Do We Ever Experience Anything Begin to Exist? The Mereological Nihilism Objection to the Kalam

hey Cameron here so uh as I mentioned in the previous live stream yesterday we're not doing these countdowns anymore these like two minute countdowns for the for the videos we're gonna skip that and uh and just get directly into the content so I am Cameron bertuzzi welcome to capturing Christianity Today we're talking about a very we're focusing in on in a very interesting topic actually so it's related to the Kalam cosmological argument which is one of the arguments for the existence of God I was I was just thinking about how many arguments there are for God's existence there are a ton uh but this one is called the column cosmological argument and it includes a premise uh that goes everything that begins to exist has a cause at least in the uh the most popular forms of the argument by uh popularized by Dr William Lane Craig and others so it has this sort of causal principle everything that begins to exist has a cause and there is this very interesting philosophically interesting objection that's being raised more and more frequently these days I see it on Facebook all over the place it's on YouTube it's in uh different um interviews that you see on YouTube and everything from from atheists we'll even play a clip of one in in today's stream but it's an it's an objection from something called muriological nihilism and that's a big fancy term myriology is basically the the study of parts and holes relations and I've got an expert in muriology joining me today to discuss the subjections really like I said it's a very interesting objection the argument itself is interesting enough but so let me go ahead and bring in my guests my guest is Dr Justin nooney he's been on the show a number of times before I can't remember all of the the different shows that you've been on for I think we've done like maybe just a random q a I mean this is this was like years ago I'm thinking of the first time that you were on but one of my one of my favorite shows that we've done together was on your deontological approach to the problem of evil which is super fascinating the problem of evil is is a topic that I I keep coming back to as someone who's interested in arguments foreign against the existence of God but in any case Dr Mooney Justin it's great to have you back I'm really excited to to talk about this yeah great um thanks for having me back I'm excited to be here it has been a little while since I've been on I I had a dissertation to finish last year so yeah well well we've got um some really interesting stuff lined up for today's show so I'm really excited to to get into it but Justin is there anything that we'd like to or that you would like to sort of uh say at the very beginning of this to kind of help set up maybe what the objection is flesh out some of the details so we can understand like really what's what's kind of going on here yeah sure I mean I'll say a little bit more uh add a little bit to what you were saying about the column just so it's clear what is the argument here and what it why is it important right so it's like you said it's this popular argument for the existence of God basically tries to show that um there's got to be some kind of cause of the universe some reason why the universe came into existence and that cause it has at least some of the attributes that are traditionally attributed to God um but it relies as you said on this principle that says everything that begins to exist has a cause and uh Craig William Lane Craig who is like kind of the main defender of these are of this argument um gives I think three different Arguments for that premise um and we're just going to talk about one of them um correct yeah so so there's a I mean it's a the Kalam argument huge subject lots of different stuff to talk about um and I actually I mean to be honest I'm not persuaded at this point that Craig's version of the argument is successful um but I do have some things to say about the particular objection we're going to talk about today I I am not persuaded by this objection so anyway yeah you have other thoughts on the argument which which is uh something I love I mean I love for people to think for themselves and think through these arguments and and not just accept an argument just because it leads to a conclusion that you may want to be true anyways um yeah so help us flesh out I I guess what what we could do is just go to the clip we have a clip lined up with Alex O'Connor he actually kind of lays out this objection in a conversation with William Lane Craig that he had on his channel Alex O'Connor's uh more more well known as Cosmic skeptic and he uh he had a conversation with Dr William and William Lane Craig two and a half years ago I think somewhere around there and he raises this objection at about the 43 minute Mark so let's go ahead and play that clip it's only a minute long and then we'll kind of get your thoughts on that Justin so here here we go here's the clip 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 yeah 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 uh 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 chord but of course the important Point here for me was that the kind of beginning to exist we need to talk about 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 the label of a chair but but nothing has actually begun to exist yeah so that is the clip and again this is this is a very common objection I'm seeing it more and more that some people I mean there was this one uh atheist I can't remember the the name that they went by on Facebook but they were saying that they even denied that uh no they they didn't deny that they exist rather what they denied is that they didn't exist during the Jurassic period so he he did not yeah I asked him so if you think that nothing begins to exist then you know you obviously exist now so where were you during the Jurassic period And so his his response was that I existed but I just existed all over the place maybe something it's a very odd and strange uh view but it's it's something that that's popping up more and more often and so I thought it'd be helpful to kind of just get a professional thoughts on this so so Justin help us begin to really understand what this objection is and maybe some some different ways to to think deeper about it yeah okay so um uh so that premise in Craig's argument that says everything that begins to exist has a cause one of his ways of motivating that premise is to say Hey you know look around whenever you see something coming into existence there's something that caused it to come into existence and so this is a kind of non-deductive argument for thinking oh well then the universe will be like that too if it started to exist then it was caused to come into existence by something and then from there you know we what what is that something is it God whatever but the objection here or at least one version of it says well it's not really true that we can look around and see things coming into existence all the time and then notice oh whenever that happens they have a cause um and the reason why that's supposedly not really true is because ordinary material things according to this objection don't ever come into existence uh rather uh they they don't really ever exist at all what you have instead are just uh what are called muriological symbols and myriological symbols are just objects that have no parts uh or in the in the technical language of metaphysics we'd say they have no proper Parts um but so okay so suppose you think that there are only myriological symbols while myriological symbols you know there they would these would be something like particles or strings or you know whatever the fundamental things are but yeah quarks or whatever that the material universe is made of right and so what the um what this view is saying is that there aren't ordinary objects like people and hippos and chairs and cars there are just muriological symbols or particles or atoms or whatever you want to call them arranged as if there were things like that and then we talk as though there were things like that because that's convenient or useful or maybe ingrained in our Thinking by Evolution or something like that but it's not really true what's really true is just that there are swarms of symbols in various Arrangements um okay various geometric shapes yeah yeah um yeah so that's the objection and I mean it's an interesting objection and I think it is a serious objection so Craig is I think maybe more dismissive of this objection than I am uh he you know the the video with um we just played the clip from you know if you keep listening to it they they uh Craig and Alex talk for a while about this objection and Craig a couple of points says some pretty dismissive things and he also uh one of the one of the two references um when Craig he did like a talk like the 10 worst objections to his argument and he lists that one as one of them um I mean so I think maybe it's important to emphasize that um this view called muriological nihilism it's I mean he's right that there's a sense in which it's a radical view but it's not a fringe view this is a view that um some very smart philosophers uh defend and that a lot of people working in metaphysics take very seriously uh and so I think we should take it seriously too but I also think it's false and so um I mean maybe if you think the best way to approach this is just we can maybe talk about some of the reasons to endorse nihilism and why I'm not convinced by them and then maybe some of the reasons to reject nihilism yeah no I think that's a good way to to move forward I mean one one thing that I did want to point out is that if so someone that's raising this objection I mean usually when we raise certain objections at least this this can happen is that our objection has sort of underlying assumptions like we're assuming something as part of of our objection so like we could assume that there's uh you know a real world out there for if we're objecting on some of the grounds but there are there are different assumptions is the point here in muriological nihilism could be one of the assumptions behind this objection but there's a further question is mariological denialism actually true so you you if you you can go that route if you want to defend muralogical nihilism I think that's like you said it's a it's a way to go it's not necessarily like a fringe View and so there can be some fruitful dialogue that can happen on that level um but I suppose what I wanted to point out is that if you are raising this objection then you probably need to be aware at least at a surface level of like of the dialectic like be aware of the reasons for and against this position and be ready to defend it if it comes to that you know so uh just kind of be aware that like philosophy there's there's all sorts of different positions and uh you can't just like assert your own view as as if it's just the view and that there's no alternative or anything like that just uh just be aware of that as we go into this next part where we're going to start to analyze whether or not neurological nihilism is actually the case yeah good um that that seems right to me and relatedly it's probably a good idea to be aware of like what are the alternatives to muriological nihilism like what are the range of options here so actually maybe I should say something briefly about that um so Peter Van in wagen is a really famous philosopher he does some philosophy of religion and so you sometimes see his name around in philosophy of religion circles on the internet but he's actually best known in Philosophy for his work in metaphysics the thing that I'm I I most I know him uh most for is is actually the memes so there's there's a few memes that are that are circulating uh of him like kind of sitting back in a chair and like drinking a coffee and stuff it's just it's kind of funny because it the the meme is supposed to be like this guy he has such a reputation for being like one of the smartest philosopher like Christian philosophers alive he's just so so intelligent and so uh I don't know it's just it's funny that that's what I know most for I actually have some of his books back here and his uh his problem of book evil is his problem of evil book rather is a really really good book but um yeah sorry sorry to cut you off go go ahead continue yeah so one thing that he's known uh really known for in um philosophy is formulating this question that he called the special composition question and uh although he didn't put it exactly this way somebody else phrased his question this way um under what conditions do some things compose a thing all right so at men in his book van in wagon says you can also it sometimes helps to think of it in Practical terms like what would it take to get some things to compose a thing what would you have to do to some things in order to make another thing that has those things as its parts okay um and there are three kinds of answers to this I'm going to paraphrase are actually probably pretty close to quote Ross Cameron here he says something like this like you know some people say never right it's never true that some things compose a thing some people say always it's always true that some things compose a thing and some people say sometimes some things compose a thing and sometimes they don't okay so those are on one way of slicing up the options those are the three options but that third view which is called restricted composition uh divides up into a bunch of different sub options because there's a lot of different ways to say you know that sometimes some things compose a thing and sometimes they don't like well well when you know under what conditions yeah yeah there's a lot of different versions of that um but there's only one version of The View that says always and only one version of The View that says never because you know those don't really leave a lot of wiggle room yeah that's helpful I mean I I want to guess since you reject neurological nihilism I want to guess that you take the third option yeah I am the third option yeah I endorse restricted composition um so uh the The View that says always some things always compose a thing that's called muriological universalism uh or just universalism um and uh that view is actually very popular a lot of philosophers like that view uh but not me I don't like that yeah I mean wouldn't that entail that like you could just pick out you know 10 different random objects in the world and then say that that those 10 objects compose another object right yes yes and that's universally yep so like a common example you'll hear is according to universalism there is an object that is composed of my nose and the Eiffel Tower and nothing else so it's this weird object that has a like a scattered location and these two parts that have like nothing to do with each other and are totally different kinds of things um yeah so muriological universalism has the consequence that there are a bunch of very bizarre objects um and then and that is one of the reasons some people don't like it is because wow that seems pretty counterintuitive to think that there are all those things like that um on the other hand muriological nihilism goes in the other direction and says there aren't even the kinds of normal things that we think there are like people and hippos and trees and cars and whatnot right and that is pretty counterintuitive in its own way and so that's a reason some people don't like nihilism um but maybe let me say some maybe I could give like two examples of arguments for nihilism and then tell you why I'm not really persuaded by them sure so this is not exhaustive or anything but a couple of examples so one of the most important Arguments for muriological nihilism is that um it gets rid of a lot of problems so in uh material object metaphysics there are a bunch of puzzles about like how objects relate to each other which objects there are and are not um like so one really famous example involves a statue and a piece of clay or in some versions it's like a piece of bronze or marble and there's like this puzzle that kind of pressures one to accept the bizarre conclusion that you can have two objects in the same place at the same time and I don't think it's really important for us to get into the details of that puzzle but the point is just there are a lot of really tricky puzzles about ordinary objects and one way to solve all of those puzzles uh without um you know just kind of with it at one stroke is to just say what really aren't any composite objects none of the objects involved in the puzzles actually exist um and so uh that's one of the main motivations for myriological nihilism right it's got this puzzle design solving power to it yeah yeah that's a yeah well the the puzzle that I was thinking of and I can't remember the name I know it starts with a a th the ship of Theseus what is it hypothesis yes Theseus okay I got it right um yeah that's one that that comes to mind I think I've asked my daughter about that one I can't remember her response to it but yeah it's another one of these puzzles where it's like okay yeah how does that actually work and and if you just deny that there is no ship you know ships are there all you have are fundamental particles arranged shipwise and so that then you you sort of do away with the those puzzles so yeah I think that's uh that would you say that that's like the the primary point in its favor um it's one of the primary points it it's hard to say if it's like the main one um it might be though it is a popular one um yeah it's one of the big ones I'll say that well when I've yeah that's that's one of the the reasons that sort of appealed to me is I've thought through these issues I I've by no means have done a deep dive into myriology but uh as I you know comes across my my thinking every now and then that is one of the things I think about is is that yeah it would it would actually kind of solve these issues but then I think on the other hand and uh you'll probably get to this eventually there are other puzzles that come along with denying that there are just um any composite objects so we'll maybe talk about that later in fact there's a really good paper by Bradley retler uh where he actually argues that all or perhaps or at least most of the standard puzzles about ordinary objects can be reconstructed using only myriological symbols and and so it turns out that uh nihilism doesn't actually solve the problems after all or at least doesn't solve them in a way that is uniquely nihilist that you couldn't you know you do some other way uh so if regular is right it turns out that this what seemed like At first maybe a really strong argument for nihilism uh is not at all a strong argument for nihilism um if he's right it's kind of entirely undercut but suppose he's not right about that suppose suppose he's wrong and that as a matter of fact we can still solve all these puzzles by becoming muriological nihilists well I think there's still a serious problem here uh some people will not agree with me about how serious it is but I take intuitions extremely seriously and kind of like Common Sense views about the world extremely seriously right um and it seems to me like this is just complete given that sort of methodology this is just completely the wrong way to go about solving these puzzles and it you could compare it to this there are a bunch of puzzles and ethics there are problems about like what to do in various conceivable and sometimes actual moral dilemmas uh what is the right thing to do in controversy situations that are ethically controversial and so on right okay here's a really simple way to solve all the puzzles in ethics just be a moral nihilist say there are there are no moral facts whatsoever including relativistic moral facts right so not even moral relativism is true there's just enough morality is not a thing it doesn't exist at all okay I think uh and and actually I think most philosophers would would agree with this that's not a good way to solve the problems in ethics even though it has that feature of being able to solve them all at one stroke and to that extent it's kind of attractive right um and it seems like the problem is just that it's too revisionary like it really seems like ethics is a real thing there is such a thing as morality and uh the reason these puzzles weigh on us is because they are real problems and not something that we can just be like oh forget about that let's just say there's no morality at all um so I kind of think that way about muriological nihilism I'm like well all right the price of solving the puzzles if the price of solving the puzzles is to say there aren't really any of the things like around me in my room right now that there seemed to be that's a pretty high price yeah what I was gonna say you you gotta be a little bit careful here because the The Atheist that is that is attracted toward neurological nihilism because it's going to solve all these problems they're probably going to be uh attracted to ethical nihilism or moral nihilism uh for the same reasons and so yeah there are still I mean the more philosophically informed atheists that I know that they lean or or just full full-blown accept moral realism but um a lot of atheists online are moral nihilists and and they're they'll gladly accept that and so um we got to be careful about like using that as as the definitive reason against mariological nihilism I know that that's not what you were saying at all you were just saying that uh you know you take intuition seriously and so uh cases I mean when we're trying to do good philosophy it's it is actually more uh complicated and difficult yeah well if I could perhaps I might be able to come up with a different example like I'm not as familiar with epistemology um you know that's definitely not my area but I know there are at least some puzzles in epistemology and you could get out of those puzzles if you just started denying that there's any such thing as knowledge or justification or belief right or a philosophy of mind right like you can get out of problems about Consciousness by being in a limitivist but like almost no one in philosophy is an eliminate of this um anyway okay so yeah no that's true that's good okay yeah you can apply you can use the same kind of argument against well in a lot of different areas and you could just uh become a nothingness a complete nihilist if there's nothing there's no Puzzles Either yeah okay so that's one of the main motivations for um for muriological nihilism I'll mention one more it's not the only other one but um you know you might be moved by considerations of parsimony you might think hey look if we eliminate ordinary objects and say there's just uh you know myriological symbols um we've got a lot fewer things in the world and we've got a lot of kinds of things uh because not only do we not have individual hippos like Fiona for example we also don't have any hippos the whole kind hippo we don't need that anymore right so you get both what's called uh ontological parsimony getting rid of particular things and ideological parsimony which is getting rid of kinds of things um okay so some people might be drawn to nihilism by considerations of parsimony and here are two things that I think um uh are important challenges to that objection one is that some people are drawn to the view that parsimony only matters or matters most when it comes to fundamental things and kinds of things um but uh it's not at all clear I would say that ordinary objects are uh fundamental things and that ordinary object kinds are fundamental kinds um now I mean we could perhaps argue about this but suppose that only myriological symbols are fundamental um well then you haven't made any kind of gain in parsimony uh that matters Anyway by eliminating all the non-fundamental objects that are made up out of them um so depending on what you what kind of parsimony you think counts this argument may not actually have any Force but even if you think that um non-fundamental things count towards uh of use level of parsimony or whatever um I which I actually am inclined to think that they do I'm I'm sort of moved by this consideration you know parsimony is just one of the many features of a theory that has to be taken into account and balanced against its other pros and cons and I think it's one of the weaker um considerations uh I don't think the way some people do that it only comes into play when all else is equal but nevertheless I think that it's it's a fairly easy a very defeasable consideration it's it's it's only a weak kind of reason to accept or reject a view and so if there are good enough reasons to think that composite objects do exist uh it's going to be hard for considerations of parsimony to outweigh those um so anyway that's some thoughts about parsimony yeah yeah and parts of money I think I mean My Views on parsimony more generally is that I'm kind of aligned with swinburn and that I apply principles of parsimony when we have two competing views that are roughly on par with each other and then part summary Simplicity can help kind of break the tie but even then it's like how much weight do we want to give to Simplicity because sometimes complicated theories or hypotheses are the real like that's the one that is true so I don't know I'm I uh as of late have been less impressed with uh these sort of parsimony concerns but that's just like a personal anecdote that it's not really like an argument at all if you actually if you take the view of parsimony that you just suggested which is like the tie breaker view like it doesn't really matter unless the two theories are otherwise tied then I think it's going to be even harder to defend nihilism by appealing to parsimony because I think if they're not even close to tide um that the nihilism versus views or well let's just say nihilism versus the negation of Niles um yeah which will bring me to reasons to reject nihilism uh if if you're ready for those yeah let's go ahead and move into to some reasons against nihilism I think that'd be cool so again I'll just talk about maybe a couple of Representative ones instead of trying to do everything but one is is just an appeal to intuitions um so again philosophers disagree about how important intuitions are and so forth but I think a lot of philosophers do take intuition seriously to some extent and there are I think some good reasons to take intuition seriously to some extent um and it turns out we do see a a lot of people at any rate do seem to have intuitions that suggest that sometimes some things compose other things so um for example um consider uh consider like a case where I take a bunch of Lego bricks and I you know snap them together and construct like a little Lego house or something I think that you know I have the intuition that there is a thing here that is now made out of those Lego bricks that they compose something there's not just the bricks there there's also the house-shaped thing that's made of the bricks and it helps I think to contrast this with cases where we don't have the same intuition so for example a case from Peter Van in wagen what if um suppose you and I shook hands and I had like some really super sticky glue on my hand and when we shook hands our hands got stuck together uh my intuition in Van in wagon's intuition is we don't compose anything there's nothing there that's shaped like two people shaking hands there's just two separate objects and if there was no glue and we were just gripping hands even even more it seems to me yeah that we don't compose anything while we're shaking hands much less while we're not shaking hands right and so there are cases where it kind of seems like yeah we put things together in a certain way like you know if I Glue wood together a couple boards together now I think okay I've made some bigger object out of these two boards if I glue two people's hands together I don't think I've made a bigger object um so I you know maybe uh you'll have those intuitions maybe you won't but insofar as people have those intuitions I take that to be at least a defeasable reason to think there are some composite objects in the world yeah I mean I'm I'm 100 on board with that that that's one of the reasons why I I cannot Embrace muriological nihilism there I mean there are other versions of nihilism um and I don't even know if you'd want to necessarily call it nihilism that there are some Christian philosopher friends of mine who uh take a view and maybe there's you'll probably know the the correct like name for this but uh the view that basically there are um like fundamental particles but then also people yeah so um van in wagon's view is sometimes called organicism and his view is there are symbols myriological symbols uh and there are organisms but there's nothing else so there's no artifacts or at least inorganic artifacts um uh and no like rocks and mountains and stuff like that right that's just simples arranged in various ways but yeah there are people and other organisms as well and then Trenton Merricks has a similar view where he thinks there are people and and generally like conscious things but then other than that it's just simples um those yeah so those are not versions I'm way more attracted I'm way more attracted to something like that like that makes a lot more sense but even then like a biological organism I feel like would run into the same kind of like issues like intuitively that I would come up against when I'm thinking of like where like what if I'm trying to figure out does does do mountains exist then I would run up against something like where okay where if this mountain does exist where does it start where does it end because it seems like it's going to be kind of fuzzy like you know what what uh piece of uh Rock are you gonna you know specify as like the the end point of this uh this mountain and I think that we we'd run into some very similar issues when it comes to um organisms so like the little particles and cells you know cells will die off and you'll get new cells and uh there's I forget the the name of it but like if you were to replace all of yourself like there's a bunch of different like I don't know tricky and weird things like um with with respect to organisms I'm no biologist by any means but I do know that like cells can replace themselves and so you know it's it's just very strange I think the same kind of issues that I would have with like uh like I was saying with mountains and the existence of uh of like ordinary objects like that non-bye or non-organic uh life I would still I think probably have the same similar kinds of issues when it came to organic life but maybe those could be resolved if I yeah yeah a bit deeper no and it's true that the the problem about vagueness is uh one of the main arguments against restricted composition but it's not by itself an argument for nihilism because you can also get around it by being a Universalist and just saying oh well for any things for any symbols there's a thing that they compose and then you can just make the vagueness something in our language like we just aren't precise enough in our language when we talk about mountains to have picked out exactly one of the mountain shaped things the one that ends right here instead of like an inch bar um so it's not by itself an argument for nihilism but it is an argument against restricted composition um and it's an interesting one and an influential one that uh should again be taken seriously um well so you talked about intuition yeah you talked about intuition that's like a that's a big reason against muriological nihilism so what are some others so another one is perception um I so this is you know this is controversial as well I mean all of this is controversial but some people think that we actually perceive that there are composite objects like that I I I'm not just this view says I'm not just seeing like patches of color arranged in a certain way when I look around me I'm actually seeing uh like the oh okay these properties are co-instantiated by something and not those you know that there's an object filling this space here but not this one um and I think you know it's hard to argue for this but what I recommend that people do is just to kind of reflect on their own perceptual experience just sort of sit back and think about this look around and think like does it seem like the world is just sort of automatically presented to you as being divided up into certain objects and not others like books and tables and so on but not necessarily like the left two-thirds of a table and not like the composite of the table on this side of the room and the ceiling fan on the ceiling you know I so I actually think that there is perceptual justification for believing that there are ordinary objects and that's highly significant because perceptual um experience is normally taken to be a really important source of knowledge and a really important source of justification for our beliefs and so if you're trying to say that like our perceptual uh experience of the world is like systematically wrong about like what objects there are right that's that's pushing towards uh a radical skeptical hypothesis right it's not as bad as brain and a back kind of stuff but it is a really really revisionary uh in a certain sense uh and so I think that's an extremely powerful reason to reject or at least resist myological nihilism certainly nothing that parsimony is going to be able to defeat in my view one of the things I think that would maybe help me and the audience to help better understand the second reason from perception is to uh can you distinguish between intuition and perception yeah so an intuition at least in the in the sense that I mean is um like uh it's it's more a priori right like if you just like imagine in your head two people shaking hands and getting stuck together and then you have this sense either that they do compose something or that they don't um that would be an intuition um it's it's coming it's not coming through your sense faculties like your eyes or your ears or whatever but um when we're talking about perception what I'm thinking of at least primarily is like the five senses and what they tell us about the world right it's because I can see with my eyes that I you know see that there's a laptop in front of me there's a desk in front of me and so forth right and what I'm suggesting and and what other people have suggested is we're not merely seeing Arrangements of like color and shape that we interpret as oh okay let's say that this part of that image that I'm getting is corresponds to an object and this one doesn't I don't think we do that it seems to me that we're just sort of presented with this one is an object here and this one here right and we could like on reflection deny that but we wouldn't thereby cease being presented with the world as being a certain way we would just be saying oh well we're being misled by the way the world is presented to us I don't know if that helped it does it does and um I guess one of the objections that sort of came to mind is like well we could see it maybe as some sort of like evolutionary debunking argument like we can see why Evolution would select for beings who have this sort of perceptual faculty uh even though that there aren't these actual objects out in the world so uh what are your thoughts on that sort of objection to yeah another influence influentions of restricted composition um that says like you know it aren't our beliefs about uh what kinds of things compose and what don't what objects there are and what there aren't aren't those just shaped by like cultural factors or evolutionary factors which have nothing to do with the actual truth of those beliefs um yeah okay so a couple of thoughts about this I mean one version of the problem well all right let me actually I'll just focus on that version of the problem so so that version of the problem says hey look uh you know it's just an accident that we have the beliefs that we do about what sorts of things there are and aren't so some people say about this version of the problem that like look it actually thinking in terms of evolution it would have been adaptive for us to be able to kind of like uh organize our environment you know predict how objects are going to behave and so on and so forth um and so it's not so crazy to think that maybe we would have evolved uh correct beliefs about what objects there are um I think some people maybe make that move there's actually an even better move though in my view and that's this um it does seem adaptive that uh we we would be capable of grasping uh a priori truths that is truths that are not based um inexperience uh and so one reason why this is useful is that that's what able enables us to reason uh it's what a what enables us to do um you know like uh Math and Science physics right all that kinds of stuff right and I think you know the standard view about why is it that we're able to do physics it's not because Evolution selected for the ability to do physics it's because Evolution's selected for like us just being able to to reason and to make observations about the world and so forth right but then as a side effect of having those mental capacities we can also do physics and so one way to deal with the debunking objection against uh beliefs about ordinary objects is to say well look um it was useful for us to have like access to the a priori realm to be able to grasp the necessary truths including arguably truths about composition like when do some things compose other things and because that well sorry it was it was uh adapted for us to um be able to have access to necessary truths and because that was adaptive as a side effect we do have access to necessary truths about composition even if that itself wasn't evolutionarily useful and so now we have this kind of ability just like we have the ability to do physics that's sort of a happy accident of evolution um I don't know if that made sense did I explain that clearly enough yeah yeah no I think so um the term that came to mind that I've seen in uh when you're when you studied various evolutionary debunking arguments when it comes to like epistemology uh there's a word that gets used spandrel evolutionary spandrel I think that's the way you were thinking of like uh yes and I guess the way the story I just told works better as a story about our intuitions and it maybe not so much about our perceptions maybe there's a perceptual version of it that could be told as well um but yeah it's that's the idea is like well our capacity to to um do lots of of things that we like even to do philosophy is a spandrel right we didn't evolve to do philosophy because that was helping us survive you know on the African Savannah we evolved to be able to think because that helped us survive and once we had that ability we were able fortunately to use it to do other stuff including perhaps figuring out when some things come was another thing so yeah I think one of the best responses to The evolutionary debunking argument like well any particular one that you want to raise with respect to any particular problem um I mean I'm I'm still a fan of The evolutionary argument against naturalism I think that it's actually really difficult like if you want to apply the the reasoning consistently if you want to use a sort of evolutionary story to debunk some knowledge that you think you've got um I think it's going to be really difficult to draw the line like planting is is very famous about pointing this out like naturalist if you just take the conjunction of naturalism and evolution then it just seems like Evolution doesn't necessarily pick for True beliefs necessarily it picks for uh survival and so you could have a whole range of different beliefs that would nevertheless still be uh confer Fitness and and survivability and so I think what the the challenge is going to be is to draw the line like where where do you actually draw the line in these evolutionary debunking arguments and so if you think that they work in this one case then why don't they work when it comes to the more General case of of your your reasoning capacities more generally about you know your beliefs about uh these these sort of grand metaphysical views like belief in naturalism where are you going to draw that line because you don't want to deny that because then you're going to you're going to wind up in some pretty uh scary territory so I think that's that's probably for me um one of the reasons why I would never be able to endorse something like that yeah good I actually also like that kind of response because you're right like for almost everything in philosophy there is a debunking argument about like that domain of yes of like what philosophy talks about right and so there is this problem about like okay if you're gonna rely on a debunking argument in this area uh is there any good reason for you not to thereby like just say okay everything in philosophy is debunked uh which of course some people might think but I you know sure usually you know what people are trying to say right because there's debunking arguments about ethics there's debunking arguments about math there's a debunking arguments about metaphysics right just you know all over the place so yeah yeah okay excellent I'm glad that we're uh we're on the same page about that yeah I mean maybe we should just do a show on debunking arguments maybe invite uh Thomas bogartisan he's got an interesting paper on that he's got one yeah I forget the name of the the uh the title of the paper and he's moved on to other projects since then but it's like the the only and some something like that like the the only evolutionary argument that every naturalist should should care about something yeah to do a show on that um well I want to try to to draw I mean we're basically out of time here but I kind of wanted to to draw everything back to the the topic for today which is the sort of myriological nihilism objection to and again I think it was also really uh helpful when you sort of laid out you were explained what the Kalam cosmological argument was but then you said for this particular causal principle premise one of the cosmological art of the column cosmological argument everything that begins to exist has a cause Dr William Lane Craig the most famous defender of this argument he has three different defenses of that premise and this objection targets one defense of that premise so even if it's successful it doesn't therefore refute his other two arguments or show that the causal principle is false or anything like that all it would do is undercut one particular support that is offered for the causal principle being true so I think it's helpful to kind of situate like help us you know to see exactly what's at stake here right what even if this objection is successful what does that mean and it means basically that instead of three supports you've only got two and then what we did uh for for the bulk of the show was we looked at reasons for and against mirological nihilism and I say this a lot and I'll say it again in these shows these these 45 minute hour hour and a half shows we're really only able to scratch the surface you know these shows hopefully what they do is get you excited about starting to read the literature and delve deeper into these issues yourself but we hope to expose you know some of the the good philosophy that's going on behind the scenes that many people just aren't super familiar with or aware of but hopefully that kind of situates things and what we've done in this show so far but Justin is there anything that you would like to uh to make sure that you say before we kind of close out the show or wrap it up yeah sure let me add one thing so um I I was thinking about this you know last couple of days leading up to this and it seems to me there might actually be an easy way to reframe the Kalam to just get around this objection and thereby restore even if you think it works restore that third line of argument for the the causal principle um why not just say every event that begins to occur has a Cause even if you think that when you get some symbols arranged chair wise no new object comes into existence that's the chair composed of those symbols there is a new event that starts happening the event of those symbols being arranged chairwise now uh and so it's this particular objection at any rate wouldn't be a problem for that version of the causal principle now I I think that crap I might not be remembering this correctly but I think that the reason Craig doesn't go this route is that he he wants to say no there are some uncaused events like uh indeterministic like Quantum sort of stuff right but actually I think the better View and also I think the more um widespread view is that no even indeterministic events of that sort are caused they're just not caused deterministically their causes are probabilistic they're it's like all right if this cause is in place then there's say a 50 chance that a particle is going to Decay or whatever right um and if it does it was caused by uh that condition being in place it just wasn't causally determined by that condition being in place um and so I actually I think that a principle like that might be um pretty defensible so again I've only you know just started thinking about it so maybe there's yeah I think uh well first of all I like that A variation of the the column I think that that that has uh potential but I was thinking more like what would what would Dr William and Craig say about this and and why does he sort of take the position that he does and something that I've just kind of learned about him is that he is not afraid to like dig his heels in and just defend a position like he when it comes to like some people have said to him you know what why don't you defend a version of the column cosmological argument that is compatible with both a theory and B theory of time and he's just like I think a theory is true so I'm just going to continue defending the column like the way that I do it you know and so I think that he he would probably take a similar position with respect to this and just be like you know dig his heels in be like muriological nihilism is false so this objection is is you know kind of like what kind of like what you said his uh his General attitude was in his conversation with Alex O'Connor was a little bit dismissive not necessarily in like a bad sense but it was just like you know increduly kind of like I'm not super you know I'm on board with that W right yeah it was I think a bit dismissive of muriological nihilism but he wasn't like dismissive of Alex right they had a really great conversation it seemed to me anyway yeah so I think I think he would probably just dig his heels in and which is fine you know to each his own everyone has their own different way of of addressing things but yeah I mean this is this kind of reminds me of like the Josh Rasmussen style like just find a way to still make the argument granting the objection you know and say like well you know maybe there's still another pathway maybe we can come kind of come to agreement on this but then yet find another way that we can still make progress and move forward so I'm always a fan of that approach too but um yeah we'll go ahead and wrap up things um I do want to let the audience know like let me know what you think about shows like this this was a very specific show on a very specific topic so if you like to see this type of content let me know in the comments if you'd like to see more where we're kind of taking a closer look at specific objection to specific objections to specific arguments we'd love to uh or I would love to to cover more topics like this so just let me know what you think uh Justin thanks for coming back on this has been awesome yeah thanks for having me I enjoyed it yeah I'm really looking forward to our uh the we have some projects in the works that uh we haven't really made public yet but I'm really excited about the the our future projects that we'll be working on together and I'll be looking more for us some more shows that we can uh do together so I always love having you on I love the way that you explain things so Justin awesome thanks for coming on I'll see you guys in the next caption Christianity video I'll actually be posting a video um within the hour so if you're watching this live then you guys will uh be greeted with a new video very very soon so for everyone else see you guys later see you next time hey it's me again uh actually don't leave yet I've got something super super important to tell you so first of all you're awesome like you you just watched a really really long video just now and you're still watching it that is actually pretty amazing secondly we have hundreds literally hundreds of other apologetics related videos for you to watch on our Channel go check them out I've interviewed Exorcist hosted debates between Christians and atheists I've even made response videos to atheists all of that is available on our Channel go check it out third I rely on people that see value in my work people like you that watch videos to the very end to keep the lights on around here literally this is how I feed my family so if you see value in the work that I do please consider supporting this ministry and becoming a patron links to that are in the description oh and uh have I mentioned that Christian

Channel: Capturing Christianity

Views: 6,093

Keywords: capturing christianity, cameron bertuzzi, apologetics, god, atheism, existence of god

Id: 4HNs2HpPSfk

Length: 53min 15sec (3195 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 21 2023