[quote]groo wrote:
[quote]Cortes wrote:
[quote]groo wrote:
groo wrote:
If there is a cause for everything then what caused the first cause (god
This I didn’t write I quoted a page that I felt gave a simple breakdown of the cosmological argument and its various critiques in a timeline fashion. The more sophisticated objections are farther along in the timeline of course and some of them have a lot of fun symbolic logic or math.
If I was trying to work on refuting it I would focus on that what we know about causes comes from us being in the universe and simply because everything in the universe has a cause this doesn’t mean the universe necessarily has one. I don’t think its particularly important to refute though since the cosmological argument as its iterated in the present says absolutely nothing about religion.[/quote]
You need to read BG’s link above.
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What defenders of the cosmological argument do say is that what comes into existence has a cause, or that what is contingent has a cause. These claims are as different from Everything has a cause as Whatever has color is extended is different from Everything is extended. Defenders of the cosmological argument also provide arguments for these claims about causation. You may disagree with the claims though if you think they are falsified by modern physics, you are sorely mistaken ? but you cannot justly accuse the defender of the cosmological argument either of saying something manifestly silly or of contradicting himself when he goes on to say that God is uncaused.
He doesn’t break it down but what defenders of the cosmological argument are defending is everything that comes into existence has a cause WITHIN THE UNIVERSE. Or if you want to rephrase everything that is contingent withing the universe has a cause. The claims are nonsensical about anything outside of the universe where we in fact have no idea what rules of logic or laws of science exist and cannot accurately say anything about them.
And while everything within the universe might be contingent and have a cause this can’t be said about the universe it self…or it can’t be taken as necessarily true.
. No one has given any reason to think that the First Cause is all-powerful, all-knowing, all-good, etc. is not a serious objection to the argument.
People who make this claim like, again, Dawkins in The God Delusion show thereby that they havent actually read the writers they are criticizing. They are typically relying on what other uninformed people have said about the argument, or at most relying on excerpts ripped from context and stuck into some anthology (as Aquinass Five Ways so often are). Aquinas in fact devotes hundreds of pages across various works to showing that a First Cause of things would have to be all-powerful, all-knowing, all-good, and so on and so forth. Other Scholastic writers and modern writers like Leibniz and Samuel Clarke also devote detailed argumentation to establishing that the First Cause would have to have the various divine attributes.
Of course, an atheist might try to rebut these various arguments. But to pretend that they dont exist that is to say, to pretend, as so many do, that defenders of the cosmological argument typically make an undefended leap from There is a First Cause to There is a cause of the world that is all-powerful, all-knowing, etc. is, once again, simply to show that one doesnt know what one is talking about.
This is sort of a rough criticism because I can’t think of anyone that argues against the cosmological argument saying that people haven’t tried to ascribe divine qualities to such a noncontingent being, more that they don’t find the arguments particularly compelling. In fact I could do the same thing for say Leibniz who Feser uses as a proponent of the cosmological argument. If we grant he’s true about that do we grant he’s true about monads and no existence of the immortal soul. Leibniz had access to some of Spinoza’s writings prepublication and while he admired it he certainly didn’t like the consequences for Christianity or Judaisim. If we say the atheists are cherry picking by ignoring Aquinas in its entirity the same claim can be made for the theist. The PSR is interesting. It is circular though even the proponents of it have generally moved toward an argument like this to counter the circularity by simply saying its not relevant:
If God exists, then the PSR for contingent propositions is true. Why? Because Gods activity ultimately explains everything. This is going to be clearest on views on which Gods activity alone explains everything, and that is going to be most plausible on Calvinist-type views, but also seems correct on any theological account that has a strong view of divine concurrence with creaturely activity. Moreover, the inference from Gods being the creator and sustainer of everything to the claim that divine activity provides the explanation of everything contingent, or at least of everything contingent that is otherwise unexplained (this variant might be needed to handle creaturely free will), is a highly plausible one. Thus, someone who has good reason to accept theism has good reason to accept the PSR.
Now one might think that this is a useless justification for the PSR if were going to use the PSR to run a cosmological argument, since then the cosmological argument will be viciously circular: the conclusion will justify the PSR, whereas the PSR is a premise in the argument.
However, recently Daniel Johnson (forthcoming) has come up with a very clever account showing that a cosmological argument based on the PSR could still be epistemically useful even if the PSR is accepted because of the existence of God (he also applies the view to the possibility premise in the ontological argument). Suppose that, as Calvin and Plantinga think, there is a sensus divinitatis (SD) which non-inferentially induces in people the knowledge that God exists at least absent defeaters and tells them something about God s power and nature.
Suppose that Smith knows by means of the SD that God exists. From this, Smith concludes that the PSR is true this conclusion may not involve explicit reasoning, and it is one well within the abilities of the average believer. Smith then knows that the PSR is true. Next, Smith sinfully and without epistemic justification suppresses the SD in himself, and suppresses the belief that God exists. If Calvins reading of Romans 1 is correct, this kind of thing does indeed happen, and it is why non-theists are responsible for their lack of theism. However, the story continues, the suppression is not complete. For instance, Smiths worshipful attitude towards God turns into an idolatrous attitude towards some part of creation. It may very well happen, likewise, that Smith does not in fact suppress her belief in the PSR, though she forgets that she had accepted the PSR in the first place because she believed in God. Indeed, this situation may be common for all we know.
Johnson then claims that Smith remains justified in believing the PSR, just as we remain justified in believing the Pythagorean theorem even after we have forgotten from whom we have learned it and how it is proved. Thus, Smith continues to know the PSR. The cosmological argument then lets Smith argue to the existence of God from the PSR, and so Smith then can justifiably conclude that God exists. Of course, unless Smith has some additional source of justification for believing the PSR, Smith has no more justification for believing that God exists than she did when she learned about God from her SD. So the argument has not provided additional evidence, but it has restored the knowledge that she had lost.
We have a circularity, then, but not one that vitiates the epistemic usefulness of the argument. Irrational suppression of a part of ones network of belief can be incomplete, leaving in place sufficient beliefs allowing the reconstruction of the suppressed belief. A similar thing happens not uncommonly with memory. Suppose I am trying to remember my hotel room number of 314. I note to myself that my hotel room number is the first three digits of p. Later I will forget the hotel room number, but remember that it is identical to the first three digits of p, from which I will be able to conclude that the number is 314. My reason for believing the number to be identical to the first three digits of p was that the number is 314, but then after I will lose, through a non-rational process of forgetting, the knowledge that the number was 314, I will be able to recover the knowledge by using a logical consequence of that very piece of knowledge. In doing so, I do not end up with any more justification for my belief about the room number than I had started out with, but still if I started out with knowledge, I end up with knowledge again.
This means that an argument where a premise was justified in terms of the conclusion can be useful in counteracting the effects of non-rational or irrational loss of knowledge. This means that the cosmological argument could be useful even if none of the arguments for the PSR given above worked, and even if the PSR were not self-evident. For some people may know that the PSR is true because they once knew that God exists. They lost the knowledge that God exists, but retained its shadow, the entailed belief that the PSR is true.
This is how they get around the argument of theoretical physics:
But that is fine for the defense of the PSR. The PSR does not say that for every contingent proposition there is the best possible kind of explanation, but just that there is an explanation, an explanation enough
If you find explanation enough compelling so be it.
This is how they use math to argue against the idea of that a necessary being is impossible…but this certainly would allow the use of math in a counter argument to the cosmological argument.
Perhaps a necessary being is impossible. Abstracta like propositions and numbers, however, furnish a quick counterexample to this for many philosophers. However, one might argue further that there cannot be a causally efficacious necessary being, whereas the unproblematic abstracta like propositions and numbers are causally inefficacious.
A radical response to this is to question the dogma that propositions and numbers are causally inefficacious. Why should they be? Platos Form of the Good looks much like one of the abstracta, but we see it in the middle dialogues as explanatorily efficacious, with the Republic analogizing its role to that of the sun in producing life. It might seem like a category mistake to talk of a proposition or a number as causing anything, but why should it be? Admittedly, propositions and numbers are often taken not to be spatio-temporal. But whence the notion that to be a cause one must be spatio-temporal? If we agree with Newton against Leibniz that action at a distance is at least a metaphysical possibility, although present physics may not support it as an actuality, the pressure to see spatiality or even spatio-temporal as such as essential to causality is apt to dissipate�?�¢??the restriction requiring spatio-temporal relatedness between causal relata is just as unwarranted as the restriction requiring physical contact.
And thats just Leibniz whose ideas are already pretty far from a theistic God as conceived by most believers. If we go to Spinoza it moves even farther.
So if it makes it better than saying that our idea of causes don’t extend outside the universe…feel free to read it as I don’t find the PSR to be a compelling reason that the universe must be contingent in the same way as the parts of the universe. I also think that the PSR has nothing to say about anything outside of the universe. And goddamit Monads are fucking stupid.
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Please put “” on the stuff you copied and pasted, its very hard to differentiate from your commentary on it.
