Me vs. The Theologians: The Cosmological Argument
In the comments to a previous post, a reader calling himself “Deep Thought” said that he believes in god based not on blind faith, but rather based on logical evidence. I asked him to show me the evidence for the existence of god, and he pointed me to an article by Peter Williams. The article defends various arguments for the existence of God against Richard Dawkins and his book, The God Delusion.
I’m going to deal with these one at a time. Today, I’ll address the Cosmological Argument. The argument goes like this: many events we observe are caused by prior events, but “a causal regress must terminate somewhere (lest, per impossible, it becomes infinite)”. To escape this infinite causal regress, theists say that we need a god to act as the “first mover” and set the universe in motion.
Dawkins says that this argument illegitimately assumes that god is immune to the regress problem and needs no cause. Williams responds that the entire point of this argument is to demonstrate the logical necessity of postulating an uncaused thing (which we are encouraged to identify as god).
First and foremost, this argument, even if it is valid, does not prove the existence of god. It proves the existence of an “uncaused thing”. As Dawkins points out in his book (and Williams ignores), there is absolutely no reason to reason to believe that this uncaused thing is intelligent, cares about the morality of what humans do, answers prayers, magically impregnates virgins, et cetera. If you define “god” to mean “the uncaused thing”, then this might be a proof a god’s existence. But it provides no evidence for the existence of the sort of god which people actually believe in.
In fact, none of the arguments which Williams considers provide any evidence for the religious beliefs of real people. Still, today’s argument (like the others) might provide support for some sort of Deistic god, assuming it is sound. So, if you’re a Deist, keep reading.
Why must a causal regress terminate somewhere? Williams argues that it is impossible for everything to be caused because
As soon as one asks ’caused by what?’ one can see the problem with hypothesising that everything is caused. Outside of everything is nothing, and ‘from nothing, nothing comes’.
Based on this, Williams gives a proof:
Premise 1: Some things are caused (e.g. this sentence)
Premise2: It is impossible for everything to be caused
Conclusion: Therefore there must exist an uncaused thing
Williams wants to prove that a particular theory of the universe’s temporal-causative structure (call it the “infinite chain” model) is self-contradictory. Let’s sketch the simplest possible rendering of this model: The universe has existed for an infinite length of time, and it contains an infinite set of events {En}, where n ranges over the integers; each Ei is caused by the previously occurring event Ei-1.
Williams’s proof fails because he equivocates two different meanings of “everything”. When he argues that “Outside of everything is nothing” he effectively uses “everything” to mean “the universe”. Yet, he wants to have “everything” mean “each event in the set {En}”, and thereby demonstrate an internal contradiction in the infinite chain model. The infinite chain model neither asks nor answers the question “was the universe caused by something?”; it is merely concerned with the causal structure of events occurring in an already existing universe.
In fact, what Williams does show is that the question “was the universe caused by something?” is misguided and unanswerable. This does not, however, tell us anything about god.
This did get turned around a bit, I fear. While your quote of me, above, is accurate, the article was provided for a different reason. You stated that you felt Dawkins had refuted Thomistic logic after admitting you weren’t familiar with Thomistic logic personally. This article has the same goal as St. Thomas’ original work – showing that belief in God is not irrational, but can be supported by reason. In other words, it is not meant to be positive proof for the existence of God, but logical proof that such belief is not irrational. Since Dawkins got even the goal of the arguments wrong, I was not surprised then 9or now) that there is confusion.
You also seem to deeply misunderstand Williams’ statement. Williams does not refer to ‘the universe’, he refers to ‘all things’; this ,b/>included God. His argument is that the causal chain *includes* God as what St. Thomas called the “Prime Mover”. Since everything cannot be caused, that which is not caused is God. If you insist that there is no ‘uncaused thing’, this creates the paradox that there was no first effect (no Prime Mover) and, thus, there must be nothing *at all*.
So, again – the statement is logically valid. Causation exists, therefore there must exist an uncaused thing.
sorry for the poor editing!!
It is possible for events to occur in a causative manner without there being any “first event” — the infinite chain model gives a precise description of how this is possible.
Maybe I did misunderstand Williams; his argument is rather sloppy.
Can you produce a rigorous proof that the infinite chain model is self-contradictory? Do you have empirical evidence to show that the model makes predictions contrary to what we observe in the world?
Careful, now! Williams’ argument was very clearly stated as a logical argument.
The Causa Sui nature of the argument in full is very detailed; as I metioned earlier, I heartily recommend the shorter Summa. Of, simply peruse the bibliography from Williams’ page.
In short, the quantum infinite chain proposition means nothing within Logic.
Firstly, I don’t think quantum mechanics is very relevant to what we are discussing.
Secondly, your statement that the “infinite chain proposition means nothing within Logic” is rather bizarre; what Williams is trying to do is logically demonstrate that the infinite chain model (and, more generally, any model where all events are caused) is self-contradictory.
Lastly, if you think Williams’s argument against the infinite chain model (“…Outside of everything is nothing, and ‘from nothing, nothing comes’.”) is an example of clarity and rigor… well I just don’t know what to say to that.
Man; catch the flu and take some vacation, and look what I miss!
First off, let me just point out that current cosmology has a definite beginning to the universe (the Big Bang). I’m just saying.
But let us assume, for the sake of logical argument, that existence is infinite (which was the assumption att he time of Aquinas, actually). At that point, the universe is still contingent; i.e., it is possible that it could have never existed. With the universe being contingent by nature the fact that it exists, even in infinite form, means that there must be a necessary (’sufficient’) factor that caused its existence – as Aquinas said ‘and that we understand to be God’.
Adler phrased it like this;
1. The existence of an effect requiring the concurrent existence and action of an efficient cause implies the existence and action of that cause.
2. The cosmos as a whole exists.
3. The existence of the cosmos as a whole is radically contingent (meaning that it needs an efficient cause of its continuing existence to preserve it in being, and prevent it from being annihilated, or reduced to nothing).
4. If the cosmos needs an efficient cause of its continuing existence, then that cause must be a supernatural being, supernatural in its action, and one the existence of which is uncaused, in other words, the Supreme Being, or God.
Another linguistic explanation is put this way:
1. A contingent being exists (a contingent being is such that if it exists, it can not-exist)
2. This contingent being has a cause or explanation of its existence.
3. The cause or explanation of its existence is something other than the contingent being itself.
4. What causes or explains the existence of this contingent being must either be solely other contingent beings or include a non-contingent (necessary) being.
5. Contingent beings alone cannot cause or explain the existence of a contingent being.
6. Therefore, what causes or explains the existence of this contingent being must include a non-contingent (necessary) being.
7. Therefore, a necessary being (a being which, if it exists, cannot not exist) exists.
Swinburne’s argument by Induction on the Cosmological Argument is one that I, personally, don’t care for but that is quite popular with my peers. Let me quote a fairly good glodd of his argument;
“…if only scientific explanations are allowed, the universe would be a brute fact. If the universe is finite, the first moment would be a brute fact because no scientific causal account could be given for it. If the universe is infinite, each state would be a brute fact, for though each state would be explained by the causal conditions found in prior states plus the relevant physical laws, there is no reason why any particular state holds true rather than another, since the laws of physics are compatible with diverse states. That is, although the features F of the universe at time t are explained by F at time t1 plus the relevant physical laws L, and F at t1 is explained by F and L at t2, given an infinite regress there is no reason why F or L at tn might not have been different than they were. Since F and L at tn are brute facts, the same holds for any F explained by F and L at tn. Hence, regardless of whether the universe is infinite or finite, if only scientific evidence is allowed, the existence of the universe and its individual states is merely a brute fact, devoid of explanation.
The universe, however, is complex, whereas God is simple. But if something is to occur that is not explained, it is more likely that what occurs will be simple rather than complex. Hence, though the prior likelihood of neither God nor the universe is particularly high, the prior probability of a simple God exceeds that of a complex universe. Hence, if anything is to occur unexplained, it would be God, not the universe. On the other hand, it is reasonable to appeal to God as an explanation for the existence of a complex universe, since there are good reasons why God would make such a complex universe “as a theatre for finite agents to develop and make of it what they will””
Or, ‘taken at face value it is far more probable that God exists rather than the universe; since the universe obviously exists, it is highly probable that God exists as the cause of the universe’.
As for some of your other commentary – this proof was not calculated to describe the nature of the sufficient cause, just show the existence of one.
Also, your ’simplest’ version of the universe, an infinite existence, requires that the unprovable Axiom of Choice be true, meaning that a fair number of philosophers and mathematicians would disagree with you that this is the ’simplest’ version.
That is a much more clear-headed argument than Williams gives. Thank you.
By its very nature, the universe cannot have a cause or explanation for its existence. Why is this the case? What we mean by “the universe” is essentially “the collection of everything that exists”. Suppose that the universe was caused by some thing X. This thing X must be a real existing thing, but must lie outside of the universe in order to be its cause. This a contradiction: by definition, nothing lies outside the universe. (Yes, this argument is very similar to what Williams said; this is what I meant by when I mentioned that Williams inadvertently shows that it is misguided to look for a cause for the universe. But the fact that the universe is uncaused does not preclude all the individual events within the universe from being caused.)
Sure, you can use a modified definition of “universe” which limits its scope and allows some things to exist outside it. But then the “meta-universe” (consisting of the original universe together with these “outside things”) must necessarily be uncaused an without explanation.
As for the comparative simplicity of god and the universe, Occam’s Razor is a greatly overrated epistemic tool. If a scientist makes up a very simple theory which is untested or untestable, no one thinks that “it must be true because it’s simple”. (Actually, this issue is rather subtle, and I ought to write a post about this some time.)
Also, let me address the big bang. It doesn’t say the universe has existed for a finite amount of time. This is a very common misunderstanding of the big bang model. All the model really says is that ~13.7 billion years ago the universe was in a very hot dense state and that space has expanded since then. If you extrapolate a short way backwards in time from that hot dense state using the theory of General Relativity, you find that GR predicts a singularity, i.e. a “beginning of the universe”.
It is traditional to label this singularity t=0, and reference other events in the big bang from that point in time. This, however, is done merely for convenience. Actually, physicists are pretty certain that GR breaks down under the conditions which the big bang model postulates. So, that backwards extrapolation is actually not legitimate, and we should not attach any real significance to the point in time we labeled t=0.
To understand what happened in earlier on during the big bang (prior to the end of the Planck epoch), we need a theory of quantum gravity. And we don’t have one. So, maybe there was a beginning of time, or maybe things happened differently. We don’t know.
As for the Axiom of Choice, the meaning of “axiom” in logic and mathematics is subtly different from the word’s common usage. Here’s what Dictionary.com says:
Mathematical axioms are not true or false (though they might be inconsistent with each other). When you use math to model the real world, what you do is make up some mathematical system (with any axioms you like) and then ask whether the world corresponds to the behavior of that abstract mathematical system. The axioms, and the abstract system arising from them are neither true nor false; the question is whether they successfully model the real world.
When I refer to the Axiom of Choice I mean it just as you say. The Axiom of Choice can’t really be proven or disproven; you must decide if it is or isn’t reality. Problem is, depending on your definition of ‘exists’ within the axiom it can be either self-evidently true or self-evidently false. While most mathematicians currently accept a strong AC, more and more are rejecting it as constructivists gain more influence.
Please don’t confuse ‘existence’ and ‘contingency/necessity’; You are shifting from defining the universe as ‘everything that is contingent’ (which is the definition in the argument) to ‘everything that exists’ (your statement). These are two different definitions! *Of course* the argument is meaningless if you alter definitions!
Your argument “But the fact that the universe is uncaused does not preclude all the individual events within the universe from being caused” is very similar to Bertrand Russell’s ‘just because individual brinks are small doesn’t mean that the wall is small’. The reply was ‘we aren’t saying the wall is small, we are saying the wall is *brick*”.
In the end, the Cosmological argument succeeds in a very important way – if you accept certain assumptions, there is a logical proof of the existence of an uncaused entity that exists ‘outside’ the contingent/observable universe. And there is no method of proving those assumptions untrue. Thus, belief in God, so defined, is *just as logical* as unbelief. In short, you aren’t forced to accept the existence of God, but you *are* forced to accept that those who do accept the existence of God are not acting in an illogical or irrational manner.
Defining the universe as the collection of everything that is contingent is simply the wrong definition for our purposes. It doesn’t make any sense to ask what is the cause of something that might exist, but in fact does not. What we want is an explanation for why the world is the way it is, rather than any of the other ways that it might be (including “nothing existing at all”). It is possible to find causes and give explanations locally, but not globally.
As for the Axiom of Choice: I was a bit confused about this issue. I believe the problem is that I had been thinking of the causal chain model I had laid out as a toy model of causality, with time divided into discrete chunks, and you had thought I meant it as a full, proper model reflecting the continuous nature of time. It’s true that if time is continuous, you can’t point identify a single point in time as the cause of the next point in time, since there are always more points between them. So, it’s necessary to slightly amend one’s view of what causality is. Basically, you want to define a time-evolution operator, U(X(t),T), which takes the current state of the world, X(t), and deterministically evolves it by an amount of time T (which may be negative or positive) to the state X(t+T). In this picture, you can sensibly say that the state X(t) is caused provided there exists some negative number, -tau, so that the action of U on X(t) is defined for all T in the interval [-tau,0]. (That, is if you can’t evolve the state X backwards in time at all, then it is not caused.) None of this seems terribly relevant to the Cosmological argument, which is why I initially gave a simple toy model of causality.
‘Contingent” does not mean “might exist but doesn’t” it means “does exist, but doesn’t have to”. This is not a discussion of why the universe exists as it is, but why it exists at all and *how*. And, unfortunately for your statement, the natural universe (i.e., all that exists that is not supernatural) is, by definition, contingent. Science is incapable of answering the question ‘why is there something rather than nothing?’. That isn’t a weakness of science, that is simply how the universe is. Therefore, the universe that you and I experience is contingent.
According to Dictionary.com: “Contingent: Logic. (of a proposition) neither logically necessary nor logically impossible, so that its truth or falsity can be established only by sensory observation.” Contingent things can be either existent or non-existent in fact.
But anyway, (I think) we both agree that “the universe” the set of things which do, in fact, exist. And we agree the universe is contingent: there’s no logical, a priori reason that the universe has to be the way it is, or that anything has to exist at all. The point I’ve been trying to make is that, although the universe is contingent, there cannot possibly be an explanation for it, due to the very definition of “the universe”. It will never be possible to give an answer (natural or otherwise) to the question “why is there something rather than nothing?”.
We can only answer “why are things the way they are?”-type questions locally, not globally for the universe as a whole.
Once more, although it is subtle, you are changing the definition of universe from the logical one to the common one, but that is off the point a touch.
The problem you have is that your statement “…there cannot possibly be an explanation for [the universe” is simply a statement of opinion, not a statement of logic.Until you explain, in logical terms, how a contingent thing or set cannot have an ultimate necessary cause, this is just your opinion, no more. Indeed, it is your opinion against formal logic’s forms.
I am currently finishing my first year of philosophy and have delved deeply into the cosmological argument for the end of year dissertation. My findings have been along the same lines as *Deep Thought* in that it is logically impossible for infinite regress to have taken place. First of all we are all contingent beings. However we cannot all be contingent beings without having one *prime* non-contingent being to have begun the chain. Now as Bertrand Russell Russell said in Why I am Not A Christian and the phrase that has been repeated in in this debate, tho notion of brute fact, seems to be rather missing the point for. The earth may be brute fact but isn’t it narrow minded not to look further than this concept of brute fact to how it came to be brute fact. Science is supposed to look for answers to the questions of how, logically, therefore science cannot reject the logical argument for God just because it smarts of the supernatural. What I am trying to say is that there are many reasons for why his earth requires a cause that science not only cannot explain but refuses to explain. I am deeply disturbed by the misuse of the term *logic* in conjunction with God’s non-existence. Infinite regress is as illogical as God. Yes, I understand the properties of the *infinite chain* theory however I am forced to disagree with the statement that it proves that God does not exist as it cannot be an accurate way to prove infinite regress. As with Paul Davies who shows that matter cannot be destroyed, there is room for God to be infinite and beyond time. I feel that we are far too caught up in our concept of time. Before the universe existed there was no time. Now can we please remember that the Big Bang theory was written originally by Georges LeMaitre, phyisist, mathematician and Catholic Priest.
My research has led me to the logical conclusion that the earth requires a cause and that cause appears to me to be God. I am aware that many disagree but I am yet to be moved by *theory* Evidential theory is a false and *supernatural* as an religion accused of relying on folklore and myth.