Kalam Cosmological argument

Why not? Why not? Why not? Why?

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Compassionate conservatism - bringing you a kinder, gentler torture chamber

I don't find that at all convincing.Computer scientists are capable of creating virtual worlds and of influencing those virtual worlds, while they themselves are not part of the virtual worlds they create.

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Compassionate conservatism - bringing you a kinder, gentler torture chamber

That's a similar claim to the one made by Discreet Label in Message 33. I don't agree, as I indicated in Message 35.Let me explain the problem differently.You say "if creator totally seperate .. then this means no interaction". That's arguably correct if we are talking about the concept of "interact" that exists within the universe. But a creator outside the universe could have ways of manipulating that universe, ways that don't count as "interaction" in the sense of the word that applies within the universe. The effect of actions of the external creator would be seen by those inside the universe as uncaused events.

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Compassionate conservatism - bringing you a kinder, gentler torture chamber

You are simply assuming that matter cannot exist with space. Your "explanation" amounts to saying that you cannot conceive of matter without space and therefore it is impossible. But reality need not be responsive to the limitations in our ability to conceive. Again, you appear to be arguing that what you cannot conceive could not be. But that has never been a persuasive argument. Quite a bit of today's science is beyond what 19th century scientist could conceive. You seem to have merged two of my questions into one. I questioned your "Time cannot possibly be infinite", and it seems you are responding to that. I repeat the other question later (below)You assert "an actual infinite does not exist", but as far as I know, there is no proof of this. As far as I know, many (perhaps most) cosmologists will admit that they have not disproved an eternal universe. They take the evidence for the big bang as evidence against an eternal universe, but evidence that is less than a disproof.Now let's get to that last question - the one you didn't answer. Even if time is finite, why should that imply a beginning?If, given any actual time, there was an earlier actual time, then time would have no beginning. The positive real numbers have no beginning. Given any positive real number, there is a smaller one.As I understand the Big Bang model, it describes the evolution of the early cosmos. But it does not assert that it had a beginning. The question of whether it had a beginning is unsettled. You can say that there was a virtual beginning, which we obtain by projecting backwards. This is similar to saying that 0 is a virtual beginning to the positive real numbers. But just as 0 is not itself a positive real number, the virtual beginning of the universe might not correspond to anything that ever existed, and thus there might be no event to which it corresponds.A note on logic.In a logical argument, one presents premises, and then deduces conclusion from those premises. It is impossible to deduce a conclusion, other than a tautology, unless there are premises that imply the conclusion. The "Kalam" argument pretends to deduce a far-reaching conclusion, but without any premises at all. That's an impossibility. It should be obvious that the argument depends on smuggling in unstated premises.The challenge for you, is to identify all of those unstated premises, so that you can produce a clean logical argument. As you try to do that, I think you will find the Kalam argument is circular. The conclusion is being assumed in the hidden premises.

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Compassionate conservatism - bringing you a kinder, gentler torture chamber

Hmm! This risks getting off topic. I think you may have missed the point.Consider Conway's game of life. The program deals with rules for creating cells (or, more crudely, for toggling the luminous state of pixels). Within the created virtual world there are entities such as gliders and glider guns. However the program has no rules at all for gliders or glider guns. And creatures living in that virtual world would have no concepts at all dealing with the basic cells or pixels. For those virtual creatures, the laws of nature would be those dealing with such features as gliders and glider guns.Let's bring the idea back to the Kalam argument. That argument claims that there is a designer of the virtual world. But the argument itself uses as evidence only what is observable within that world. In effect, the Kalam argument claims that you can deduce the computer program from what is observed by the behavior of the gliders and glider guns.

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Compassionate conservatism - bringing you a kinder, gentler torture chamber

Perhaps a completely different program could have produced the same virtual world. That doesn't seem relevant to the point I was making. And that point was the separation between the rules and concepts of the virtual world, and the rules and concept that were used to create the virtual world. In particular, I was responding to "You cannot have a creator outside of creation also influence creation, for it is a self contradictory expression" (Message 33). The virtual word example is a clear example of a creator outside the created world but influencing it.

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Compassionate conservatism - bringing you a kinder, gentler torture chamber

The programmer might be omnipotent and omniscient over the virtual world he has created, yet be neither omnipotent nor omniscient in his own world.I'm not sure if that is what you were asking.

The problem is that NJ is not consistent in making that assumption. For if God is separate from our world, then nothing in our world could demonstrate the existence of God. Thus the Kalam argument is doomed before it starts.

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Compassionate conservatism - bringing you a kinder, gentler torture chamber

Matter is observed to displace space. But if matter exists without space, clearly it wouldn't displace space. Your argument shows nothing.If you want to make an empirical argument for the existence of God, then go to it. We can all get out our microscopes and other instruments to see if you have provided the empirical evidence. But that's not what the argument is claiming. Rather, it claims to be a conceptual argument. Therefore you need to show what it is about the concept of matter that requires space. You have not done that. When challenged, you merely repeat the same bare assertion but provide no new evidence. Which specific law is this? Another bare assertion. And that is where you assume what you are claiming to prove. That makes your argument circular. Are you presenting a conceptual proof, or a proof by appeal to experts? It wouldn't surprise me if Hawking, Penrose and Feynman are/were all atheists, so appealing to them is not going to help your case. You are assuming what is in dispute. Again, this is circular. That's an excellent way of stating what you would need to demonstrate, in order to support your argument. But simply restating it does not in any way demonstrate it. And there is the crux of your argument. You are unable to conceive of a universe without a creator. You therefore conclude that there must be a creator.I suppose we could call it the "proof from lack of imagination." But it is really just the old proof from ignorance. That is to say, it is no argument at all.You really should look at my "note on logic" toward the end of Message 52. These ontological arguments for God claim to use logic to do what logic cannot do. Such arguments are intellectual scams. Anybody presenting such an argument is a flim flam man. The reason nobody should be a fundamentalist Christian, is that fundamentalist Christianity is fundamentally dishonest. It relies on these intellectual scams to beguile the gullible into joining the cult.

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Compassionate conservatism - bringing you a kinder, gentler torture chamber

I'm glad you recognize that. There aren't any good arguments. That's why it is always easy to knock them down. There is no burden here. You are the one claiming to present an argument. All I need do is find the flaws. It's not up to me to answer that. You made the claim it is impossible, so it is up to you to establish the impossibility. Then you should be able to take the laws, and use formal logic to conglomerate them in such a way as to prove your assertion. But I won't hold my breath waiting, for I doubt that it can be done. Again, that's no burden for me. You are the one claiming to have an argument, so it is up to you to support that claim. All I need do is point out the problems (such as undemonstrated assumptions). I'm not making an argument. I am merely pointing out the holes in your argument. The difference is that I haven't claimed to be making an argument. I simply accept that the world exists. I don't have to explain how it got here.Likewise, you could just accept that the world exists. You could even express your belief in a creator. Your problem comes when you claim to have an argument to support such a creation. Sorry to disappoint, but I don't even know what it means to be a strict naturalist. And I certainly don't claim to be something that I don't know what it means. I'm not sure why I would need to "plead the fifth." I don't go around denying "could have been"s unless I can prove that it couldn't have been. If you had merely said that there could have been a creator, I would not have challenged that. You have no idea whether or not I am an atheist. I keep my own religous views out of the debate. You are still asserting what has been challenged in your argument.If you don't want those to be challenged, you should lay them out at the beginning as assumed premises. Hmm, come to think of it, assumed premises can still be challenged, but in most cases people will simple reject the argument if they find the premises unpersuasive. It makes your argument more honest if you explicitly state the assumptions. Repeating it multiple times does not make it true. As has been pointed out, the singularity need only be a virtual point. It's a mistake to say that the world began at a singularity. You yourself have denied actual infinities, so you ought to be a bit skeptical of actual singularities. The singularity is the limiting asymptotic value if we trace the history of the cosmos backwards. But an asymptote is virtual. There is no basis for saying that the universe itself was ever at the point of singularity. That's where you run into problems with your assumption that there had to be a beginning. Given any time, maybe there had to be an earlier time. It doesn't follow that there had to be an earliest time. You have no basis for asserting that. Then I had better state my position on laws, since you have it wrong. I take it that our laws are descriptive, not prescriptive. Nature has no obligation to obey our scientific laws, except when those laws are analytic (logically necessary on account of the meanings of the terms). I take our scientific laws to be human constructs, as part of the scientific enterprise of describing the world as accurately as possible and for the benefit of making highly probably predictions.If our laws are highly reliable, that's an indication that the scientists have done there work well. If we later toss those laws (as we rejected Newtonian mechanics for relativity), that only supports the conclusion that these laws are human constructs. It is well known that with logic you can only prove what is contained in the assumptions. You can find that stated in many books on logic and many philosophy books. I have done no such thing. I have questioned your assumptions. I have not questioned any laws of physics. The argument is impenetrable only to those whose thinking is so fuzzy that they cannot see the transparent circularity. Now that's hilarious. It is your failure that you don't even understand the concepts well enough to see why I am objecting to your assumptions. I applied that terminology to fundamentalists. I did not apply it to you. It is not up to me to decide whether you are a fundamentalist. Presenting the argument in a debate is very different from using it to recruit people into an ideology.

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Compassionate conservatism - bringing you a kinder, gentler torture chamber

My point is only that the electrons and photons are not part of the virtual world created. Perhaps that virtual world has its own equivalent of photons and electrons, but that would be a function of the algorithm rather than the details of implementation.

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Compassionate conservatism - bringing you a kinder, gentler torture chamber

I would say that your points have already been refuted.

That's their gentle way of pointing out that you are making bare assertions, with not one iota of evidence to support your assertions.That counts as refutation in my book, particularly when you demonstrate that you can only repeat the assertions and cannot answer the questioners. The assertions on which you base the argument are not laws of physics. Perhaps they are laws of theology or laws of rhetoric, for I rarely see them used except in rhetorical presentations by theologians. Maybe they were considered natural laws at the time of Aristotle, but we are well past the mistakes of that era.Edited by nwr, : fix typo

That's an assumption you are bringing to the argument. There is no law of physics stating that everything has a cause. And there is evidence to suggest otherwise, some of it pointed out by Percy in Message 114. That's another assumption you bring to the argument. Even if it were true that everything has a cause, it would not follow that there was a necessity for a first cause.A particular event might be caused by an event that preceded it by 1/2 second. In turn, that might be caused by an event preceding it by 1/4 of a second. And that, in turn, might have been caused by and event that was 1/8 of a second earlier. We could have a whole stream of events, all occurring within a period of 1 second, each one of them caused by an earlier event (still within that 1 second), and not a single one of those causes was a first cause.

That's not a law of cause and effect. It is a principle to be applied when measuring force. If I push against the wall, I am to conclude that the wall is pushing against me with the same force. The Material Cause: ...
The Formal Cause: ...
The Efficient Cause: ...
The Final Cause: ...That's straight from Aristotle's philosophy. It has long since been rejected by science. Most philosopers, with the exception of theologians, also reject it.