The First Cause Argument
Offline The First Cause Argument is commonly invoked to prove the existence of God. I'm sure that nearly everyone here is familiar with it, but for the sake of completeness, it goes something like this:
Everything in the universe that exists is an effect of prior causes. We can trace the causes of these effects, which are in turn effects of other causes. We can't have an infinite regress of causes, as that would have required an infinite amount of time to pass before we reached the current state of affairs. Therefore, there must be an effect that was not caused, a first cause. That first cause is God.
The traditional response is that the argument contradicts itself. Either everything must have a cause, in which case God must as well (and the first cause disappears), or not everything requires a cause. We know that at the scale of quantum effects, cause and effect get a bit unclear. Some quantum phenomena do not require causes, but simply happen, or begin to exist, spontaneously, such as Hawking radiation and electron tunneling (please correct me if I am wrong on either of those counts). So, not everything requires a cause. And if not everything requires a cause, why should the universe itself require one, that cause being God? In the very first moment, the universe was small enough to be affected by random quantum fluctuations.
Therefore, in addition to the argument being self-contradictory, one of its premises is simply wrong.
I'd like to take another look at it, though. Assuming, for argument, that the first cause establishes the existence of God, and that God is omnipotent and eternal (i.e., just enough God to exist forever and cause universes, satisfying our urge for a first cause), we run into another problem. We have simply multiplied the first cause by infinity, and haven't actually resolved the infinite regression we complained about earlier. In order to hold this view, we must believe that God has existed forever before creating our universe, either doing whatever it pleases this sort of God to do an infinite number of times, or simply doing nothing. Then, at the end of that forever, God made our universe, just for us. We still have to wait forever for that to happen, though.
So, I'd like to hear what everyone here thinks about this.
Religion is a virus.
Fight the infection.
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There are a lot of assumptions in both First Cause arguments and in refutations of First Cause arguments.
The first assumption is that god (be it my personal favorite G-d or the Flying Spaghetti Monster ...) exists =within= the Universe. Since we know that some gods claim to exist =within= the Universe (FSM -- Bless His Noodley Goodness, forever and ever, R'amen.), that leaves us with the question as to whether or not some particular god =always= existed =within= the Universe. That is, was there a time such that the god in question existed and was not in the Universe and the Universe did not exist.
Since we know that FSM (Peace be upon second helpings) created the entire Universe, FSM meets the conditions of both existing =outside= the Universe and =before= the Universe existed. QED, neither FSM nor my personal favorite G-d (though spaghetti and meatballs is truly a blessing) are members of the set "everything in the universe that exists is an effect of prior causes". At which point, all arguments =against= the existence of any particular god which is being disproved collapses.
The second assumption isn't an assumption, per se, but the logical fallacy of Assuming the Conclusion. One would have to show that the CONCLUSION can only be satisfied by some god, be it my favorite G-d, FSM, or my friend in high school who insisted we were all a figment of his imagination.
The third assumption is that the Universe is not its own cause, thus providing a cause for the effect of existing in the first place. This one has some support at least.
The fourth assumption is that time is not infinite. There is nothing in any of the Physical sciences which requires that time be finite. This means that "infinite regression" arguments have all the time in the, uh, world, to work themselves out. This raises an interesting possibility, which is that the Natural Laws which might have created the Universe are themselves a product of some form of evolution -- universes spontaneously popping into existence and only hanging around long enough for us to talk about them if the laws which apply to that Universe support sustainable existence.
"Obviously I'm convinced of the existence of G-d. I'm equally convinced that Atheists who've led good lives will be in Olam HaBa going "How the heck did I wind up in this place?!?" while Christians who've treated people like dirt will be in some other place asking the exact same question."
The problem with a transcendent God, a deity which somehow exists outside of space and removed from time, is that such an entity is unimaginably alien to any possible experience or understanding of an intelligence within the domain of space/time. It would be completely impossible to say anything intelligible about such an entity, that entity would literally be unknowable. Knowledge claims about the unknowable are, of course, an admission that you literally have no idea what you're talking about. Claims that a transcendent God created the universe, created us, cares about us, damns us and saves us, answers our prayers, or interacts with the universe in any way are completely unsupportable. As well to talk about the daemon sultan Azathoth that dwells outside the universe at the heart of space and time as to make serious claims about a transcendent God.
I believe I addressed the possibility of a self-creating universe in my original post, so I won't address that further here. However, it turns out that time, at least in the past-direction, is finite. Before the initial expansion of the Big Bang, there was no time or space. If you want to go back past the first moment of expansion, you have to invoke some kind of transcendent entity, see above. Of course, even assuming that time is infinite into the past, then the present necessarily exists at some point between the forever behind us and the forever before us, and we shouldn't object to that.
Religion is a virus.
Fight the infection.
This particular argument is so prevalent, I believe it appeals to our intuition and tangible experience. I remember spending many long evenings, as a 9-11 year old trying this argument on for size. Looking at it's apparent axiomatic nature of slap you in the face self-evidence. It appeals to the sense of wonder, it still does even after having been refuted countless times. When you truly think about it, no matter what your theistic inclination, the sense of wonder is truly overwhelmingly stunning. What happened before the universe, how can we, insignificant specs of mater and energy that we are, even begin to comprehend such an event. The fact that the question is senseless doesn't make it any less enigmatic. The fact that there was no BEFORE, in the sense that we understand it, while tangent on comprehension, it really defies it completely. How can we begin to imagine a NO TIME event? How can we imagine a NO PLACE location?
I believe that the reason it has prevailed through the millennia is due to it's truly incomprehensible conclusion. It defies intuition and tortures the mind to say that we cannot possibly know, EVER, in any way shape or form. The fact that theists stomp all of that wonder with the dirty boot of GOD DID IT!, seems almost excusable and has a certain appeal to it. The more you think about it, the less sense it makes, your mind begs for a closure to the argument, an end to the potential madness... Alas it is not to be, intellectual honesty would reveal the GOD DID IT! for what it truly is. Ockham's razor would conclude ANY OTHER hypothesis to have a higher probability of being correct. Quantum foam driven, virtual space-time bubbles with nearly 0 energy, therefore allowing for an extremely large amount of time to dissipate is a much neater solution, with infinitely less assumptions than god.
Still, when I feel too wrapped up in my personal existence, bring up the cosmological argument. It always serves to show how insignificant we truly are, and yet able to comprehend the fact that we cannot comprehend.
"Don't seek these laws to understand. Only the mad can comprehend..." -- George Cosbuc
I just got done in another thread bitch slapping si fi superstition. There is no mystery to life or the universe. What is unknown now is not going to lead to invisible friends magical thinking beings OR super computers being gods who created us.
What humans have always been capable of is using their imaginations, be it the ancient myths of the past or the modern claptrap of pantheism.
Woo is woo. Be it the polytheism of the Egyptians thinking the sun was a god, or the bloodthirsty god of the Abraham three, or the claptrap of Scientology, to the new age woo of thinking we are a giant computer simulation.
THE REALITY is that all of this is merely as natural as clouds forming and manifesting into a hurricane because of the conditions of the atmosphere at the time. There is no Neptune or giant computer causing hurricanes, nor does any god of Abraham or Vishnu or Allah explain reality.
What is is simple, what is is merely non cognitive processes. No god/s no super computer manipulating us. Woo is woo, and merely a product of human imagination.
I get just as cheesed off by people who watch Star Trec and think they can treat it like a science class as I do when someone tries to use their ancient book of myth in place of science.
Our scientific method is not leading to a manipulated cause by thinking things, be they invisible beings or giant computers. Our method is merely saying that what is and what we know now is merely non cognitive processes.
Woo persists in our species because of our natural evolutionary drive to want to continue. But because we did not evolve with modern science, and our evolutionary flaw of gap filling, is the REAL reason woo in the form of gods, superstition and si fi crap, explains why all these fantastic conspiracies throughout our history exist.
We default to gap filling far too often before we actually TEST to verify. God belief, ghost belief, JFK conspiracies, Area 51, moon landing being faked, are ALL forms of superstitious claptrap.
"We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus -- and nonbelievers."Obama
Check out my poetry here on Rational Responders Like my poetry thread on Facebook under Brian James Rational Poet, @Brianrrs37 on Twitter and my blog at www.brianjamesrationalpoet.blog
I'm not sure if this unrelated rant is in response to what I wrote, but if it is, you completely missed my point. But ya, Woo is bad, people are all equal... (insert other cliche Brianism in here)
The OP was on how one treats the first cause argument, to claim that it is as natural as cloud formation and of the same category is silly.
Fun fact, the word silly can be replaced by almost any derogatory word.
"Don't seek these laws to understand. Only the mad can comprehend..." -- George Cosbuc
I did not miss the point. I just know what the end goal of their arguments are.
God=You don't know I can fill the gap with whatever I want=superstition
The believer will argue both first cause and uncaused as leading to their myth.
First cause=my god
No cause=my god
I didn't miss the point, I simply am focused on their end goal and where they want to lead us and don't like their elaborate yellow brick road.
"We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus -- and nonbelievers."Obama
Check out my poetry here on Rational Responders Like my poetry thread on Facebook under Brian James Rational Poet, @Brianrrs37 on Twitter and my blog at www.brianjamesrationalpoet.blog
Thank God! It all makes sense now. The reason you are unable to perceive logic is due to your self-admitted agenda to refute the conclusion if it leads to God, no matter the intellectual price you will have to pay. So my assertion that you are INCAPABLE of PROPER INFERENCE is confirmed. Glad a saw this.
"In this book, they list ten steps in the course of human evolution, each of which is so improbable that before it would have occurred the sun would have ceased to be a main sequence star and would have burned up the earth. They estimate the probability of the evolution of the human genome by chance to be on the order of 4∧(360)^110,000, a number which is so huge that to call it astronomical would be a wild understatement. In other words, if evolution did occur, it would have been a miracle, so that evolution is actually evidence for the existence of God”-William Lane Craig
Don't you ever want to give up posting the same shit over and over...
Great to see your back. You've been gone for a while... or at least not posting but only reading posts.
We are truly blesses by his Noodly Appendages.
All Hail his meatballs and extra sauce.
I've heard serious people trying to come forward with the idea of a naturalistic intelligent First Cause to the Universe getting frustrated by religious zelots, that I've decided to spread out the possibilities and consequences off the theories of the Origin of the Universe. I've decided not to create e new thread becase there are already plenty about this subject.
Obviously I do not want to disprove atheism or prove theism. Actually my conclusion is that this has nothing to do with both those things if your concept of Deity is "a recognized preternatural or supernatural immortal being, who may be thought of as holy, divine, or sacred, held in high regard, and respected by believers"
3 possibilities for Universe origin:
Intentional First Cause ----> Doesn't need multiple Universes/dimensions to explain the Fine-tuned Universe. Needs at least another plane of reality from where this FC acted to create our own reality. Begs the question of who or what created the FC. This question is perfectly valid in "our" reality which is contained in the known laws of logic, mathematics and physics.... however the "other" reality most likely has inconceivable laws that we don't know nothing about. Any attempt to study it is biased by our own nature from which we are forever bound to. Things that are non sensical in this Universe might not be on the other. The only thing that can be inferred to this unknown FC is that it created this Universe intentionally for the purpose of creating conscient observers, thus is intelligent and most likely conscient.
Blind First Cause (M-Theory) ----> Needs multiple universes up to a scale beyond imagination. The scale of constants, force relations and possibilities of Universes with conscient observers is close to impossible to calculate in order to explain away the Fine-tuned Universe. From here on the M-theory faces the same problems as the IFC. Who or what created the 11th dimension? Is there infinite regress in the 11th dimension? If the crash of 2 branes creates another Universe in infinite succession into the future then there will be infinitely more Universes in the future. BUT! there will also be infinitely LESS Universes in the past. How did the first 2 branes came to be?
Singularity (no cause) ----> It is a possibility to begin with but it's the one who explains less about the origin of the Universe. It doesn't explain fine-tuning and the singularity itself is complete non sensical object that sprouted from absolute nothingness. I assume that nothing can come from nothing. When you talk about quantum fluctuations that come from nothing that is not true. Those fluctuations are a emerging property of the space-time continuum! There was no space-time continuum at Time=Zero
Question: Does time even makes any sense in the big picture or is just an emerging property of THIS Universe?
Question: How to conciliate or resolve at least one of 2 paradoxical problems? ----> Infinite regress of time of causality and Existence sprouting from absolute nothingness.
What do we know? According to our best guess the Universe DID start with the Big Bang. The scale of this problem is so big that the more prudent posture is humbleness to the solution, thus every guess is valid at this time. I would go with the first 2 because they answer more than just the singularity. I prefer the first to the second because it more easily explains the fine tuning although I know I'm incurring in the Anthropic principle illusion.
We cannot answer with (relatively) absolute certainty on the unmoved mover problem..
The first cause argument may be logically valid (redefined in terms of type theory), but this does not mean it is completely sound..
In my opinion, the most logical conclusion for one who is driven to seek "the truth" is to re-align focus to extend one's life, so that you may have the chance to discover this truth in a future time.
It is otherwise futile to attempt to dig to the center of the Earth when the only tool we currently have is a hand shovel by comparison.
what do you mean by this?
After some thought and some reading, I think we can never answer this question in the boundaries of logical philosophy and scientific method.
My appeal to readers is that instead of focusing on attempting to answer questions which cannot be answered, we can shift attention to the pursuit of life extension and/or technological singularity, which will ultimately enable us to answer these questions, and hopefully escape our bleak cosmological fate.
Oh yes!
No doubt about it! It's just I like to exercise my mind with riddles like this... I've been having an affair with philosophy. But I'm less optimist than you in that particular field. I'm not convinced that even a Tec singularity can answer the question and, also, I'm skeptical about the feasibility of an Omega Point given the laws of nature
I can relate to that.
There is a website I visit (lumosity.com) explicitly for a daily dose of mental exercise. This is partly why I am here also.
Be an optimist! Have a little faith
in us geeks.