I'm not sure how much the B theory point really weakens the argument. I am extremely confident that B theory is true, so if A theory is required for the Kalam to work, that automatically means the argument has basically no force for me. But I don't know if it really requires A theory. Craig defines "begins to exist" in a way that presupposes A theory, but as a B theorist, I think his definition is just wrong, and the correct definition is that something begins to exist at time t if t is the first point on its worldline (with the direction along the worldline defined based on causality). This definition is basically the same as your definition that X begins to exist at t if X exists at t, but not any time before t, and X doesn't exist timelessly, except that I've modified it to work even in situations that involve time travel.
Some of the attempts to justify the causal principle (e.g. induction from everyday experience) don't depend on Craig's idiosyncratic definition. The only ones that really seem to depend on A theory are the purely intuition-based ones, since thinking of the universe as a spacetime block gives us different intuitions about it. But it's hard to say how much this defeats the intuition given that there's no actual argument behind it - some Kalam proponents might claim that they have an intuition that the universe needs a cause of its beginning to exist even if B theory is true, and it's hard to argue against them when their point is just intuition (or at least, it's no easier to argue against them than it was before). That being said, I think the Kalam fails for the other reasons you've laid out even if the B theory point doesn't kill it.
Also, to try to pull you over to the B theory side, I'll say I don't think the infinite ethics arguments works against it at all, for a few reasons:
1. It just doesn't seem like a situation could be rendered metaphysically impossible simply by the fact that it's seemingly impossible to determine certain axiological or ethical facts about it. That seems to get things backwards to me. The situation is still just as conceivable regardless of the weird moral facts.
2. A theory doesn't do anything to solve the infinite ethics dilemmas. After all, what happens in the future still has to matter somehow on A theory if ethics is to make any sense at all: Any ethical theory that says that the effects your actions have on the future (even just 1 second in the future) don't matter is morally insane. So even if you're an A theorist, you can't just restrict your moral concern to only what's happening in the present moment. But then there's no reason why an infinite amount of pleasure and pain occurring in the future would cause any fewer problems for A theory than for B theory.
3. Even if you somehow could restrict moral concern to only the present moment on A theory, it's still possible for infinitely many people to exist in the present moment (in fact, it's probably actual). So A theory would still run into infinite ethics dilemmas, or at least infinite axiology dilemmas. You could try to get rid of these by adopting finitism, but then this would solve the problem for B theory as well.
4. Related to what I said in (2), A theory, or at least presentism, seems to cause big problems for ethics. We know that the future, and any moral theory that doesn't take the future consequences of our actions into account is horrendous. But how can we do this on presentism? How can the future matter if it doesn't even exist?
Regarding your thoughts about the infinite ethics argument, first of all, I'm laughing because all the things you're saying--both about infinity and ethics, about B-theory being right, and more--are almost exactly the same as conversations I've had with one of my best friends (blog here, but sadly he has only one article https://nonnatural.substack.com/p/michael-huemer-is-mistaken-about). Are you a moral realist epiphenomenalist, by any chance? That would make the overlap uncanny!
1) I think it can be a sign that something has gone wrong if ethics seems to break. Like, it's not that the thing breaking ethics *explains* why it's impossible, but that impossible things tend to break ethics, and possible things don't.
2) I agree it's still a puzzle for A-theory, but it seems worse for B-theory. On B-theory, it seems strictly analogous to the spatial case. A-theory breaks the analogy, because they're not simultaneously real. It's true that, on A-theory, all the same moments in total will be experienced, at every time, only a finite number of moments exist.
3) A-theory still gets loads of infinite ethics dilemmas, I agree! But there's a particularly gnarly one that B-theory gets--namely, seeming to imply that an infinitely long life with any percent positive and negative experience is neither good nor bad.
4) I think an A-theorist can say "I have concern for people that don't exist now, but that will exist!"
I'm not an epiphenomalist, so I guess I'm not exactly like your friend. I generally consider epiphenominalism to be the least likely philosophy of mind to be true.
Here's an argument that seems to have as much force as the B-theory Kalam:
1) Every object that has a left-most edge has a cause.
2) The universe has a left-most edge (well, this is probably false, but just go with it).
3) Therefore, the universe has a cause.
Everything that's said in favor of the Kalam causal principle can be said in favor of premise 1). But it seems unconvincing. For the Kalam to be a convincing argument, I think there needs to be something suspicious about the things being uncaused--mere generalizations of the form "such and such things tend to be caused in our experiences, so they must be caused," make for a very weak causal principle.
Hm, the causal principle still seems more reasonable than generalizing to all objects with leftmost edges, mainly because when we refer to the cause of something's existing, we're referring to the cause of its beginning to exist, but causes have nothing to do with the leftmost edge of an object specifically. You could, for example, use a more general that all events have a cause (with an event being anything that takes place in spacetime) and then derive that anything that begins to exist has a cause from that.
One could also attempt to derived it from a principle like, "All changes have a cause," except that that would only imply that everything that's once didn't exist has a cause, which wouldn't apply to the universe.
On causal finitism—I also weakly lean towards it being true, but perhaps a bit more strongly than you. I think the explanation-based versions of the arguments for causal finitism (rather than the patchwork principles) are good and not seriously undercut by the UPD. Shameless self-plug, I’ve argued for one here, though I am not 100% convinced the argument works: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11153-023-09876-z
Nice! I'll check it out. I currently do not know what to say about many of Joe Schmid's arguments, and am definitely conflicted. Infinite paradoxes are a topic on which I currently feel very confused, and need to do more reflection.
Can't believe you didn't use the "under B theory, it's no stranger for time to have a first second than it is for a ruler to have a first inch" analogy. Deeply disappointed, unsubscribing.
Also I do think Craig thinks that its possible to make a KCA that fits B-theory, he said as such in a Youtube Q&A.
>The distinction between nothing and not anything sounds innocuous but is crucially important. If there was ever a state of nothing, then it’s plausible that it couldn’t cause anything. But those who reject premise one don’t think that at some point there was nothing—they simply deny that there is such a thing as before the universe. There isn’t anything hotter than the hottest object, but nothing—pure emptiness—isn’t hotter than the hottest object.
I don't see the distinction you're trying to make. Nothing is not "pure emptiness" because emptiness implies space, and the existence of space is not nothing. What difference is there between nothing existing before the universe and there not being such a thing as before the universe? They are both nothing.
More importantly, the argument should be that nothing can cause itself to exist: because before it existed, it didn't exist, and things that don't exist can't cause anything, much less their own existence.
>In fact, it even seems possible—to me at least—that something begins in time without a cause. It seems possible that, say, a giraffe would simply appear uncaused. Sure, it’s very unlikely, but nothing about it seems absurd or contradictory. I can imagine it distinctly—it strikes me as clearly ideally conceivable.
It's not conceivable at all. You can imagine a giraffe appearing out of nowhere with no apparent cause: things happen without us knowing the cause of them all the time. That's not at all the same thing as imaging a giraffe appearing without a cause. Events occurring without a cause at all is not conceivable if you have any understanding of what "cause" means at all.
It would be weird if there was some initial state where nothing existed, and then a universe popped into being. But, of course, that's not what Kalam critics think happened. The beginning of the universe is simply the beginning of everything.
Analogy: it would be weird if nothing was brighter than the sun. But it wouldn't be weird if there wasn't anything brighter than the sun.
Opponents of the Kalam don't claim the universe caused itself, but that the universe existed without a cause.
Re things appearing uncaused: I guess you and I just have different intuitions about the case.
But you can conceive of something beginning to exist without a cause. Just imagine it happening - and there you go. You may say that it’s merely apparent and not actual, but we’ve already stipulated that it’s not apparent.
The only way you can’t conceive of this imo is if you have aphantasia.
I can conceive of something appearing with no apparent cause, or starting with no apparent cause: things appear or start all the time without me knowing what the cause was. What I can’t conceive of is such a thing happening without a cause.
I think you’re confusing what happens in everyday life vs. what can happen in theory. Yes things happen in everyday life that have causes we don’t know about, but in theory we could be wrong - no matter how unlikely it is. All you have to do is show how it’s metaphysically possible, and it definitely seems metaphysically possible. When you visualize something popping into being, do you really just find it impossible for there *not* to be a cause? To me my imagination clearly shows that it’s possible that nothing caused it, no matter how weird it is. Like that’s obviously a thing that could happen and there’s no being that did anything, even if God was there.
There is a being that did something: you decided to imagine it. It is not metaphysically possible for something to begin without a cause, and saying that you can imagine it is like saying you can imagine a square circle. If you claim to have done it you must not understand what a circle or a square is, and anyone who claims to imagine something beginning without a cause doesn’t understand what a cause or a beginning is.
But I’m not existent in that world that I’m conceiving of. I exist in a world here and now where I’m conceiving something, but I don’t exist in the world that I’m conceiving. If what you’re saying is really the case, then it’s literally inconceivable for you to not be the cause of something because you (allegedly) can’t conceive of a world where you are not the cause of something in that world because you are the one conceiving it. But that’s absurd, because people cause things all the time. Conceiving something is not the same thing as causing something. You may cause a mental representation of that thing, but it’s not the thing itself.
Can you describe “The beginning of everything” in a way that’s qualitatively different from “Before this point there was nothing, including time or space”? I still don’t see a difference between “nothing, then X” and “the beginning of X”. If there isn’t anything brighter than the sun, then nothing is indeed brighter than the sun.
2. Craig himself no longer thinks the A-theory has to be right for the Kalam to work (I think he says this in one of his Capturing Christianity interviews).
Do you think that if one rejects premise one, that "everything which begins to exist has a cause," one should also reject the PSR? I think it could be argued that a cause is a type of explanation (at least for temporal things), so if something does begin to exist without a cause, there is no explanation for its existence.
A cause is a type of explanation, but usually proponents of the PSR say there are other types as well, so something could be causeless but still have an explanation. That being said, it does seem the causal principle rests on similar intuitions to the PSR. This is all the worse for the causal principle, since I think the PSR is almost certainly false (I don't even think it's metaphysically possible, whereas the causal principle is at least metaphysically possible).
I am not disputing that something could be causeless and still have an explanation. The universe might very well be like that, for instance. It just seems to me that something could not begin to exist without a cause and have an explanation for why it began to exist. Any explanation for why something did begin to exist would appear to be a cause for its beginning to exist.
To take an example from the article, let's say that a giraffe appears uncaused. I can't think of any explanation of the giraffe's appearing uncaused that would not be a cause of the giraffe appearing.
For instance, there can't be some law of the universe that a giraffe will appear at such and such time and place, nor can there be some kind of fundamental "giraffe force" that allows giraffes to appear out of nowhere because those would both be causes for the giraffe's appearance (apologies for my lack of scientific knowledge regarding both laws and fundamental forces if I'm getting anything wrong here). It seems better to say that if the giraffe began to exist without a cause, then there is no explanation for the giraffe's beginning to exist.
Essentially, since X's beginning to exist uncaused is a contingent fact, and there cannot be an explanation of this fact that does not contradict X's uncaused beginning, we appear to have a violation of the PSR. Hence, it seems to me that if one rejects premise one of the Kalam argument, one should also reject the PSR.
Both it and you are wrong on point one. It's a metaphysical category error to believe the universe began in any sense. The universe is infinite in each of the three physical dimensions; time, space, and scale. There was never nothing, only something in different forms.
The universe never began, it always existed, therefore there's no reason to even consider a creator. What applies to everything within the universe dies not apply to the universe and vice versa. Everything within the universe has a unique position in time, space and scale, as a sub-set of the infinite indistinguishable everythingness called Universe or Chaos or Aether or ( my preference ) Actuality.
One thing I thought you were going to mention but that didn't end up being mentioned is that even if the past is finite, that doesn't mean there was a first moment of the past. Thus, it could be that the past is finite, and yet the universe still didn't begin to exist.
There doesn't have to be a moment most distant in the past. The past could be like the open interval (0,1). E.g., the universe could be exactly 13.8 billion years old, such that if you go back in time, there are points closer and closer to 13.8 Gya, but no moment exactly 13.8 Gya.
first of all, being new here, im utterly shocked and confused to find youre both a theist and a utilitarian? do i have that right? thats fascinating.
re this essay, one thing that strikes me about this argument against the cosmological argument is that you dont find the cosmological argument compelling for the same reasons you find other abductive arguments compelling. your version of theism, if i understand you, entails that a perfectly good god would cause the world to exist. and a non-contingent, causing-god does the explanatory work of the world existing more simply than the many brut facts and remainders entailed by naturalism.
Yes, I'm a theist and a utilitarian! I think theism and hedonistic utilitarianism are hard to reconcile, but there's nothing particularly incompatible about combining theism with a theory of utilitarianism on which lots of things--e.g. relationships--can be intrinsically good for a person.
Yeah, your second paragraph sums it up well! The only quibble I'd have is that I think God is probably contingent. But still: better to have one brute fact of the utmost simplicity--God exists--than the concoction of naturalistic brute facts.
it seems intuitive to me that a perfect god would be ontologically simple - so, non-contingent and self-explaining. if contingent, his existence would beg further explanation, so, less simple.
One observation/question: how are your objections fundamentally different from Kant's Antinomies? Specifically, Kant argues that causality, space/time, finite/infinite, supreme being are unresolvable via pure reason alone.
Yes, I know Kant went on from there to postulate some transcendent reality, and the assertion turned out to be rather provocative for the history of philosophy (e.g., analytic vs. continental schools of philosophy).
Yet, just for a moment pausing on the antinomies themselves, how are they still not valid?
I'm not sure how much the B theory point really weakens the argument. I am extremely confident that B theory is true, so if A theory is required for the Kalam to work, that automatically means the argument has basically no force for me. But I don't know if it really requires A theory. Craig defines "begins to exist" in a way that presupposes A theory, but as a B theorist, I think his definition is just wrong, and the correct definition is that something begins to exist at time t if t is the first point on its worldline (with the direction along the worldline defined based on causality). This definition is basically the same as your definition that X begins to exist at t if X exists at t, but not any time before t, and X doesn't exist timelessly, except that I've modified it to work even in situations that involve time travel.
Some of the attempts to justify the causal principle (e.g. induction from everyday experience) don't depend on Craig's idiosyncratic definition. The only ones that really seem to depend on A theory are the purely intuition-based ones, since thinking of the universe as a spacetime block gives us different intuitions about it. But it's hard to say how much this defeats the intuition given that there's no actual argument behind it - some Kalam proponents might claim that they have an intuition that the universe needs a cause of its beginning to exist even if B theory is true, and it's hard to argue against them when their point is just intuition (or at least, it's no easier to argue against them than it was before). That being said, I think the Kalam fails for the other reasons you've laid out even if the B theory point doesn't kill it.
Also, to try to pull you over to the B theory side, I'll say I don't think the infinite ethics arguments works against it at all, for a few reasons:
1. It just doesn't seem like a situation could be rendered metaphysically impossible simply by the fact that it's seemingly impossible to determine certain axiological or ethical facts about it. That seems to get things backwards to me. The situation is still just as conceivable regardless of the weird moral facts.
2. A theory doesn't do anything to solve the infinite ethics dilemmas. After all, what happens in the future still has to matter somehow on A theory if ethics is to make any sense at all: Any ethical theory that says that the effects your actions have on the future (even just 1 second in the future) don't matter is morally insane. So even if you're an A theorist, you can't just restrict your moral concern to only what's happening in the present moment. But then there's no reason why an infinite amount of pleasure and pain occurring in the future would cause any fewer problems for A theory than for B theory.
3. Even if you somehow could restrict moral concern to only the present moment on A theory, it's still possible for infinitely many people to exist in the present moment (in fact, it's probably actual). So A theory would still run into infinite ethics dilemmas, or at least infinite axiology dilemmas. You could try to get rid of these by adopting finitism, but then this would solve the problem for B theory as well.
4. Related to what I said in (2), A theory, or at least presentism, seems to cause big problems for ethics. We know that the future, and any moral theory that doesn't take the future consequences of our actions into account is horrendous. But how can we do this on presentism? How can the future matter if it doesn't even exist?
Regarding your thoughts about the infinite ethics argument, first of all, I'm laughing because all the things you're saying--both about infinity and ethics, about B-theory being right, and more--are almost exactly the same as conversations I've had with one of my best friends (blog here, but sadly he has only one article https://nonnatural.substack.com/p/michael-huemer-is-mistaken-about). Are you a moral realist epiphenomenalist, by any chance? That would make the overlap uncanny!
1) I think it can be a sign that something has gone wrong if ethics seems to break. Like, it's not that the thing breaking ethics *explains* why it's impossible, but that impossible things tend to break ethics, and possible things don't.
2) I agree it's still a puzzle for A-theory, but it seems worse for B-theory. On B-theory, it seems strictly analogous to the spatial case. A-theory breaks the analogy, because they're not simultaneously real. It's true that, on A-theory, all the same moments in total will be experienced, at every time, only a finite number of moments exist.
3) A-theory still gets loads of infinite ethics dilemmas, I agree! But there's a particularly gnarly one that B-theory gets--namely, seeming to imply that an infinitely long life with any percent positive and negative experience is neither good nor bad.
4) I think an A-theorist can say "I have concern for people that don't exist now, but that will exist!"
I'm not an epiphenomalist, so I guess I'm not exactly like your friend. I generally consider epiphenominalism to be the least likely philosophy of mind to be true.
SAD!
Here's an argument that seems to have as much force as the B-theory Kalam:
1) Every object that has a left-most edge has a cause.
2) The universe has a left-most edge (well, this is probably false, but just go with it).
3) Therefore, the universe has a cause.
Everything that's said in favor of the Kalam causal principle can be said in favor of premise 1). But it seems unconvincing. For the Kalam to be a convincing argument, I think there needs to be something suspicious about the things being uncaused--mere generalizations of the form "such and such things tend to be caused in our experiences, so they must be caused," make for a very weak causal principle.
Hm, the causal principle still seems more reasonable than generalizing to all objects with leftmost edges, mainly because when we refer to the cause of something's existing, we're referring to the cause of its beginning to exist, but causes have nothing to do with the leftmost edge of an object specifically. You could, for example, use a more general that all events have a cause (with an event being anything that takes place in spacetime) and then derive that anything that begins to exist has a cause from that.
One could also attempt to derived it from a principle like, "All changes have a cause," except that that would only imply that everything that's once didn't exist has a cause, which wouldn't apply to the universe.
On causal finitism—I also weakly lean towards it being true, but perhaps a bit more strongly than you. I think the explanation-based versions of the arguments for causal finitism (rather than the patchwork principles) are good and not seriously undercut by the UPD. Shameless self-plug, I’ve argued for one here, though I am not 100% convinced the argument works: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11153-023-09876-z
Nice! I'll check it out. I currently do not know what to say about many of Joe Schmid's arguments, and am definitely conflicted. Infinite paradoxes are a topic on which I currently feel very confused, and need to do more reflection.
Can't believe you didn't use the "under B theory, it's no stranger for time to have a first second than it is for a ruler to have a first inch" analogy. Deeply disappointed, unsubscribing.
Also I do think Craig thinks that its possible to make a KCA that fits B-theory, he said as such in a Youtube Q&A.
Yeah, that's a good point. I've now added a note saying that.
>The distinction between nothing and not anything sounds innocuous but is crucially important. If there was ever a state of nothing, then it’s plausible that it couldn’t cause anything. But those who reject premise one don’t think that at some point there was nothing—they simply deny that there is such a thing as before the universe. There isn’t anything hotter than the hottest object, but nothing—pure emptiness—isn’t hotter than the hottest object.
I don't see the distinction you're trying to make. Nothing is not "pure emptiness" because emptiness implies space, and the existence of space is not nothing. What difference is there between nothing existing before the universe and there not being such a thing as before the universe? They are both nothing.
More importantly, the argument should be that nothing can cause itself to exist: because before it existed, it didn't exist, and things that don't exist can't cause anything, much less their own existence.
>In fact, it even seems possible—to me at least—that something begins in time without a cause. It seems possible that, say, a giraffe would simply appear uncaused. Sure, it’s very unlikely, but nothing about it seems absurd or contradictory. I can imagine it distinctly—it strikes me as clearly ideally conceivable.
It's not conceivable at all. You can imagine a giraffe appearing out of nowhere with no apparent cause: things happen without us knowing the cause of them all the time. That's not at all the same thing as imaging a giraffe appearing without a cause. Events occurring without a cause at all is not conceivable if you have any understanding of what "cause" means at all.
It would be weird if there was some initial state where nothing existed, and then a universe popped into being. But, of course, that's not what Kalam critics think happened. The beginning of the universe is simply the beginning of everything.
Analogy: it would be weird if nothing was brighter than the sun. But it wouldn't be weird if there wasn't anything brighter than the sun.
Opponents of the Kalam don't claim the universe caused itself, but that the universe existed without a cause.
Re things appearing uncaused: I guess you and I just have different intuitions about the case.
But you can conceive of something beginning to exist without a cause. Just imagine it happening - and there you go. You may say that it’s merely apparent and not actual, but we’ve already stipulated that it’s not apparent.
The only way you can’t conceive of this imo is if you have aphantasia.
I can conceive of something appearing with no apparent cause, or starting with no apparent cause: things appear or start all the time without me knowing what the cause was. What I can’t conceive of is such a thing happening without a cause.
I think you’re confusing what happens in everyday life vs. what can happen in theory. Yes things happen in everyday life that have causes we don’t know about, but in theory we could be wrong - no matter how unlikely it is. All you have to do is show how it’s metaphysically possible, and it definitely seems metaphysically possible. When you visualize something popping into being, do you really just find it impossible for there *not* to be a cause? To me my imagination clearly shows that it’s possible that nothing caused it, no matter how weird it is. Like that’s obviously a thing that could happen and there’s no being that did anything, even if God was there.
There is a being that did something: you decided to imagine it. It is not metaphysically possible for something to begin without a cause, and saying that you can imagine it is like saying you can imagine a square circle. If you claim to have done it you must not understand what a circle or a square is, and anyone who claims to imagine something beginning without a cause doesn’t understand what a cause or a beginning is.
But I’m not existent in that world that I’m conceiving of. I exist in a world here and now where I’m conceiving something, but I don’t exist in the world that I’m conceiving. If what you’re saying is really the case, then it’s literally inconceivable for you to not be the cause of something because you (allegedly) can’t conceive of a world where you are not the cause of something in that world because you are the one conceiving it. But that’s absurd, because people cause things all the time. Conceiving something is not the same thing as causing something. You may cause a mental representation of that thing, but it’s not the thing itself.
Can you describe “The beginning of everything” in a way that’s qualitatively different from “Before this point there was nothing, including time or space”? I still don’t see a difference between “nothing, then X” and “the beginning of X”. If there isn’t anything brighter than the sun, then nothing is indeed brighter than the sun.
A few minor quibbles here:
1. Regarding the "I can conceive of a causeless beginning" move, it might be worth looking at Anscombe's paper which responds to Hume on this topic. It may not convince, but it's a fairly canonical text in this literature: https://www.jstor.org/stable/3327630?searchText=&searchUri=&ab_segments=&searchKey=&refreqid=fastly-default%3A680744fcf5ca18f5bfdad63a55078ef0&initiator=recommender
2. Craig himself no longer thinks the A-theory has to be right for the Kalam to work (I think he says this in one of his Capturing Christianity interviews).
Thanks, fixed.
Yes, I've heard the Anscombe point, I find it utterly unconvincing. Ideal conceivability isn't just about having a mental image of the thing.
Do you think that if one rejects premise one, that "everything which begins to exist has a cause," one should also reject the PSR? I think it could be argued that a cause is a type of explanation (at least for temporal things), so if something does begin to exist without a cause, there is no explanation for its existence.
A cause is a type of explanation, but usually proponents of the PSR say there are other types as well, so something could be causeless but still have an explanation. That being said, it does seem the causal principle rests on similar intuitions to the PSR. This is all the worse for the causal principle, since I think the PSR is almost certainly false (I don't even think it's metaphysically possible, whereas the causal principle is at least metaphysically possible).
I am not disputing that something could be causeless and still have an explanation. The universe might very well be like that, for instance. It just seems to me that something could not begin to exist without a cause and have an explanation for why it began to exist. Any explanation for why something did begin to exist would appear to be a cause for its beginning to exist.
To take an example from the article, let's say that a giraffe appears uncaused. I can't think of any explanation of the giraffe's appearing uncaused that would not be a cause of the giraffe appearing.
For instance, there can't be some law of the universe that a giraffe will appear at such and such time and place, nor can there be some kind of fundamental "giraffe force" that allows giraffes to appear out of nowhere because those would both be causes for the giraffe's appearance (apologies for my lack of scientific knowledge regarding both laws and fundamental forces if I'm getting anything wrong here). It seems better to say that if the giraffe began to exist without a cause, then there is no explanation for the giraffe's beginning to exist.
Essentially, since X's beginning to exist uncaused is a contingent fact, and there cannot be an explanation of this fact that does not contradict X's uncaused beginning, we appear to have a violation of the PSR. Hence, it seems to me that if one rejects premise one of the Kalam argument, one should also reject the PSR.
By the way, I don’t think I’ve seen you address Thomas Aquinas and his Five Ways yet.
Or the contemporary Thomistic philosopher Edward Feser’s work.
Do you have any views on the Aristotelian-Thomistic approach?
Both it and you are wrong on point one. It's a metaphysical category error to believe the universe began in any sense. The universe is infinite in each of the three physical dimensions; time, space, and scale. There was never nothing, only something in different forms.
The universe never began, it always existed, therefore there's no reason to even consider a creator. What applies to everything within the universe dies not apply to the universe and vice versa. Everything within the universe has a unique position in time, space and scale, as a sub-set of the infinite indistinguishable everythingness called Universe or Chaos or Aether or ( my preference ) Actuality.
Peter Brooks’ post reminded me, why not take the KCP to be continently true like Andrew Loke does? Solves the whole conceivability thing
One thing I thought you were going to mention but that didn't end up being mentioned is that even if the past is finite, that doesn't mean there was a first moment of the past. Thus, it could be that the past is finite, and yet the universe still didn't begin to exist.
Wait, why? Wouldn't the first moment just be the moment most distant in the past.
There doesn't have to be a moment most distant in the past. The past could be like the open interval (0,1). E.g., the universe could be exactly 13.8 billion years old, such that if you go back in time, there are points closer and closer to 13.8 Gya, but no moment exactly 13.8 Gya.
Weird!
first of all, being new here, im utterly shocked and confused to find youre both a theist and a utilitarian? do i have that right? thats fascinating.
re this essay, one thing that strikes me about this argument against the cosmological argument is that you dont find the cosmological argument compelling for the same reasons you find other abductive arguments compelling. your version of theism, if i understand you, entails that a perfectly good god would cause the world to exist. and a non-contingent, causing-god does the explanatory work of the world existing more simply than the many brut facts and remainders entailed by naturalism.
Yes, I'm a theist and a utilitarian! I think theism and hedonistic utilitarianism are hard to reconcile, but there's nothing particularly incompatible about combining theism with a theory of utilitarianism on which lots of things--e.g. relationships--can be intrinsically good for a person.
Yeah, your second paragraph sums it up well! The only quibble I'd have is that I think God is probably contingent. But still: better to have one brute fact of the utmost simplicity--God exists--than the concoction of naturalistic brute facts.
it seems intuitive to me that a perfect god would be ontologically simple - so, non-contingent and self-explaining. if contingent, his existence would beg further explanation, so, less simple.
Appreciate your blog. Always thought provoking.
One observation/question: how are your objections fundamentally different from Kant's Antinomies? Specifically, Kant argues that causality, space/time, finite/infinite, supreme being are unresolvable via pure reason alone.
Yes, I know Kant went on from there to postulate some transcendent reality, and the assertion turned out to be rather provocative for the history of philosophy (e.g., analytic vs. continental schools of philosophy).
Yet, just for a moment pausing on the antinomies themselves, how are they still not valid?
Merci!
I think pure reason can show God exists.