

Anyone have any thoughts on this?

Tags: Argument, Cosmological, Kalam

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I've previously not commented on whether space and time started at the big bang. From what I've seen of experts interviewed on the subject, we don't know, and the english language starts to have trouble even describing what we don't know.

The video was quite interesting and certainly raises some new points for me regarding the 1st premise. It also exposes how the argument does not logically lead to theism and shows how unfounded any religious implications are, but that is fairly obvious anyway. It was certainly not a solid refutation of kalam in my view.

To whomever (although someday our grammar will allow "whoever") is reading:

"Around 12:30 (20 seconds later) [Guth] states outright that we cannot extrapolate arbitrarily far into the [past], that it is mathematically impossible, that at some point inflation began...."

(Spell checkers other than Apple's also accept any correctly-spelled word; grammar checkers might flag "best" when we human folk know it's a typo and the writer meant "past". "Dumb software!" (I once wrote software, including an early 1970s form of email for limited in-house use.))

Years ago Stephen Hawking said, or was explained as having said, he gave the first few nano-nano-nano-seconds to the Pope. It meant of course that his mathematics did not extend to the so-called big bang.

He was a leader in the field, and leaders need followers. Be wary of followers!

Leaders need to address doubts and persuade; followers need only obey.

Think Sigmund Freud, John Muir, and others. Freud led; his followers obeyed for a while, but instead of addressing further doubts they became dictators and splintered psychiatry (which sometimes strengthens a movement and sometimes weakens it.) Ditto for Muir; his followers obeyed for a while and eventually splintered the environmental movement. Probably helpfully.

Okay, back to cosmology. Hawking admitted that his math neither extended to nor explained the big bang. Followers came along and tried to extend a math suggested by relativity past where Hawking saw it failing. They invented inflation; others invented nothingness.

Accept that with today's hardware, and probably the future's hardware, we will not know.

But heck, if someone with money will pay your salary and for the hardware you need, speak/write with confidence and get some of it.

Catholicism made me a sometimes doubter; politics made me a sometimes cynic.

There's several problems with the Kalam Cosmological Argument, almost all of them associated with the fact that our language is horrendously inadequate to talk about metaphysics, and that it causes us to smuggle hidden assumptions into our logical arguments without realizing where.

For instance, "Everytime I put some extra force onto a moving object, it gains a bit of speed. A photon is an object that's travelling at the speed of light. Thus if I were to add some force to a photon, it will proceed to break the speed of light. Ergo, the speed of light is limit on velocity. Q.E.D."

It's pretty much impossible to defeat this argument without relying on what we've actually observed about the speed of light. The hidden assumption above is that increasing velocity also makes time slow down (general relativity) and you'd need more and more energy to increase the speed of an object (and eventually: infinite energy). But you'd never know that unless you knew about general relativity.

The Kalam -short as it is- has a lot of sloppy language that should make us suspect similar hidden assumptions.

The Universe had a beginning? Well, define beginning of the universe. It's true that we've established that the universe had a moment of rapid expansion from what was already there (probably an environment of zero energy), but does that mean that that was its "beginning"? Possibly it was a natural result of the laws governing that zero energy space, in which case the real "beginning" would have been whenever the advent of these laws started -if such a question even makes sense.

Everything that begins to exist has a cause? Well, define begins to exist. A recombination of matter isn't quite the same as a "beginning" of the universe or the advent of natural laws in a zero-energy space. The equivocation here is dangerous and was precisely the reason the light-speed argument failed.

And there's more problems with the Kalam. Craig has admitted that his language only makes sense if the universe operates according to an A-theory of time. Getting into what that means would take us too far, but suffice to say that virtually all physicists since Einstein disagree and think the universe works under the B-theory of time. If this is in fact true, the Kalam also collapses.

And then even if we accepted the Kalam, the only thing we'd have proven is that this universe has a cause; we can't actually get anything from that. Maybe the cause is the multiverse. And to prove that that has a cause, we'd have to prove that the multiverse has a beginning, which is totally impossible at this point.

So is the Kalam correct? Maybe. Maybe not. We don't really know at this point, and the only people who would claim to know, are those who have already made up their mind about the underlying proposition (i.e. a God). As I like to say "It's not likely to convince anyone who wasn't determined to reach at a given conclusion to begin with".

It is the major premise that causes the deepest trouble: everything that begins to exist has a cause.

This is a statement about the state of the world which establishes a very general  premise in metaphysics. Even if it were true of everything in our experience, it still might fail for something not within our experience. In other words it is a gigantic assumption. By its very nature it cannot be verified, but it is expected to be accepted as a reasonable assumption.

The minor premise is not without difficulty as well. It relies on the assumption that there was a time when the universe did not exist. Many will think this is what the Big Bang asserts, but it isn't. In the Big Bang time and space begin together and the space-time continuum in which we exist is the universe. Consequently there is in the Big Bang theory no time at which the universe did not exist, even though the universe has a finite age. Of course the Big Bang theory may be only one possibility, but that is enough—it is a possibility in which the minor premise of the Kalam argument does not hold.

I think there is also a problem with the notion of cause itself—what it is in ordinary circumstances encapsulated in ordinary language loses all its meaning when you speak of the entire universe having a cause outside the universe and of necessity immaterial.

Sometimes a "thought experiment" clarifies. Here is one a primitive tribe might easily hold since it mirrors nature as we know it.

Suppose for the sake of argument there are two supernatural spirits, one male and one female, and that a universe is created when they come together in cosmological intercourse.

Then you have two gods so to speak, neither a creator, and the cause of a universe is their coming together, an event. And what's more there might be multiple universes created in this way.

Is anything in that hypothetical notion prevented by the Kalam argument as stated?


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