Cosmic Skeptic & Dr. Craig Discuss the Kalam

[Music] so welcome back everybody to the cosmic skeptic podcast my name is alex o'connor and i'm joined today by dr william lane craig who is uh the professor of philosophy at both houston and biola universities with two phds has famously debated god and the existence of god with an expansive array of very high profile atheists and always seeming to come out of those interactions unscathed he's also the author of more books than years i've been alive so dr craig thank you for taking the time thank you for being here on the podcast certainly alex good to be with you that number of books and your age may be a reflection of your youth i think maybe i i think uh your how prolific you are is kind of the point that i was trying to get out there um so as i said just before we got started dr craig i'm sure that most of my audience will be familiar with you and some of the things you've said but they'll be familiar with them through the lens of the atheist because in my community a lot of people have responded to your works and uh so the people who who are listening might feel as though they've heard everything you've had to say before but it's unlikely that they've really given the time to listen from the horse's mouth except in a debate scenario where they're probably going in with some biased kind of starting points so today i wanted to discuss the kalam cosmological argument and one of the principal reasons for that is because not too long ago i put out an article on my website about why i thought there was a particular version or justification for the clam cosmological argument that begs the question and i got a wealth of response from it and i also saw that you'd made a series of uh of objections that you called something like objections so bad i couldn't have made them up and that was one of them and i thought whoa maybe i'm misunderstanding something here so i thought it'd be good to sit down and talk to the man himself so just as a bit of introduction why is it that you're so well connected to the kalam cosmological argument are you the person who gave it that name i know you're incredibly well known to having popularized it so what's that connection i did my doctoral work in philosophy at the university of birmingham in england and um i did it on the cosmological argument for god's existence and in studying the history of this argument i discovered that although the argument goes all the way back to the 4th century after christ in medieval islamic theology this argument became highly developed and highly sophisticated and so i tagged the argument the kalam cosmological argument in honor of that medieval muslim tradition kalam is simply the arabic word for a point of doctrine and denotes medieval islamic theology excellent and so the form of the argument is quite impressively simple and i'm sure that most people listening will have at least heard it in passing um would it be a fair analysis to say something of the following the first premise is everything that begins to exist has a cause for its existence the second premise is that the universe began to exist and the conclusion which logically follows is that the universe had a cause yes and this is a deductive argument which means that if both the premises are true the conclusion must also be true so the only way to attack this argument the only way to raise objections is raising objections with the premises right i find that most people when they try to raise objections they jump to the second premise something like the universe beginning to exist it's quite a difficult thing to prove it seems and yet you've got quite an expansive literature on different reasons why we can know this to be the case so perhaps we can start there before talking about the first premise how can we know uh let's say philosophically because i know there are scientific ways and philosophical ways to look at this philosophically speaking how can we make that assertion that the universe began to exist i do think that the second premise is the most controversial premise in the argument and therefore the one to which i've devoted the most attention uh historically the second premise that the universe began to exist was supported by philosophical arguments it wasn't until the 20th century that there was any sort of empirical evidence for the beginning of the universe and as i looked at the various arguments that were offered historically for the beginning of the universe the finitude of the past it seemed to me that two of them stood out one would be the argument based on the impossibility of an actually infinite number of things in reality and then the other would be the impossibility of forming an actually infinite collection of things by successive addition these arguments are independent of each other even if one fails the other could still be sound and so together i think they provide very persuasive philosophical grounds for affirming the finitude of the past and hence the beginning of the universe sure so let's think about this uh the difference between an actual and a potential infinite which is the crucial distinction to make as far as i understand it is that uh an actual infinite is kind of what it says on the tin it's it's it's a an actually existing infinite number of things as it were that actually exist in reality whereas a potential infinite is something that can tend towards infinity such as dividing the space between uh two points on a ruler you can divide that infinitely but that doesn't mean that there are actually an infinite number of things between each point is that a fair analysis oh that's exactly right alex and the concept of the potential infinite dominated western mathematics and philosophy until the 19th century when george cantor german mathematician discovered the concept of the actual infinite so the notion of the of a potential infinite plays its role in calculus where we think of infinity as a limit which a process approaches but never arrives at whereas the notion of the actual internet finds its application in infinite set theory where mathematicians talk about sets that have an actually infinite number of members in them and it is absolutely crucial to distinguish these because one is not denying that the potential infinite can exist the denial is that there could be an actual infinite in the real world sure so there are two objections that to me can be derived from this idea of the distinction between the potential and actual and uh infinite the first is this there's an argument to be made that potential infinites in some way assume the existence of actual infinites for example people think that if a potential infinite is something like two spaces the space between two objects being infinitely divisible that there are somehow an infinite number of divisions between those two points and so although it's like although when you do the divisions it tends towards infinity the number of actual divisions the number of halfway points or something like that is an actually infinite number of things so that would imply that actual infinites do exist in between any two spaces what's the problem with that the problem with that is that it is guilty of a modal operator shift it is true that possibly a line is divided here and here and here and here at infinitum but it doesn't follow that there is a place here and here and here and here where the line is possibly divided that's two different claims and um i would say that a line is not a composition of points that the line is logically prior to any points that you specify on it and that therefore the possibility of potentially infinite processes does not imply an actually infinite number of points to assume that a line is a composition of points is to already beg the question in favor of the existence of an actual infinite number of things sure so uh to flesh this out let's think of a more concrete example um i'm thinking of the example of this paradox of the light bulb which you've probably come across this this is this is how i'm kind of understanding the objection in its most strong form you can imagine some kind of light bulb that that is programmed to switch on and off at particular intervals and it's programmed such that you have a length of time let's say you know 10 minutes that once half the remaining time has elapsed the switch gets hit right so so it starts off and halfway between the kind of time elapsing that the light bulb gets turned on and then halfway between the remaining time it gets turned off and halfway between the remaining time then it gets turned off and obviously the on and off switch is increasing in speed in terms of how quickly it's going on and off now the reason that this is an interesting point to raise is that by the time the actual time has elapsed it seems that you actually have a substantiation a thing that has actually happened an infinite number of times and we have to answer the question of whether the light bulb would be on and off at the end of the question but the kind of real question the real interesting part is relevant to this discussion is that if you had such a programmed light bulb it would seem not just that you've kind of got a potentially divisible uh potentially infinitely divisible space but that an actual infinite number of things has happened in a finite amount of time yes this is a paradox known as thompson's lamp after the author who invented it and the question that thompson was raising is at the end of the process will the light be on or off and there's no answer to that question because there is no causally prior state immediately prior to the final state of the lamp after it's gone through the process and so my argument would be that thompson's lamp is absurd that it it cannot exist because the there will be a causal gap between the states of the lamp in the series of switchings and the state of the lamp after the switchings are complete there is no immediate causally connected state prior to that last state uh and and therefore the state of the lamp at that last state would be literally uncaused which i think is metaphysically absurd sure so from this are we supposed to take that the lamp couldn't be programmed in such a way i mean it seems like it doesn't break any kind of on the surface i mean any kind of logical or metaphysical rule to say that you could have such a program but you're you seem to be implying that because of the conclusion it it leads to we should kind of go back and then judge that actually that couldn't be programmed in such a way well i i would say that metaphysically it is impossible because of what i just said about this causal seizure so to speak between the states of the lamp in the switching series and the state of the lamp after the switching series has ended but it's also scientifically impossible as well nobody has thought there could really be such a thing because once you get down to certain quantum distances it's impossible to switch the lamp on and off anymore the thing is purely a thought experiment it's not meant to be something that's physically realizable and so this wouldn't have any impact upon contemporary science contemporary science has no use whatsoever for the actual infinite uh contemporary science operates purely on the basis of potential infinities sure and perhaps it raises the question of whether or not there is such a thing as a minimal interval of time which i know is is an open question um we should press the reason this is important uh to the argument i mean to the kalam is that essentially we're trying to address the idea that the the universe could have been eternal because this is one of the atheist escape groups many of the time this would you say well look yes maybe there needs to be some kind of explanation for for the causes that caused everything but what if that just goes back eternally and the universe is eternal and what you're trying to demonstrate here is that the universe can't be eternal because it leads to logical absurdities oh not logical uh alex i would say metaphysical there's no logical contradiction in the notion of the actual infinite infinite set theory is a well understood branch of mathematics uh it's perfectly consistent and coherent but i maintain that when you try to instantiate it in the world of the real right the thing it leads to these absurdities and the thompson lamp illustration is an example of that second argument that i mentioned for the definitive to the past the impossibility of forming an actually infinite collection by successive addition like switchings on and off of a lamp sure so this is why we can talk about the concept of infinity in mathematical literature but that shouldn't give us reason to think that it can be substantiated in such a way that would affect the argument right yes that's right in mathematics there are just all sorts of entities for example imaginary numbers and infinite dimensional spaces and so forth that cannot be physically instantiated but they're perfectly consistent logically okay so the second objection that this raises and why it's important is that you can ask the question if an actually infinite number of things or number of events or something like that is impossible uh to to be real um in the sense that we're using the term real does god not count as an actual infinite now it's important to understand here alex that this is not an objection to either premise it would just show that the theist is going to have a problem too but it doesn't do anything to refute the argument now theists are typically well not typically universally held that god is not composed of parts a god is not an aggregate of definite and discreet elements that make up a collection and therefore the notion of god's infinity is not a mathematical notion it's not a quantitative motion it's a qualitative notion it means things like god is perfectly holy uh omniscient omnipotent uh timeless spaceless and so forth uh all of those sort of qualitative attributes go to make up god's infinity but his the infinity of god is not a quantitative concept sure um the reason why i would have immediate trouble with this is thinking about although the attributes of god that you mention are qualitatively infinite there may be some room for applying quantitative infinites for instance if god is not dormant right if god is not just a kind of impersonal being that that sits there doing nothing we have an image of god that does things that intervenes that creates universes at particular times but not at others would imply that perhaps you could ascribe to god something like an infinite series of events in terms of an infinite number of actions that he's caused unless there's some point beyond uh which god is dormant i don't see why you can't apply the same reasoning to say that if god commits actions then god has committed an actually infinite set of actions what you're raising here alex is the very interesting question of god's relationship to time and as you explained so well if there is a series of successive events in god's life then the same arguments against the infinitude of the past would apply to god that apply to the universe and therefore the classic proponents of this argument like al-khazali argue that there is a beginning of time and that god existing beyond the universe not before it not before time but beyond time is timeless um and unchanging and perfect and that therefore the arguments are inapplicable to god because god doesn't have a past so anticipating this this reply i was thinking about the concept of the afterlife and how the reason why it's not problematic to say that the afterlife is infinite is because that seems to be a potential infinite right because it kind of it starts at a certain point and tends towards infinity but there isn't already an existing uh kind of infinite set of days or something in in heaven in the afterlife the problem i see is reconciling that with what you've just said which is that god exists not kind of infinitely for an infinite amount of time but outside of time itself my understanding of the afterlife is somehow being with god right and so yeah if if if the afterlife is being with god in an infinite kind of way um doesn't that mean that the afterlife is a kind of actual infinite or or is it kind of rather than a potential i think what it implies alex rather is that god is in time the view that i defend is a rather novel hybrid view but i think it's the best view and that is that when god creates time he enters into time in virtue of his real causal relationship with temporal changing things and in virtue of his knowledge of tensed facts like what time it is now so on the view i defend god is timeless saws creation but in time from creation going forward on into the afterlife sure and it's important that you say sans creation rather than before creation because that doesn't make much sense it's like talking about before the big bang or something like that as well you always said that that's like asking what's north of the north pole right it's just it's a contradictory notion um yeah but does that imply that in order to accept all of the assumptions that you're making uh or the arguments that you're making i should say that although the afterlife is a kind of being with god it's not being with god in in his kind of timeless state you are still confined to time in the afterlife in some way so there's still how would we understand is there still like a part of god that's outside of the afterlife no no i don't think so i think god enters into time he takes on a temporal mode of existence at the creation of the world so that when god creates the first moment of time he enters into time and thereafter has the temporal mode of existence so i think god exists right now i think that in the incarnation god entered into human history in the person of christ and that in the afterlife we will enjoy what the bible calls everlasting life with god and with his son jesus christ which implies potential in infinity because everlasting is a kind of ongoing uh ongoing process so that's right does that mean that when we say god is timeless as i've heard you say a number of times we kind of mean that he he was timeless a part of him as timeless but now is a temporal being something like that well here it's so easy to be tricked by language right and i think what we have to say is that god is timeless songs creation and end time subsequent to creation and that is a non-contradictory way of stating it is that non-contradictory because the way i'm thinking of it is is god sans creation is timeless uh and so god kind of exists eternally as a timeless being but somehow at the same in the same breath exists as a temporal being as well so it's temporary creation this is a timeless spaceless existence and time and space come into being at the moment of creation which i would identify for the sake of simplicity with the big bang with t equals zero the first moment of time sure um so when we talk about so it doesn't make sense to talk about god creating the universe at a point in time right well let me um modify what i said i shared with you my understanding what i think is the best view but there are certainly other theist philosophers who hold different views of god and time for example richard swinburne alan padgett john lucas hold to a view of god existing literally prior to creation but in a sort of non-metric time that is to say a time in which you cannot distinguish successive intervals of duration uh so that there is no point a million years prior to the moment of creation there is no point one hour before creation there is this kind of amorphous time that is pre-creation time but it's not metric it doesn't have a metric to it that enables you to distinguish intervals of varying duration so there is that view out there that's not my own view but i want to say there are a number of options open to theists it's not as though the kalam argument commits you to a certain view of god in time other theists wouldn't maintain that god god is timeless just simplicity that god never enters into time i disagree with them but there are theists who would hold to that and that would be consistent with the column argument as well sure uh the reason i think this is important is because i know it's not strictly the conclusion of the kalam or maybe you think it is but i've heard you talk in the past about how once we identify that there's a cause to the universe we can say that it's a personal uh a personal cause let's say um because of the fact and i may be misunderstanding here but my interpretation was that it has to kind of do something to create a universe right and if an infinite being creates a finite thing that doesn't seem to make sense unless the the infinite being can change its nature in some sense um but how can we understand this outside of the idea of time right because my when i first heard that kind of line of thought i was thinking well are we saying there's an infinitely existing being who because at some point in time creates the universe something must change and therefore it must be a kind of conscious decision-making cause with outside without time i don't see how that how that jump can be made um i wouldn't express it exactly the way you did but i think that you're in the ballpark the problem here is how do you get an effect with the beginning from a cause which is permanent yes if the cause is truly sufficient for its effect then if the cause is there permanently the effect ought to be there permanently how in the world do you have a permanent cause but in effect it only begins to exist a finite time ago and it seems to me that the best answer to that question is that the cause is a personal agent endowed with free will because free will can initiate new effects without antecedent-determining conditions and so what i would say is that this timelessly existing free agent freely wills to create the universe and therefore time comes into being at that moment and this being enters into time at that moment so this is the problem i'm having uh is you say he wills the universe into being at that moment but how can we make sense of a term like at that moment if this being is timeless because as you say if it's an infinite being the question is if if that cause is sufficient and infinite then the effect should also be infinite implying that there was no sufficiency up to a certain point but how can you talk about points with no time this is a great question and the question here you're raising is which one is explanatory prior god's decision to create the world is simultaneous with the origin of the world they they're at the same moment the first moment of time so which is explanatory prior is it the moment of time and it is at that moment that god chooses or is it rather that god makes a free choice and therefore that is the first moment of time and i would say it's the latter god's free choice is explanatory prior to the existence of the first moment of time because in the absence of some sort of a an event there would be no time it would just be timelessness you need something to happen in order for time to exist and what happens is that god freely chooses to create the universe so it's all about explanatory priority here so the the insufficiency of the cause before let's say if it's the wrong language but before the universe exists the the insufficiency of the cause which means that it hasn't existed yet uh is is prior in in explanation rather than prior in time well what i'm i'm trying to say is that what you call the insufficiency of the cause is due to the fact that the free will of this being has not chosen to create the universe the this being um has not made such a decision but the instant that such a decision is made time comes into being indeed the decision is explanatory prior to the first instant of time yeah um when you say the the free it's because of the the freedom of the being and the free being hasn't made the decision it feels like that it's begging for the word yet to be on the end of that it hasn't made the decision yet you know but it's like we're carefully avoiding that language because of the complications of time but it seems like the explanation that you're giving uh it feels to me like naturally it invokes a sense of time i i still don't quite see how it works without time well you you just have to be very careful if you're going to be philosophically precise to use tenseless verbs in your sentences and not use temporal particles like before or yet and things of that sort and i think that we can avoid those and make coherent statements for example i said psalms the universe god exists timelessly that's a tenseless verb song's the universe god uh does not freely choose to create the universe um so i i think that these statements can be correctly made if we just watch our our tenses and our uh adverbs sure so i should say to the listeners i'm going to leave uh resources and and writings that dr craig has has uh has made on on these points because there's no way you can get to the bottom of them in a podcast like this but the reason that i wanted to kind of talk about this for a little bit was because of the fact that one of the objections that has been made and i think i've made it in the past is this idea that yeah the kalam cosmological argument gets you a cause of the universe right but it doesn't get you something resembling a god um but here what we're doing is we're trying to show that in order if we if we kind of admit that the the there is a course of the universe that's outside of the universe and is therefore timeless eternal infinite whatever it may be that it does in fact have to be personal it does in fact have to have free will and some form of consciousness and so the clam actually does imply a type of cause not just a cause i i think that's does that make sense well it does to me this is al hazali's argument right for the person heard personhood of the cause of the universe this isn't original with me it's in al hazali's work and when i first read it i thought this is absolutely brilliant this is the only way that you can get a temporal effect with the beginning from a permanent cause it's if it's if you've got an agent endowed with freedom of the will who can choose to do something without antecedent-determining conditions and since that time alex i've enunciated two other arguments for the personhood of the creator one from richard swinburne based upon the distinction between personal explanations and scientific explanations and then another based upon the um causal power of the cause of the universe uh a a an unembodied mind is the best candidate for a timeless spaceless immaterial cause of the universe so i've got three arguments all leading to the same conclusion that the cause of the universe is a personal unembodied mind which is uh very close to a theistic concept sure um so what we've kind of covered then and and those points um again i'll i'll leave resources down below for people to explore i don't want to get i don't spend too much time on the same point or same objection what we've shown here is that there's a philosophical reason at least uh to think that the universe began to exist that's the second premise and this philosophical reason to think that if the if the conclusion does hold that the cause is a personal cause that's probably best described as god so i want to discuss the first premise um because a lot of the time in the literature as far as i can see people think that this is the kind of this is the kind of obvious one it's the kind of well come on of course everything that begins to exist has a cause now let's not say there is an argumentation behind it um but it seems like people are just far more willing to accept it as intuitively true do you have the same thing well actually alex that's what i think when i first enunciated the cosmological argument to me the first premise is a no-brainer i thought anybody who is intellectually honest will agree to the first premise and so i have been amazed frankly at the number of non-theists who are willing to admit that the universe began to exist i think they're impressed with the scientific evidence for the beginning the universe and therefore bite the bullet and say the universe came into being uncaused from nothing and to me that is just a compromise of women's intellectual integrity to be honest well yeah i mean to be clear if if a person accepts the second premise uh that the universe began to exist and that includes you know a lot of people will want to say well the big bang wasn't the beginning of everything but whatever was before the big bang would just be part of the universe as we're talking about it right um if we accept that premise then the listener needs to bear in mind that the only way to deny the conclusion is to as you say bite the bullet and say that something at least that begins to exist doesn't have a cause so and this this fact drove a lot of the resistance to big bang cosmology during the 20th century people like fred hoyle the proponent of the steady-state model was very explicit that it is metaphysically absurd what the big bang theory says that the universe came into being without a cause at some point in the past he said this is impossible there's got to be something before it and so he adopted or propounded his steady state theory and we've had oscillating theories vacuum fluctuation theories all sorts of alternatives to try to avoid that beginning because i think quite rightly these theorists see that if the universe truly began to exist it would be a metaphysical absurdity to say it just came into existence uncaused an interesting piece of trivia um fred hoyle is of course the man who coined the big bang theory but he did so pejoratively he was on a radio show and he said well this this big bang theory he was making fun of it and that's where we get the name from um but let's talk about this so on your website reasonable faith because i do do my research uh i found you gave three justifications for this first premise reminding the listeners the first premise is everything that begins to exist has a cause now the three justifications you give with a bit of explanation but just the just the first line is firstly that something cannot come from nothing secondly that if something can come from nothing then it is inexplicable why just anything and everything doesn't come into existence from nothing or come into being from nothing and the third point is and i quote common experience and scientific evidence confirm the truth of premise one what kind of common experience are you talking about when you say that everyday experience scientific experience we always look for causes of events that's the whole project of science and we never come across um things coming into being uncaused now immediately people will think about quantum indeterminacy uh that there seem to be events that on at least the copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics are uncaused but um two things here need to be said the argument is very carefully worded uh it does not say every event has a cause it says everything that com begins to exist has a cause right so the argument is quite consistent with quantum indeterminacy and there being uncaused events what it says is that there can't be things substances that come into being without a cause and then the second thing that i would say is that the copenhagen interpretation of quantum indeterminacy is by no means the only or the most plausible interpretation of quantum mechanics there are at least 10 different physical interpretations of the equations of quantum mechanics and some of these are as fully deterministic as uh non-quantum theory so that it's not a proven counter example in any case yes um which is something again listeners should bear in mind i i do hear a lot of people i want to reference quantum physics which is famously uh not very well understood so we've got to be careful when we when we try to do that kind of thing but i i did yeah i have a friend who says that the quantum mechanics is sort of the trump card right that a lot of people like to play they don't understand it but they just say well if quantum mechanics can be like that then any absurdity can happen yeah it's just it just shows really a lack of understanding of the theory that's not to say that there aren't um very well thought out arguments related to quantum physics uh in kind of in relation to the discussion we're having but you are right that a lot of the time you do hear it from people who are as you say using it as a trump card i've experienced that myself but there's a kind of there was an inconsistency that i that i found um which i was struggling with or an apparent inconsistency when i was when i was reading your your points on the column um okay and it's on this point right because on the one hand you say if things can come into existence without a cause then why wouldn't it be happening all the time right why wouldn't a horse or an eskimo village as you say just pop into existence out of nothing right why don't we observe that holding that in mind um in in the blackwell companion to natural theology you you are talking about this this quantum um idea that quantum mechanics gives us evidence of something coming from nothing essentially and your response to that is to say this you say popularizers touting such theories as getting something from nothing that is quantum mechanics apparently do not understand that the vacuum is not nothing but a sea of fluctuating energy endowed with a rich structure and subject to physical laws such models do not therefore involve a true origination ex nihilo okay so help me out here you say that quantum mechanics isn't an example of something coming from nothing because it doesn't come from nothing but then you say well if something could come from nothing why wouldn't a horse pop into being well my thought is that if we did observe a horse popping into being in my living room that similarly wouldn't be out of nothing right because my living room isn't nothing oh all right now here we're talking about whether there's an efficient cause for that remember aristotle distinguished between several different kinds of causes efficient material formal and so forth and when i talk about whatever begins to exist has a cause i'm thinking of efficient causes there needs to be something that brings it into being i don't think it has to have a material cause but it there does need to be at least an efficient cause that brings it into being now with respect to quantum mechanics the point there is that certain popularizers of modern science like lawrence krauss love to say that in quantum mechanics you have theories by which the universe comes into being out of nothing and in fact that's just not the case you have a physical state of affairs which is either a quantum vacuum a field of fluctuating energy or these are quantum physical fields described by physical laws and these physical states of affairs can reconfigure themselves so as to produce particles or the universe um and so there definitely are causes uh in this case for the universe or the particles coming into being yeah um uh lawrence krauss his book a universe from nothing is a fantastic overview of cosmological science but i hear this a lot of the time too people say well you know you talk about something come from nothing but nothing isn't really nothing and if that's the case then we're not talking about the same thing here um i i agree with you on that point have you read um the review in the new york review of books of kraus's uh book a universe from nothing david david albert the the philosopher of quantum physics david albert wrote a review of kraus's book and it just is excoriating for the uh sloppiness of of krause's use of the term nothing i have i have read that that review i think i read it in preparation to talk to lawrence krauss who i know follows me on twitter so i'll be careful what i say about him here and how much i agree with you on on the sloppiness of his work um uh but yeah it's worth bearing in mind that we're kind of we're talking about two different things here right when a philosopher is talking about nothing they mean as aristotle said what rock stream of they mean nothing right and so if there's some kind of quantum soup or something then that that is not actually nothing but yeah here's how i like to put it alex nothing the word nothing even though it's a pronoun it's not a referring term right it's not a singular term it's a universal quantifier it's a negative quantifier it means not anything so if i say i had nothing for lunch that is saying i did not have anything yeah because if you don't make that careful distinction and you think of nothing of something that can be can be spoken about you can make arguments like um uh in ac grayling's history of philosophy he he puts forward the argument uh nothing is brighter than the sun a candle is brighter than nothing therefore a candle is brighter than the sun right but clearly the point being raised here is that when we talk about nothing we have to be clear that as you say we're talking about um we're talking about a kind of existential qualifier we're saying no thing not the existence of universal qualifier okay yeah with jose again the importance of philosophy of language yeah in dealing with even scientific issues yeah but on that point of of equivocating terms where perhaps they they shouldn't be um i'm intrigued because a lot of the time people will say now i'm not sure if this is an argument you would make but this is what my article was on my essay was on about the the begging the question of the kalam now some people have said now when you refer to common experience i thought you might have meant something like any time we see something beginning to exist it appears to have a cause that's a common experience that a lot of people will refer to they say look you can never have something that begins to exist me beginning to exist a chair beginning to exist that doesn't have a court but of course the important point here for me was that the kind of beginning to exist we need to talk about uh in order for the column to hold in order to get our conclusion is beginning to exist from nothing surely whereas a chair doesn't begin to exist from nothing a chair begins to exist from pre-existing material and yes although it makes sense to say the chair exists now and didn't exist an hour ago what we really mean is that the material that the chair is made out of has rearranged itself or been rearranged in such a way that we now arbitrarily give it the na the label of a chair but but nothing has actually begun to exist oh oh alex i think that's just well as you say that's included in my list of arguments so bad i couldn't eat just think of your own self you began to exist it is absurd to think that you existed before your father's sperm and mother's egg united in conception for you to begin to exist you didn't exist during the jurassic period you didn't exist during the era of galaxy formation you began to exist about 18 years ago in this conception event and so don't think that beginning to exist um is something that is subverted by it's having a material cause i explicate what it means to begin to exist by saying x begins to exist at t if x exists at t and t is the first time at which x exists yeah and that is fulfilled for the chair and yourself and other things that begin to exist and the point is that when we look at the things that begin to exist we have a tremendous inductive argument that everything that begins to exist so defined has a cause it's hard to think of an inductive generalization that could be more strongly supported than that well this is where we where we have to be careful about language to make sure the point gets across as glad as i am that it's meaningful to say that i wasn't around to witness my parents conception uh i i think that when when we say it's kind of absurd yes that that you know i existed in in the jurassic period or something what i'm being careful to say here is that everything that i'm made of existed yeah at that time right fair enough and so when we talk about beginning to exist in in the sense of the common experience in order to justify premise one we're talking about beginning to exist conceptually beginning to exist as an arrangement something like this right we're not talking about actual matter becoming instantiated or something like that well yeah i don't think that it's necessarily just a matter of arrangement i mean take fundamental particles for example like electrons or quarks they're not arrangements of anything because they are fundamental particles you're raising an issue here as to whether or not there are composite objects uh things that are arrangements of symbols that are themselves not arrangements of anything and and there are certainly these sorts of fundamental particles but more to the point alex would be that the definition i gave begins to exist namely x begins to exist at t if x exists at t and t is the first time at which x exists is it's irrelevant whether or not x is a fundamental thing that is not an arrangement of prior materials or whether it is either one of those fulfills that definition perhaps i can explain why i'm having trouble with this as pertains to something like a chair which is that it seems to me that designating when that point t is is an arbitrary measure that we make subjectively right if you have a if you have a collection of wood um and you you kind of begin forming it into a chair you could say well look it's not a chair right now maybe if i bend this little bit like this and hammer in that now it's a chair it seems like to say uh this is the point here which the chair now exists is an arbitrary subjective notion that we've kind of placed upon an object it's not actually intrinsic to the object itself well i do think that that's a good point i i would say an even better example would be a building like a skyscraper when does that actually begin to exist um but there are plenty of things that aren't like that like yourself uh i think it's very clear when you began to exist and even with respect to the chair or the building we don't need to specify time t as an instant time t can be any interval of time it could be 1970 for example so this building began to exist in 1970 uh if the building existed in 1970 and 1970 was the first time at which it existed so don't think that the time at which something begins to exist needs to be to finally specify because as as you say there will be some vagueness as to when it actually begins but at the same time with regard to the universe though this is all academic because there is a very precise time which the universe begins to exist well i'm trying to move towards a distinction between the universe beginning to exist and things like chairs beginning to exist and in order to show why perhaps they don't support each other um let's say you know you have a skyscraper and you don't know particularly what time it begins to exist but you could say that it's a period of time instead still it seems that the notion of beginning to exist as we're talking about it as pertains to chairs and skyscrapers is not something it's not a uh is not an attribute of the thing but an attribute of us it's an attribute of the people observing it and giving it a label the the fact that a piece of wood becomes a chair is not something so much true of the of the word but as it is true of us because nothing about the actual material really changes in such a way that's meaningful except as we decide that it's meaningful well i i think that's a kind of anti-realist view of reality that i would have grave reservations uh about that the the chair is some kind of a mental construct that right that you make that certainly wouldn't apply in any case to fundamental particles or things that we don't think about i mean for example there was a time at which tyrannosaurus rex began to exist and if you go back far enough there were no tyrannosaurus rex prior to that and this has nothing to do with my conceiving of it or well i mean so this actually quite a helpful example talking about species so take the species of homo sapiens right i mean it clear i mean it seems to me clearly that although it makes sense to say that you know there was a point at which human beings existed and a point say you know 50 000 years before that where human beings didn't exist right but clearly the coming into existence of this species homo sapiens is something that we have put upon it okay now now granted when i said tyrannosaurus rex i was thinking of a dinosaur a flesh and blood organism i wasn't thinking of a species and similarly with homo sapiens i agree with you it isn't clear at all what is to be classed as homo sapiens they're all kind of hominids that it's very difficult to classify but nevertheless if you go back in time far enough for example 1 million bc there weren't any human beings around at that point human beings began to exist sometime later and that's an objective fact that has nothing to do with our conceptions well um allow me to try putting the same statement you just made in different words you said there's a human beings began to exist what if i said something like um because we both agreed a moment ago that the matter that makes up human beings already existed even if the human beings didn't uh what if i said something like the the matter which exists arranged itself in such a way that the we would label homo sapiens right that seems to me the same thing as saying that the homo sapiens began to exist well if if we would label it correctly but that there is an objective fact here it's it doesn't begin to exist in virtue of our labeling it the reason we label it as a homo sapiens or as a human being is because you have an organism that is recognizably human it's it's not reptilian it's not uh amphibian this is uh a hominin that is endowed with certain kinds of mental and behavioral capacities that we would count as human and the beginning of existence of that thing is explored by paleontologists and paleoanthropologists just wholly independently of us i think i've hit on our disagreement then which seems to be that you would say that we call a homo sapien a new object that begins to exist a new thing because it begins to exist whereas i would say that conceptually it begins to exist because we've decided to call it uh homo sapiens it's kind of the reverse right i think that's the disagreement we're having yeah well this gets into this question again that i mentioned whether or not you think there are really composite objects or not um and however you come down on that uh there are going to be certain entities that are not composite objects like fundamental particles like electrons and quarks and so on and i would say persons like yourself and these provide clear-cut examples of things that exist that are not just arrangements of prior matter and therefore don't have any objective reality well okay so so the reason why i wanted to to make this argument is to try and get across the point that i feel that the only thing that if anything has meaningfully begun to exist the only thing that would fulfill that criterion would be the universe itself because everything within the universe that begins to exist begins to exist in a conceptual sense only as the argument that i was trying to make but clearly you disagree with that yes right i suppose and i think i mean you're talking here about a view that is and i need to get technical it's called myriological nihilism yeah that there are no composite objects essentially yes but even meteorological nihilists recognize that there are fundamental particles that are not composites they're not aggregates of things and some like peter van in wagon would say that living things like horses and humans and persons are also not just aggregates of material because they are alive and there have for have a kind of unity to their being that goes beyond being merely an aggregate of material things so i i think the person is going to take the line of neurological nihilism well it's worse than mereological nihilism i mean he has to say that there are no fundamental objects well i'm not sure that's the case um for instance if we accept that fundamental particles exist and what we mean by fundamental particles are simply things that can't be broken down any further and so what we mean when we say beginning to exist is a rearrangement of fundamental particles in such a way that it kind of uh that it gives rise to arbitrary labeling as a new object right so that's the kind of view that i would take not that there aren't composite things but then everything that begins to exist is just an arrangement of composite things all right that's not a you mean arrangement of fundamental things yes if you break it down far enough right yes okay and that would be a consistent view it's a very radical view one that i wouldn't hold i i can't see any good reason to be a mere logical nihilist um but in any case i don't think that that would subvert the argument for the universe beginning to exist right because in that case you can rephrase the argument not such that the universe began to exist but you can say all fundamental particles began to exist sure but that but then do you see how did you see how that just completely undermines the idea of the common sense experience of things beginning to exist because although it may make philosophical sense to talk about uh fundamental particles beginning to exist we wouldn't be able to say something like we've observed it happening oh no i i think that's not right alex what it requires is a modification of the second premise not the first the first premise that whatever begins to exist has a cause would remain intact it's just that on the meteorological nihilist view very very few things begin to exist because they don't exist there are no people there are no horses there are no skyscrapers there are no chairs but if you reformulate the second premise so that it states not the universe began to exist but all the fundamental particles began to exist you get the same conclusion um okay so perhaps i can explain why because you say it's at least a consistent worldview let me try and explain why i thought this would beg the question when it came to the column was because if we accept the view that everything that begins to exist as we observe it in the world let's say is not actually beginning to exist in the meaningful sense it's just a rearrangement of pre-existing matter um and ultimately the furthest you can break it down as to fundamental particles but those existed since the beginning of the universe um meaning that in other words in the meaningful sense the only thing that began to exist was the universe right now the reason this is a problem is because to beg the question is to accept the first premise only by virtue of already having granted the conclusion now if the first premise is everything that begins to exist has a cause but the only thing that truly begins to exist in the sense we want to talk about is the universe then the first premise just becomes the universe has a cause which is identical to the conclusion no it just means that the universe would be the only instance of that first premise that i i want our your listeners to understand how radical the view is that you're expressing here it's not just that things don't begin to exist it's rather that these things don't exist at all there are no such things as chairs and planets and people and skyscrapers none of these things actually exist and that's why they don't begin to exist the only thing that begins to exist would be these fundamental particles um and so this is a i mean you can take that line if you want but it's really a radical view because i know that i exist i think descartes is quite right about that if there's one thing i can't doubt it's that i exist and i began to exist so i think this is not you know this is sort of like an academic way to try to escape the art but it's not a plausible solution the person who really is looking for truth the two the two observations i'd make is potentially first to say that on the cartesian view yes you can know you exist but i'm not sure you could therefore know that you began to exist but just on the cartesian view um but and and secondly and and kind of uh important here is that you say that by denying that things begin to exist i deny that things exist i would rather frame it as saying something like um the the limits of an object and for people who are listening what i mean by that are the boundaries of the thing the thing that make it that thing as opposed to something else right the the the definitional boundary that you put around that thing is not a property of the thing but a property of us in a way right so it it does exist conceptually so i can make sense of saying here is here is a book um but what i'm saying is that my my calling this a book and my saying that this has boundaries such that this is a book and this other thing over here is not that book is is a product of my mind right um but but it's it's like it does conceptually exist however the actual boundary itself is is an arbitrary it's a it's a mind dependence yes reality that's why i said this is a sort of anti-realism that ah extremely implausible saying that you construct reality by imagining these boundaries but these are not mind-independent realities if there were no people there would be no books and planets and galaxies and stars yeah it's a strange line of thought um i would say i would say that calling it something like anti-realism might be misleading because of the fact that i wouldn't say that nothing exists independent of the mind right i'm not saying that things existing or or rather you know existence is a product of the mind what i'm saying is that categorizing that which exists into independent objects is a product of the mind right right except for fundamentals except for fundamental articles which themselves began at the beginning of the universe now this would be the only mind independent realities on this neurological nihilist view that we just conceptually set boundaries to things and so construct the world of objects around us yeah i think one thing i've learned is is how radical the view is that i that i hold because i think you're probably writing the implications and i hadn't considered them to the fullest extent before that if i'm going to say something like um things only begin to exist as a rearrangement of pre-existing matter and the beginning to exist is a is an arbitrary metric we put on it that the only thing that exists uh definitionally as an independent object mind independently are fundamental particles and everything else that exists uh as kind of individual individually discernible objects are mind-dependent which is which is a really interesting radical implication of my view that i'll i'll give some thought and for my listeners i'll i'll try and write an explication on that on that view um so if you do take that view yeah this sort of ideological nihilism then um you're right we wouldn't have any inductive examples of things that begin to exist right the first premise would still be true that whatever begins to exist as a cause but we wouldn't have any examples of things that begin to exist other than these fundamental particles we still got all of those to deal with and that's fine but you wouldn't be able to as you say appeal to your common experience on this view yeah so so this is well that's a fair point and this is why i thought it begged the question um was because and i guess the the implications are more radical now that i think about it but the reasoning i was thinking of was well if the only thing that ever really began to exist uh was the universe then as you say that the first premise although it doesn't become the conclusion it means that the only kind of the only thing which begins to exist is the universe so when we say everything that begins to exist has a cause the only example we can think of is the universe and so by saying the first premise you're essentially believing that because you believe the universe has a cause oh no no i'm not now there i think that's a mistake alex i have actually reformulated the kalam cosmological argument to make it more modest by rephrasing the first premise in the following way if the universe began to exist then the universe has a cause second premise the universe began to exist therefore the universe has a cause so that statement of the argument would be fully in line with neurological nihilism if the universe began to exist then the universe has a cause or if the fundamental particles began to exist then they have a cause etc etc so yeah it would just mean that uh it's not begging the question uh it would just mean that you're wrong you you couldn't use this sort of inductive argument that i appealed to quite quickly right as you point out in your in your series about uh objections and about the objection of circularity in particular you say well arguments don't beg the question people beg the question right and so i would agree with you that if you reformulate the kalam or even if you keep it in the original form but use a different justification you're not begging the question my my essay was just trying to make the point that if you justify it in that inductive manner it seems to me that you're begging the question um well i i'll agree with you that the inductive argument wouldn't work if you have this kind of myriological nihilism and then i would fall back on the two metaphysical arguments which for me are the most important as opposed to the inductive argument so the the kind of other justification that you might give and the one that i found really interesting uh was saying if things can come into existence out of nothing that is if you deny the first premise then why doesn't it happen all the time right why don't things begin to exist out of nothing all the time now my first thought was to say how do we know that they don't right because to come into being out of nothing would surely imply coming coming into existence not within the universe because everything in the universe is not nothing as we've said and so to come into being out of nothing it would have to somehow come into being outside of the universe and therefore we wouldn't observe it so maybe it is happening all the time but we wouldn't be able to observe it by definition here i think you're making the same mistake that we talked about earlier when you spoke of the horse coming into being in the living room yeah thinking that therefore it's not out of nothing and what i explained there was that i'm seeing uh without an efficient cause that's what i mean by out of nothing so if things could come into being without an efficient cause it seems inexplicable why things aren't just popping into existence all around us things of different sorts because they don't need efficient causes to bring them into being this was an argument that a.n pryor developed and i found it just completely convincing so um let me how can i how can i put this um a horse how about an argument like this now i've i've heard what i think might be this kind of line of argumentation from you before but i don't want to put words in your mouth so if someone were to say something like and it seems absurd on the surface but if they said something like well what if it's the case that universes are the only thing which can come into being out of nothing right a horse can't come into being out of nothing but but there's something about the universe and we already know that the universe is a special kind of something compared to everything within the universe it seems to kind of have the we need to think about it in a different way could we not say something like well maybe things do come into being all the time except the only thing that come into being out of nothing is a universe and therefore we wouldn't be able to observe it um as ann pryor said prior to its existence the universe doesn't exist so as to constrain what can come into being or not so you can't say that only things of a certain kind can come into being without efficient causes because without their causes there just isn't anything to constrain it uh so i don't think that you can say that only certain kinds of things can come into being without efficient causes yeah now the argument that i didn't want to put it in your mouth was one that i've heard elsewhere people would say the argument that the reason you can't say that only universe can come into being out of nothing is because nothing doesn't have any properties and so therefore can't have a kind of preference for universes over other things yeah um my my response to that was to say what if the what if the the necessity of it being a universe is not a property of the nothing but a property of the thing and and let me explain myself if for example um if we human beings create a circle it has to be round right we can't create a square circle right but that's not due to a property of us that's due to a property of the circle right so in the same way although nothing has no properties and so can't prefer universes what if it can only what if only universes can come from nothing because of a property of the universe not because of a property of nothing right that's that is exactly what you would have to say because as you say properties only in here in existing things beings have properties not non-being so you'd actually it's an inherent property of the universe that it can spring into existence without a cause and i really wouldn't sense that which sounds absurd something that doesn't exist come into existence without a cause because it has a property after it's coming into yeah i mean it sounds strange but the the reason why i think it it's useful to think in in those terms or at least of the possibility of it happening is because specifically the objection that why don't things pop into existence all the time i suppose what i'm trying to do is make a at least a far-fetched case i'm trying to show at least a possibility that things could come into existence out of nothing and yet by definition we'd be incapable of witnessing it so maybe things do come into existence out of nothing all the time but because these are only universes we'll never be able to observe it we'll never be able to see it let me commend you for your method alex because by pushing these questions what you help the atheist to see is the intellectual price tag yes of his atheism and i think that's very valuable you you one of the goals of the christian apologist will be to try to raise the intellectual price tag of non-belief and if non-believer non-theism requires me to be a neurological nihilist to think that things have an intrinsic property that they can come into being that other things don't have this is all raising the intellectual price tag of non-belief for me at least alex just way way beyond what i'm willing to pay and so that's helpful that you're doing this that that is a really really interesting way of thinking about apologetics and the argument that we're having is kind of like you know what's the better deal here right because both worldviews seem at least consistent but you've got to ask yourself you know how much you're willing to sacrifice of your intuitions how much you're willing to sacrifice of the beliefs that you um think are true in order to to hold to those conclusions and the key point is taking taking the justifications that we're giving and showing what they lead to right because a lot of people consider well this argument may allow this to be the case but they don't think that if you accept that justification it can also lead over here and you don't want that right and so i think um this demonstrates this discussion has demonstrated that that every time you think of a justification for a point you're trying to raise you have to consider the implications of that justification and the other areas of philosophy it causes you to absolutely sacrifice that that's a that's a really really fascinating um way of thinking about it i think i think it's a great place to end uh end this conversation i i thank you so much for having me on today this has been an unexpectedly rich and uh thought-provoking conversation and i i really enjoyed it that's really wonderful to hear because i i i remember kind of wanting to have you on and um i didn't tell anybody uh that this this will be released without my followers knowing before it happened but if i did tell them they'd probably be saying go and yeah go and go and debate him go and go and show him what's what and and it's like i would never drink never dream of trying to do that with someone of your caliber of your caliber so i just wanted to kind of ask questions um so i'm glad to hear that that it's kind of led to this kind of conversation but especially it's gone in directions i didn't think it would go in um but it has been fascinating and i think that it's definitely going to lead for some follow-up um points that i want to make so anybody listening to this there's a good chance i'll i'll do some kind of video or some kind of essay on some of the points that we've covered because there's it's just so many things flowing out of of uh so many implications flowing out of what we've what we've spoken about but uh but dr craig thank you again for coming on it's been a real pleasure

Channel: ReasonableFaithOrg

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Rating: 4.9370966 out of 5

Keywords: Christianity, Jesus, Christ, God, World, Reasonable Faith, William Lane Craig, Cosmology, Cosmos, Universe, Creation, Naturalism, Theism, Atheism, Kalam, Existence of God, Philosophy, Theology, Science, Mathematics, Cosmic Skeptic, Time, Eternity, Infinites, Logic, Debate, Alex O'Connor

Id: EGdt2bN0x2o

Length: 73min 54sec (4434 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 19 2021