The Causal God Gambit

[Cheerful Charlie]

I have been reading through some of William Craig Lane's arguments about the Kalam argument, Multiuniverse, virtual particles et al, and had a bit of a thought about Kalam sort of arguments.

We are all familiar with the concept of God of the gaps. If science doesn't know what cases X, God did it.

But I find a similar sort of argument is made in these sort of 'technical' debates. If a scientists states that virtual particles appear randomly from physical principles, and create a Uiniverse, apologists will state, that no, God causes that to happen. Since God causes it to happen, it has a cause, and it has a beginning. I call this the Causal God Gambit.

It's an assertion that attempts to shift the burden of proof to the atheist. No matter what the materialists offers as reasons to think of the Universe in a metaphysical naturalist manner, one can always play the god gambit and claim God is the cause. The problem is that one can just as easily assert that it's fairies or many Gods or no God at all, if we just make assertions. And try to shift the burden of proof.

So in the end, the Kalam arguments seems to rely on a long, tedious, longwinded march to the Causal God gambit. A loaded assertion that in the end, begs the question.

I named it that causal God gambit in light of Schopenhauer's dictum that all logical errors should be given a name so that we may easily recognize them when we meet them. It's a form of the fallacy of argument by definition.

To assert God is the cause of all things, one needs to demonstrate that God actually does exist, and causes anything at all. assuming that is not evidence.

 

[OLDMAN]

I like it, cuts to the chase and defines a long winded semi-technical sermon into something tangible.

 

[T.G.G. Moogly]

I always thought the whole "begins to exist" blather was an exercise in juvenile cleverness, another fake explanation of how gods can be real when it's obvious they are not.

 

[bigfield]

All Cosmological arguments: God is exempt from causality for reasons.

 

[Cheerful Charlie]

Epistemological problem. How do you establish the most fundamental basic levels of what is reality? Hard to do, therefore false equivalency or skepticism. So we end up with stuff like Plantinga's idea that God is properly a basic belief in need of no proof.

 

[Lion IRC]

WLC and others do NOT insist that everything comes into existence.

They agree that a past-eternal 'thing' transcends the need for a prior/first cause.

So if a past-eternal, perpetual motion universe was metaphysically plausible, then that would be a defeater of Kalam. No first cause of any kind required, neither personal entity nor spontaneous chance.

But when atheists start to talk about things 'popping into existence' out of nowhere/nothing then WLC is entitled to ask whether that idea is magic or science. And if it's science, then science would ordinarily be expected to investigate BEYOND the claim that a thing, an event, just spontaneously happened and lets leave it at that - no further investigation. End of discussion.

If science has to resort to invisible causes or unknown causes or making unsubstantiated, brute claims that there is no cause, then it is committing something worse than God-of-the Gaps. It's committing hypocrisy.

 

[T.G.G. Moogly]

WLC and others do NOT insist that everything comes into existence.

They agree that a past-eternal 'thing' transcends the need for a prior/first cause.

So if a past-eternal, perpetual motion universe was metaphysically plausible, then that would be a defeater of Kalam. No first cause of any kind required, neither personal entity nor spontaneous chance.

But when atheists start to talk about things 'popping into existence' out of nowhere/nothing then WLC is entitled to ask whether that idea is magic or science. And if it's science, then science would ordinarily be expected to investigate BEYOND the claim that a thing, an event, just spontaneously happened and lets leave it at that - no further investigation. End of discussion.

If science has to resort to invisible causes or unknown causes or making unsubstantiated, brute claims that there is no cause, then it is committing something worse than God-of-the Gaps. It's committing hypocrisy.

WLC is an idiot that can't make observations unless he wraps them up in an invisible spaceman suit. He's a perfect example of how gods begin.

 

[bilby]

WLC and others do NOT insist that everything comes into existence.

They agree that a past-eternal 'thing' transcends the need for a prior/first cause.

So if a past-eternal, perpetual motion universe was metaphysically plausible, then that would be a defeater of Kalam. No first cause of any kind required, neither personal entity nor spontaneous chance.

But when atheists start to talk about things 'popping into existence' out of nowhere/nothing then WLC is entitled to ask whether that idea is magic or science. And if it's science, then science would ordinarily be expected to investigate BEYOND the claim that a thing, an event, just spontaneously happened and lets leave it at that - no further investigation. End of discussion.

If science has to resort to invisible causes or unknown causes or making unsubstantiated, brute claims that there is no cause, then it is committing something worse than God-of-the Gaps. It's committing hypocrisy.

Saying 'I don't know', because you don't know, is the antithesis of hypocrisy.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with saying 'We observe that particles spontaneously appear out of nothing; what, if anything, causes this is unknown'.

To say anything else would be either ignorant or dishonest.

Virtual particles are observed appearing out of nothing. And we don't know whether that appearance has a cause, nor what that cause, if there is one, might be.

We do know that nobody wrote anything relevant about virtual particles hundreds of years ago; and we do know that attempts to couple this interesting phenomenon with religion are dishonest at best.

 

[Lion IRC]

Epistemological problem. How do you establish the most fundamental basic levels of what is reality? Hard to do, therefore false equivalency or skepticism. So we end up with stuff like Plantinga's idea that God is properly a basic belief in need of no proof.

Well if Sean Carroll can get away with saying that if a theory is "sufficiently elegant and explanatory", it need not be tested experimentally, (post-empirical science,) then Plantinga is in good company.

Karl Popper would be turning in his grave. Not because of Plantinga but Carroll.

 

[abaddon]

Epistemological problem. How do you establish the most fundamental basic levels of what is reality? Hard to do, therefore false equivalency or skepticism. So we end up with stuff like Plantinga's idea that God is properly a basic belief in need of no proof.

Well if Sean Carroll can get away with saying that if a theory is "sufficiently elegant and explanatory", it need not be tested experimentally, (post-empirical science,) then Plantinga is in good company.

Karl Popper would be turning in his grave. Not because of Plantinga but Carroll.

Citation needed. Where'd Carroll say that? Coming from you, it's a near certainty that the context that clarifies whatever was actually said was totally ignored.

 

[Lion IRC]

And when I post the citation you will do what....?

I'm happy to get it for you.
I just want to know whether it changes anything for you if he did say it?

 

[Lion IRC]

And by the way, I only found out about his having made those comments in an article by George Ellis and Joe Silk at nature.com

 

[abaddon]

And when I post the citation you will do what....?

I'm happy to get it for you.
I just want to know whether it changes anything for you if he did say it?

You can get the quote and supply its context to support your claim, as you should have done already when you made the claim.

 

[Lion IRC]

But such is the changing face of science and the apparent slow death of empiricism which we see from the likes of Marcello Gleisner and Lawrence Krauss as they come to terms with the reality that a (non theist) unified theory of everything is most likely never going to eventuate.

 

[Lion IRC]

And when I post the citation you will do what....?

I'm happy to get it for you.
I just want to know whether it changes anything for you if he did say it?

You can get the quote and supply its context to support your claim, as you should have done already when you made the claim.

So you want me to play Google bus boy for you and when I produce the citation it won't change anything. No. I think I will give that a miss. It's a waste of my time.
I'm not interested in whether or not you believe me. I'm interested in whether or not Carroll's statement would change anything for you. If it won't then you don't need a citation.

 

[bigfield]

Epistemological problem. How do you establish the most fundamental basic levels of what is reality? Hard to do, therefore false equivalency or skepticism. So we end up with stuff like Plantinga's idea that God is properly a basic belief in need of no proof.

Well if Sean Carroll can get away with saying that if a theory is "sufficiently elegant and explanatory", it need not be tested experimentally, (post-empirical science,) then Plantinga is in good company.

Karl Popper would be turning in his grave. Not because of Plantinga but Carroll.

And by the way, I only found out about his having made those comments in an article by George Ellis and Joe Silk at nature.com

To no-one's surprise, Sean Carroll never actually made the comment that Lion IRC has attributed to him.

The quote above is actually from Ellis & Silk:

This year, debates in physics circles took a worrying turn. Faced with difficulties in applying fundamental theories to the observed Universe, some researchers called for a change in how theoretical physics is done. They began to argue — explicitly — that if a theory is sufficiently elegant and explanatory, it need not be tested experimentally, breaking with centuries of philosophical tradition of defining scientific knowledge as empirical. We disagree. As the philosopher of science Karl Popper argued: a theory must be falsifiable to be scientific.

http://www.nature.com/news/scientific-method-defend-the-integrity-of-physics-1.16535

Here is Carroll's actual article on the subject:

https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25322

So you want me to play Google bus boy for you and when I produce the citation it won't change anything. No. I think I will give that a miss. It's a waste of my time.

Not "a waste of time" but an impossible task, since Carroll never made the comment that Lion IRC has attributed to him.

I'm not interested in whether or not you believe me. I'm interested in whether or not Carroll's statement would change anything for you. If it won't then you don't need a citation.

This is the red flag that the quote was bogus.

 

[abaddon]

So you want me to play Google bus boy for you and when I produce the citation it won't change anything. No. I think I will give that a miss. It's a waste of my time.
I'm not interested in whether or not you believe me. I'm interested in whether or not Carroll's statement would change anything for you. If it won't then you don't need a citation.

It’s standard among honest people that they won’t be disinterested about the truth while presenting arguments.

So there is a discussion among physicists that looked usable for theism somehow. Carroll’s worried that speculations might be stifled with too strict an application of falsifiability. And Ellis and Silk are concerned partly for the standards of science but also partly about public trust in science if science is perceived as overly speculative. “The fear is that it would become difficult to separate such ‘science’ from New Age thinking, or science fiction,” says Ellis (http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/blogs/physics/2015/02/falsifiability/).

Why’d you bring it up? Are you one of the exploiters of arguments among scientists who’d like to say “See how speculative science is? So why believe it?” Or “See how speculative scientific theories are? So why not believe God is a good explanation?”

Even if we relaxed the falsifiability test for God, does God have explanatory power?

 

[Cheerful Charlie]

Long ago, people like William of Okham came up with the concept of secondary causes, the idea that nature is how God does things, a set of laws working on material things, rather than a series of direct miracles by God. Thus science is the study of the material world created by God and the laws of God that run the Universe. Rene Descartes
was influential in his writing about science in agreeing with this. Thus the soul had no part in the matter of life, life was the result of the secondary laws of God acting on matter, our bodies. Our bodies were like an intricate machine, life was like the movement of the hands of the clock. What was the soul and how did it work with our body? Rene Descartes and others in the end could not demonstrate we had a soul or how it works. The empirical way of doing, that was started by the Greek medical scientists had languished, but as Science started to actually produce results was revived. And prospered with people like Newton.
Science was a bout investigating things by observation and experiment.
So now, everybody did science the same way. Rather than empty theorizing, theorizing based on observation and experimentation. An orthodox Catholic Chemist and an Atheist chemist did chemistry the same way, whether you considered the laws of chemistry a creation of God or not. Which is where we are today.

A great par of the success of experimental science was creation of tools to help our observations, microscopes, telescope, decent clocks, thermometers and other devices.

The problem here is God is highly theoretical, and metaphysical naturalism works just as well. The theist can't demonstrate god actually exists or has anything to do with the basic laws and matter of the Universe. We are back to essentially, a God of the gaps situation.

So maybe God is an explanation, or not. Or something else. Some proponents of ID admit that their designer is theoretically not God as we think of it. Maybe there are a succession of designers and the divine original designer died millenia ago. And then we have the problems of a God as WCL and others wish to demonstrate must exist has other problems, the problem of evil, free will and omniscience etc.

The theists then want to find a way to prove logically there must be a God to create the secondary causes. Atheistis who support metaphysical naturalism would like a way to prove that position for once and for all if possible. Attempts to reinvent God such as Process theology haven't been very successful.

Here is where we are today.

 

[Lion IRC]

So you want me to play Google bus boy for you and when I produce the citation it won't change anything. No. I think I will give that a miss. It's a waste of my time.
I'm not interested in whether or not you believe me. I'm interested in whether or not Carroll's statement would change anything for you. If it won't then you don't need a citation.

It’s standard among honest people that they won’t be disinterested about the truth while presenting arguments.

So there is a discussion among physicists that looked usable for theism somehow. Carroll’s worried that speculations might be stifled with too strict an application of falsifiability. And Ellis and Silk are concerned partly for the standards of science but also partly about public trust in science if science is perceived as overly speculative. “The fear is that it would become difficult to separate such ‘science’ from New Age thinking, or science fiction,” says Ellis (http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/blogs/physics/2015/02/falsifiability/).

Why’d you bring it up? Are you one of the exploiters of arguments among scientists who’d like to say “See how speculative science is? So why believe it?” Or “See how speculative scientific theories are? So why not believe God is a good explanation?”

Even if we relaxed the falsifiability test for God, does God have explanatory power?

I brought it up because Cheerful Charlie was bemoaning Plantiga's concept of 'properly basic belief'. I actually agree with Carroll and Plantiga and Gleisner et al.
Some ideas or concepts are beyond the method of empirical repeatable measurement.
And falsifiability shouldn't trump reasonableness.

 

[Lion IRC]

...A great part of the success of experimental science was creation of tools to help our observations, microscopes, telescope, decent clocks, thermometers and other devices.

This is a central point! Very important.
Scientists like Carrol and Ellis and Gleisner (and Hawking) are beginning to realise that we are at the upper limit of our ability to measure what we want to measure.
We can't build a Hadron Colider sufficient to test what we need to test. And we won't EVER be able to.