Episode 15, Josh Rasmussen on the Contingency Argument
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 22 ส.ค. 2024
- In this episode, Alex talks to Dr Josh Rasmussen (www.apu.edu/th...) for a part 2 of their conversation, this time focusing on the contingency argument. They play about with the notion of symmetry and which side of the argument has the upper hand at different parts of the dialectic.
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Dr. Malpass, your content (both your blog and your video discussions) have been very influential on me. While I do not agree with all of your conclusions, I consider you to be a valuable intellectual resource. Thank you for sharing your views with honesty, integrity, and thoughtful consideration. I wish you luck and success in your future endeavors.
Man the guest on this show is fantastic. Plus it helps the guests when the interviewer understands what they are saying.
What an awesome podcast. I think Josh convinced me to believe in God.
really? how so?
@HarryNicNicholas He's offered good reasons for concluding a simple "foundation" at the bottom, for placing consciousness there, etc. You may not be persuaded, but let's not pretend that he hasn't made valuable contributions (eg. his book dialogue with Leon)
@@TheProdigalMeowMeowMeowReturns
if you take away his charisma, he's just doing the 'I just want to believe' appeal to emotions all apologists rely on.
@@TheProdigalMeowMeowMeowReturnshe actually gave no areasons.
This is a model of how to have an enlightening philosophical conversation with charity and lack of defensiveness...great work here...
lol, it's wank. i love malpas but all you guys do is try to talk god into being real, you can't not only cos god is imaginary, but the god you have won't let you have evidence he exists, this is glaringly obvious to me but no religist i've encountered seems to have realised god has spent 2000 years not interfering with free will by hiding, you think rasmussen is going to screw up god's free will card?
religion is silly however fancy the language. and no one is ever going to "prove" god exists, and certainly not by talking for hours on end.
I just hit play! So excited!!!
Boy have I been hoping for a conversation on this argument between you two. Can’t wait to listen
Once again, I come here for the discussion and then get distracted by how appealing I find the way Alex presents himself. I can't quite put my finger on exactly what it is....
He may rise before Zod.
Two philosophers just trying to work out reality together. This is how more conversations should be.
Two civilised men disagreeing in an agreeable manner..
25:30 Listening this after covid is insane LOL
Interesting discussion.
Apologetics Showdown Thanks. Followed on from our conversation the other day.
Alex, on the off chance you see this, I tried to map out my perception of the progression of the conversation. Id be glad for you, or anyone, to let me know if I’m tracking this correctly.
ALEX move 1: maybe not all contingent things are caused
Josh move 1: we have good inductive reasons to think they are, such as all leaves being from trees
Alex move 2: maybe, but we also have good inductive reasons for thinking that those causes are also contingent things
Josh move 2: maybe not all things are caused by contingent things
Josh move 3: we’re going based off of induction alone, it’s a draw. However, I think an inference to the best explanation based on our observances breaks the tie. Just as we wouldn’t expect to see protons bouncing around, similarly, we wouldn’t expect to see the necessary thing display its effect.
ALEX move 3: maybe, but maybe we shouldn’t expect to see the contingent think display its effect either.
Josh move 4: but the thing that breaks the symmetry is that what follows from the principal that “every contingent thing has a cause“, is that there exists a necessary thing.
ALEX move 4: but why can’t I rephrase the principle to say “every contingent thing that has a cause has a contingent cause“?
Josh move 5: but what would motivate us to say that there are two types of contingent thing, caused and uncaused? Maybe that’s like saying there are caused cups and uncaused cups.
ALEX move 5: in the absence of any explanation why, it boils down to a brute fact either way. Either it’s a necessary truth why some contingent things are caused or uncaused, or it’s a necessary truth that contingent things are caused and necessary things are uncaused.
Joshs reasons are apparently linked to the necessary thing being a mind, and may be discussed in the future.
This is an extremely interesting discussion. I'll be pondering this for a while
topic for the next talk: falsification
I would love to hear more about it. I thought it was pretty useful conception.
Great discussion!
I've only just been introduced to Dr. Josh Rasmussen and he's great, one of the best theist philosophers.
As you were talking about trees and leaves, my naturalistic mindset kicked in, and immediately this picture of a tree as a representation of, or one might say the metaphor for the universe, fleshed in my mind.
Consider the life cycle of a tree; let's say leaves come from the tree branches. They sprout in the spring, live, fall off in the autumn and die...creating the soil with its nutrients. Eventually the tree itself dies, providing more nutrients for another tree, or you might say: the same tree changes forms and is recycled.
Furthermore, it's not just leaves that come from the tree, but tree seeds as well.
Where does the tree come from? Well...from the seed, right? The seed that grows in the soil made by "tree stuff".
Now, given that the tree here is a representation of the universe, it needs not oxygen, CO2 and the Sun for energy. It already contains all the energy it needs. Energy which is being conserved.
I'm sure you see where I'm going with this.
All of the elements of the system are contingent, and yet the system is self-sustaining. You might even say, the system is self-sufficient and...necessary?
Or maybe it is brut contingency? I honestly don't really see the fundamental difference between the two anyway.
At any rate, what I truly do not understand, is why would a necessary thing need to be "maximally great" and personal at that. 🤷🏻♂️
I think if necessary being is God, then him being personal is not that problematic.
@@maxpayne3628 I don't know why a necessary thing should be a person. Personhood certainly isn't necessary
@@alexlarsen6413 Can You Please define Personhood of God? Like what does that mean?
@@maxpayne3628 No I can't because it makes no logical sense, and besides not the one claiming a necessary thing is a conscious being.
@@alexlarsen6413 Okay so claiming thar Necessary being is conscious is Personhood...
I think you're saying that we can't be sure that Necessary being has consciousness and we don't know, whether he made the conscious decision to create the Universe or Not. Is that what you're saying?
15.50 blades of grass are leaves that pop directly from the ground.. not from trees .. same for tulip flower leaves..
FYI: not all leaves come from trees. it's a good example of how the second premise fails via ambition and overreach.
Great content.
Ha, nice catch!
Lol, first thing that crossed my mind, but it was Alex that said this, not Josh. :)
i didn't get what's he saying in the opening ... 3:18 ... « _i've seen people respond to arguments with pictures that contradict the conclusion, but reveal nothing wrong with any premise in the argument... and if i come back and say *but actually these premises are independently supported and they brlkhage like a picture* ... it's actually unhelpful to them because the picture has more power in their mind.. » ... like ... what's he talking about..
Screen sharing a powerpoint slide or similar would be helpful in some parts of this conversation.
Josh and Alex are both great
Surely we should be less confident in taking a principle that explains our observations and extending it to apply to additional cases the less similar those additional cases are to the observations we based the principle on.
So maybe all the leaves in my neighbourhood grow on trees but I should be less confident about other countries with the same climate and even less for other countries with different climates and even less for other planets and even less for alternative universes.
Likewise with a causal principle, once the additional case is outside space and time and really nothing remotely like any of the situations where we gathered the observations, its hard to see how you could have much confidence at all that it would still apply.
1:30:23 Interesting point. One should explain the difference between the caused things and uncaused things- and the (perhaps) initial thing’s being necessary may be the difference that helps explain why it doesn’t have a cause. Big Question: Is it more reasonable to say the uncaused are of a different modal nature-necessary instead of contingent- than merely of a different category of contingent thing (most of which are caused)?
It is interesting to think about all of contingent reality itself as a contingent thing/event, which is either caused or uncaused.
Oners82 I don’t see how it’s a contradiction in terms. Maybe it’s true that all contingent objects/events have causes, maybe not. I don’t really know. But I’m not seeing how the possibility of something’s failing to exist requires it to have a cause/explanation for its existence.
I don’t think “contingent” means “depends on something else for its existence”, I take it strictly to mean “it exists but might not have”. If you bake causal dependence into the definition of contingency, then I’m not sure that the universe is contingent. It seems to me that one should separate dependence from the definition and then argue that all contingent things depend on something else for their existence.
Whether this is the best theory, that there are contingencies that are brute (unexplained, uncaused, don’t depend on anything else), is another question.
Every prime number (that isn’t 4) isn’t divisible by 4 just by the definition of prime numbers. I think I’m missing the point of what was being said there. Also, the definition of an even number is that it’s divisible by 2, so 2 is the only possible even prime number… I didn’t understand this part of the discussion… Anyone know what they meant? Something about falsifiability?
Apologists think that whomever speaks the most words wins the debate.
Joshua is a gem 😍
Do you have any content that pertains to the problem with the one in the many.
Christian's like the claim that somehow the Trinity is a solution to this problem but I suspect they've never actually articulated it to me in a proper contexts
Haha love the Oscar Peterson intro music
I don't know how you can assert something is contingent when your sample size is one without additional information. In the case of the first human, you can get additional information from fossils, geology, genetics. In the case of the universe, I don't know that there is any.
@Oners82 With sample size one, it is also logically and metaphysically possible that it can't be any different, irrespective of whether or not the events within it are deterministic. If the only information you have is X exists, how can you know that X is contingent?
@Oners82 My position is that the value of the proposition "The universe is contingent" is unknown, not true or false.
As for your other point, if one presupposes the universe is not contingent (could not have been any other way), whether or not it's deterministic is still unknown.
I can think of at least 4 reasons how we know the Universe is contingent. But ill just give one here.
The fact that it is possible for my experience of the universe to be in error entails that the universe is contingent.
When I say that our experience of the universe could be in error I mean we experience the universe to be a real physical reality, but that experience could be false.
For example, it is possible that I am in a coma and this universe is only in my head.
It is possible im in the matrix and am experiencing a digital world, not a physical one.
It is possible I am a brain in a vat being experimented on by powerful aliens and my experiences are artificial.
Whilst these scenarios may be unlikely, they are nevertheless possible.
Given their possibility it follows that: "it is possible that this universe I am experiencing does not exist".
So we can create a simple syllogism:
1) Only contingent things can possibly not exist.
2) This universe possibly does not exist.
3) Therefore, this universe is contingent.
@@jackplumbridge2704 It's also possible that what you think is possible is in fact impossible, and therefore the universe is not contingent.
@@michaelcheng3925 No, you are confusing metaphysical possibility with epistemic possibility.
To claim the universe is necessary you would need to claim that it is impossible for our experience of the universe to be in error. And no serious thinker is going to make a claim that absurd.
We know that people fall into coma's. And we know that people can have conscious experiences inside of their coma's.
The one dislike is the guy with coronavirus
radioactive decay happens at random intervals and has no cause. just saying, it's basic.
Of course radioactive decay has a cause. If it had no cause, and was happening randomly, then we could not calculate the half life of any substance. Radioactive substances wouldn't have any such thing as a half life.
You have confused a cause with an indeterminate effect/result with something lacking a cause at all.
I'm confused why the contingency argument isn't just a standard fallacy of composition. Josh's example of all leaves coming from a tree suggesting that the leaves in your backyard come from a tree isn't analogous. If it's all things are contingent therefore the universe is too, the analogy would be all leaves come from a tree therefore the universe comes from a tree. You aren't comparing like things. It doesn't even get you a probabilistic answer. No matter how many purple marbles I pull from the bag, it gives no indication what color the bag is.
he actually respondz to this humean objection in his book with Alexander pruss, it was objection number 4 to the contingency argument
@@PabloSensei care to give a brief overview?
@@bouncycastle955 they basically say that even if you believe extended simples do not actually exist like a globular sphere for example and is just an extension of the mind you would still have to ask why the smaller materials are arranged in a spherical way which would then entail an explanation hence making it contingent:). it was along those lines, you can find the PDF for free on z lib
@@PabloSensei how is that a response to my initial comment at all? He gave an example, I gave a counter example that I think is more analogous, you respond by redescribing his analogy.
What do you think, if we know the color of the objects in the bag, does that tell us, or even give us a reason to think we know anything about the color of the bag itself? It seems like a really obvious 'no' to me...
In what way, specifically, is that disanalogous from saying that the objects _in_ the universe are contingent, but that doesn't tell us anything about the properties of the universe itself.
@@bouncycastle955 oh i don't think they mentioned anything related to qualitative properties like colour, ig I'll have to look into that
Great conversation!