Board index ‹ Creation and Evolution

[inferior]

> Again, an infinite regression takes us nowhere. Only if the past is finite can there be a present. An actual infinite (in contrast to a potential infinite) is actually infinite. An actual infinite has no room for growth. Therefore there has to have been a First Cause, whatever it was.

What's logically contradictory about the reality we live in extending infinitely into the past?

[jimwalton]

I gave two examples. Suppose you go to the grocery store and, approaching the deli counter, you plan to take a ticket for your proper turn. But on the ticket-dispenser you see a sign that says, “Before taking this ticket, you must take a ticket from the machine on the right.” You reach for that machine, but it also has a similar sign on it. The third machine has the same sign. And the fourth. This could go on forever (which is Kalam’s point), unless you finally get to a machine somewhere in the line that allows you to take a ticket. Unless there is a beginning, there can be no present.

The second example was this: Instead of starting counting at 1, start at the first number after zero. Well, you can’t start at .9, because there’s .8, .7, etc. You can’t start at .1 because there’s .99, and there’s .999, and .9999. In other words, if we have to consider an infinite quantity of previous numbers, we can’t even begin to count.

An infinite regression cannot bring us to the present. Only if there is a beginning can there be a present. No matter what your perspective, (natural or supernatural), you must appeal somewhere to an uncaused cause.

Geisler wrote it this way: By definition, an infinite can never be traversed—it has no end or beginning. But since the moments before today have been traversed—that is, we have arrived at today—it follows that there must only have been a finite (limited) number of moments before today. That is, time had a beginning. David Hume said that it was absurd to believe there were an infinite number of moments: "The temporal world has a beginning. An infinite number of real parts of time, passing in succession and exhausted one after another, appears so evident a contradiction that no man, one should think, whose judgment is not corrupted, instead of being improved, by the sciences, would ever be able to admit it."

[inferior]

But if our reality extends infinitely into the past, your first argument doesn't address that. All it says is that if you started counting backwards you'd never reach the end. That's not a logical contradiction.

As for the second, "we can't even begin to count," that again seems to misunderstand the question. If the reality we live in extends infinitely into the past, then it never "began." It extends infinitely into the past.

Suppose for the sake of argument that the reality we live in has existed forever. Suppose you had a time machine, one that lets you observe any time in the past, just by plugging the number of years back you want to go. Plug in any number, go back to any previous time no matter how far back, and there's no logical contradiction in our little thought experiment here. Stack the exponents as high as you want. No contradiction.

Your arguments are like asking "what happens if I plug in negative infinity?", but infinity isn't a number.

The temporal world has a beginning. An infinite number of real parts of time, passing in succession and exhausted one after another, appears so evident a contradiction that no man, one should think, whose judgment is not corrupted, instead of being improved, by the sciences, would ever be able to admit it.

Got a cite for that? Even just quoting the first sentence only generates a few hits for book by Ravi Zacharias, plus a couple unrelated, and none citing a source for the Hume quote.

But take a step back and look at what's being said there. That's not an argument, it's just claiming that the conclusion is so obvious that if you can't see it, you must be an idiot. That shouldn't convince anyone.

[jimwalton]

Thanks for the conversation. My point is that we can be certain there was a beginning to the universe. This makes sense logically, in that unless we had a beginning we could not have a present, as I've illlustrated. It also makes sense scientifically, since the current scientific paradigm is that the universe had a beginning (http://www.foxnews.com/science/2018/04/ ... pened.html). It also makes sense mathematically. The expansion of the universe can be mathematically reversed and brought down to a single dimensionless point. In 2003, cosmologists Arvind Borde, Alan Guth, and Alexander Vilenkin were able to prove that since the universe is in a state of cosmic expansion, it cannot be eternal in the past but must have had an absolute beginning. According to Vilenkin, “Cosmologists can no longer hide behind the possibility of a past-eternal universe. There is no escape, they have to face the problem of a cosmic beginning.”

> If the reality we live in extends infinitely into the past, then it never "began." It extends infinitely into the past.

I'm trying to grasp this. You're saying that reality can't extend infinitely into the past because if it did, then there was no beginning, and therefore no existence in the present. Then you say "It extends infinitely into the past." I'm not catching what you're saying.

> Your arguments are like asking "what happens if I plug in negative infinity?", but infinity isn't a number.

That's actually not what I'm saying. What I'm saying is that if the past is infinite, then we aren't here to have this conversation. Therefore the past is not infinite.

> Got a cite for that?

David Hume, An Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Section XII, “Of the Academical or Sceptical Philosophy, part 2 § 125

[Dude]

The Kalam argument is awful. Both the first and second premises are completely unsupported.

[jimwalton]

I disagree. Let's break it down.

"Everything that begins to exist has a cause." This certainly seems more plausible that its denial. The idea that things that don't exist can pop themselves into existence is horrible science, illogical, and worse than magic. If you know the illogic of the idea that if something begins to exist, something else caused it to come into existence, let's hear it. I'm not aware of anything that can spontaneous cause its own existence from a state of nonexistence. What's awful about this premise?

"The universe began to exist." There is substantial scientific and mathematical support for this premise, as well as logical ones. There is strong evidence from astronomy and its mathematical observations that virtually confirm an absolute beginning roughly 13.8 billion years ago. What's awful about this premise?

Let's talk about it. As far as I can see, premises ! and 2 are quite adequately if not fully supported.

[Dude]

> What's awful about this premise?

We have never, under any circumstances, observed anything "begin to exist."

Literally all of material existence is a rearrangement of pre-existing matter.

It's a premise without any support.

> There is substantial scientific and mathematical support for this premise, as well as logical ones. There is strong evidence from astronomy and its mathematical observations that virtually confirm an absolute beginning roughly 13.8 billion years ago. What's awful about this premise?

That's not what the big bang says. The big bang says approximately 13.8 billion years ago there was a massive expansion event that developed into our current local presentation of the universe. The big bang does not say that material came into existence from nothing, just that the universe developed into its current form from this state.

There is nothing that supports the notion of a "beginning" in an existential sense.

[jimwalton]

> We have never, under any circumstances, observed anything "begin to exist."

We do all the time. My daughter-in-law is undergoing IVF. The technicians watch the sperm and egg meet and something new begins to exist. Every car that comes off the assembly line is now a car where previously it was not. I do woodworking. I shape pieces and join them, and the object I am making begins to exist as a chair, a chest, or whatever the project is. Two substances join in a chemical reaction, and a new substance is formed that was not there before (salt from sodium and chloride). It is no longer sodium or chloride, but now salt; it has begun to exist.

You may be thinking of the first law of thermodynamics: Matter can neither be created nor destroyed, but only changed in form. In actuality, this is a philosophical statement, not a scientific one. To be more accurate we'd have to say, "As far as we have observed, the amount of actual energy in the universe remains constant. That is, no one has observed any actual new energy either coming into existence or going out of existence." It actually says nothing about the universe being eternal or of having no beginning. As far as the first law is concerned, energy may or may not have been created, and then placed in a contained system of sustenance where no new energy is formed and none is lost. It simply asserts that if energy was created, then as far as we can tell, the actual amount of energy that was created has remained constant since then.

But frankly, the argument wins either way. If the universe IS eternal, then we admit that eternity is possible, and therefore God could be eternal also. If the universe is NOT eternal, it needs a cause.

> Literally all of material existence is a rearrangement of pre-existing matter.

Of course it is. But things begin to exist. It would be grossly inaccurate to say that I have existed from eternity because atoms existed. Ah, yes, "I am stardust." No, I'm me. Though I am to some extent the rearrangement of previously existing matter, I began to exist at a particular place and time in my mother's uterus.

The Earth, also, began to exist at a certain time. The fact that cosmic dust existed beforehand doesn't negate that this planet had a beginning with its agglomeration of matter. Before it was not a planet; now it is. We can trace its formation and the causal elements of its beginning.

> That's not what the big bang says. The big bang says approximately 13.8 billion years ago there was a massive expansion event that developed into our current local presentation of the universe.

An expansion from what? No one knows. The Big Bang model presupposes that all matter-energy in the universe, space, and time initially began in one point (having zero spatial and zero temporal extension). Space didn't even exist. According to current astrophysics, there was nothing that space expanded into. Space was being created as the universe expands. The universe truly began to exist.

> The big bang does not say that material came into existence from nothing, just that the universe developed into its current form from this state.

There is no scientific theory that postulates the existence of matter before the Big Bang. Some theorists propose an infinite density of energy, but with no particular substantiation of that idea.

I say, by looking at the logic and the science, the Kalam argument has plenty of support, reason, and substantiation.

[inferior]

> My point is that we can be certain there was a beginning to the universe.

You say "certain," but then you just make a questionable claim ("unless we had a beginning we could not have a present") which you've asserted but not proven. I explained why I disagreed with your assertion, and offered a challenge that doesn't try to treat infinity as a number.

BTW you're misunderstanding what the Big Bang theory is saying. I wouldn't go to Fox News for good explanations of science, but you can note that even the article you cite doesn't make the claim you make. As that article suggests we can work backward to a prediction that everything we see in the visible universe occupied a tiny volume at extremely high energy, but then that's where we stop and have to say we simply don't know what happened before that point. Our current understanding of physics is insufficient to extrapolate further back than that.

And I think you might be misreading Vilenkin, based on what he's saying in that article about the universe arising without cause from a quantum vacuum. It sounds like when he talks about the BGV theorm he's talking about the "our" universe, the visible universe we live in, and when he's talking about the universe arising without cause from a quantum vacuum he's talking about some larger, encompassing reality that makes the spontaneous formation of universes possible. But it's also (as he freely admits) a lot of speculation. I don't see anything in there that supports the stronger stance you're taking, but I didn't spend a lot of time on it.

> > If the reality we live in extends infinitely into the past, then it never "began." It extends infinitely into the past.

> I'm trying to grasp this. You're saying that reality can't extend infinitely into the past because if it did, then there was no beginning, and therefore no existence in the present. Then you say "It extends infinitely into the past." I'm not catching what you're saying.

If the reality we live in extends infinitely into the past, then it had no beginning.

That was in response to your "we can’t even begin to count" argument. You don't need to "begin to count" if the reality we live in extends infinitely into the past, so "we can’t even begin to count" makes no sense as a rebuttal. There's no need to "begin to count" because there's no beginning.

That's actually not what I'm saying. What I'm saying is that if the past is infinite, then we aren't here to have this conversation.
But your arguments to support that claim are implicitly making that kind of assumption. Otherwise why is "we can't even begin to count" even a sensible reply? The hypothesis is that the reality we live in extends infinitely into the past. Therefore it had no beginning. Therefore "we can't even begin to count" is not contradicting anything about the hypothesis.

> David Hume, An Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Section XII, “Of the Academical or Sceptical Philosophy, part 2 § 125

Thanks, I guess Ravi Z added the first sentence, which isn't in the original. In context, it still doesn't look like Hume goes beyond asserting that he thinks the idea is absurd, therefore anyone who disagrees must have corrupted judgement. That's not an argument.
And we haven't even exhausted the non-deity possibilities. If you allow that God can be timeless, why can't something that isn't a deity be timeless?

But also, what sense does it make to say that something that is timeless and unchanging is also "personal"? It makes no sense for something that is timeless and unchanging to have desires, or plans, or intentions, etc. It just "is." So if the answer here is that something has to be timeless, it's not going to be anything like what we mean by the word "person." Maybe something analogous to quantum vacuum (with spacetime being a property of universes that arise, as Vilenkin suggests, "without cause" from it).

We simply don't know. Our understanding of physics breaks down when we extrapolate backwards, before we get to a singularity.

[jimwalton]

> And we haven't even exhausted the non-deity possibilities. If you allow that God can be timeless, why can't something that isn't a deity be timeless?

Here's where the conversation lies. Since we are looking for a causal mechanism that is powerful, eternal, timeless, and personal, let's discuss the non-deity possibilities.

> what sense does it make to say that something that is timeless and unchanging is also "personal"?

Because impersonal causes must have first causes, and only personal causes can be first causes (though not every personal cause is a first cause). Kinetic energy is energy in motion; potential energy is energy stored. The only way something begins in motion is if there is a first cause. You can never have an infinite chain of causes—it regresses. Whenever we see a chain of causes, we can always ask, "Who caused it?" The first cause is always personal.

> Maybe something analogous to quantum vacuum (with spacetime being a property of universes that arise, as Vilenkin suggests, "without cause" from it).

That's not an argument, but rather a shoulder-shrugging speculation. We're after inferring the most reasonable conclusion, using evidence and logic.

> We simply don't know. Our understanding of physics breaks down when we extrapolate backwards, before we get .to a singularity.

Exactly. We are remiss to assume scientific explanations when everything we know about science hits the trashcan as we extrapolate backwards. At this point, according to our current scientific knowledge, nature did not exist at the singularity, and neither did the laws or forces of nature. But since we know the current state of the outcome, we can reasonably surmise that the causal mechanism was powerful, timeless, eternal, and personal. That's where the discussion lies now. What are the possibilities?