for me. But, you also have to assume there is an intelligent being, that there is only one God, and not several, assume that, for some reason, He does not have to follow any laws of physics where He is, that His power allows Him to create universes somehow, etc… (and that without diving into omnipotence and omniscience which are further steps that have to be assumed if we go for the abrahamic god). in short, building an hypothesis on sand. It is much worst than somebody finding a comb on the beach imagining how it was lost, who lost it, how he or she looks like, where he or she lives, what is his or her job, etc… it can be satisfying, it can be logically consistent… but it is only imagination, a fiction. And limited imagination, for that is, as it is based on what we know of combs, that do exist in our universe, which use and properties are fully known, from which we can at least infer some things, contrary to universes creation. So, sorry, but about the creation of our universe, I’ll go with « I don’t know ». And about the preferred hypothesis, I’ll use Occam’s razor, the only available scientific tool, and what we know of our universe: it existed for all time. As time started with the universe, there was no « before ». Our universe comes from something, but as our laws of physics collapse when we reach the beginning, this something had probably other laws. No need of a God outside our universe, no need of intelligence, no need of an outside of our universe, just the singularity, or whatever we call it, it comes from. Occam’s razor.
On part 2, induction, 1:38:34 pointing out the difference between the whole and parts. The difference is between a timeless cause and a temporal cause. What i think we inductively gather from experience is that a cause is present to its effect, either temporarily, or by proximity. Eternity past is only a moment prior to transient time. Or simply there was a proximity, God speaking out from eternity, or the timeless state, (even on the b theory), and by proximity, causing the effect.
Hello Joe. I am a great admirer of yours. I am a Theist. I subscribe to the Scholastic Tradition of Philosophy in general and Thomism in particular. I really enjoyed this critique of the Kalam. Although the Kalam nor any argument in similitude is an argument that Aquinas would have offered, insofar as he believed you could not demonstrate philosophically that the universe had a beginning, despite the fact that he believed it did for Theological reasons. He simply did not have access to the evidential resources we now have access to given the current state of contemporary physics and its standard cosmological model. Nevertheless, the argument has been defended by Thomists and analytical Thomists such as David Oderberg. Though I do not think any Thomists would ever defend the causal principle as expressed in the first premise on the basis of intuition alone. Instead I think Thomists would further qualify any reliance on intuition as applicable only to temporal becoming in the first instance, and temporal becoming as it is measured by change in the second. Change and time which follows from it are what we are most intimately familiar with however, for the Thomist, change is distinguishable from creation. So I think the first premise is a defensible metaphysical principle but as it pertains to creation it requires additional qualifications that do not fall within the scope of an appeal to intuition.
Hi 😊. If you reach a certain amount of subscribers, I hope you will make another AMA (Ask Me Anything) video. Also, I hope you can do a collab with Alex (CosmicSkeptic) again for his new podcast "Within Reason", because I think you would be a perfect guest for discussing lots of philosophical problems on his podcast (and I hope he already contacted you) :) 😊😊
23:45 Logic is based on millennia, perhaps 1000s of teraseconds, of experience and evidence during which the 'intuition' of logic has not been found wanting. It is not _obviousness_ that logic must work, but that when we have relied on it it has always worked. This is unlike Kregg/Craig's intuition based on zero experience of creation of universes.
I don't understand how there's intuitions rejecting the causal principle. What is it that people take into consideration when they develop intuitions that the causal principle is false?
If people want to disagree with you they will make up anything to justify themselves. In this case, denying the causal principle 😅. Yet they would not live like that. The causal principle is supreme in daily life.
41:19 this is where I'm at so far. A few thoughts i had is, on the intuition of the principle of causation, i wonder if this could be modified to say that everything temporal has a source. On the idea of creation ex nihilo, it's interesting that it is unintuitive to you guys. It's hard for you to imagine things coming into existence without a prior state or substance leading to that. With creation ex nihilo, though, it's not as though there is nothing. There is a living God, and note the idea of life, which denotes a constant motion. If you conceive of someone all powerful, but with nothing to work with, God could not push against empty space and accomplish anything. But if you conceive of a living God, with a living and overflowing substance, (since life overflows), it's easier to conceive of creation coming forth from God. The Word of God is like the essence of God coming out from within Himself. Metaphysically speaking, that Word holds all things together. It is universal. It is a sufficient source for all things to come into being. And the way to think about it is not to be all powerful with emptiness, but to have a living substance(called divinity) within that has generating power. This is not very precise language, but my point is it depends what kind of God you conceive of to inform whether your idea of creation will be intuitive or not.
2. I don't think of eternity past as not having any time, which would imply a frozen and motionless existence. On the other hand, I don't think of it in terms of change, like growing perpetually older. I think of eternity like being perpetually fresh and new in a living way that still implies motion, not static. So it intuitively makes sense for such a state of being to create the universe. As opposed to an eternally motionless being moving himself without any time to do so in order to create. 3. On the B theory of time, if there is a yardstick that represents time, but exists as a kind of constant reality, my strong intuition has always been, how did that yardstick get there? What is its cause or source? To me it still doesn't make sense without God.
Do you not accept Kant's critique of metaphysics or later Wittgenstein? I think you should make a video about why you do. From my perspective, we have concepts about causality that allow the world to be intelligible for us, but in no way can we derive truths about the world simply from the logical structure of the concepts. Our concept of cause presupposes an effect, but we have not learned anything about the world a priori. Kant's Transcendental Dialectic tries to explain why arguments like these, about God and infinite causal chains, can never be resolved in principle, and I find his reasoning quite convincing. In Wittgensteinian terms, "metaphysical truths" are just facts about the grammar of a concept, but these in no way add to knowledge about the world. An analysis of causality increases our self-consciousness about the concept of causality, but the idea of knowledge about the world a priori is incoherent on my view.
Kant's critique of metaphysics is quite different from Wittgenstein's. In fact, they are contradictory to each other, as Kant never said that we cannot know universal truths a priori. These are the synthetic a priori truths (including causality). Kant's criticism of arguments for the existence of God and other "paralogisms of reason" are based on pseudo-antinomies. Furthermore, given transcendental idealism, NO truth will be about the world. For Wittgenstein, on the other hand, the idea was that a priori truths are meaningless. Therefore, they are neither true nor false. Of course, this is nonsense, because the same proposition a priori will be true or false...
I have just started watching, but do you discuss Humean vs non-Humean causation in this video? If not, do you think this would be relevant for the causal principle and the Kalam in general?
I just simply dont understand what it means to exist outside of time. Like if you made a computer simulation of a world, sure you exist outside of it but it doesnt mean that youre not subjected to time. Similarly, if something "outside of time" caused existence to exist, then there would have had to been a) a state when that causal [event or agent] didnt cause existence to exist and b) a state when that causal event/agent did cause existence to exist. If you have events, you have time. The argument is incoherent at face value imo.
Events are metric in character (that is, they are subdivisible into shorter events), because every object in an event undergoes becoming. Therefore, while B is an event, A is not. The relationship between A and B is state-event causation.
I would propose that the Kalam should be phrased in a probabilistic version. I think it is conceivable that things could come into being uncaused, but a simple experiment of looking at my desk makes me conclude, that this happens extremely rarely, if not never. After all, there is an infinite amount of metaphysically possible objects visible to the human eye that could appear on my desk in the next second (e.g. black holes of any of the continuum of possible radii between 1cm and 100cm. Or objects made of substances that are not even part of the standard model of particle physics, e.g. made of quarks of generation higher than 3, or an infinite number of species of visible angels). And yet, none of them have appeared as I was looking at my desk for the last second. From this, I conclude, that either the list of metaphysically possible visible objects is finite (which I find extremely implausible), or the causal principle is true: they didn't appear because their probability of appearing was zero.
Principles other than the Kalam’s causal principle also entail that the probability of that happening is zero!🙂 (Eg, the transfer/change principles (TCP), restricted causal principles, explanation-based principles rather than cause-based principles, etc.)
It's funny how religious apologists start with their conclusion and then work backwards toward confirmation, all while claiming they are "truth seeking". LOL. Can you say, "Lying for Christ!"
It's interesting that the causal principle used to be: "Anything that exists has a cause". But that of course would imply that God also has a cause, so the wording was subsequently amended to say, "Everything that *begins* to exist has a cause". Neither version has much to recommend it.
Thanks for another great video Joe! I had an argument for causation being essentially temporal that was independent of the ones you mentioned, and I was hoping to get your thoughts on it. I focus specifically on creative causes or causing something to begin to exist. This seems to entail that the thing caused did not exist and then did ("then" isn't meant to be necessarily temporal). This would be a transition or change. I think this would be uncontroversial and merely a matter of definition, but I'm not entirely sure. Next, I think that change is essentially temporal. For one, I think this is intuitive to many people. For example, in movies when time stops so does change. However, another reason is that it seems difficult to me to define change without time. Change is not just two different states of affairs next to each other in away analogous to spacial location. There seems to be a dynamic succession, and that sounds like time to me. If causing something to begin to exist is a change, and change is essentially temporal, then causing something to begin to exist is essentially temporal. Thus, causing time to begin to exist would require time and be viciously circular. It seems persuasive to me, but I wanted to know how others might respond. Thanks.
@@Opposite271 Thanks for the feedback. The way I see it the effect itself depends upon a transition from nonexistence to existence. This is because the thing is being caused to begin to exist which implies it did not exist at least at some point (if only a logical point as opposed to a temporal point). This transition is a change which I think is essentially temporal. In other words, I'm trying to claim that causation itself, which is needed to produce the effect, is essentially temporal.
@@Micah-bz3xy So the idea is that if the effect is temporal then the causation has to be temporal. It is conceivable that an unchanging cause produces a effect instantaneously without any in between processes. One could consider this to be a atomic causation without any other causations between cause and effect. It seems then that it is not necessary that temporality has to exist before the effect exists instead it could come into existence simultaneously and instantaneously with the effect as a byproduct. A instantaneous change would be binary instead of fuzzy and could allow for something like that.
@@Micah-bz3xy Another question would be, is instantaneous change even change? It would be change because a state of affairs (nothing temporal exists) would turn into another state of affairs (something temporal exists). I think change is more defined by a state of affairs turning into another state of affairs then by transition. It is possible to have a spatial transitions from one water level to another but it isn’t change because it lacks the turning into another thing.
@@Micah-bz3xy But this creates now a paradox. How can a state of affairs that is unchanging turn into a state of affairs that is changing? Is that the paradox you meant?
I’m confused about how explanations arnt temporal the way simultaneous causes are. The mass of the infinite boulder is simultaneously causing the impression in the sand. Same with lower level neurons simultaneously causing higher level brain function. Sure, these are thought of as “explanations” but they are also “simultaneous causes” no? The ARRANGEMENT may not precede the event but is SIMULTANEOUSLY giving rise to it. And if it’s simultaneous then exist in a temporal relationship, right?
@@MajestyofReason there is this version of the grim messenger paradox: "Consider a closed system consisting of two particles, A and B, in which the reaction A + B -> AB is spontaneous and irreversible. The reactants collide inevitably with each other due to Brownian and thermal motion. As soon as A and B collide, they react to form AB, which then remains inert. Suppose that the system has existed eternally and that the reaction between A and B has occurred at collision n. However if the system has existed eternally, there is always a collision before n (n-1), and one before n-1 (n-2), ad infinitum (n-∞), at which the reaction has not yet occurred, which is impossible given that the reaction is spontaneous, and would occur at first contact. Therefore, it is impossible for the system to have existed eternally, and thus causal finitism is true."
@@NG-we8uu most of the responses in my Kalam playlist equally apply to this version. For instance, from the fact that one can tell an inconsistent story involving an eternal past, it simply doesn't follow that an eternal past (or an infinite causal chain) is impossible. I can tell an inconsistent story involving taxis, but that doesn't mean taxis are impossible. All the paradox allows us to infer is that one cannot *conjoin* an eternal past *together with* various other assumptions -- e.g., that there's a particular system within that eternal past with very specific properties. But the fact that we cannot *conjoin* an eternal past with various other assumptions clearly doesn't mean an eternal past is impossible, any more than the fact that we can *conjoin* God's existence with various other assumptions clearly doesn't imply that God is impossible. It implies only that we cannot jointly have an eternal past *together with* various other properties. There are many more problems besides -- see my kalam playlist for more :)
Your symmetry reply to the MTA does not succeed if one believes that God is identical to His existence. This is because God's properties are not explanatorily before His existence, but identical to His existence. So, (b) is false. Second, one might say that metaphysical principles need to be grounded in something in reality. Loke argues that laws of nature are grounded in causal dispositions in his previous chapter, and this can be extended to metaphysical laws. But nothing in concrete reality can be the source of this difference.
Excellent ideas! Notice, though, that God's identity with his existence and his properties only *bolsters* the symmetry problem, since then it *still* follows -- which is we need to run the symmetry argument -- that none of God's properties could ground the difference between God and other beginningless things where beginninglessly existing uncaused is concerned. The specification in (b) is meant to establish that none of the properties of the thing in question could ground the difference between that thing and other things where existing (or beginning) uncaused is concerned; *one* way to establish that is to show that existence is explanatorily prior to any such property, which is asserted in (b); but *another* way to establish that is to show that existence cannot be explanatorily *posterior* to any such property, which (as you grant) would follow from God's identity with his existence and properties. [Notice that, so long as existence cannot be explanatorily *posterior* to any such property, it follows that no such property of x could ground the difference between x and other things where existing uncaused is concerned, for any such ground, as Loke points out, would have to be explanatorily prior to x's existence.] So (b) could simply be modified to say that 'whatever properties that differentiate God and other beginningless things will *not* be had explanatorily prior to the existence of God or those things', and the symmetry problem would run just as well. As for the point about metaphysical principles, I don't find it plausible that metaphysical principles must be grounded in causal dispositions; after all, there are lots of metaphysical principles *about the conditions under which anything could possess any dispositions at all* , and such principles couldn't be grounded in dispositions on pain of vicious circularity. There are also lots of metaphysical principles about abstracta, which are plausibly grounded in the nature of abstracta and not the dispositions of concreta. (E.g., consider the metaphysical principle that abstracta are causally effete. This is surely grounded in the nature of abstracta, not concreta.) Additionally, there are metaphysical principles about what is *impossible* (e.g., that nothing can simultaneously be both red all over and green all over), and it's not clear how these could be grounded in dispositions. (Plausibly, it's *because* that's impossible that nothing has the power to make something that's red and green all over, rather than the other way around.) Finally, it may be a metaphysical principle that, necessarily, reality has an ultimate foundation. If so, this principle plausibly cannot be grounded in the powers of something, since *to be* an ultimate foundation is to be *uncaused and ungrounded* , and hence that there is (or must be) such a foundation is not due to the powers of anything.
@@MajestyofReason It seems that God's existence being self-evident in an "absolute sense" that Aquinas mentions can help break the symmetry. I think this paragraph is illuminating: Furthermore, those propositions ought to be the most evident in which the same thing is predicated of itself, for example, man is man, or whose predicates are included in the definition of their subjects, for example, Man is an animal. Now, in God, as will be shown in a later chapter, it is pre-eminently the case that His being is His essence, so that to the question what is He? and to the question is He? the answer is one and the same. Thus, in the proposition God exists, the predicate is consequently either identical with the subject or at least included in the definition of the subject. Hence, that God exists is self-evident. - Summa Contra Gentiles book 1 chapter 10 paragraph 4 Now, while Aquinas disputes this claim epistemically speaking later on, he goes on to affirm this in an "absolute sense," which is what is relevant here. This can help one understand why God exists. His existence is a tautology in the "absolute sense." I think this works best when God is identical to His existence, so in the proposition "God exists," the subject is identical to the predicate. As for my claim about causal powers, I admit that this was mistaken. But, I think an underlying thought could still be established. I don't think that metaphysical principles are something out there that imposes itself onto reality, but rather that it is grounded in reality. So, we still need something in reality that grounds the laws of doing the explaining. I think it would be very strange for a proposition to impose itself on the world in that it is most fundamental, rather than the principle being derived from what substantially exists. By the way, Andrew Loke argues against Classical Theism in the book, and he makes some pretty easy mistakes doing so, like saying God "actualized His own potential" when He created the universe, not knowing that actualization in this context refers to something being caused to change. I like your arguments more, even if I still disagree with them.
"You can concieve of a world where things come into being without causes." At this point... just word salad. The very definition of coming into being = caused. How can you have something coming into being without a cause. Is there even a single example of this?
As I see it the causal principle is STILL a problem for free will *even if* it dosnt say anything about deterministic causes and leaves room for indeterministic causes. If the causes of our decisions are indeterministic or random we *still* did not choose them. For example what ever causes me to choose chocolate over vanilla may be an indeterministic cause or a random cause but I still did not freely choose to want what I want. We don’t have the ability to go back and choose differently we have no control over our wants. Whether the cause was deterministic or random either way there is no free will.
1:54:24 Can't the Kalam's causal principle account for why we don't have uncaused mental stuff while the transfer principle and the colocation principle don't? Like it seems like all the physical facts could be the same, but I experience hallucinations at random. In so far as this response means you have to take a controversial position in philosophy of mind it weakens the Kalam. But a theist is presumably already going to have to argue for some sort of dualism, if they take God to be a disembodied mind.
You mention many times throughout your videos about this "unique position in the grand epistemic landscape". I am curious, how do I find my position? I am a complete beginner when it comes to philosophy but am adventurous in my journey. I know my question is very broad, but I'm not sure how else to frame it, there seems to be so many questions to ponder, metaphysically, epistemically, aesthetically, within the fields of the mind, science, religion, ethics, politics, etc. Where does one begin?
According to what you have seen (podcasts, books, Yt videos, etc), you have a certain epistemic landscape, and you can make your rational judgments from it. (as far as I know, this is a not qaformal term, but it is used anyway). Since Joe clearly cares more than usual about being rational, within the limits possible, he has a great deal of epistemic humility (perhaps even in an exaggerated way sometimes), so he uses this term a lot. Not to mention he wants to honor this *majestic* phrase (possibly my favorite because of him, I use it to talk to my friends even if they are not interested in philosophy): "What altar of refuge can a man find when he commits a treason against the *majesty of reason* ?". - *Baruch Spinoza* I'm also new on philosophy. I wish you a good journey!
I fail to see the problem with a simultaneous first cause… this video says there is a problem with simultaneous first cause bc it was either temporal or non temporal but nothing was clear… can someone help
If you define a swan as a certain kind of white swimming bird that lives in waters in Europe and has certain other attributes, like the food it eats, its size, the fact it builds a nest and a few dozen others... Then a bird that shares some or even many of those attributes but is black.. just isn't a swan. Oh, you say, but they interbreed. Then you have to accept that a great Dane is actually a Doberman.
I'm sorry, but what's the difference between causal determinism(all events are determined by prior causes) and "noma?" determinism(Everything is determined by the causal law)? And what was his point there again? I didn't understand that.
Good question! It‘s causal determinism vs. nomic (from ‘nomos’, meaning law) determinism. If I recall correctly, his aim is to argue that we should only be willing to accept that every event is determined by physical *law* , rather than determined by a *cause* , and so - in a deterministic context - we can have a non-causal explanation of events where the causal principle demands instead a causal explanation. And in an indeterministic context, the laws can indeterministically explain events in a non-causal manner, which contrasts with the causal principle that demands a specifically *causal* explanation of such events. He could have been making this point in connection to non-causal interpretations of quantum mechanics, or - less likely - he could have been mounting the ‘non-causal explanation’ objection to the KCP that I covered. I’m not exactly sure! (Phil usually uses clips without showing us what question he asked that prompted them)
@@MajestyofReason okay that's helpful. Thank you for going over the quantum mechanics/indeterministic arguments in the face of determinism. Just curious do you think everything is a composite object (would that make everything therefore abstract?) and is that a deterministic perspective?
Nice video. Great analysis as always - thanks, Joe. I suppose I don't have all that much issue with premise 1 of the Kalam. For me premise 2 is the most contentious premise and where (I think) the argument fails since I don't think there's adequate reasons/evidence to support it being true.
@@roger5442 hi Roger i have been ill and did not listen to the full lecture so i don't know if it was addressed. I'm pretty sure premise 2 will be based around the fact that you cannot have infinite amount of time in the past. Are you saying that time in the past is infinite.
@@redx11x Sorry to hear that; hope you feel better. Sort of. Typically it's the "impossibility" of past infinite causes/events/beings, not necessarily time. Because the Kalam is an argument that relates to 'causes' (eg: premise 1 introduces a causal principle) and so the Kalam proponent wants to argue for a 'first' cause, because God needs to be a 'first' cause. No, I wouldn't say the past is infinite. I do say that I think it's prima facie possible it is. I don't have reason(s) to think it's impossible. Or - I don't find the arguments for its impossibility to be particularly convincing.
I would reject the causal principle on the basis that it is impossible to know universal laws. If I only observe white swans in the region in which I live, then I can conclude with greater certainty that all swans in my region are white then that all swans on earth are white. -The reason for this is that we are using induction on the basis of past observations under certain conditions. -The further away the conditions of a possible observation is from past observations, the more uncertain becomes the validity of the rule for those possible observations. -Induction can therefore only be used to justify local regularities but can never justify universal laws. -Even if we would find such a universal law, we would never be justified to believe that this regularity is universal. -As such knowledge about universale laws is impossible.
@@Drigger95 By discovering local regularities in the succession of events. We go with the most general rule until we find out it’s limits and eventually we find a even more general rule.
@@Drigger95 My statement here is based on humanities ability to know. I do not intend to apply this rule to hypothetical beings who are subject to different natural regularities or even different logical principles then us.
It’s a part of the theory of relativity that Space and Time are interconnected. You can’t have one without the other. At least, not under our current physics
The idea that causes are either prior to or simultaneous to effects is an issue for the kalam? I’m dont see this… please help me…. For example: The cause of the universe is god and therefore god is proceeds the universe. Or the cause of the universe is god and therefore god exists simultaneously with the universe. Either way linear nontemporal causation or hierarchical temporal causation. Neither is an issue for the kalam as far as I see it?
If the cause is prior to or simultaneous with the universe, then the cause is temporal, since it stands in a temporal relation to the universe. But if the cause is temporal, it cannot extend infinitely into the past, per the arguments on behalf of the Kalam's second premise. So, it must have begun -- or, at least, it temporal portion must have begun. And since everything that begins requires a cause, this cause of the universe (or at least its temporal portion) requires a cause. Now, if all causes are before or simultaneous with their effects, then *this cause* must *also* be temporal. And the same reasoning will show that *this cause* (or its temporal part) will need a *further* cause, and so on ad infinitum. But that, of course, involves infinitely many causes and effects, which contradicts the arguments for the Kalam's second premise. So, if all causes are before or simultaneous with their effects, then the Kalam is in trouble.
@@MajestyofReason the way you just responded is immensely helpful! Thank you! This all seems to rest upon the whole “causation must be temporal or tensed” premise - which is fine - but what about Oppys naturalistic and metaphysically necessary first cause? It posses the special quality of primary existence and I can grant that but Is it, then, suggested to not extend prior before metric time? It’s necessary existence means to necessarily exist in time and exert causative influence in time? Or does it go back before time and extend into some amorphous non metric time and then make some natural transition FROM non metric time INTO metric time and THEN exert its first creative influence upon the rest of the contingent casual chain? Or does it not go that far back and only exist within time? If it DOES transition then can a nontemporal entity cause an effect within time? Suggesting that causation must not be temporal? I’m asking in a way about Oppys first cause here. It dosnt “begin to exist” with respect to time bc I assume it is the cause of time but does this mean its existence prexists time? If so it means that a causative agent before time could exert an effect in time? How is the bridge gapped here? I apologize if any of my questions or comments are offensive or in poor form. I’m lay to all of this
@@MajestyofReason I guess I’m curious here. If a necessary causative agent (natural or otherwise) that exist in amorphous time prior to metric time have any ability to exert a cause or actualize a potential within the realm of metric time? Ie can an uncaused essential being that exist in an amorphous time before metric time create the causative chain that begins and sustains our current universe? That gap between the beginning of metric time and the amorphous time before it is what confuses me. Does our naturalistic uncaused cause theories only start and presuppose metric time or do they extend beyond? If they extend before time then how do they cause the contingent temporal universe of today? How is the gap crossed? If all causation must be temporal to universe that suggest time extends before the universe?
@@MajestyofReason maybe this brings up the difference between an explanation and a cause? Maybe the explanation is able to transverse the gap but the cause isn’t? Maybe we say that the natural essential cause is uncaused and exists prior to metric time (explanation) and that it creates and gives rise to metric time and the entire temporal causal chain within time (cause and effect, tensed)…such that the act of causation need not bridge that gap but the explanation can? Thoughts?
Break it up over the span of a few days, put it on 1.5x speed, and it will fly by😊 (In all seriousness, I totally recognize that long length videos aren’t for everyone🙂)
You’re making this harder than it is. The proposition “everything that begins to exist has a cause” is not supported. It should be “everything that begins it exist in our universe has a cause”. All of the physical laws that describe what happens in the universe may or may not apply to the universe itself. For example nothing can travel faster than the speed of light yet inflation theory, which so far is supported by observation, indicates the universe itself expanded several times faster than the speed of light. All that we can know is what we can conclude from studying what is in the universe and how it behaves. We have at this point no way of knowing how universe come to be. Essentially we have one universe, an N of one of you will. What can we infer from this? Nothing - or everything. However you can’t know anything. The Kalam fails.
18:18 I have mulled over "x causes y just in case x brings about y" but it just does not make sense, unless "just in case" is yet another expression philosophers have hijacked, butchered and distorted in order to exclude those not in the club. "Just in case" means "because of the possibility of something happening ... " (Colins, Cambridge, Oxford English), so are philosophers defining "Efficient cause" to mean "x produces y if there is a possibility that x produces or brings about y" ? i.e. if it's possible it happens.
As philosophers use 'just in case', it means the same thing as 'if and only if'. I used 'just in case' to try to minimize reliance on technical concepts like the material biconditional. But your comment here helpfully highlights the need for clarification!
@@MajestyofReason Why have philosophers taken a well-used phrase, and chosen to use it wholly differently instead of the well-known "if and only if and only if (iff/↔)" in logic?
@frogandspanner He explained that in his response. To minimize the technical lingo. Not everyone understands the verbage of logic & he used a common phrase to connect the same meaning. While I think that most of his viewers would know these things, the random recommended view might not, as well as those that are interested but don't study these things. It's not that "philosophers are stealing language," more so just him making the content slightly easier to understand for those that aren't as well read in this area.
@@Chryso3077 In what way is using "just in case" to mean the virtually orthogonal "iff" making the concept easier to understand? Lest != iff Everybody understands "just in case" to mean "lest", and understands "if an only if" to mean what a logician means, so to flip the two helps nobody, and makes communication worse.
@frogandspanner an example of what I mean: I'm putting these cookies out just in case Santa comes I'm putting these cookies out if & only if Santa comes While they don't have exactly the same meanings, they can be understood to functions relative to each other I the same context. The cookies still get put out & the expectation for Santa remains. The truth of the conclusion isn't reflected in the intent, while they can still be used interchangeably on a surface level. Relating to my point before that the hyper specific uses of the words used by logicians aren't the message, but rather the general/colloquial intent for less learned listeners.
I think there is a problem with using the term something beginning to exsit. Something beginning to exsist is a human concept, it's about how we perceive the world. It has nothing to do with actual world. In reality matter and energy that are transformed so it takes on a different form. The Earth consist for elements that all existed before the earth was formed and that is also true for every human, animal and everything else.
They just mean that there is a point in time when something didn't exist and then did. eg: they would say that there are points in the past (1867 etc) that you didn't exist yet and at some point (conception/birth) you do exist. That point from non-existence to existence is what they mean by you "beginning to exist." ie: that transformation from one form into something else is what they mean as a 'beginning' If you imagine a timeline and mark your conception/birth date. Prior to that mark you didn't exist, then you did - they would say that is when you "began to exist."
@@roger5442 Yes and that's the problem, they argue in human terms and concepts. You can't determine something about the fundament of realty by examining human concepts.
@@sortehuse What's wrong with humans using human terms? The idea is that it's a metaphysical principle. It would apply to things before humans existed eg: the earth didn't always exist and the point it comes into existence is its beginning.
@@roger5442 Sorry for not being clear. We have to use human terms because that's the only teams we have, but we have to be very careful har we use them. In our conceptual thinking Earth started to started to exist about 4.54 billion years ago, but that have noting to do with the deep reality of the Universe. As far as the Universe is concerned the Earth and everything else in the Universe has existed since it's beginning, because the thinks that make up the Earth and everything has been there since the beginning as far as we know. The law of conservation of energy says that energy is neither created nor destroyed (and matter is also energy according to Einstein) and the the conservation of quantum information mean that information cannot be created nor destroyed. So the building blocks and to information to make the Earth was there from the beginning. If you wanted to make an argument for God this would be a far better argument that the Kalam cosmological argument, BTW.
@@sortehuse But it seems that if the earth 'started' to exist 4.54 billion years ago isn't just a 'human' concept - it's true from the universe's perspective too. If earth started to exist 4.54 billion years ago then there was no earth existing 5 billion years ago. Yes, you can say that 5 billion years ago its matter/energy existed, but it isn't earth yet; it's in a different (non earth) form. When it becomes its earth 'form' is what they mean by 'begins to exist' - ie: the universe has gone from being in a state where no earth exists to where earth begins to exist. *"So the building blocks and to information to make the Earth was there from the beginning. If you wanted to make an argument for God this would be a far better argument that the Kalam cosmological argument, BTW."* Why would that be a better argument for God?
34:30 "But its atleast conceivable that there's a world in which actions like torture (for fun) lack the property of wrongness." Idk bout that one chief 💀
I take error theory to be entirely conceivable, though in error! It’s not like Olson, say, or Cowie, or Joyce, is talking total nonsense or is conceptually confused. Utilitarianism is also eminently conceivable, and it’s obvious that torture conceivably produces more pleasure/welfare/desire satisfaction than pain/etc in a utilitarian world (which is one reason I didn’t actually add “(for fun)” which you added in your (mis)quotation) An addition I’ll edit in: divine command theory, while the most implausible metaethical view, is at least conceivable, and it’s entirely conceivable that God commands torture in a DCT world. (After all, God is depicted as commanding genocide (or ethic cleansing, depending on interpretation) in the Bible, and he also is depicted as indiscriminately drowning babies and commanding people to kill their children. Torture isn’t too far off! Then again, someone might say that these depictions aren’t even conceivable to begin with, since there’s a decent case to be made that it’s inconceivable for a morally perfect being to act like this.) Another edit: oops! I listened prior and heard the thing about for fun - I’ll retract that point
@@MajestyofReason 1. Nope. Keep in mind the context goofy. 34:22-34:29: "Most people grant that the claim, 'torturing a child just for fun is wrong' must be true on the basis of its intuitive obviousness." Being charitable, I took your conceivability consideration to (relevantly) connect to your previous point. But I'll ask a clarificatory question. Do you think it's conceivable that there's a world in which actions like torturing toddlers for fun (stance-independently) lack the property of wrongness? 2. No. I take Olson, Joyce, Daly, Loeb, etc, to be conceptually confused. The utilitarianism point is irrelevant. Who would (seriously) deny that torture can't lead to greater happiness/decrease in suffering? The question at hand concerns the normative status of committing such acts. 3. Idek why you brought in the DCT stuff at this point. That's (like the util point) irrelevant. NO ONE IS TALKING ABOUT TORTURE SIMPLCITER! If I mentally torture a convicted pedo (or cause extreme pain by) by keeping him away from my kids, that's obviously permissible. Stay on topic for crying out loud.
@@Jon-jr7kx Regarding (1), I don't know when I made the edits in connection to when you commented -- I believe you prolly commented while I was making one or more edits (I made multiple, one about DCT, one about correcting the point about "for fun", and a couple in my original paragraph), so it makes sense if you didn't see them all. But I noticed the 'for fun' point by watching the context, since I thought 'maybe the 'for fun' was artificially inserted bc I had said something previously', which turned out right. So I corrected that point, and there's no need to escalate things like you usually do (and which causes me to disengage after responding after you escalate, so as not to waste my time -- which is what I'll probably do here, as elsewhere). "I took your conceivability consideration to (relevantly) connect to your previous point. But I'll ask a clarificatory question. Do you think it's conceivable that there's a world in which actions like torturing toddlers for fun (stance-independently) lack the property of wrongness?" Yes, I think some stance-dependent accounts of rightness and wrongness, while mistaken, are clearly conceivable. (In order to run some of my criticisms thereof, I need to be able to conceive of situations wherein their account holds, and draw out implausible consequences thereof. This doesn't hold for all of my criticisms, and it won't hold for everyone else's, of course.) (2) That's alright if you think that; I don't, and I don't see any reason to ascribe to such intelligent, well-read, professional metaethicists basic conceptual confusions. That strikes me as deeply implausible (and their competent participation in metaethical debates seems to me quite surprising on that hypothesis), but others aren't beholden to my plausibility structures. Indeed, it strikes me as overwhelmingly implausible that almost 40% of philosophers who don't accept moral realism are conceptually confused. As for the utilitarianism point, that's obviously relevant. The claim at hand is: CON: is conceivable. Suppose utilitarianism is conceivable, and suppose it's conceivable that there's a utilitarian world where torturing a child just for fun produces more pleasure/welfare/desire satisfaction than it does pain/etc. Then CON strictly follows, since a utilitarian world where torturing a child just for fun produces more pleasure/welfare/desire satisfaction than it does pain/etc is a world in which, per the strictures of utilitarianism, torturing a child just for fun is not wrong but instead is right. Hence, the utilitarian point is painfully relevant: it shows that it's conceivable that the normative status of torturing a child for fun is not the status _being wrong_. My point was precisely one about the normative status of the act. Its normative status is affected by the normative theory true at the world, and it's obviously conceivable that some act of torturing a child for fun in a utilitarian world satisfies utilitarianism's specifications for being right, not wrong. (E.g., if there's someone (e.g., the torturer) whose pleasure derived from the act far surpasses the pain experienced by the child.) (3) You say, "Idek why you brought in the DCT stuff at this point. That's (like the util point) irrelevant." But it's obviously not irrelevant. Suppose the DCT says an act is right (and so not wrong) iff and because God commands it. And suppose it's conceivable that, in a DCT world, God commands someone to torture someone for fun. Then CON is true: it's conceivable that . So the DCT point is obviously relevant. And insofar as OT atrocities are conceivable to me, this, too, is conceivable to me. And while my original point was put in terms of torture simpliciter, I already corrected that, and it's easily modified, as just explained, to the case of torture just for fun. (And note that, in the conceived-of world, it need not be the case that ; God's command could be an implicit one 'written on the heart' of a psychopath. The psychopath then does the act just for fun, thereby following the implicit command written by God on their heart.) So I have stayed eminently on the topic; the only thing off topic is repeated, false accusations of being irrelevant.
The KJV Bible is mathematically encoded. The first verse, Genesis 1:1 In the beginning 3 words 14 letters In the beginning God 4 words 17 letters 4/17 is .235 The word truth occurs 235 times in the KJV Bible. Genesis 1:1 ten words 44 letters √1044 is 32.31 The word scripture occurs 32 times in the KJV Bible. The square root of ten is 3.16 John 3:16
The chapter and verse numbers in the Bible were assigned centuries after the original books were written, in order to provide an easy way to make references, so any numerical pattern that references a verse is either a coincidence or was fabricated by later scribes. In a book of thousands of words, finding numerical coincidences is easy enough; in fact, many fiction books also feature surprising numerical patterns.
The original book of genesis didn't even had any chapter or verses, it was just a single block of text. So when you say "Book N, chapter x:y has Z number of words or letters" you just sound dumb, because the very demarcations of chapters and verses were fabricated by later scribes.
Also, this number thing only works in english. For example, In my language, portuguese, Genesis 1:1 starts with "No princípio, Deus criou os céus e a terra". The more i think about it, the more you sound dumb
@gabri41200 It's always English or Hebrew with these people, never Greek or Aramaic. They forget and confuse the languages in which the texts were written and the ones people actually spoke at the time. Ancient Hebrews loved patterns and number riddles, which is why you will always find things in the OT in pairs of 3 or 7. When it comes to English... the believers are just exposing their cultural predisposition and pitiful monolingual perspective, from a language which had less to do with Biblical times than Archaic Chinese.
Here's one way to reformulate the argument from chaos (inspired by the Bayesian argument for Existential Inertia): Let H be the hypothesis that X begins to exist at time t, uncaused. Given the Causal Principle (which we'll denote C), the probability of H is 0. Given the negation of C, then it is not the case that H has a probability of 0. So, P(~H|C) > P(~H|~C) Therefore, any time that something fails to begin to exist uncaused (i.e. all the time), you get a nonzero amount of evidence for the causal principle. Now that I think about it, Existential Inertial and the causal principle are basically just time-reversed versions of each other. So, maybe I can just find some guy who has spent a lot of time researching Existential Inertia and I'll get a bunch of arguments for the causal principle for free! You wouldn't happen to know anybody like that, would you? ;)
Very clever! :) I argue that a similar causal principle implies existential inertia in chapter four of my book, in case you're curious :) One quick substantive note: it might be better not to compare C and its negation but instead C and a comparably specific alternative principle, and if we do that, it may no longer be the case that C predicts ~H better than the alternative principle does. (Whereas, at least as formulated in my book, we took the relevant competitor to be not simply the negation of EIT but the 'Classical Theistic Sustenance Thesis')
I don't know if it's begging the question, because the argument is made ad absurdum - that is, if something has no means of coming into existence, it couldn't come into existence. As the contrary would be to argue that something that has no means of coming into existence, has a means of coming into existence. A contradiction. So I agree with the OP.
@@msmhao If 'has no means of coming into existence' just means 'there's no way it could come into existence', then the OP's comment is just a tautology: if there's no way something could come into existence, it couldn't come into existence'. This lends no support whatsoever to the Kalam's causal principle, though. It doesn't say anything about whether a *cause* is needed for something to come into existence. And the OP would also be illicitly smuggling in "(a cause)" into that notion of 'no means of coming into existence'. So the OP either begs the question by assuming that a cause is a necessary means by which something comes into existence, or else the OP is simply the tautologous claim that something which cannot come into existence couldn't come into existence, which doesn't support the Kalam's causal principle.
@Majesty of Reason I suppose I should clarify, what you said so far is correct, but what I intended is that to deny the causal principle would entail affirming absurdities, because the CONTRARY would be to argue that something can come into existence and there was no cause prior to it that made it possible.
@@MajestyofReason na. The kalam is stupid. The first premise is an unsubstantiated assertion. All you have to do is reject the first premise and the argument falls apart. It's also a special pleading fallacy because if God can be eternal, then there is no reason why the universe can't be eternal
@@travissimpson7829 Anything can be eternal. The universe can't be because there are specific reasons. It actually goes like this: 1. Whatever begins to exist has a cause. 2. The universe begins to exist. Here theists will argue why the universe has to be a beginning. In my opinion, these arguments are really bad, but it's another history. 3. The universe has a cause. I do not agree with Kalam, but your argument is completely stupid. Kalam just says that the universe has a beginning and whatever that has a beginning has a cause and this cause can't be caused because this being caused the time, so there is nothing before. As simple as that
@@davib.franco7857 You didn't justify the premise that the universe began to exist either. So no, it's not stupid. In fact, many theoretical physicists like Lawrence Krauss think that there was never a point when nothing exited
The kolam does not address causation, so you are just preaching nonsense. It was ignorant uneducated rhyme back when and has no use except bye dishonest theologians in trying justify their unjustified belief. The Kolam is statement of personal opinion not a statement of fact.
Kalam fails at its second premise by committing a COMPOSITION FALLACY Just because those things INSIDE the universe have an attribute DOES NOT MEAN that the universe itself has the same attribute Case closed
3:10:03 should be unpalatable* 😅
1:26:42 it's not actually clear that this principle is simpler than the Kalam's causal principle, since this principle has entailments or commitments that the Kalam's causal principle doesn't (e.g., requiring causes of concrete objects that don't begin to exist). Still, though, it's *also* not clear that the principle *more complex* than the Kalam's causal principle, since the latter *also* has entailments or commitments that the former doesn't (e.g., requiring causes of non-objects (like events, processes, states of affairs, etc.) that begin to exist). In any case, our central point here is simply that the principle in question is equally supported by induction and abduction, and that's clearly true! So our criticism here stands.🙂
Why do you think there is no relevant difference between laws requiring cause to begin to exist and physical things requiring cause to begin to exist (1:53:35)
Also about the transfer principle, why can’t a new physical system itself pop into or pop out of existence
@@muhammedshanushan3931 (1) I didn’t claim that there’s no relevant difference at the time stamp. (2) I address the ‘systems themselves’ popping into existence uncaused later in the section on the argument from chaos after the video with RR
@@MajestyofReason 1) At 1:53:35 you said without answering the question ‘what is the relevant difference’ the explanatory power of explanation will be diminished
But later when in comes to transfer principle ,you said merely suggesting there is no relevant difference is not enough , does the question ‘what is the relevant difference ?’ diminish transfer principle as well ?
@@MajestyofReason 2)well that explained popping into existence, but not going out of existence (see 1:50:15 when RR says there is no relevant difference between beginning and ceasing)
Your next book should be “My Four Hour Videos: A Compilation.”
Well there you go.
Actual infinity does exist and Joe's videos on Kalam proved it .
this is incredible. please continue this series.
You guys are beasts, I'm peacing-out at 2 hours. Great content.
Probably the best longest video by a philosophy TH-camr and I haven’t seen it yet. Kidding. I’m excited. I’m currently reading your actualism paper. Philosophy-tubing is looking like an attractive secondary career path if grad school doesn’t work out for me.
¿Por qué no los dos?
Hard shell of academia and soft shell of internet popularization?
You’re a gift to the community, thank you
❤️❤️❤️
Part 3, chaos
2:06:02 this section asks the question, why think that only God exists timeless with no cause and not other random timeless uncaused things. I think this gets back to the inductive point. We see a stable, unified universe. We infer from what we do see back to what we don't see, the source of it all. Not guess at what could be that's not compatible with what we see. This makes chaos still be a valid point for me.
2:10:08 if the initial state of the universe was timeless and therefore uncaused, maybe that could be granted. But did it have a reason for why it changed states? If it was timeless lifeless thing, what initiated it to cause the change? A living God makes more sense to me for starting the whole thing in motion in the first place, because being alive has the property of motion, or at least capacity for it.
I don’t understand your second point.
The universe may have been unstable by nature and had to change state. Or something forced it, and it can be any force, intelligent or not. And this change did not take place in time, as there was no time, but in something else.
@chefchaudard3580 Can there be change without time? Change has a before and after. The point is, if the initial was timeless, then what got it to its next state? A timeless thing can't be chaotic, it has to be either unified and static or in a unified stable motion forever and ever, or else it's not timeless or eternal. If something external changed it, what kind of thing has that power? A mind and personal, or mindless and impersonal? How can one mindless domino fall over and knock over the other dominoes?
@@collin501 which dimensions existed « before » the Big Bang? Certainly not the time as we know it (an arrow pointing to the future). Maybe a « time » with an arrow pointing to the past, or some other dimension that cannot be called « time », as it has not many of the properties of the time as we know it, but allows changes nonetheless. We simply don’t know, but there are many hypothesis that don’t involve a god of any sort.
And maybe nothing « external » changed it. It can entirely be something « internal », because it was unstable, or simply it had to change.
You assume too much. We cannot rule out many hypothesis, so going for one is just wishful thinking.
@chefchaudard3580 if you had an arrow pointing to the past, you would have something future in reference to that past and change. Time is simply to mark change in reference to something that has not changed. One thing changes in reference to something else, and you have a before and after.
But I agree I do make assumptions, but I think they are reasonable ones. I'm not saying I have proof that my belief is the only possibility. In the end, it has to intuitively make sense even if I don't have proof. And it goes well beyond just contemplating first cause theories. But if I review the possibilities, I factor several other things in. Does a Creator with a mind and will make sense as an ultimate first cause? Yes. And given the character of our nature, we fit well with a Creator. We are able to contemplate His existence. It is natural for humans to worship and have religious experiences. It seems healthy for the mind to have a trusting relationship with God. It's a relational thing, not a scientific proof. Maybe we'll never have the scientific proof. But it seems reasonable and there are no big red flags with science and philosophy. Without red flags to say, it's all delusional, I'm happy to put my faith in God and find relational and testimonial evidence.
That's my approach.
@@collin501 the arrow of time is not my hypothesis. It is from the physicist Sean Caroll and it has to do with entropy.
th-cam.com/video/vmlyQ0PjLzY/w-d-xo.htmlsi=_RyHASZ3V6n27gwC
The « God » hypothesis does not work for me because :
- it does not answer any question. How did God create a universe? Which physics does He use for that? Which physics does He live in? We have nothing comparable we can build any hypothesis on. It is the opposite of the scientific method, which asks that we go from evidence to hypothesis, not start with the conclusion.
- it does not correspond to anything we see in our universe. There is no magic in our universe, everything seems to be constrained by our 4 dimensions, the 3 forces, entropy, etc… there is no need for a God to explain anything so far, we have no sign there is one.
- you need to assume too much things for the God hypothesis to work : discard all other hypothesis, which are, for most of them, as good an explanation. And this is already unjustified and unacceptable for me. But, you also have to assume there is an intelligent being, that there is only one God, and not several, assume that, for some reason, He does not have to follow any laws of physics where He is, that His power allows Him to create universes somehow, etc… (and that without diving into omnipotence and omniscience which are further steps that have to be assumed if we go for the abrahamic god).
in short, building an hypothesis on sand. It is much worst than somebody finding a comb on the beach imagining how it was lost, who lost it, how he or she looks like, where he or she lives, what is his or her job, etc… it can be satisfying, it can be logically consistent… but it is only imagination, a fiction. And limited imagination, for that is, as it is based on what we know of combs, that do exist in our universe, which use and properties are fully known, from which we can at least infer some things, contrary to universes creation.
So, sorry, but about the creation of our universe, I’ll go with « I don’t know ». And about the preferred hypothesis, I’ll use Occam’s razor, the only available scientific tool, and what we know of our universe: it existed for all time. As time started with the universe, there was no « before ». Our universe comes from something, but as our laws of physics collapse when we reach the beginning, this something had probably other laws. No need of a God outside our universe, no need of intelligence, no need of an outside of our universe, just the singularity, or whatever we call it, it comes from. Occam’s razor.
On part 2, induction, 1:38:34 pointing out the difference between the whole and parts. The difference is between a timeless cause and a temporal cause. What i think we inductively gather from experience is that a cause is present to its effect, either temporarily, or by proximity. Eternity past is only a moment prior to transient time. Or simply there was a proximity, God speaking out from eternity, or the timeless state, (even on the b theory), and by proximity, causing the effect.
I died when you said Bussey. I was so focused on this part of the video and then that shocked me lol
Hello Joe. I am a great admirer of yours. I am a Theist. I subscribe to the Scholastic Tradition of Philosophy in general and Thomism in particular. I really enjoyed this critique of the Kalam. Although the Kalam nor any argument in similitude is an argument that Aquinas would have offered, insofar as he believed you could not demonstrate philosophically that the universe had a beginning, despite the fact that he believed it did for Theological reasons. He simply did not have access to the evidential resources we now have access to given the current state of contemporary physics and its standard cosmological model. Nevertheless, the argument has been defended by Thomists and analytical Thomists such as David Oderberg. Though I do not think any Thomists would ever defend the causal principle as expressed in the first premise on the basis of intuition alone. Instead I think Thomists would further qualify any reliance on intuition as applicable only to temporal becoming in the first instance, and temporal becoming as it is measured by change in the second. Change and time which follows from it are what we are most intimately familiar with however, for the Thomist, change is distinguishable from creation. So I think the first premise is a defensible metaphysical principle but as it pertains to creation it requires additional qualifications that do not fall within the scope of an appeal to intuition.
Great to see you in the comment section! Thanks for your insights here, and I hope my channel and work serves you well❤️
Are you still thomistic or a theist?
@@gg2008yayo Still both.
Hi 😊. If you reach a certain amount of subscribers, I hope you will make another AMA (Ask Me Anything) video.
Also, I hope you can do a collab with Alex (CosmicSkeptic) again for his new podcast "Within Reason", because I think you would be a perfect guest for discussing lots of philosophical problems on his podcast (and I hope he already contacted you) :) 😊😊
Joe make Alex look like a kindergarten pupil
babe wake up, new MoR video😍
Best way to spend a Saturday evening, great stuff again Joe!
I came here to chew bubble gum and destroy the Kalam, and I'm all out of bubble gum.
23:45 Logic is based on millennia, perhaps 1000s of teraseconds, of experience and evidence during which the 'intuition' of logic has not been found wanting. It is not _obviousness_ that logic must work, but that when we have relied on it it has always worked.
This is unlike Kregg/Craig's intuition based on zero experience of creation of universes.
I don't understand how there's intuitions rejecting the causal principle. What is it that people take into consideration when they develop intuitions that the causal principle is false?
Some sort of intuition like “EVERYTHING??? I don’t know about that…”
If people want to disagree with you they will make up anything to justify themselves. In this case, denying the causal principle 😅. Yet they would not live like that. The causal principle is supreme in daily life.
@@Drigger95 🤣
Now this is what I like to see.
I cannot believe it took me an hour just to get through the first 20 minutes of the video lollll
41:19 this is where I'm at so far. A few thoughts i had is, on the intuition of the principle of causation, i wonder if this could be modified to say that everything temporal has a source. On the idea of creation ex nihilo, it's interesting that it is unintuitive to you guys. It's hard for you to imagine things coming into existence without a prior state or substance leading to that. With creation ex nihilo, though, it's not as though there is nothing. There is a living God, and note the idea of life, which denotes a constant motion. If you conceive of someone all powerful, but with nothing to work with, God could not push against empty space and accomplish anything. But if you conceive of a living God, with a living and overflowing substance, (since life overflows), it's easier to conceive of creation coming forth from God. The Word of God is like the essence of God coming out from within Himself. Metaphysically speaking, that Word holds all things together. It is universal. It is a sufficient source for all things to come into being. And the way to think about it is not to be all powerful with emptiness, but to have a living substance(called divinity) within that has generating power. This is not very precise language, but my point is it depends what kind of God you conceive of to inform whether your idea of creation will be intuitive or not.
2. I don't think of eternity past as not having any time, which would imply a frozen and motionless existence. On the other hand, I don't think of it in terms of change, like growing perpetually older. I think of eternity like being perpetually fresh and new in a living way that still implies motion, not static. So it intuitively makes sense for such a state of being to create the universe. As opposed to an eternally motionless being moving himself without any time to do so in order to create.
3. On the B theory of time, if there is a yardstick that represents time, but exists as a kind of constant reality, my strong intuition has always been, how did that yardstick get there? What is its cause or source? To me it still doesn't make sense without God.
JOSEPH C. SCHMID 👍
Do you not accept Kant's critique of metaphysics or later Wittgenstein? I think you should make a video about why you do. From my perspective, we have concepts about causality that allow the world to be intelligible for us, but in no way can we derive truths about the world simply from the logical structure of the concepts. Our concept of cause presupposes an effect, but we have not learned anything about the world a priori. Kant's Transcendental Dialectic tries to explain why arguments like these, about God and infinite causal chains, can never be resolved in principle, and I find his reasoning quite convincing. In Wittgensteinian terms, "metaphysical truths" are just facts about the grammar of a concept, but these in no way add to knowledge about the world. An analysis of causality increases our self-consciousness about the concept of causality, but the idea of knowledge about the world a priori is incoherent on my view.
Kant's critique of metaphysics is quite different from Wittgenstein's. In fact, they are contradictory to each other, as Kant never said that we cannot know universal truths a priori. These are the synthetic a priori truths (including causality).
Kant's criticism of arguments for the existence of God and other "paralogisms of reason" are based on pseudo-antinomies. Furthermore, given transcendental idealism, NO truth will be about the world.
For Wittgenstein, on the other hand, the idea was that a priori truths are meaningless. Therefore, they are neither true nor false. Of course, this is nonsense, because the same proposition a priori will be true or false...
I have just started watching, but do you discuss Humean vs non-Humean causation in this video? If not, do you think this would be relevant for the causal principle and the Kalam in general?
Awesome video, Joe. Very helpful!
Always happy to serve (and to see you in the comments!)
I just simply dont understand what it means to exist outside of time. Like if you made a computer simulation of a world, sure you exist outside of it but it doesnt mean that youre not subjected to time. Similarly, if something "outside of time" caused existence to exist, then there would have had to been a) a state when that causal [event or agent] didnt cause existence to exist and b) a state when that causal event/agent did cause existence to exist. If you have events, you have time. The argument is incoherent at face value imo.
Events are metric in character (that is, they are subdivisible into shorter events), because every object in an event undergoes becoming. Therefore, while B is an event, A is not. The relationship between A and B is state-event causation.
"That's why he's the GOAT! The GOAT!" - probably Augustine talking about Joe Schmid
This YT Shorts content is a disgrace. This clearly isn't nearly comprehensive enough man.
I would propose that the Kalam should be phrased in a probabilistic version.
I think it is conceivable that things could come into being uncaused, but a simple experiment of looking at my desk makes me conclude, that this happens extremely rarely, if not never.
After all, there is an infinite amount of metaphysically possible objects visible to the human eye that could appear on my desk in the next second (e.g. black holes of any of the continuum of possible radii between 1cm and 100cm. Or objects made of substances that are not even part of the standard model of particle physics, e.g. made of quarks of generation higher than 3, or an infinite number of species of visible angels). And yet, none of them have appeared as I was looking at my desk for the last second.
From this, I conclude, that either the list of metaphysically possible visible objects is finite (which I find extremely implausible), or the causal principle is true: they didn't appear because their probability of appearing was zero.
Principles other than the Kalam’s causal principle also entail that the probability of that happening is zero!🙂 (Eg, the transfer/change principles (TCP), restricted causal principles, explanation-based principles rather than cause-based principles, etc.)
Well put
It's funny how religious apologists start with their conclusion and then work backwards toward confirmation, all while claiming they are "truth seeking". LOL. Can you say, "Lying for Christ!"
It's interesting that the causal principle used to be: "Anything that exists has a cause". But that of course would imply that God also has a cause, so the wording was subsequently amended to say, "Everything that *begins* to exist has a cause". Neither version has much to recommend it.
it never used to be the first one
God didn't begin to exist
Thanks for another great video Joe!
I had an argument for causation being essentially temporal that was independent of the ones you mentioned, and I was hoping to get your thoughts on it.
I focus specifically on creative causes or causing something to begin to exist. This seems to entail that the thing caused did not exist and then did ("then" isn't meant to be necessarily temporal). This would be a transition or change. I think this would be uncontroversial and merely a matter of definition, but I'm not entirely sure.
Next, I think that change is essentially temporal. For one, I think this is intuitive to many people. For example, in movies when time stops so does change. However, another reason is that it seems difficult to me to define change without time. Change is not just two different states of affairs next to each other in away analogous to spacial location. There seems to be a dynamic succession, and that sounds like time to me.
If causing something to begin to exist is a change, and change is essentially temporal, then causing something to begin to exist is essentially temporal. Thus, causing time to begin to exist would require time and be viciously circular.
It seems persuasive to me, but I wanted to know how others might respond. Thanks.
But it seems to me that only the effect has to be temporal since it is the thing that begins to exist.
@@Opposite271 Thanks for the feedback. The way I see it the effect itself depends upon a transition from nonexistence to existence. This is because the thing is being caused to begin to exist which implies it did not exist at least at some point (if only a logical point as opposed to a temporal point). This transition is a change which I think is essentially temporal. In other words, I'm trying to claim that causation itself, which is needed to produce the effect, is essentially temporal.
@@Micah-bz3xy
So the idea is that if the effect is temporal then the causation has to be temporal.
It is conceivable that an unchanging cause produces a effect instantaneously without any in between processes. One could consider this to be a atomic causation without any other causations between cause and effect. It seems then that it is not necessary that temporality has to exist before the effect exists instead it could come into existence simultaneously and instantaneously with the effect as a byproduct.
A instantaneous change would be binary instead of fuzzy and could allow for something like that.
@@Micah-bz3xy
Another question would be, is instantaneous change even change?
It would be change because a state of affairs (nothing temporal exists) would turn into another state of affairs (something temporal exists).
I think change is more defined by a state of affairs turning into another state of affairs then by transition.
It is possible to have a spatial transitions from one water level to another but it isn’t change because it lacks the turning into another thing.
@@Micah-bz3xy
But this creates now a paradox.
How can a state of affairs that is unchanging turn into a state of affairs that is changing?
Is that the paradox you meant?
what do you think of the PSR?
I’m confused about how explanations arnt temporal the way simultaneous causes are. The mass of the infinite boulder is simultaneously causing the impression in the sand. Same with lower level neurons simultaneously causing higher level brain function. Sure, these are thought of as “explanations” but they are also “simultaneous causes” no? The ARRANGEMENT may not precede the event but is SIMULTANEOUSLY giving rise to it. And if it’s simultaneous then exist in a temporal relationship, right?
What do you think about Josh Rasmussen's contingency Argument from his book? Can you make a video about it in the future?
Joe I have to ask. ¿ Are Pruss and Rasmussen christians ?
Have you taken into account the grim messenger paradox?
I discuss that extensively in my Kalam playlist - check it out❤️
@@MajestyofReason I can't find that playlist, please share the link
@@MajestyofReason there is this version of the grim messenger paradox:
"Consider a closed system consisting of two particles, A and B, in which the reaction A + B -> AB is spontaneous and irreversible.
The reactants collide inevitably with each other due to Brownian and thermal motion. As soon as A and B collide, they react to form AB, which then remains inert.
Suppose that the system has existed eternally and that the reaction between A and B has occurred at collision n.
However if the system has existed eternally, there is always a collision before n (n-1), and one before n-1 (n-2), ad infinitum (n-∞), at which the reaction has not yet occurred, which is impossible given that the reaction is spontaneous, and would occur at first contact.
Therefore, it is impossible for the system to have existed eternally, and thus causal finitism is true."
@@NG-we8uu most of the responses in my Kalam playlist equally apply to this version. For instance, from the fact that one can tell an inconsistent story involving an eternal past, it simply doesn't follow that an eternal past (or an infinite causal chain) is impossible. I can tell an inconsistent story involving taxis, but that doesn't mean taxis are impossible. All the paradox allows us to infer is that one cannot *conjoin* an eternal past *together with* various other assumptions -- e.g., that there's a particular system within that eternal past with very specific properties. But the fact that we cannot *conjoin* an eternal past with various other assumptions clearly doesn't mean an eternal past is impossible, any more than the fact that we can *conjoin* God's existence with various other assumptions clearly doesn't imply that God is impossible. It implies only that we cannot jointly have an eternal past *together with* various other properties.
There are many more problems besides -- see my kalam playlist for more :)
@@NG-we8uu the playlist is linked in the description of this video👍
Relevant videos in the playlist will be #9 and #12-23
Your symmetry reply to the MTA does not succeed if one believes that God is identical to His existence. This is because God's properties are not explanatorily before His existence, but identical to His existence. So, (b) is false. Second, one might say that metaphysical principles need to be grounded in something in reality. Loke argues that laws of nature are grounded in causal dispositions in his previous chapter, and this can be extended to metaphysical laws. But nothing in concrete reality can be the source of this difference.
Excellent ideas!
Notice, though, that God's identity with his existence and his properties only *bolsters* the symmetry problem, since then it *still* follows -- which is we need to run the symmetry argument -- that none of God's properties could ground the difference between God and other beginningless things where beginninglessly existing uncaused is concerned. The specification in (b) is meant to establish that none of the properties of the thing in question could ground the difference between that thing and other things where existing (or beginning) uncaused is concerned; *one* way to establish that is to show that existence is explanatorily prior to any such property, which is asserted in (b); but *another* way to establish that is to show that existence cannot be explanatorily *posterior* to any such property, which (as you grant) would follow from God's identity with his existence and properties. [Notice that, so long as existence cannot be explanatorily *posterior* to any such property, it follows that no such property of x could ground the difference between x and other things where existing uncaused is concerned, for any such ground, as Loke points out, would have to be explanatorily prior to x's existence.] So (b) could simply be modified to say that 'whatever properties that differentiate God and other beginningless things will *not* be had explanatorily prior to the existence of God or those things', and the symmetry problem would run just as well.
As for the point about metaphysical principles, I don't find it plausible that metaphysical principles must be grounded in causal dispositions; after all, there are lots of metaphysical principles *about the conditions under which anything could possess any dispositions at all* , and such principles couldn't be grounded in dispositions on pain of vicious circularity. There are also lots of metaphysical principles about abstracta, which are plausibly grounded in the nature of abstracta and not the dispositions of concreta. (E.g., consider the metaphysical principle that abstracta are causally effete. This is surely grounded in the nature of abstracta, not concreta.) Additionally, there are metaphysical principles about what is *impossible* (e.g., that nothing can simultaneously be both red all over and green all over), and it's not clear how these could be grounded in dispositions. (Plausibly, it's *because* that's impossible that nothing has the power to make something that's red and green all over, rather than the other way around.) Finally, it may be a metaphysical principle that, necessarily, reality has an ultimate foundation. If so, this principle plausibly cannot be grounded in the powers of something, since *to be* an ultimate foundation is to be *uncaused and ungrounded* , and hence that there is (or must be) such a foundation is not due to the powers of anything.
@@MajestyofReason It seems that God's existence being self-evident in an "absolute sense" that Aquinas mentions can help break the symmetry. I think this paragraph is illuminating:
Furthermore, those propositions ought to be the most evident in which the same thing is predicated of itself, for example, man is man, or whose predicates are included in the definition of their subjects, for example, Man is an animal. Now, in God, as will be shown in a later chapter, it is pre-eminently the case that His being is His essence, so that to the question what is He? and to the question is He? the answer is one and the same. Thus, in the proposition God exists, the predicate is consequently either identical with the subject or at least included in the definition of the subject. Hence, that God exists is self-evident.
- Summa Contra Gentiles book 1 chapter 10 paragraph 4
Now, while Aquinas disputes this claim epistemically speaking later on, he goes on to affirm this in an "absolute sense," which is what is relevant here. This can help one understand why God exists. His existence is a tautology in the "absolute sense." I think this works best when God is identical to His existence, so in the proposition "God exists," the subject is identical to the predicate.
As for my claim about causal powers, I admit that this was mistaken. But, I think an underlying thought could still be established. I don't think that metaphysical principles are something out there that imposes itself onto reality, but rather that it is grounded in reality. So, we still need something in reality that grounds the laws of doing the explaining. I think it would be very strange for a proposition to impose itself on the world in that it is most fundamental, rather than the principle being derived from what substantially exists.
By the way, Andrew Loke argues against Classical Theism in the book, and he makes some pretty easy mistakes doing so, like saying God "actualized His own potential" when He created the universe, not knowing that actualization in this context refers to something being caused to change. I like your arguments more, even if I still disagree with them.
"You can concieve of a world where things come into being without causes."
At this point... just word salad. The very definition of coming into being = caused. How can you have something coming into being without a cause. Is there even a single example of this?
As I see it the causal principle is STILL a problem for free will *even if* it dosnt say anything about deterministic causes and leaves room for indeterministic causes. If the causes of our decisions are indeterministic or random we *still* did not choose them. For example what ever causes me to choose chocolate over vanilla may be an indeterministic cause or a random cause but I still did not freely choose to want what I want. We don’t have the ability to go back and choose differently we have no control over our wants. Whether the cause was deterministic or random either way there is no free will.
1:54:24 Can't the Kalam's causal principle account for why we don't have uncaused mental stuff while the transfer principle and the colocation principle don't? Like it seems like all the physical facts could be the same, but I experience hallucinations at random. In so far as this response means you have to take a controversial position in philosophy of mind it weakens the Kalam. But a theist is presumably already going to have to argue for some sort of dualism, if they take God to be a disembodied mind.
You mention many times throughout your videos about this "unique position in the grand epistemic landscape". I am curious, how do I find my position? I am a complete beginner when it comes to philosophy but am adventurous in my journey. I know my question is very broad, but I'm not sure how else to frame it, there seems to be so many questions to ponder, metaphysically, epistemically, aesthetically, within the fields of the mind, science, religion, ethics, politics, etc. Where does one begin?
According to what you have seen (podcasts, books, Yt videos, etc), you have a certain epistemic landscape, and you can make your rational judgments from it. (as far as I know, this is a not qaformal term, but it is used anyway). Since Joe clearly cares more than usual about being rational, within the limits possible, he has a great deal of epistemic humility (perhaps even in an exaggerated way sometimes), so he uses this term a lot.
Not to mention he wants to honor this *majestic* phrase (possibly my favorite because of him, I use it to talk to my friends even if they are not interested in philosophy):
"What altar of refuge can a man find when he commits a treason against the *majesty of reason* ?".
- *Baruch Spinoza*
I'm also new on philosophy. I wish you a good journey!
I fail to see the problem with a simultaneous first cause… this video says there is a problem with simultaneous first cause bc it was either temporal or non temporal but nothing was clear… can someone help
Will you continue your Kalam series with Stephen?You guys didn't upload any video for a long time.
It’s in a bit of a hiatus. Next video will hopefully be over the summer!
If you define a swan as a certain kind of white swimming bird that lives in waters in Europe and has certain other attributes, like the food it eats, its size, the fact it builds a nest and a few dozen others...
Then a bird that shares some or even many of those attributes but is black.. just isn't a swan.
Oh, you say, but they interbreed.
Then you have to accept that a great Dane is actually a Doberman.
I'm sorry, but what's the difference between causal determinism(all events are determined by prior causes) and "noma?" determinism(Everything is determined by the causal law)? And what was his point there again? I didn't understand that.
Good question! It‘s causal determinism vs. nomic (from ‘nomos’, meaning law) determinism. If I recall correctly, his aim is to argue that we should only be willing to accept that every event is determined by physical *law* , rather than determined by a *cause* , and so - in a deterministic context - we can have a non-causal explanation of events where the causal principle demands instead a causal explanation. And in an indeterministic context, the laws can indeterministically explain events in a non-causal manner, which contrasts with the causal principle that demands a specifically *causal* explanation of such events. He could have been making this point in connection to non-causal interpretations of quantum mechanics, or - less likely - he could have been mounting the ‘non-causal explanation’ objection to the KCP that I covered. I’m not exactly sure! (Phil usually uses clips without showing us what question he asked that prompted them)
@@MajestyofReason okay that's helpful. Thank you for going over the quantum mechanics/indeterministic arguments in the face of determinism. Just curious do you think everything is a composite object (would that make everything therefore abstract?) and is that a deterministic perspective?
Nice video. Great analysis as always - thanks, Joe.
I suppose I don't have all that much issue with premise 1 of the Kalam.
For me premise 2 is the most contentious premise and where (I think) the argument fails since I don't think there's adequate reasons/evidence to support it being true.
That’s quite similar to my view🙂
why does the argument fail at 2
@@redx11xNo worries. Well I personally don't have any adequate reason(s) to accept premise 2. That's why it fails (for me at least).
@@roger5442 hi Roger i have been ill and did not listen to the full lecture so i don't know if it was addressed.
I'm pretty sure premise 2 will be based around the fact that you cannot have infinite amount of time in the past.
Are you saying that time in the past is infinite.
@@redx11x Sorry to hear that; hope you feel better.
Sort of. Typically it's the "impossibility" of past infinite causes/events/beings, not necessarily time. Because the Kalam is an argument that relates to 'causes' (eg: premise 1 introduces a causal principle) and so the Kalam proponent wants to argue for a 'first' cause, because God needs to be a 'first' cause.
No, I wouldn't say the past is infinite. I do say that I think it's prima facie possible it is. I don't have reason(s) to think it's impossible. Or - I don't find the arguments for its impossibility to be particularly convincing.
I would reject the causal principle on the basis that it is impossible to know universal laws.
If I only observe white swans in the region in which I live, then I can conclude with greater certainty that all swans in my region are white then that all swans on earth are white.
-The reason for this is that we are using induction on the basis of past observations under certain conditions.
-The further away the conditions of a possible observation is from past observations, the more uncertain becomes the validity of the rule for those possible observations.
-Induction can therefore only be used to justify local regularities but can never justify universal laws.
-Even if we would find such a universal law, we would never be justified to believe that this regularity is universal.
-As such knowledge about universale laws is impossible.
If it's impossible to know universal laws, how the hell is science working 😂.
@@Drigger95
By discovering local regularities in the succession of events.
We go with the most general rule until we find out it’s limits and eventually we find a even more general rule.
@Opposite271 it is impossible to know universal laws... lol how do you know that? That's a universal law.
@@Drigger95
My statement here is based on humanities ability to know.
I do not intend to apply this rule to hypothetical beings who are subject to different natural regularities or even different logical principles then us.
I bet RR will identify as agnostic within a year....Great video Boys!!!
Do we just assume that time doesn't exist outside our universe or do we know somehow?
It’s a part of the theory of relativity that Space and Time are interconnected. You can’t have one without the other. At least, not under our current physics
The idea that causes are either prior to or simultaneous to effects is an issue for the kalam? I’m dont see this… please help me…. For example: The cause of the universe is god and therefore god is proceeds the universe. Or the cause of the universe is god and therefore god exists simultaneously with the universe. Either way linear nontemporal causation or hierarchical temporal causation. Neither is an issue for the kalam as far as I see it?
If the cause is prior to or simultaneous with the universe, then the cause is temporal, since it stands in a temporal relation to the universe. But if the cause is temporal, it cannot extend infinitely into the past, per the arguments on behalf of the Kalam's second premise. So, it must have begun -- or, at least, it temporal portion must have begun. And since everything that begins requires a cause, this cause of the universe (or at least its temporal portion) requires a cause. Now, if all causes are before or simultaneous with their effects, then *this cause* must *also* be temporal. And the same reasoning will show that *this cause* (or its temporal part) will need a *further* cause, and so on ad infinitum. But that, of course, involves infinitely many causes and effects, which contradicts the arguments for the Kalam's second premise. So, if all causes are before or simultaneous with their effects, then the Kalam is in trouble.
@@MajestyofReason the way you just responded is immensely helpful! Thank you! This all seems to rest upon the whole “causation must be temporal or tensed” premise - which is fine - but what about Oppys naturalistic and metaphysically necessary first cause? It posses the special quality of primary existence and I can grant that but Is it, then, suggested to not extend prior before metric time? It’s necessary existence means to necessarily exist in time and exert causative influence in time? Or does it go back before time and extend into some amorphous non metric time and then make some natural transition FROM non metric time INTO metric time and THEN exert its first creative influence upon the rest of the contingent casual chain? Or does it not go that far back and only exist within time? If it DOES transition then can a nontemporal entity cause an effect within time? Suggesting that causation must not be temporal? I’m asking in a way about Oppys first cause here. It dosnt “begin to exist” with respect to time bc I assume it is the cause of time but does this mean its existence prexists time? If so it means that a causative agent before time could exert an effect in time? How is the bridge gapped here? I apologize if any of my questions or comments are offensive or in poor form. I’m lay to all of this
@@MajestyofReason I guess I’m curious here. If a necessary causative agent (natural or otherwise) that exist in amorphous time prior to metric time have any ability to exert a cause or actualize a potential within the realm of metric time? Ie can an uncaused essential being that exist in an amorphous time before metric time create the causative chain that begins and sustains our current universe? That gap between the beginning of metric time and the amorphous time before it is what confuses me. Does our naturalistic uncaused cause theories only start and presuppose metric time or do they extend beyond? If they extend before time then how do they cause the contingent temporal universe of today? How is the gap crossed? If all causation must be temporal to universe that suggest time extends before the universe?
@@MajestyofReason maybe this brings up the difference between an explanation and a cause? Maybe the explanation is able to transverse the gap but the cause isn’t? Maybe we say that the natural essential cause is uncaused and exists prior to metric time (explanation) and that it creates and gives rise to metric time and the entire temporal causal chain within time (cause and effect, tensed)…such that the act of causation need not bridge that gap but the explanation can? Thoughts?
I wanted to watch it but was immediately deterred when I saw the time.
Break it up over the span of a few days, put it on 1.5x speed, and it will fly by😊
(In all seriousness, I totally recognize that long length videos aren’t for everyone🙂)
Sup dawgs
You’re making this harder than it is. The proposition “everything that begins to exist has a cause” is not supported. It should be “everything that begins it exist in our universe has a cause”. All of the physical laws that describe what happens in the universe may or may not apply to the universe itself. For example nothing can travel faster than the speed of light yet inflation theory, which so far is supported by observation, indicates the universe itself expanded several times faster than the speed of light. All that we can know is what we can conclude from studying what is in the universe and how it behaves. We have at this point no way of knowing how universe come to be. Essentially we have one universe, an N of one of you will. What can we infer from this? Nothing - or everything. However you can’t know anything. The Kalam fails.
Is the "Beet Hoven" pronunciation of Beethoven's German name a joke or a common mispronunciation made by the British?
ask stephen😅
18:18 I have mulled over "x causes y just in case x brings about y" but it just does not make sense, unless "just in case" is yet another expression philosophers have hijacked, butchered and distorted in order to exclude those not in the club.
"Just in case" means "because of the possibility of something happening ... " (Colins, Cambridge, Oxford English), so are philosophers defining "Efficient cause" to mean "x produces y if there is a possibility that x produces or brings about y" ? i.e. if it's possible it happens.
As philosophers use 'just in case', it means the same thing as 'if and only if'. I used 'just in case' to try to minimize reliance on technical concepts like the material biconditional. But your comment here helpfully highlights the need for clarification!
@@MajestyofReason Why have philosophers taken a well-used phrase, and chosen to use it wholly differently instead of the well-known "if and only if and only if (iff/↔)" in logic?
@frogandspanner He explained that in his response. To minimize the technical lingo. Not everyone understands the verbage of logic & he used a common phrase to connect the same meaning.
While I think that most of his viewers would know these things, the random recommended view might not, as well as those that are interested but don't study these things.
It's not that "philosophers are stealing language," more so just him making the content slightly easier to understand for those that aren't as well read in this area.
@@Chryso3077 In what way is using "just in case" to mean the virtually orthogonal "iff" making the concept easier to understand?
Lest != iff
Everybody understands "just in case" to mean "lest", and understands "if an only if" to mean what a logician means, so to flip the two helps nobody, and makes communication worse.
@frogandspanner an example of what I mean:
I'm putting these cookies out just in case Santa comes
I'm putting these cookies out if & only if Santa comes
While they don't have exactly the same meanings, they can be understood to functions relative to each other I the same context. The cookies still get put out & the expectation for Santa remains. The truth of the conclusion isn't reflected in the intent, while they can still be used interchangeably on a surface level.
Relating to my point before that the hyper specific uses of the words used by logicians aren't the message, but rather the general/colloquial intent for less learned listeners.
I think there is a problem with using the term something beginning to exsit. Something beginning to exsist is a human concept, it's about how we perceive the world. It has nothing to do with actual world. In reality matter and energy that are transformed so it takes on a different form. The Earth consist for elements that all existed before the earth was formed and that is also true for every human, animal and everything else.
They just mean that there is a point in time when something didn't exist and then did.
eg: they would say that there are points in the past (1867 etc) that you didn't exist yet and at some point (conception/birth) you do exist.
That point from non-existence to existence is what they mean by you "beginning to exist."
ie: that transformation from one form into something else is what they mean as a 'beginning'
If you imagine a timeline and mark your conception/birth date. Prior to that mark you didn't exist, then you did - they would say that is when you "began to exist."
@@roger5442 Yes and that's the problem, they argue in human terms and concepts. You can't determine something about the fundament of realty by examining human concepts.
@@sortehuse What's wrong with humans using human terms?
The idea is that it's a metaphysical principle. It would apply to things before humans existed eg: the earth didn't always exist and the point it comes into existence is its beginning.
@@roger5442 Sorry for not being clear. We have to use human terms because that's the only teams we have, but we have to be very careful har we use them. In our conceptual thinking Earth started to started to exist about 4.54 billion years ago, but that have noting to do with the deep reality of the Universe.
As far as the Universe is concerned the Earth and everything else in the Universe has existed since it's beginning, because the thinks that make up the Earth and everything has been there since the beginning as far as we know. The law of conservation of energy says that energy is neither created nor destroyed (and matter is also energy according to Einstein) and the the conservation of quantum information mean that information cannot be created nor destroyed.
So the building blocks and to information to make the Earth was there from the beginning. If you wanted to make an argument for God this would be a far better argument that the Kalam cosmological argument, BTW.
@@sortehuse But it seems that if the earth 'started' to exist 4.54 billion years ago isn't just a 'human' concept - it's true from the universe's perspective too.
If earth started to exist 4.54 billion years ago then there was no earth existing 5 billion years ago.
Yes, you can say that 5 billion years ago its matter/energy existed, but it isn't earth yet; it's in a different (non earth) form.
When it becomes its earth 'form' is what they mean by 'begins to exist' - ie: the universe has gone from being in a state where no earth exists to where earth begins to exist.
*"So the building blocks and to information to make the Earth was there from the beginning. If you wanted to make an argument for God this would be a far better argument that the Kalam cosmological argument, BTW."*
Why would that be a better argument for God?
Totally disagree. Yes I watched the video on 20x speed.
How long does it take you to make such videos lol?
verrrry longgggg
a kalam
3:27:53 As physicist Peter what? 🤨📸
lmfao
that's a chunky video my dude
34:30 "But its atleast conceivable that there's a world in which actions like torture (for fun) lack the property of wrongness."
Idk bout that one chief 💀
I take error theory to be entirely conceivable, though in error! It’s not like Olson, say, or Cowie, or Joyce, is talking total nonsense or is conceptually confused. Utilitarianism is also eminently conceivable, and it’s obvious that torture conceivably produces more pleasure/welfare/desire satisfaction than pain/etc in a utilitarian world (which is one reason I didn’t actually add “(for fun)” which you added in your (mis)quotation)
An addition I’ll edit in: divine command theory, while the most implausible metaethical view, is at least conceivable, and it’s entirely conceivable that God commands torture in a DCT world. (After all, God is depicted as commanding genocide (or ethic cleansing, depending on interpretation) in the Bible, and he also is depicted as indiscriminately drowning babies and commanding people to kill their children. Torture isn’t too far off! Then again, someone might say that these depictions aren’t even conceivable to begin with, since there’s a decent case to be made that it’s inconceivable for a morally perfect being to act like this.)
Another edit: oops! I listened prior and heard the thing about for fun - I’ll retract that point
@@MajestyofReason
1. Nope. Keep in mind the context goofy. 34:22-34:29: "Most people grant that the claim, 'torturing a child just for fun is wrong' must be true on the basis of its intuitive obviousness."
Being charitable, I took your conceivability consideration to (relevantly) connect to your previous point. But I'll ask a clarificatory question. Do you think it's conceivable that there's a world in which actions like torturing toddlers for fun (stance-independently) lack the property of wrongness?
2. No. I take Olson, Joyce, Daly, Loeb, etc, to be conceptually confused.
The utilitarianism point is irrelevant. Who would (seriously) deny that torture can't lead to greater happiness/decrease in suffering? The question at hand concerns the normative status of committing such acts.
3. Idek why you brought in the DCT stuff at this point. That's (like the util point) irrelevant. NO ONE IS TALKING ABOUT TORTURE SIMPLCITER!
If I mentally torture a convicted pedo (or cause extreme pain by) by keeping him away from my kids, that's obviously permissible.
Stay on topic for crying out loud.
@@Jon-jr7kx Regarding (1), I don't know when I made the edits in connection to when you commented -- I believe you prolly commented while I was making one or more edits (I made multiple, one about DCT, one about correcting the point about "for fun", and a couple in my original paragraph), so it makes sense if you didn't see them all. But I noticed the 'for fun' point by watching the context, since I thought 'maybe the 'for fun' was artificially inserted bc I had said something previously', which turned out right. So I corrected that point, and there's no need to escalate things like you usually do (and which causes me to disengage after responding after you escalate, so as not to waste my time -- which is what I'll probably do here, as elsewhere).
"I took your conceivability consideration to (relevantly) connect to your previous point. But I'll ask a clarificatory question. Do you think it's conceivable that there's a world in which actions like torturing toddlers for fun (stance-independently) lack the property of wrongness?"
Yes, I think some stance-dependent accounts of rightness and wrongness, while mistaken, are clearly conceivable. (In order to run some of my criticisms thereof, I need to be able to conceive of situations wherein their account holds, and draw out implausible consequences thereof. This doesn't hold for all of my criticisms, and it won't hold for everyone else's, of course.)
(2) That's alright if you think that; I don't, and I don't see any reason to ascribe to such intelligent, well-read, professional metaethicists basic conceptual confusions. That strikes me as deeply implausible (and their competent participation in metaethical debates seems to me quite surprising on that hypothesis), but others aren't beholden to my plausibility structures. Indeed, it strikes me as overwhelmingly implausible that almost 40% of philosophers who don't accept moral realism are conceptually confused.
As for the utilitarianism point, that's obviously relevant. The claim at hand is:
CON: is conceivable.
Suppose utilitarianism is conceivable, and suppose it's conceivable that there's a utilitarian world where torturing a child just for fun produces more pleasure/welfare/desire satisfaction than it does pain/etc. Then CON strictly follows, since a utilitarian world where torturing a child just for fun produces more pleasure/welfare/desire satisfaction than it does pain/etc is a world in which, per the strictures of utilitarianism, torturing a child just for fun is not wrong but instead is right. Hence, the utilitarian point is painfully relevant: it shows that it's conceivable that the normative status of torturing a child for fun is not the status _being wrong_. My point was precisely one about the normative status of the act. Its normative status is affected by the normative theory true at the world, and it's obviously conceivable that some act of torturing a child for fun in a utilitarian world satisfies utilitarianism's specifications for being right, not wrong. (E.g., if there's someone (e.g., the torturer) whose pleasure derived from the act far surpasses the pain experienced by the child.)
(3) You say, "Idek why you brought in the DCT stuff at this point. That's (like the util point) irrelevant."
But it's obviously not irrelevant. Suppose the DCT says an act is right (and so not wrong) iff and because God commands it. And suppose it's conceivable that, in a DCT world, God commands someone to torture someone for fun. Then CON is true: it's conceivable that . So the DCT point is obviously relevant. And insofar as OT atrocities are conceivable to me, this, too, is conceivable to me. And while my original point was put in terms of torture simpliciter, I already corrected that, and it's easily modified, as just explained, to the case of torture just for fun. (And note that, in the conceived-of world, it need not be the case that ; God's command could be an implicit one 'written on the heart' of a psychopath. The psychopath then does the act just for fun, thereby following the implicit command written by God on their heart.)
So I have stayed eminently on the topic; the only thing off topic is repeated, false accusations of being irrelevant.
@@MajestyofReason I'll follow your lead and not waste my time responding to these braindead replies.
@@Jon-jr7kx, right and wrong are RELATIVE. 😉
The KJV Bible is mathematically encoded.
The first verse, Genesis 1:1
In the beginning
3 words 14 letters
In the beginning God
4 words 17 letters
4/17 is .235
The word truth occurs 235 times in the KJV Bible.
Genesis 1:1 ten words 44 letters
√1044 is 32.31
The word scripture occurs 32 times in the KJV Bible.
The square root of ten is 3.16
John 3:16
_"Oh look, fancy numbers and desperate pattern recognition! Good enough evidence for me!"_
The chapter and verse numbers in the Bible were assigned centuries after the original books were written, in order to provide an easy way to make references, so any numerical pattern that references a verse is either a coincidence or was fabricated by later scribes. In a book of thousands of words, finding numerical coincidences is easy enough; in fact, many fiction books also feature surprising numerical patterns.
The original book of genesis didn't even had any chapter or verses, it was just a single block of text. So when you say "Book N, chapter x:y has Z number of words or letters" you just sound dumb, because the very demarcations of chapters and verses were fabricated by later scribes.
Also, this number thing only works in english. For example, In my language, portuguese, Genesis 1:1 starts with "No princípio, Deus criou os céus e a terra".
The more i think about it, the more you sound dumb
@gabri41200
It's always English or Hebrew with these people, never Greek or Aramaic. They forget and confuse the languages in which the texts were written and the ones people actually spoke at the time. Ancient Hebrews loved patterns and number riddles, which is why you will always find things in the OT in pairs of 3 or 7. When it comes to English... the believers are just exposing their cultural predisposition and pitiful monolingual perspective, from a language which had less to do with Biblical times than Archaic Chinese.
Here's one way to reformulate the argument from chaos (inspired by the Bayesian argument for Existential Inertia):
Let H be the hypothesis that X begins to exist at time t, uncaused. Given the Causal Principle (which we'll denote C), the probability of H is 0. Given the negation of C, then it is not the case that H has a probability of 0. So,
P(~H|C) > P(~H|~C)
Therefore, any time that something fails to begin to exist uncaused (i.e. all the time), you get a nonzero amount of evidence for the causal principle.
Now that I think about it, Existential Inertial and the causal principle are basically just time-reversed versions of each other. So, maybe I can just find some guy who has spent a lot of time researching Existential Inertia and I'll get a bunch of arguments for the causal principle for free! You wouldn't happen to know anybody like that, would you? ;)
Very clever! :)
I argue that a similar causal principle implies existential inertia in chapter four of my book, in case you're curious :)
One quick substantive note: it might be better not to compare C and its negation but instead C and a comparably specific alternative principle, and if we do that, it may no longer be the case that C predicts ~H better than the alternative principle does. (Whereas, at least as formulated in my book, we took the relevant competitor to be not simply the negation of EIT but the 'Classical Theistic Sustenance Thesis')
If something has no means of coming into existence (a cause), it couldn’t come into existence.
congrats on begging the very question at issue
I’m as theist as it gets… but that’s just a textbook example of assuming your conclusion within your premises.
I don't know if it's begging the question, because the argument is made ad absurdum - that is, if something has no means of coming into existence, it couldn't come into existence. As the contrary would be to argue that something that has no means of coming into existence, has a means of coming into existence. A contradiction. So I agree with the OP.
@@msmhao If 'has no means of coming into existence' just means 'there's no way it could come into existence', then the OP's comment is just a tautology: if there's no way something could come into existence, it couldn't come into existence'. This lends no support whatsoever to the Kalam's causal principle, though. It doesn't say anything about whether a *cause* is needed for something to come into existence. And the OP would also be illicitly smuggling in "(a cause)" into that notion of 'no means of coming into existence'. So the OP either begs the question by assuming that a cause is a necessary means by which something comes into existence, or else the OP is simply the tautologous claim that something which cannot come into existence couldn't come into existence, which doesn't support the Kalam's causal principle.
@Majesty of Reason I suppose I should clarify, what you said so far is correct, but what I intended is that to deny the causal principle would entail affirming absurdities, because the CONTRARY would be to argue that something can come into existence and there was no cause prior to it that made it possible.
1. Whatever begins to exist has a cause.
2. God doesn't have a cause.
3. Therefore god doesn't exist
The best explanation for this comment is that you’re a theist trying to make atheist commenters look bad
JJAJAJAJAJAJA vengo por que te hicieron meme😂😂
@@MajestyofReason na. The kalam is stupid. The first premise is an unsubstantiated assertion. All you have to do is reject the first premise and the argument falls apart. It's also a special pleading fallacy because if God can be eternal, then there is no reason why the universe can't be eternal
@@travissimpson7829 Anything can be eternal. The universe can't be because there are specific reasons. It actually goes like this:
1. Whatever begins to exist has a cause.
2. The universe begins to exist.
Here theists will argue why the universe has to be a beginning. In my opinion, these arguments are really bad, but it's another history.
3. The universe has a cause.
I do not agree with Kalam, but your argument is completely stupid. Kalam just says that the universe has a beginning and whatever that has a beginning has a cause and this cause can't be caused because this being caused the time, so there is nothing before. As simple as that
@@davib.franco7857 You didn't justify the premise that the universe began to exist either. So no, it's not stupid. In fact, many theoretical physicists like Lawrence Krauss think that there was never a point when nothing exited
whos "MILK" is it? 🤔
The kolam does not address causation, so you are just preaching nonsense.
It was ignorant uneducated rhyme back when and has no use except bye dishonest theologians in trying justify their unjustified belief.
The Kolam is statement of personal opinion not a statement of fact.
Kalam fails at its second premise by committing a COMPOSITION FALLACY
Just because those things INSIDE the universe have an attribute DOES NOT MEAN that the universe itself has the same attribute
Case closed