I just completed a three-part series exposing the laughable science illiteracy of Alvin Plantinga’s “Two Dozen or So” arguments for God. I’ve now had several requests to take on Edward Feser’s Five Proofs of the Existence of God (2017). Since there aren’t any good, easily locatable rebuttals online (this one by Jonathan Garner is the closest I could find, and it’s a bit lackluster). Plantinga and Feser have a common thread of ignoring the sciences; but even more, both are acting like the Modern Age never happened. They are still thinking like Medieval monks, who didn’t know how evidence or science worked, didn’t know Aristotle was already obsolete even in the ancient world, and thought their own naive semantical armchair musings could tell them facts about the Universe. In this case, explicitly. Feser confesses he’s resurrecting the logic and arguments of Medieval scholasticism.
Feser’s book contains one chapter for each of the titular five arguments, plus two more chapters, one attempting to extract more attributes for his thus-proven God, and one collecting and responding to some common rebuttals to his Five Arguments. Notably, like all Christian apologetics, that last chapter only “succeeds” by omitting everything that actually undermines his conclusions. Just compare it with my article Bayesian Counter-Apologetics for a start at what’s wrong here: the evidence actually argues against Feser’s God. And we follow evidence. Not armchair fantasies in Feser’s head. But here my only thesis shall be that none of his arguments succeed in producing a sentient superbeing. But that means his penultimate chapter can also be ignored, since all it does is build on the Five Proofs to resolve God into a more complex psychological entity with particular emotions, goals, and superpowers. But if none of those Proofs hold water, that chapter is just full-on moot. I won’t even bother with it. Though there is a lot there of interest if you want to explore Feser’s theology—including a really bizarre, sexist argument for God being a man (around pages 246-57).
Feser’s last chapter will also be useful to you if you want to see how a theist responds to common rebuttals to his Five Arguments. In fact, the whole book is handy if you want to train at this; it contains a lot of examples of badly argued points from atheists, so if you want to avoid those, he’s given you a kind of atlas of them (here and in each preceding chapter, every one of which closes by addressing specific rebuttals). But my refutations here will already be immune to everything he says in his last chapter. So it won’t serve any function to address it here.
That’s because I won’t be providing or fixing up every conceivable rebuttal one could throw at Feser. There are a lot of false, dubious, or fallacious moves in this book. And quite a lot of already-well-known refutations that are better than the ones he represents in his last chapter. Rather, I’ll just cut to the chase of the single most unrecoverable mistake in each of his five arguments, the one error that really just does it in, rendering the rest of the corresponding chapter a waste of time even to bother reading. Which does not amount to proving God doesn’t exist. It just amounts to proving that in this book Feser has failed to provide any genuinely rational reason to believe in one. I figure you’ll find that the most useful for dealing with fanatical Feserists on the internet.
One common thread to understand all of what follows is that Feser is a thousand years behind the times in the scientific study of the cognition of ontology. Every argument Feser deploys is just a manipulation of a model in his head. He imagines a model in the theater of his mind, and deduces some things he thinks he’d need for that model to obtain in reality. At no point does he ever show that this model ever corresponds to reality. This is a common and serious problem with theology (see my article The God Impossible for some important perspective on this). Yes, maybe you can come up with a model for how the universe works, such that only a God could explain why it exists. But whether the universe actually corresponds to that model you just invented is precisely the question we are trying to answer. No amount of tinkering with the model, can answer that question. Science is superior to theology precisely because it found a way to stop just tinkering with models in our heads and start testing which models actually apply. And models that can’t be tested, it rightly declares unknowable.
Such is the fate of Feser’s imagined God.
Argument One: The Aristotelian Proof
A quick and dirty way to phrase this argument is: change is real; change requires some fundamental underlying substrate, an ultimate “causy thing,” that makes change possible; ergo, that has to be God. The handwave at the end there, from the major premise to the conclusion, involves some convoluted step of reasoning about there having to be some actual thing that actualizes change, which itself is not actualized by anything else—something “self-actualizing.” Aristotle’s “Unmoved Mover.” How you get a mind out of that is where it gets all wobbly and his supposed logical precision dissolves.
Really, the most nothingly nothing you can have without facing a logical contradiction, is the absence of everything except logically contradictory states of affairs. And that means everything. Including gods, laws of physics, rules, objects, minds, or extensions of space or time. And by Feser’s own reasoning, the absence of everything except logically necessary states of affairs entails the presence of every logically necessary thing. And nothing else. Hence the absence of everything including logical contradictions is the same thing as the presence of only the logically necessary. Since if some entity’s existence is logically necessary, by definition its absence would entail a logical contradiction. That’s literally what “logically necessary” means.
But what happens when you take away everything except that which is demonstrably logically necessary? Not what we “conjecture” or “wish” were logically necessary; no, we don’t get to cheat. No circular arguments. Only what we can actually formally prove is logically necessary. And that means, prove now, not at some hypothetical future time. We don’t get to “conjecture” or “wish” into existence some new logical necessity we have yet to really prove is such. Well. What happens is, we get a nothing-state that logically necessarily becomes a multiverse that will contain a universe that looks just like ours. To a probability infinitesimally near 100%. See Ex Nihilo Onus Merdae Fit (or its brief: The Problem with Nothing).
A quick and dirty way to phrase that argument is: if nothing exists, then by definition no rules exist limiting what will happen to it; if no rules exist limiting what it will happen to it, it is equally likely it will become one of infinitely many arrays of things (including remaining nothing, which is just one of infinitely many other things no rule exists to prevent happening); if we select at random from the infinitely many arrays of things it can become (including the array that is an empty set, i.e. continuing to be nothing), the probability is infinitesimally near 100% the array chosen at random will be a vast multiverse whose probability of including a universe like ours is infinitesimally near 100%. Because there are infinitely more ways to get one of those at random, than to get, for example, the one single outcome of remaining nothing. There is no way to avoid this. Unless you insert some law, power, rule, or force that would stop it, or change the outcome to something not decided at random. But once you do that, you are no longer talking about nothing. You have added something. Which you have no reason to add. Other than your human desire that it be there. Which is not a compelling argument for it being there.
That the evidence looks to support the conclusion that there is a multiverse (far more than it supports there being a god) only verifies the hypothesis that the universe did start with such a nothing-state. But that’s still just a hypothesis. There may well have always been something. There may have never been nothing, in any sense at all. But it’s peculiar that starting with a nothing-state, gets us exactly the weird universe we observe. That seems a pretty strange coincidence. Still, I’m doing the same thing Feser is: building a model in my head, and working out what would have to happen or be the case if that model were true. Does that mean my model corresponds to what actually happened? No.
What this exercise teaches us is that Feser has no basis for arguing that the substrate, the ultimate “actuality” that actualizes all potentials, has to be all the things he claims. He might be able to prove logically that some substrate must exist (that’s still questionable, but I won’t challenge it in this article). But he doesn’t actually present a valid logical argument for it being the substrate he defines. That it would have those properties is only true of a model he invented in his head. Is it true outside his head? He presents no evidence to conclude it is. Because Feser doesn’t “do” science, you see. He’s not, like, into evidence, man.
Feser’s formalization of this argument appears around page 35. It has 49 premises. I shit you not. Most of them are uncontroversial on some interpretation of the words he employs (that doesn’t mean they are credible on his chosen interpretation of those words, but I’ll charitably ignore that here), except one, Premise 41, where his whole argument breaks down and bites the dust: “the forms or patterns manifest in all the things [the substrate] causes…can exist either in the concrete way in which they exist in individual particular things, or in the abstract way in which they exist in the thoughts of an intellect.” This is a false dichotomy, otherwise known as a bifurcation fallacy. It’s simply not true that those are the only two options. And BTW, this Premise, is the same key premise (hereafter always hidden) in all five of his arguments. We can thus refute all of them, by simply refuting this single premise (more on that later).
So let’s do that.
Ironically, a third option that in fact I’m quite certain is actually true, is the very option described by Aristotle himself. Aristotle took Plato to task for the mistake Feser is making, pointing out that it is not necessary that potential patterns actually exist in some concrete or mental form. They only have to potentially exist. Hence Aristotle said of Plato’s “world of forms” what Laplace said to Napoleon of God: “Sir, I have no need of that hypothesis.” Potential things are by definition not actual. So obviously we don’t need them to be actualized to exist. That’s a self-contradictory request. It’s thus self-contradictory of Feser to insist that potential things must be “actualized” somewhere (a mind; concrete things). Obviously there is no logical sense in which they must be actualized in that way.
Aristotle argued that potentials exist inherently in everything, without anything further needing to be the case. A cube contains the potential to be a sphere (by physical transformation); but not as if that potential is some sort of magical fluid contained physically inside the cube. It’s simply a logically necessary property of any material that it can be reshaped; if it can have shape, it can have any shape. Period. It is logically necessarily always the case. And Feser must agree that if something is logically necessary, it requires no other explanation of why it exists. Not minds. Not concrete things. Nothing. The only way to stop that from being true, would be to interject some power or force to stop it, e.g. something that would make the cube’s reshaping into a sphere impossible. But remember, we’re not allowed to do that. We don’t get to just “invent” things and declare their existence logically necessary; and if it’s not logically necessary, the potential it would have blocked remains logically possible. Of course, even if we could just “invent” things like that, that would simply limit what potentials exist. Still nothing more would be needed to explain that. Not minds. Not concrete things. Nothing.
Feser tries to argue that the ultimate substrate must be “one, immutable, eternal, immaterial, incorporeal, perfect, omnipotent, fully good, intelligent, and omniscient.” He only does that with silly word games—few of these words does he use in any sense you’d recognize. But let’s charitably imagine he can construct some model in his head whereby it would be true, and grant him his bizarre definitions of all these terms. The correct way to test models against each other is to build multiple models and compare them against the evidence. So let’s build a model different from Feser’s and see what happens…
I propose that the substrate of all potentiality is the actualization of spacetime. Just that. Nothing more. I’ve made the case for this elsewhere already (Sense and Goodness without God III.5, pp. 119-34). I don’t claim it’s true. I merely claim it could be true; it explains a lot; and does so better than any alternative yet offered. Including gods. The gist of it is this: every “thing” we think exists, is really just a convoluted geometric twisting of spacetime. Photons, electrons, quarks, gluons, all just different vibrations of spacetime. This is called Superstring Theory. And unlike Feser’s silly It’s a Giant Ghost hypothesis, Superstring Theory (or ST) is actually a developed theory of physics that has a number of remarkable predictive successes. Feser’s theory has exactly none. For example, ST can predict exactly all the particles of the Standard Model and all of their peculiar fundamental features and constants. Can Feser deduce all that from his It’s a Giant Ghost hypothesis? No. He just has to Mary Sue it into existence. “Well, that’s just what God would do.” “Why?” “I don’t know. It’s a mystery.” Which we call the absence of a hypothesis.
In my proposed model, the only thing that really exists, that causes every object and event and law and force and constant of physics, and has no other cause of its existence, is space-time. It is the ultimate actual thing, that actualizes all potentials; and which in turn is not actualized by anything else.
Spacetime:
- It’s “incorporeal” (it is not itself a body, but by itself is the absence of all body).
- It’s “immaterial” (in the only sense Feser requires: it isn’t made of matter, nor does it exist “in” space or time).
- It’s “immutable” (space-time can change in quantity and shape, and thereby manifest different things, but every bit of it is always the same as every other bit of it; its ultimate properties never change; just as God can think and feel and act, while his ultimate properties never change).
- It’s “one” (a continuum, a unity, unbroken, unbreakable).
- It’s “eternal” (you can shrink or squeeze it, but you can’t get rid of it; it could well have always existed; and there is no sense in which space or time is located “in” space or time; it just literally is all space and time together, requiring no further location).
- It’s “perfect” (in the sense Feser requires: every fundamental property of space-time is always and everywhere fully actualized).
- It’s “fully good” (by Feser’s definition, which contrary to his confusing use of the word “good” isn’t a value judgment, but simply the assertion that it has no unactualized features; it isn’t “broken” or “working below its potential”).
- And it’s “omnipotent” (in the only sense Feser requires: it can realize all things that can exist or happen, and therefore has all the power that it is possible for any entity to have; in fact no power can exist, but through it).
So Feser is just arguing space-time is God. Mindless, valueless, merely physical space-time. That’s just atheism.
What this means is that Feser’s entire book is about a single maneuver: trying to dodge that outcome by trying to bootstrap space-time into being an intelligent consciousness. But that’s where his argument becomes 100% bullshit. In no way does the substrate having these other properties entail it’s “intelligent.” Intelligence is only a potential thing space-time can manifest, being an organized complexity; and being an organized complexity, it cannot be a property inherent in space-time itself, which is simple and uniform. Nor would it be “omniscient,” knowledge being another organized complexity, and thus only something that space-time can be organized to manifest, not a thing space-time itself is. All possible knowledge and all possible intellection is inherent in space-time as a potential, but that is not what we mean by knowledge and intelligence. Potentially knowing everything, is not the same as actually knowing everything. A clump of goo is potentially intelligent. Organize it into a functioning brain, and it will be actually intelligent. They are not the same thing. And “we” are indeed a way the universe becomes conscious of itself; but that does not make the universe a god. Not by any definition pertinent to anyone, least of all Feser.
Hence it all falls down at Premise 41: his false assertion that potentials, to exist in an actualizer, must exist in some mind or concrete vessel. What must exist for spacetime to actually be twisted up into a proton, and thence into a collection of particles, and thence into a tree? Just spacetime. Nothing else. What must exist for spacetime to potentially be twisted up into a proton, and thence into a collection of particles, and thence into a tree? Just spacetime. Nothing else. Since nothing exists to stop spacetime possibly being rearranged into a tree, that spacetime can possibly be arranged into a tree is simply a fact of spacetime. No mind need exist “in addition” to spacetime, for spacetime to have that potential, always and everywhere. Nor is any concrete thing required. Spacetime can be completely empty. And still have the potential to form up into matter, and thence a tree. In fact, it’s statistically inevitable that every bit of spacetime there is, will. Someday. It’s a Boltzmann necessity.
So up to the point where Feser violates basic canons of logic, all his Aristotelian argument gets us to is “mindless spacetime is the fundamental substrate of all existence.” He should now get a physics degree and dedicate his life to developing Superstring Theory.
In the end, my model is as coherent as Feser’s. Indeed, arguably more so—it’s far simpler, far clearer, has a more scientific foundation, and requires no baseless suppositions (like his Premise 41). But let’s just pretend they are equally coherent. Which one is true? Can we tell from the armchair? No. Does Feser give any argument for his model being more likely than mine? No. But there are things my theory predicts that his does not—and those things we observe to be the case. Everything, in fact, is unexpected on his theory; yet completely expected on mine. The universe does appear to be born of and wholly governed by a mindless substrate. That argues for my model being far more likely than his. And if my model is more likely to be true than his and my model is false, then his model is even less likely to be true. Because my model can only be false if some other model is more probably true. But if My Theory is more probable than His Theory, and Some Other Theory is more probable than My Theory, then necessarily Some Other Theory is more probable than His Theory.
There is no way Feser can rescue his model here. He’s done. Cooked. Time to move on.
Argument Two: The Neo-Platonic Proof
Something has to hold everything together. Otherwise, it would all fall apart, right? So that has to be God! That’s the gist of this argument. And it’s just as ridiculous as it sounds. This one has 37 premises! (Around page 79) There are a lot of dubious premises in this one. But let’s just assume they all hold up, all the way to the premise that we will grant just for giggles, that everything has an “absolutely simple or noncomposite cause” holding it together (and preventing it from falling apart). Shit hits the fan right after that, at Premise 22: “Everything is either a mind, or a mental content, or a material entity, or an abstract entity.” That’s another false lemma. Remember Aristotle? There is at least one other thing that isn’t any of those things: space-time. It’s not a mind, it’s not a mental content, it’s not a material entity, and it’s not an abstract entity.
One might try to play Devil’s Advocate and say, well, space-time isn’t a material entity in the sense that it’s not “made of matter,” and obviously isn’t itself located “in” space or time, sure. But what does Feser mean by “material entity”? Well, he defines that as “having parts which need to be combined in order for them to exist,” which makes them able to come into being and pass away. This doesn’t really include space-time; and even if one thought it could, we can simply define our model’s substrate as a space-time that can’t be broken up or made or dissolved. As a hypothesis, that’s as good as Feser’s; and in fact more congruent with his insistence that the substrate be “absolutely simple,” because it’s hard to get simpler than a mindless space-time with no other fundamental properties. Certainly that’s far simpler than a vastly complex mind with unlimited superpowers. It also doesn’t get you anywhere to ask what holds space-time together and keeps it from dissolving. Because we can just as easily ask, “What holds God together and keeps him from dissolving?” Whatever answer you give to that, we can give for space-time. That’s how models work. Isn’t that great?
So here we are building on everything we pointed out in respect to Argument One. What holds a tree together is the electromagnetic force. What holds the electromagnetic force together is photons. What holds photons together is space-time. And there is no next level. That’s it. The buck stops there. In what I’ll now call the Neoaristotelian Superstring Model (or NST), a photon simply is a bend in space-time. The rest is geometry. What keeps the photon bent? Space-time. What keeps the space-time bent? Nothing. It just is bent. And where it’s bent a certain way, we call it a photon. Because that shape interacts with all other shapes geometrically in ways that we describe as the properties of a photon. We can explain how a ripple over here, moves across space-time like a wave on a sheet, to cause another ripple over there. And thus we can explain the forming and dissolving of a photon. But the substrate, the space-time, never forms or dissolves. It just changes shape. When the photon is gone or falls apart, the space-time that was manifesting it remains, unchanged in basic properties, unharmed, unaltered. Ready to be vibrated into another photon someday. Or anything else.
Space-time also has “parts” in the sense that there is some of it over here, and some of it over there, and different “parts” are shaped in different ways, manifesting different particles and forces, but this is a different sense of “having parts” than Feser is concerned about. Because space-time can never be broken up. Its parts are always a uniform and continuous whole (even if quantized, the quanta of spacetime can’t be broken apart). No matter how the different “parts” of it get bent or vibrated. There is no argument in Feser against that kind of composition being the fundamental underlying cause of all other composites. And there is no possible argument of the kind to be had. Obviously this can be the fundamental substrate holding all composites together. Obviously nothing more is needed. No world of gremlins and faeries need exist to hold the space-time and shape it. If you shake a carpet causing a ripple to move across it, no “gremlin” is needed to keep pushing the ripple. It pushes itself. It’s a geometrically necessary outcome.
Space-time also could conceivably have “come into existence,” but again not in any sense Feser is concerned with. There can’t have been any time before space-time, nor any place apart from it either. So if space-time came into existence (and contrary to what Christian apologists falsely tell you, we don’t know it did), it did so from a nothing-state. Which I already discussed above: an actual nothing-state will inevitably produce a vast, messy space-time, by logical necessity, owing to the absence of any laws, thereby entailing a completely random outcome. In the “nothing-state” the only potential that existed was the potential for space-time. Once space-time existed, every potential existed within it that it could manifest. And that’s why we see the universe we see today: one completely reducible to the bumps and geometry of a mindless space-time.
One could then say that therefore that nothing-state (which again we are just speculating once existed) contained all potentials, and therefore it is the ultimate substrate, the ultimate cause, the absolutely simple noncomposite thing that began everything else. But that still isn’t a God. Being a nothing-state, it is far simpler than a mind or anything else substantive or particular at all. It only has those things potentially. Not actually. It is therefore the absence of a God. Not the presence of one. And that is in the past now. So it can’t be holding things together now. Therefore it isn’t the thing that answers Feser’s “Neoplatonic” concern. Though it works well enough for his “Aristotelian” concern. If you want to go there. But until we have evidence that that model is real, we don’t really have any business asserting it is. But we can assert it’s a hell of a lot more likely than his Giant Super-Ghost.
We could even merge the nothing theory with the space-time theory, with the same logical semantics Feser enjoys using to build-out his marvelous God: for if space-time began and is the logically necessary being, then we can just as readily conclude the nothing-state it sprang from logically necessarily contained a single dimensionless point of space-time and thus was space-time. For the nothing-state can’t ever have existed…if it never existed (if at no time it existed) or if it existed nowhere (if it never existed at any location); for those are identical to saying it didn’t exist at all. Therefore, it is logically impossible for a nothing-state to have ever existed, that didn’t contain any point of space-time. So. Gosh. It ends up being space-time all the way down!
Either way, my space-time model works as well as Feser’s. It is absolutely simple (you can’t split away its properties; it’s everywhere the same), it is noncomposite (you can’t break it apart; it’s always there no matter what else its continual reshaping manifests as coming or passing away), it requires nothing else “beneath” it to give it existence and shape, and it explains every composition (the geometry of spacetime is what causes what we observe as the interactions of particles and thus the forces that explain all material objects and events); at least as well as his Giant Ghost does. And better, when you consider what a mindless substrate predicts we should observe, that a sentient substrate does not predict (without a massive Rube Goldergesque parade of ad hoc contrivances for which there is exactly zero evidence or logical demonstration).
So once again there is no way Feser can rescue his model here. He’s done. Cooked. Time to move on.
Argument Three: The Augustinian Proof
This is just a standard Argument from Abstract Objects. This time with only a lean 28 premises. I already exposed the flaws in that kind of reasoning when I dealt with it in Plantinga (his Argument from Sets, Argument from Numbers & Properties, and Argument from Counterfactuals). The only thing new here is that Feser fabricates the premise that “Aristotelian realism” holds that “abstract objects exist only in human or other contingently existing intellects.” That’s not true. Maybe some Medieval interpretation of Aristotle concluded that. But that is certainly not Aristotle’s actual account of abstractions—or more properly, universals. Feser seems to have confused what Aristotle said about how we discover and employ universals in human thought, with what he said about what universals are. Once we correct the mistake, Feser’s entire third argument collapses.
This puts the destruction of Feser’s argument at Premise 8 (around page 108). One could quibble about other premises in his argument, but like I said, I’m not going to trouble myself. It’s enough to identify the most fatal error. And this is it. To quote the peer reviewed Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy: “Aristotle…argued that forms are intrinsic to the objects and cannot exist apart from them.” He did not argue they exist “in human minds.” They can exist there, as in, the perception and comprehension of them can exist in a mind; but these are apperceptions of things that exist outside the mind. No mind need exist in Aristotle’s system, for all universals to nevertheless still exist. And they really exist, because the things that manifest them really exist. And this is true even of things that don’t exist: because the potential always exists in all the things that can become something else. Thus, a new and unrealized species of animal or government “exists,” in the sense that the universe contains the potential to generate it.
But I don’t want to argue over what Aristotle thought (there are indeed many disagreements on that). Because he’s obsolete. And what Feser needs is the most robust, modern version of “Aristotelian realism,” not Aristotle’s outdated version of it (much less some Medieval quack’s distortion of it). I outline what a modern, robust version looks like in Sense and Goodness without God (III.5.4, pp. 124-30). As you’ll see in my articles All Godless Universes Are Mathematical and How Can Morals Be Both Invented and True?, universals are simply the shared properties of particulars. As soon as there are two triangles, there is a common property they share (like, having three sides). No mind need exist (nor Platonic Forms for that matter) for it to be true that both triangles have three sides. Their existence alone is enough to make it true. The “having of three sides” is therefore simply a property multiple objects possess. Period.
What if no object ever forms a triangle? That’s where Aristotle’s distinction between potentiality and actuality enters. A region of space can be shaped into a triangle. Multiple regions of space can be shaped into triangles. No mind need exist (nor Platonic Forms for that matter) for it to be true that many regions of space can be shaped into triangles, even at the same time. Thus the universal property of triangularity always exists, potentially, wherever space-time exists. Even if no actual triangles are ever formed in that space-time. Because there is nothing to logically prevent that space-time from having that shape. And if ever it does have that shape, it will automatically be the same property manifested, every time it does. No mind need exist (nor Platonic Forms for that matter) for that to be true.
And that’s just all there is to it. It’s not like if you took God away from the universe, that suddenly triangles couldn’t exist, or wouldn’t have three sides, or we couldn’t notice this. Since all those things would remain without a God, their existence can never argue for the existence of a God.
So once again there is no way Feser can rescue his model here. He’s done. Cooked. Time to move on.
Argument Four: The Thomistic Proof
We need God to explain essences. Which is kind of like saying we need God to explain phlogiston. Essences, in the sense Feser means, don’t exist. They’ve been ruled out by science for centuries, as quaint and antiquated notions. What he really means is something else, just as “phlogiston” didn’t really exist, but was a failed attempt to explain something else, namely fire (and related phenomena). Fire really exists. But phlogiston doesn’t. And fire isn’t, it turns out, an element, nor is it caused by air absorbing a chemical called phlogiston. Similarly, “essences” don’t exist. And we’ve long known they don’t exist. That’s why they are no longer used in any scientific theory. But other phenomena that “essences” were a failed attempt to explain, do exist. This is why the Wikipedia article on “Essences” never once mentions any scientific use or application of the term. And why the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has a whole section titled Death of Essentialism. Now set theory has replaced the entire concept.
So right out of the gate this argument is pseudoscientific garbage.
Even from a formal standpoint, this one is just a terrible mess. His syllogism has a ton of boner mistakes in it; for example, Feser’s Premise 2 (around page 128), asserts that “If [the distinction between an entity’s essence and its existence] were not a real distinction…then we could know whether or not a thing exists simply by knowing its essence.” Um. Yeah. That’s how we know dragons and unicorns don’t exist, and lions and tigers do. Because it would be impossible to know the complete essence of, say, a unicorn, and not notice that among its properties is the feature of “being fictional.” One could circularly define that one thing as not part of one’s essence, but then you’re just arguing in a circle. Even if you try to go all Frege and Russell on me, and insist existence is not a property, that can only be true if existence is already inherent in the other asserted properties of an object; hence we’re back to indeed knowing whether something exists merely by wholly knowing its essence…that is in fact Frege and Russell’s whole point!
There is just no recovering from this gaffe. The argument is hosed.
How did Feser fuck this up? Because he confuses someone being told an incomplete description of a thing, with actually being informed of its essence (as he defines it; remember, essences don’t really exist, so I’m moving around in the model in his head, not the one that exists in reality). A fully informed account of an entity’s essence would include when it exists or didn’t. It is essential to Hitler, for example, that he did not live in the 21st century. It is essential to Yoda, for example, that no one could ever have spoken to him—other than in fiction or pretense. You could not fully understand what “Hitler” or “Yoda” were if you weren’t informed of these facts. And just excluding that one piece of information, literally the most important one, from what you will arbitrarily classify as “an essence,” is just a semantic game. And semantic games can’t get you to any grand realizations in metaphysics.
Feser actually burns a few pages arguing he is not engaging in this confusion. But alas, his protests make no logical sense. He insists if you mistakenly think lions are fictional monsters, “you have not misconceived what it is to be a lion.” Um. Yes. You have. You’ve totally misconceived what it is to be a lion. Only if you arbitrarily demarcate how you’d test whether a lion existed, with the outcome of that test—as if somehow the latter was not an attribute of the lion—can you get to Feser’s ridiculous premise. But that’s completely arbitrary. Why are we demarcating away that single property of lions as no longer essential to being a lion? Just because I know how to detect a dragon if one existed, does not mean I am necessarily fully informed as to what it is to be a dragon. If, unbeknownst to me, dragons exist, then I am simply misinformed about dragons.
Exactly this kind of nonsense Feser is tripping all over is one of the reasons essences have been abandoned by all the sciences as a useless concept. Feser’s premises just get more ridiculous and convoluted from there. And this argument racks up at 35 premises. But where it really fails is once again where it trips over competing models of reality, which is at Premise 33, where he leaps without any logical basis, once again, from “a purely actualized entity” (he means, this time, an ultimate substrate whose existence is identical with its essence), to a being that has a mind (“immutable, eternal…[etc.],” and “intelligent and omniscient”). But we already saw that does not logically follow. And he gives no logical argument for it here. He just skips to asserting it; premises missing.
Once again, space-time is an ultimate substrate whose existence is identical with its essence. And according to this AST model, space-time indeed causes what Feser means by essence and existence (because existing means simply that space-time is actually and not just potentially so shaped; and the shape it’s in, fixes every other property, and therefore anything’s “essence”). And, once again, space-time has all the properties Feser insists upon (“immutable, eternal…” etc.), except intelligence and omniscience….because, yet again, Feser confuses a potential for intellection and knowledge, with actual intellection and knowledge. Space-time does indeed contain all potentials, at all times and places. But that does not mean all potentials would necessarily be actualized, much less at every time and place.
The formalism of Feser’s argument here is just garbage, so it’s hard to find the hidden premise he is relying on to get from “ultimate substrate whose existence is identical with its essence” to “has all these amazing properties,” without his just punting to the other arguments, which I’ve already refuted. And if that’s what’s going on here, this isn’t a fourth argument. It’s just a chaotic word wall, which suddenly at Premise 33 just repeats the concluding chunk of arguments one, two, or three. And in that event, Premise 33 is simply false. The substrate he requires, doesn’t need, nor would plausibly have, intelligence or even knowledge (much less omniscience). And he has presented no syllogism showing otherwise. The only time he ever attempts one anywhere in the book, it’s that nonsense Premise 41 in Argument One. The same false dichotomy he uses in every one of his five arguments to conjure mental properties for what turns out to just be…space-time.
At most one can infer that Feser means to get to the conclusion that something exists that is “purely actual” by some new means here (something incoherent about essences and existence), but from there, the argument isn’t new. And since the borrowed part is already fallacious, all the effort he goes into to get to “purely actual” in another way here, is just a waste of everyone’s time. “Purely actual,” just doesn’t get you to God. As I’ve already shown for the previous three arguments. But to address what would be different about this argument, is to focus on this nonsense about essences and existence being different. Which isn’t true in any real world sense. It can only be true in an arbitrary, ad hoc, semantic construction in his head—which doesn’t correspond to reality. Not only because there is no such thing as an essence. But also because even what he means by an essence can’t be separated from existence in any way other than by his own arbitrary decisions; and reality cannot be discovered by just “deciding” that it be a certain way.
“I just don’t think knowing whether Hitler was a real person or a fictional character is important to knowing who Hitler essentially was,” just isn’t a rational thing to say. Nor can such a weird decision on your part, somehow unlock the mysteries of the universe outside your head.
So once again there is no way Feser can rescue his model here. He’s done. Cooked. Time to move on.
Argument Five: The Rationalist Proof
Here Feser calms down to using just 26 premises. But all he does now is deploy the standard Argument from Sufficient Reason. He goes on with a bunch of rigmarole about the “Principle of Sufficient Reason,” and builds out a lot of dubious premises on that, but I won’t trouble myself with that here. Though he’s wrong (the PSR, if false, would not entail “things and events without evident explanation or intelligibility would be extremely common,” as his Premise 2 alleges, around page 161), I don’t really care. I’m content to grant the PSR for giggles. And some of his premises I take no issue with at all, like Premise 11, which argues that even if we are looking at an infinite past chain of contingent events, why “that infinite series as a whole exists at all would remain to be explained” (a point I myself made, and explore, in Sense and Goodness without God III.3.5, pp. 83-88).
But then we get to the heart of the matter. This one does the same thing as Argument Four. It concocts a syllogism that starts out pretty clean, but ceases to make sense near the end of it, again just sneaking in the exact same argument from “pure actuality” borrowed from every other argument in the book (here, it’s snuck in as false Premise 24). The only thing different, is that now he’s trying to get there in some fifth, novel way, by some unclear, convoluted means—by arguing God is the only thing that can be the “ultimate” Sufficient Reason for everything else, requiring no further reason for his own existence or properties.
The argument is a mess. But ultimately, all Feser ends up doing here again is just proving mindless space-time necessarily exists. For in my competing model, by definition it is space-time, without any mental powers or properties, that “is the explanation of why any contingent things exist at all and which is the cause of every particular contingent thing’s existing at any moment” (Feser’s Premise 22). For it has all the properties Feser’s substrate needs to answer his Principle of Sufficient Reason, yet doesn’t need “intelligence” and “omniscience,” because it necessarily contains only the potential for intellection and knowledge (in that it can manifest minds that know things, but space-time itself is not a mind that knows things). Therefore my model is simpler. And everything is thereby explained.
It won’t do to say that space-time is itself a contingent being. Because that’s begging the question. For exactly the same reasons Feser gives for saying the same of God. I have imagined a space-time that necessarily exists. That’s my competing model. Every argument Feser gives for his “God” necessarily existing, all five, I have already shown argue that spacetime necessarily exists. The only thing he adds, each time, is to try and sneak in some mental powers (“intelligence and omniscience”). But as I showed right at Argument One, he has no logically valid route to that conclusion. And when you take them away, what you have left is simply: a necessarily existent spacetime. Which has no intelligence and isn’t conscious. And that isn’t God. It is, quite simply, the absence of God.
Once again there is no way Feser can rescue his model here. He’s done. Cooked. Time to move on.
Indeed, even his attempt at rebutting me has failed. Twice.
Conclusion
Feser’s whole schtick is to try and argue there must be some ultimate, fundamental ground of all being, which explains why everything is the way it is, and why universal properties exist, that causes all forms of change, and holds everything together and keeps it from falling apart. And he tries to argue that this ground of all being must have the properties of being “one, immutable, eternal, immaterial, incorporeal, perfect, omnipotent, fully good, intelligent, and omniscient.” But none of his arguments ever logically get to “intelligent and omniscient.” Those just get thrown on the jumble, every time without any syllogism supporting them, all based on a single false dichotomy right in Argument One (at Premise 41). Somewhere in there he conjures those attributes from a fallacy of conflating potentiality with actuality. And hopes no one notices.
Instead, Feser’s five arguments only, at best, get to that fundamental whatsit being “one, immutable, eternal, immaterial, incorporeal, perfect, omnipotent, and fully good,” under the strange definitions he contrived for those terms. Which simply describes space-time. So we have as much reason to conclude space-time is the ground of all being. And given that that makes far more sense of countless observations, we should sooner conclude so. Atheists can still argue it’s something else; but whatever candidate they propose, they’d still be arguing against God being it. I will at least concur that there must be some ground of all being, in many or all of the ways Feser insists. But it does not follow that we can already now declare that we know what it is. Nor does it follow that we can declare the best candidate for the job is God. It’s not. A better candidate by far is already just space-time. Feser’s God? We have no need of that hypothesis.
Epilogue
As I already noted, Feser has completely failed to respond to the actual arguments of this article. Not just once. But twice. So I’ve written this epilogue to complete the point that he has failed to get.
Many attempts have been made to try and nix spacetime as the candidate for the fundamental ground of all being. All have failed. To the contrary, all of Feser’s own arguments prove that it is—by proving a unified, immutable, eternal, immaterial, incorporeal, perfect, omnipotent, and fully good thing exists. Because by his own peculiar definitions of those terms, they describe spacetime to a T. He simply fails to produce any logically valid step to “add” the attributes of omniscience and intelligence (much less any qualities of mind). So what his own arguments leave us with, is spacetime.
Although spacetime does contain all potentialities, so it is “omniscient” in that sense, but that’s not conscious awareness. Conscious awareness, likewise intelligence, is always a composite, an emergent outcome of a complex causal network. It is therefore a direct logical contradiction to claim a conscious intelligence is simple. A conscious intelligence is by definition a complex. That is what separates a smart from a dumb entity: increased complexity, in what it is, contains, and can do. And science has proven consciousness is a property of exceedingly complex intelligence. You can’t have a consciousnessness devoid of any intelligence. And the simplest intelligences lack consciousness. Intelligence is always a contingent. And consciousness is contingent on intelligence. It can thus emerge from a fundamental ground of all being. But it can never be the fundamental ground of all being.
I already showed how spacetime is on Feser’s own stated terms a unified, immutable, eternal, immaterial, incorporeal, perfect, omnipotent, and fully good thing. It therefore is his own fundamental ground of all being. It is a continuum (hence one). It is fundamentally the same, everywhere and always (hence immutable). It by definition always exists, as being time itself, there is no time it never is, and therefore it always “is” (hence it’s eternal). It is not made of matter or objects or material of any kind, or indeed of anything else but itself (hence incorporeal). It is not a composite, either, since there is no amount of chopping it up at which you would end up with something that wasn’t spacetime. The fundamental properties of spacetime are always and everywhere fully actualized, nothing held back (hence it’s also perfect). None of its fundamental features are unactualized, nothing about it is broken or working below its potential (hence it’s fully good). And it can realize all things that can exist or happen, and therefore it has all the power that it is possible for any entity to have; in fact no power can exist, but through it (hence it’s omnipotent). Spacetime is too simple, however, to fundamentally possess complex composite properties like intelligence and consciousness. But Feser presents no logically sound arguments that the substrate has these properties. So that’s where he goes wrong. He gets to spacetime. But not to God.
And this should have been obvious from the start. To exist, an entity requires there to be a place and time to exist. Otherwise it by definition never exists and exists nowhere. Thus all entities that exist are dependent on and thus subordinate to spacetime. Everything that exists, to exist, requires spacetime. But spacetime itself, to exist, requires nothing but itself. It does not require some extra place and time to exist. It is place and time. Spacetime is therefore the only conceivable thing that requires no further substrate for it to be. Nothing “extra” need exist for spacetime to exist. But something extra must always exist for anything else to exist. That something extra is spacetime: a place and time to be.
So it should have been obvious that spacetime is the fundamental ground of all being. We need nothing else to explain existence. Because it needs nothing else to exist. All the “being” and “isness” that is and ever was and ever can be, boils down to nothing more than place and time: existing somewhere, at some time. Even what everything is ultimately made of, may well indeed be nothing other than spacetime, suitably twisted and knotted up into the geometries we mistake as atoms and photons. There is no evidence it’s not.
-:-
For more on Feser’s travesties see Thomism: The Bogus Science and Joe Schmid’s excellent collection of related critiques.
What book is Carrier reviewing because it surely isn’t Feser’s….
Identify any inaccuracy in my critique. Cite the page number in Feser that demonstrates your point, and explain why the content of that page demonstrates your point.
Feser deals with your review here
http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2018/02/carrier-on-five-proofs.html#more
In which he fails to respond to any argument I actually made. Indeed, he demonstrates he didn’t even read my article.
Edward Feser has replied to you on his blog.
He does cite page numbers that, according to him at least, demonstrate that you have totally misunderstood him.
It may be a good idea to address his points.
It’s the other way around. Nothing he says even replies to any argument I actually made. I’ve now documented that.
Feser himself says some nasty things about you!
http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2018/02/carrier-on-five-proofs.html
Yeah. All false. Indeed, weirdly false.
Actually, Dr. Feser has done this himself for you:
http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2018/02/carrier-on-five-proofs.html
No, he didn’t. Nothing in his article even addresses any argument I made. As I’ve demonstrated.
Something which everyone seems to forget in all of this is the intellective principle:
cf. philos-sophia.org/what-are-proofs-of-god
“if nothing exists, then by definition no rules exist limiting what will happen to it; if no rules exist limiting what it will happen to it, it is equally likely it will become one of infinitely many arrays of things (including remaining nothing, which is just one of infinitely many other things no rule exists to prevent happening)”
Here you are trying to take nothing and treat it as a thing without implying it.
To show the absurdity of your argument consider this:
Rocks dream about nothing
Therefore rocks are continuously creating an infinite array of nothings
I’m sure you can see the fallacy in this argument, namely that when I say rocks dream nothing, it means rocks don’t dream anything, not that they dream about something and that thing is nothing. As William Lane Craig puts it ” Nothingness has no properties, no powers; it isn’t even anything.”Now would it be reasonable to say that this nothingness can produce universes. If so you’d have to believe that the stuff that rocks dream about is where universes come from.
Your analogy doesn’t work. Proving you aren’t getting the point. Rocks dreaming about nothing is still not nothing: you have rocks, and dreaming. A dream of a heart will not pump your blood. For nothing to be guided by no rules regarding what will happen, there has to be actually nothing…including not even rules to govern what will happen. Once you have rocks that are dreaming, you have rules governing what will happen (such as, keeping the rock in existence, and enabling it to dream, and preventing it from turning into a rabbit, or converting its dreams into reality). Hence you can’t say “nothingness can’t produce universes because it has no properties” because that is assigning it a property (some thing it can’t do, hence some law or rule preventing it from doing that). It is precisely the absence of all properties, that enables the creation of literally any outcome, because nothing exists to stop it.
Something that a lot of people don’t realize is that there is a lot of scientific evidence for a “Universe from Nothing”. It isn’t just a thought experiment or verbal reasoning to make a point in an argument.
Lawrence Krauss wrote a book in laymen’s terms about a Universe From Nothing.
Here is a youtube video on a speech he gave about it several years ago. Now for the disclaimer this particular version of his talk is from the Richard Dawkins Foundation so it does put down religious people at a few points. So i hope that people who watch it and are religious can overlook these points and still see the true meaning of the speech. There are other versions of his speech but this is a good one due to his enthusiasm in the speech. if you start the speech at the 4 minute mark you will skip most of the Atheistic speak.
The book he wrote is a very good book that goes over more of the science behind of the subject.
No. Krauss did not. He admitted this when pressed—he said a book titled “A Universe from a Quantum Mechanical Vacuum” would not sell. So he falsely titled the book “A Universe from Nothing,” when in fact at no point in his book does he ever argue that. He flippantly ignored what theists and philosophers actually mean by nothing, when they discuss and debate whether a universe can arise from it. Krauss only shows that if you start with a bunch of something (a space-time vacuum governed by an array of specific and peculiar laws of physics), you can get a universe. He never discusses what’s possible from an actual state of nothing (which entails the absence of even a quantum vacuum, as well as of the laws governing it).
Dude, you are brilliant an entertaining! This is why I buy your books. Thanks for taking the time to put this together. This was an excellent debunking with sound reason and you definitely broke down the arguments intelligently and sufficiently.
Dr. Carrier, maybe there can be triangles without minds. But can there be truths without knowers? What is truth in itself? What should fill in the blank in this definition to signify the nature of truth? For every x, is truth if and only if x is___? We need to know the know the difference between a truth and an actual state of affairs. A logically necessary truth is true in all possible worlds and there’s a possible world where there’s no God and no knower? If truth is, say, conformity between the intellect and reality, then for there to be at least one truth, there news to be at least one intellect. In that case, if there were no intellects, there would be no truths, not even any necessary truths. It’s self-contradictory to deny that there’s any truths.
You might reply that even if human people were and are the only knowers, ancient animals from millions of years ago were still able to perceive accurately what was with them in the external world. But if there was no language then, there were no propositions either. If there were no propositions, nothing was either true or false in the epistemic senses of the words “true” and false.
There’s another problem that Feser never writes about in his book, one that Prof. James Slagle explains in his book “The Epistemological Skyhook”: Metaphysical naturalism defeats itself.
For our belief-producing faculties to be reliable, their function or their goal needs to be to produce true beliefs. But metaphysical naturalism implies causal determinism. If deterministic events force you to believe that some statement is true, that may do that because the belief may help you and others survive or because you’re always in the conditions that make you believe it. If deterministic events always decide what you’ll believe, then they’ll do that, even if your beliefs are false. You may think you can reason to discover an intellectual mistake you’ve made. But you can’t trust that thinking either, since it’ll be just as deterministic as the processes that caused you to make the mistake.
Metaphysical naturalism may be true. But if it is true, no one can believe it rationally, since causally deterministic events are non-rational. If metaphysical naturalism is true, we believe what we believe because we can’t believe otherwise. If my deterministic mental events are deterministic and non rational, I’ll believe non-rationally that my beliefs are rational.
Here’s the punching if you will. The denial of metaphysical naturalism implies supernaturalism. And supernaturalism implies that either God or something like him exists. If metaphysical naturalism is false and if God exists, rationality and rational thought presuppose that God exists.
If all you mean by “the truth” is “what exists,” then obviously yes.
If what you mean by “the truth” is “recorded verbal propositions that correctly reference or describe what exists,” then obviously no.
This is the difference between numbers and quantities. Numbers are invented words. Quantities are what they refer to. Numbers did not exist on earth until humans did. But quantities have always existed. Likewise “true propositions” never existed on earth until humans did. But the things those propositions referred to, by which they were true, have always existed.
That’s why the statement “if there were no intellects, there would be no truths” is either false or only trivially true. Even with respect to “necessary truths.” That simply means things that cannot not exist. That they cannot not exist will be the case whether any minds exist to appreciate or label or describe that fact or not. Logic does not create reality. Logic is a language; it merely describes reality. Reality does not cease to exist or operate differently simply because no one is around to describe it in a language.
That’s actually not true. It’s as false as saying we could not play violins unless our hands evolved for the purpose of playing music. Only science illiterates who don’t know how evolution works or how the human brain evolved can say silly things like this.
To get up to speed, read my article on Why Plantinga’s Tiger Is Pseudoscience.
That’s another non sequitur. A computer is 100% deterministic. And yet definitely can tell the difference between true and false outputs. That’s why self-learning computer algorithms exist. Like Shakey the Robot. Because reality pushes back, it’s impossible to navigate it and not notice false conclusions—unless you interject a Cartesian Demon, which actually would require intelligent design.
So you can see, I hope, your reasoning is hopelessly flawed. That is why anyone believes in the supernatural at all: they don’t know science, and don’t know how to reason logically.
Dr. Carrier, I think I’ve already mentioned the difference between a truth and a state of affairs. A state of affairs is a truth-maker, something that causes a proposition to be true. In itself, truth consists of conformity between the intellect and reality. So for there to be any truth, there needs to be at least one knower.
A logically necessary truth is true in all possible worlds and there are one or more possible worlds with no people in them. Even before people began to exist, there were still instances of numbers. A tree was an instance of the number one. The number of raindrops that fell during a storm instanced some huge number. 2+2 equaled 4 even that because there were instances of the number four, four-legged animals, say.
Anyhow, if a necessary truth is true in all possible worlds and if there must be at least one knower for there to be any truth, it’s logically impossible for a necessary truth to be true in all possible worlds when there’s a possible world with no knowers in it. So like Feser, I suggest that for a necessary truth to exist in all possible worlds, God must know it. Your read his chapter about abstract objects, right?
You may say that there’s a possible world where there’s no God. So let me quote from Gaven Kerr’s book Aquinas and the Metaphysics of Creation. Kerr writes: “St Thomas is rightly famous for his demonstrations of God’s existence. I am certainly of the opinion that we should read and ponder his thought in this regard for the perennial insight that the very existence of things is what is at stake in the question of God’s existence. Behind considerations of change, causality, possibility and necessity, etc., there is the insight existing things may well not exist; it is not in their natures to be. Hence, essence and existence are distinct therein, so that unless there is something that is pure existence itself on which all depend for their existence, there would be nothing, God’s primacy consists in, not being the first in a linear chain, but that on which all depend for their existence, He Himself depending on nothing” (Kerr 1).
If God just is existence, I contradict myself when I deny that God exists. After all, in that case, that’s another way to deny that existence exists.
Kerr, Gaven. “Aquinas and the Metaphysics of Creation.” New York: Oxford University Press, 2019.
What about Slagle’s argument? I’ll let him speak for himself.
http://www.classicaltheism.com/slagle/
Not really, no. And you still seem to be equivocating between both senses of “truth.”
Truth in the sense you mean here consists of conformity between a proposition (or a model, in the case of direct experience) and reality. It is only a property of propositions and models. But when we say “It is true that X,” X is not a proposition or model. It is the thing about which the proposition or model is true.
You seem to be confusing the two, as if somehow nothing would be true if language didn’t exist. It would only be true that no true propositions exist; it would not be true that “no propositions, if they existed, would be true.” Reality keeps being what it is whether anyone is aware of that or not. So to say no truths exist in your now chosen sense is only a statement about words. Not the things the words describe. “It is true that X” is an assertion that X exists. That assertion does not become false with the deletion of language. The assertion merely doesn’t exist as an assertion. What it asserts, however, remains true. There just is no corresponding proposition to correlate that truth with.
That’s why your assertion that “So for there to be any truth, there needs to be at least one knower” is false. For there to actually be a true thought, then your assertion is true. But the things thereby “truly thought” do not require a knower. So everything that could be truly thought about them, were there a mind, would remain true about them in the absence of a mind. So you are confusing language with reality again.
Likewise, “A logically necessary truth is true in all possible worlds” for any X only requires X exist in all possible worlds. It does not require anyone know that. Nor does it require any proposition to be stated or thought to be thunk. So you again seem to be conflating “truth” as a property of words, and “truth” as existing.
Meanwhile, if all you mean by God is “existence,” then you aren’t saying anything with the word. “That existence exists” is a tautology. And a rather boring one at that. That existence exists says nothing about whether existence is itself conscious. It is not. All evidence we have shows, existence can only generate consciousness in extremely isolated instances of particularly complex organization of some of the stuff that thereby exists. If you just want to call the whole of mindless nature “God,” that’s a word game in which I have no interest and see no use.
Regarding Slagle, I’ve already extensively refuted the Argument from Reason a la Reppert. So unless you can find something in Slagle not in Reppert, I see no need to consult him. If you do find something in Slagle not in Reppert, describe it, with page numbers, and I’ll assess it.
Responding to the claim that ‘For our belief-producing faculties to be reliable, their function or their goal needs to be to produce true beliefs.’ Sorry, but this is shockingly naive about how brain and behavior actually works. History is replete with people getting the right answer for the wrong reason. I don’t have to give any examples, because a high school level intellect can easily list a bunch.
This means that any argument that purports to say that truth has survival value is irrelevant. We have survived on this planet not because we discovered truths, but because we mated and multiplied without even knowing that sperm and eggs are necessary for reproduction!
There is also the converse case: getting the wrong answer for the right reason. Well, again, it’s easy to think of examples. The real name of the game, however, which all intelligent people strive for, by using fantasies rather than get used by them, is getting the right answer for the right reason. Here I will give an example: no, not religion, science.
Rob Dielenberg, re: “any argument that purports to say that truth has survival value is irrelevant” : That is itself a naive overstatement in the opposite direction. Reality is in the middle: truth-acquisition is adaptively useful (even for differential reproductive success, which requires a lot more than merely “reproducing”); but not being intelligently designed, we are only better at it than competing species, not perfectly calibrated for it (hence my link to the article on Plantinga’s Tiger which discusses this). Consequently we have had to install cultural software (science, math, logic, critical thinking skills) to improve that faculty beyond where evolution was clunkily able to get it.
I found this to be incoherent. A state of affairs would still be objectively true or false. It’s not separate from the truth. If the state of affairs was that absolutely nothing existed, it would be objectively true that nothing existed. A mind shouldn’t be required for objective truths. The entire point of objectivity is that something is true, independent of any mind. Only subjectivity requires that a mind exists.
I’m sorry, what’s irrational about relying on our senses (empiricism)? Isn’t that how you experience the vast majority of life?
You know a creator with foreknowledge can’t provide free will, right? For there to be a point of creation requires that there be a point when there was no creation. If … at the point of no creation, your god knows exactly what you will do … then … once created, it would be impossible for you to choose to do otherwise.
If space-time has all the attributes that classical theism ascribes to God, then yes, you have successfully refuted theism. But, in so doing, you seem to have committed yourself to pantheism rather than atheism, no?
Pantheism requires spacetime to be conscious. No mind, no God. No God, no -theism, including pantheism. The only other kind of pantheism there is, is the worship of a mindless universe. I said nothing about worshiping anything.
So no, pantheism is not applicable. That kind of semantic silliness is just more of Feser’s irrationality.
Ok let’s keep it basic w/r/t the Aristotelian proof because it’s much simpler (despite Feser’s 49 premises) than you’re making it.
In Physics I and II Aristotle is trying understand how change is possible (contra Parmenides) and what principles are involved. He arrives at this:
Every change is a change of something, from something, to something
Agree, disagree? Why?
Obviously that cannot be a logically necessary truth. If something came from nothing, then change does not require a prior something. Unless you count a nothing-state as something. Exactly as I discuss in my article. You can’t just circularly assume a nothing-state can’t be followed by something; the more so as “nothing” by definition would lack any property capable of preventing that. But if even a nothing-state is something, Aristotle’s statement is vacuous. It contains no meaningful content.
Well, it sure sounds vacuous because of utterly uncontroversial it ought to be. So no need to go on hard-offense just yet, wait until we’ve found a truly objectionable premise.
As for “something from nothing”, this is far from settled science w/r/t the origins of the universe.
http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astronomy/2016/02/24/sean_carroll_talks_about_the_beginning_of_the_universe.html
Aristotle believed the universe did not have a beginning. The scholastic inheritor’s of Aristotle’s natural philosophy believed creation was not a type of change precisely because it didn’t come from a prior state.
Asserting, in the fact of evidence, that something can come from nothing does serious damage to the scientific enterprise. It’s always safer to assume, lest we fall into magic or superstition, that something observable has a causal history. One of the most obvious critiques of Creationism is that it doesn’t satisfactorily answer the question “how did homo sapiens get here?”
I actually say that same thing in my article (that whether the universe began at all, much less from a nothing-state, is not settled science; not even remotely). I’m only talking about possible and plausible scenarios that fit the facts. Not confirmed human knowledge.
But it’s not true that “asserting, in the face of evidence, that something can come from nothing does serious damage to the scientific enterprise.” Because I’m not asserting that something can always under any conditions arise uncaused. Rather, that when there is nothing, there is by definition nothing to prevent nothing from becoming something. Once there is something, then obviously by definition something exists that can stop that. As we observe. And we observe that, because there is something stopping it. The question is, what happens when you take all of that away, so that there is no longer anything preventing anything from happening? Science has yet to observe such a state. So the theory does not challenge anything about science.
Hence my Merdae Fit argument does satisfactorily answer the question “how did Homo sapiens get here?” Nothing-state entails spontaneous godless multiverse; godless multiverse entails universes that can produce and sustain living organisms somewhere in them by random chance; living organisms evolve by natural selection; enough natural selection in enough places, and random and selective forces will inevitably generate a cognitive system comparable to Homo sapiens (and the specific path leading to that species is written in the fossil and DNA record of this planet, and thus adequately reconstructed by the sciences already).
I’ll just focus on the most hilarious part of your review-“including a really bizarre, sexist argument for God being a man (around pages 246-57).”
He explicitly denies that God is a man. That is obviously an incoherent statement. Instead, Feser defends using masculine language for God in a non univocal way. Feser writes, “God is not literally a male or female.” As for the sexist comment: to claim that God relates to the world in a more paternal way than a maternal way is first, not a denial that God does have a degree of maternal relation to the world, and two, does not mean that therefore God is a man. But why would a book review have to deal with what the book actually says right?
This is a perfect synecdoche of your entire review. It intentionally misunderstands the arguments made and then attacks those misunderstandings. I enjoy thoughtful dialogue and criticism of ideas- this hardly registers as such.
I didn’t say he argued God was a human being. But a masculine being. That is what he does in fact argue. And his argument is in fact sexist. But I’ll leave that to others to entertain themselves with. Anyone woke who reads his argument will be laughing with sadness at how archaic his thinking is.
You and he seem to be the ones intent on misunderstanding what I’ve said. Try again.
Edward Feser responded to your article on his blog. He seems to think you are attacking straw men. Also he does cite page numbers.
Yeah. Feser doesn’t address any actual argument I made. His confusion is so extreme, I can only conclude he didn’t actually read my article.
I have not read this book. In the book does Feser argue for the Judeo-Christian God or just a generic diety he calls God? The reason I am asking, is to find out if there is any reason Feser would choose one God over another God. Do his arguments just point to a deity named ‘fill in the blank’, like the kalam cosmological argument does? (Sorry for spelling errors it’s late and m on my phone)
His closing chapters attempt to bootstrap his way to a traditional Christian God of some sort, by building on his five Proofs (which alone don’t get that far). But since his Five Proofs don’t work, there was no need to bother addressing his attempts to build on them. One could perhaps write a critique of just how he gets from the God of his Proofs, all the way to Christianity, but I found that a tedious waste of time. His Proofs are false. So why bother exploring what else he does with them?
Update: Feser has attempted to reply. In which he fails to address any argument I actually made.
I’m having a couple of difficulties with your second paragraph concerning Argument One.
First, why do you make a point, in your description of the most nothingly nothing, of explicitly excluding logically contradictory states of affairs? I mean, is a candidate for most nothingly nothing any less nothingly (or, rather, more somethingly) if it does not explicitly prohibit square circles, say? And what exactly is it, anyway, to have a reality with nothing in it except logically contradictory states of affairs?
And then later in that same paragraph you say, “The absence of everything but logical contradictions is the same thing as the presence of only the logically necessary”. Doesn’t that imply that logical contradictions are the same as the logically necessary?
Where am I going wrong?
That a logical contradiction cannot exist, is a logically necessary truth. It can therefore never be false. And therefore no “nothing state” can contain or obey logical contradictions, because it is logically necessary that it cannot. This is the same point Feser is trying to make: that you can’t get a more absolute nothing-state than a God, because God’s existence is logically necessary. So there can never be a nothing-state (in his view). The existence of God is logically necessary. But this argument entails the same conclusion for all other logically necessary truths. Thus, if it is true that “if God is logically necessary, then no nothing-state can exist but with also God being present” (and that is Feser’s argument), it is also true, for any [x], that “if [x] is logically necessary, then no nothing-state can exist but with also [x] being present.” The significance of this is that what then happens in a nothing-state (the most nothingly nothing-state that could ever have existed), must be governed by logic. It cannot, for example, contradict the logic of probability, nor modal logic, nor anything else. Therefore, one cannot object to the conclusion that “a nothing-state would produce a random something-state, because ‘nothing’ by definition excludes any power, force, law, or rule that would prevent it” by saying nothing-states don’t obey logic or the logically necessary laws of probability.
OK, no problem with that. A nothing state cannot contain a logical contradiction. I get that.
But in your article you’d said:
And that appears to contradict the prior assertion. It’s the word “except” that’s tripping me up.
In the article you appear to saying that whatever else it can or cannot contain, a “nothing state” can contain a logical contradiction. Doesn’t that contradict what I’ve quoted from you at the top of this comment which seems to say that whatever else it can or cannot contain, a “nothing state” cannot contain a logical contradiction.
Thus, I could envisage the following exchange:
So can a “nothing state” contain tables?
Nope.
Hamburgers?
Nope.
What about quantum fields then?
Nope.
So absolutely nothing; no exceptions whatsoever?
Ah, well almost. There is one exception; namely, logical contradictions. A nothing state can contain nothing except logical contradictions.
Am I parsing your original statement incorrectly? What is the significance of the “except” in:
Oh! Now I see what you are talking about. I didn’t catch that. Yes. That’s a typo. Obviously I meant to say exactly the opposite. I’ll emend the text to correctly parse the point, that it is the absence of everything except the logically necessary, which means nothing includes the absence of logical contradictions.
Update: Feser has responded again, and still doesn’t get it.
Dr. Carrier It seems to me there are two basic problems with your rebuttal of Feser. First in your explanation of how we get a multiverse out of nothing you simply assume at the first critical step something from nothing. Specifically you assume that the nothing state would be filled with all kinds of potential things such as a universe or multiverse. But unless you first assume something from nothing is possible, those potentials simply could not exist. Therefore your argument is only persuasive to those who also assume something from nothing is possible. For all who doubt it your theory never gets off the ground.
Second you argue the ultimate being of Feser’s Aristotle argument need not be intelligent. And further propose that space time just as easily fits as the uncaused being which grounds all others. Problem is any uncaused being cannot in principle be caused by another ( Such a being is self existent and thus cannot in principle be caused by another and of course no being can cause itself ). However as you yourself have written elsewhere. it’s not inconceivable that space time was caused by another. Well If it’s conceivable then it cannot be self existent or uncaused. For it’s not conceivable or within the realm of possibilities that an uncaused or self existent being can have a cause , not even in principle. And just to take this a step further any self existent being must also be infinite and unlimited. Because logic forces us to accept this as the only type of being which cannot even in principle be caused by another. It’s literally impossible for any being short of unlimited to be in principle uncauseable. Now a being that’s unlimited is one which lacks nothing that existence has to offer, this would of course include intelligence. And it’s precisely this point of there being nothing you could add to it that it doesn’t already have which makes it uncausable even in principle. Therefore if you try to remove intelligence from the uncaused substratum of all else, you remove the very possibility of it being the uncaused substratum of all else. Lastly an unlimited infinite being is just another term for Feser’s being of pure actuality
First in your explanation of how we get a multiverse out of nothing you simply assume at the first critical step something from nothing.
No. My linked article proves it by formal syllogism. That’s the opposite of assuming.
Specifically you assume that the nothing state would be filled with all kinds of potential things such as a universe or multiverse.
I do not assume that. I prove it. The formal proof is in the cited article. Informally, the absence of anything to stop anything from happening, logically entails the presence of all possibilities. Those possibilities need not exist in any other sense. It would be logically impossible for a nothing-state to lack any possibility, because that would entail the presence of something: a power to prevent it.
Second you argue the ultimate being of Feser’s Aristotle argument need not be intelligent. And further propose that space-time just as easily fits as the uncaused being which grounds all others. Problem is any uncaused being cannot in principle be caused by another.
Spacetime isn’t caused by anything. It either is eternal, or originated by an unavoidable, logically necessary outcome of a nothing-state that lacked any power or property to prevent it. It might even be both (as a nothing-state cannot exist, if it exists never and nowhere, therefore there can never have been “nothing” unless there was always a spacetime for it to be). All as I’ve explained in these articles, and in the articles linked within them.
However as you yourself have written elsewhere, it’s not inconceivable that space time was caused by another.
Another what? Be more specific as to what thing I was talking about and in what article “elsewhere” I speak of it.
Well If it’s conceivable then it cannot be self-existent or uncaused.
That isn’t valid logic. Many things are seemingly conceivable, that are in fact logically impossible. See The God Impossible where I explain this in detail (where in particular I give the two possible conclusions regarding Fermat’s Last Theorem: even though it is logically impossible that both could be true, nevertheless both were conceivable to us; that’s why we couldn’t conclude which was true without a formal proof, which took hundreds of years).
Clearly our organ of conceiving is flawed and often inaccurate.
Moreover, if what caused spacetime to expand from an initial nothing-point, or causes it to be eternal and thus never have a beginning or end at all, is an inseparable property of spacetime, then spacetime can be self-causing and self-existent. Just as is the case for God. In fact, every one of Feser’s five arguments can be deployed to prove spacetime necessarily exists. Because none of his arguments entail the actualizer is intelligent. And spacetime has all the other properties, or could (by thus-proved logical necessity).
Now a being that’s unlimited is one which lacks nothing that existence has to offer, this would of course include intelligence.
Problem is, the universe lacks Harry Potter magic, mile-high unicorns, and breathable space between the planets. So clearly, you are not correct. That which is possible can remain possible, even if never realized. God didn’t realize them, even on Feser’s theory, so the theory that God is unlimited in realizing every possible thing, cannot entail he would. And as for him, so for spacetime. Or any other actualizer.
As well, note that spacetime doesn’t lack intelligence. It actualized some. Us. You are confusing what the actualizer would inevitably cause to exist, with what properties the actualizer itself must have. Obviously God is not a mile high unicorn. Therefore, he is not “unlimited” in the sense you mean. So neither need spacetime be. (Note that given endless time, as spacetime will have, nearly every conceivable thing will eventually exist somewhere—including mile-high unicorns: see the Boltzmann concept, again, in The God Impossible.)
Therefore if you try to remove intelligence from the uncaused substratum of all else, you remove the very possibility of it being the uncaused substratum of all else.
That sentence makes no logical sense.
Thanks for the response, rather than try to respond to all of it. I think it makes sense to deal with one point at a time. So I’ll respond to your point about proving something from nothing. Below is your response to my suggestion that you merely assumed something from nothing rather than proved it:
Hypothetically lets assume you and I both agree that something cannot come from nothing. That would make it impossible for a universe or multiverse to appear out of a nothing state. If it’s impossible for them to appear from this state then there cannot be any potential for them to appear from this state. To think otherwise would require an event to be possible and impossible at the same time. Therefore It seems to me it would be logically impossible for a nothing state to have any potency at all UNLESS we first assume something may come from nothing.
You are not presenting any argument. Just an assertion. You are confusing what’s possible, with what’s demonstrated. Without evidence or argument, we don’t know what’s possible for a nothing-state; we have no assumptions, neither of possibility, or impossibility. I am starting with no assumptions. And then logically proving a conclusion. You are starting with an assumption as to what’s the case, without any argument at all. Not me. And then you are not addressing my formal argument to the contrary conclusion. Ignoring it entirely. An argument. Not an assumption. You are thus the one arguing from assumption. I am the one arguing from demonstration.
This tells me all I need to know. You just want to believe only nothing can come from nothing. You can’t produce any evidence or logical demonstration that that belief is true. Whereas for the contrary conclusion, I did. And that’s the difference between us. I respond to evidence and reason. Not indefensible dogmas. You prefer indefensible dogmas to evidence and reason.
Spacetime is a mathematical model that refers to a created substrate. It didn’t exist prior to the Big Bang.
I don’t see how you are using it to substitute for Feser’s ground of being.
Your discussion of potentialities doesn’t seem right. Potentialities don’t exist as concrete objects. They exist as ideas — in a mind, no?
I fail to see how else they could exist. If potentialities exist in a metaphysically first ground of being, then it follows that this ground of being has intellect.
I don’t see how you’re substituting certain scientific abstractions for the conclusions of Feser’s arguments. He isn’t arguing for a ‘model’ of the universe.
He’s arguing for a prime metaphysical grounding which makes any model of the universe even possible (or any physical science whatsoever).
No science establishes that’s the case. You must be relying on fifty-year-old science. It is now admitted by all actual cosmologists that in fact we don’t know space-time began with the Big Bang. And all scientists admit that even if it did, it is logically impossible for there to be a “before” space-time. “Before” is a location that can only exist in time.
Please read my article carefully. I discuss the problems of imagining things as existing anywhere “before” time. There is nowhere to exist, or that anything can exist, but for in time. That’s why it is the ground of all being.
No.
As Aristotle explained, as well as myself in Sense and Goodness without God, only actualities exist in concrete objects. That’s what actual means: existing concretely. The difference between actual and potential is precisely that: whether a pattern is manifest concretely. But as soon as a thing exists that can transform, all potential transformations exist as a property of that thing. They do not have to be manifest in any other way. No mind required.
Thus, if spacetime is the ground of all being (and if we trust him, all of Feser’s arguments establish that it is; as it is the only entity that answers to all his descriptions, once we eliminate his fallacious moves to get it to have “intelligence” and “knowledge”), and since spacetime can be transformed into every possible thing, all potential things exist automatically, as soon as spacetime exists. So if all that has ever existed and that necessarily exists is spacetime, then all potentials thus necessarily exist as well. No “intelligence” or “knowledge” required.
Just as Aristotle said for matter: as soon as any glob of matter exists, all potential shapes it can take exist, as a matter of logical necessity. Thus, the glob does not have to be intelligent, or know anything, or have or be a “mind.” Its existence alone entails all potentials exist (every potential thing it can be shaped into). Aristotle hadn’t yet developed the modern theories of matter as shaped space-time; he just assumed matter (as also space and time) was infinite and eternal. Even if he could have been argued into thinking matter was finite and incapable of innately generating more of itself, he would have then agreed no potential things requiring more matter than existed were possible, and thus those potentials did not exist. But we now know spacetime has no known restraints within itself as to how much of it there can be or it can stretch into. So all potentials exist within it. No mind required. And, like Aristotle, even if we could be persuaded that spacetime was finite, we’d have to agree no potential exists for anything that would require more spacetime than there is or can ever be. And that would just be the way it is.
Feser is attempting to propose a model that explains observations. His proposal contradicts abundant evidence, and has no evidence in its support. The spacetime model fares far better. And that’s just the scientific and philosophical fact of the matter.
Thanks for the reply Richard. Rather than address every counter point you raised I think it may be more productive to address them separately. I’ll start with your belief that you did not assume but rather proved something from nothing is possible. Specifically you said:
I do not assume that. I prove it. The formal proof is in the cited article. Informally, the absence of anything to stop anything from happening, logically entails the presence of all possibilities. Those possibilities need not exist in any other sense. It would be logically impossible for a nothing-state to lack any possibility, because that would entail the presence of something: a power to prevent it.
For the sake of argument suppose you and I both agreed that something may not come from nothing. If that were true then it would be impossible for the multiverse to come forth from a nothing state. And if that’s true then likewise no potential for a multiverse could possibly be lurking in the nothing state. Otherwise your reduced to believing something is possible and impossible at the same time. So in short, the only way it seems possible to get any potential at all in the nothing state,.is through the assumption that something may come from nothing. Absent that assumption it’s logically impossible for any potential to exist in the nothing state. For real potentials only exist where real possibilities exist, and if something may NOT come from nothing .Then no real possibilities exist for the nothing state. The only logical way around this is to assume something may come from nothing, then and only then may you get real potentials in the nothing state
No. That’s not how assumption works. You are assuming a fixed conclusion (that only nothing can come from nothing). I am assuming no conclusion (I am not pre-deciding whether something can or cannot come from nothing). And then logically demonstrating what follows. Hence you are arguing from assumption. I am arguing from demonstration. See my other comment to you. This is simply the difference between us. I reject assumptions. You depend on them.
Dr. Carrier, thanks so much for showing that Feser’s arguments don’t work. I was doubting my ability to dismiss them because I couldn’t engage with all the concepts they contain. Thanks to you, I do now, with the exception of one. May I request a further clarification of Aristotle’s Theory of Forms? I’ve read your links, done other reading, and I’m still not getting it. I think I understand your points about space-time; I just don’t get the specifics.
I think what you are saying is there doesn’t need to be a god or “actualizer” because potential things can exist without being concrete or in a mind. So premise 41 is false, and the argument becomes unsound (if not invalid). Is it as straightforward as that? I feel like I’m missing something here. Thank you so much.
That’s pretty much it.
Feser divides the options essentially into ‘universals exist in a Platonic realm; or universals only exist when manifest in concrete things [which he defines very specifically as things that cease to be what they are when disassembled, for instance; which is why spacetime isn’t a concrete thing by his own definition]; or universals must exist in a mind’ and then he eliminates the first two options (rightly so, IMO), and thus lands on the third as the only option left.
But “individual particular things” are not where universals exist. Universals are expressed by “individual particular things”; but exist in all things. Again, once you have a lump of clay, you have every universal property inherent in it: every possible shape that clay can take. The clay does not have to be in that shape, for the property of being able to be in that shape to exist. And universals are just the possible shapes of things. So if everything is just shaped spacetime, all possible things (hence all universals) exist in spacetime. Not because spacetime actually is shaped to manifest them, but because all that is required for them to exist actually is for spacetime to be thus shaped, and all that is required for them to exist potentially is for spacetime to be thus shapeable.
Thus, as soon as you have spacetime, if all things are just shaped spacetime, then you have all universal properties. They exist as logically necessary properties of spacetime, as the potential shapes spacetime can take. No mind is required. No particular things (no actual manifestations of any universal) are required. Nothing else is required. Once you have the spacetime, you have all possible universals. End of story.
Thank you so much. I really appreciate that you took the time to respond. I understand much better now. I’m so glad to have found this site, and I’m looking forward to taking some of your courses.
Dr carrier I appreciate your response but I still have significant issues with your theory. I’ve read “EX Nihilo Onus Merdae Fit” and your response to Feser and still see the assumption problem. However for the sake of argument I’ll grant all the possibilities in the nothing state and then address what I feel are more serious fundamental problems. So I’ll quote P3 from Ex Nihilo onus Merdae Fit and then comment:
–•P3: Of all the logically possible things that can happen when nothing exists to prevent them from happening, continuing to be nothing is one thing, one universe popping into existence is another thing, two universes popping into existence is yet another thing, and so on all the way to infinitely many universes popping into existence, and likewise for every cardinality of infinity, and every configuration of universes.
Ok here’s what jumps out at me. It seems you only attempt to explain how we get potential universes in the nothing state. But that is a very small step in explaining something from nothing. The heavy lifting comes in explaining how one of those potentials gets actualized. And I don’t see where you’ve addressed that issue at all. A potential universe cannot actualize itself. You need an outside agent for that. A potential universe simply remains potential until something moves it from potential existence to actual existence. This seems a very serious problem for your theory, for how in the world do we get this necessary agent out of the nothing state?
One more observation. I really don’t see how you can claim to have proved something from nothing until this issue is satisfactorily dealt with. Therefore your answer cannot assume something from nothing, lest you be arguing in a circle.
This seems to dramatically complicate things. For I think it reasonable to assume nothing comes from nothing until proven otherwise. Therefore the agent which actualizes the potential universe must in some way be just as significant as the universe it causes. Otherwise you have something from nothing. So how do you get such a being out of the nothing state? Frankly this seems an insurmountable problem, but maybe you can prove me wrong.
Read the whole argument. The syllogism answers this. C2: Therefore [given logical necessity], continuing to be nothing was no more likely than one universe popping into existence, which was no more likely than two universes popping into existence, which was no more likely than infinitely many universes popping into existence, which was no more likely than any other particular number or cardinality of universes popping into existence.
Nothing more is required to make this so. Simply the absence of anything that can ensure “continuing to be nothing.” When there is no force or power that can keep a nothing-state “continuing to be nothing,” it is logically necessarily the case that that nothing-state can transform into any other state.
No “outside agent” is needed. That’s the point.
Please actually read the actual syllogism. And try to understand how logic works. That syllogism refutes the assumption “I think it reasonable to assume nothing comes from nothing until proven otherwise.” It proves that that isn’t reasonable at all.
Also please note that I do not prove that something did come from nothing—because as the article makes clear, we have no evidence there ever was in fact a nothing-state. All my syllogism proves is that if there ever were a nothing-state, by logical definition nothing would exist to stop it transforming into any other state.
When nothing exists, nothing exists to privilege any particular outcome (like “continuing to be nothing” or anything else). What follows from that follows by logical necessity. Not assumption. And not some “extra external” power or thing. When an outcome is logically necessary, no other thing is required.
Ok this is probably my fault for not being clear about what really strikes me as the major problem with your theory. So let me try again. Lets assume that the lack of anything permits all these possibilities to exits in the nothing state. What I want to focus on is the nuts and bolts of how a multiverse pops into existence from a nothing state.
.
You say this will happen as a logical necessity and no outside agent is needed. However my understanding of how every potential is actualized leads to a very different conclusion. In fact I argue that without an outside agent you have a potential actualizing itself with leads to a violation of the principle of non contradiction. Which of course would be logically impossible. Let me explain with an example and then apply it to the multiverse issue.
Suppose you have a pan of water on a stovetop. That pan of water is potentially boiling hot. However in order for it to pass from potentially hot to actually hot you need an outside source for the heat. This is necessary because the pan of water cannot supply itself with that which it does not have (sufficient heat for boiling).Consider the absurdity of saying it could actualize its own potential for boiling. It would then have to simultaneously have and not have the necessary heat to boil. For if it got the needed heat from itself, it would never have been potentially hot but actually hot.This is the problem with any potential actualizing itself, you get a situation where something both exists and not exists at the same time. Applying this to the multiverse popping into existence without an outside agent leads to exactly the same problem. Because before the multiverse can actually exist it must first exist potentially . And when it exists potentially that which it lacks is existence. Now If it does not acquire existence from an outside agent then it could only come from itself. But again look at the absurdity of that situation. If it received existence from itself then it would have to exist and not exist at the same time. This is why I take issue with your theory that no outside agent is needed. Because its logically impossible to pass from a potential multiverse to an actual multiverse without one. Moreover the removal of all barriers in the nothing state does not alleviate the need for this outside agent. Because it does not matter how the potential for a multiverse found its way into the nothing state. What’s crucial is HOW it passes from a potential multiverse to an actual multiverse. Really this is the major issue that I have with your theory. How a multiverse could pop into existence from a nothing state. With that said it would be helpful to me if you could elaborate on how this might happen. Specifically could you answer these questions:
A) Are you saying the potential universe actualizes itself?
B) What triggers such an event?
C) Where does all that Matter/energy come from ?
A) Are you saying the potential universe actualizes itself?
Nothing actualizes it. It is spontaneous. Because there are no laws of physics preventing that. Indeed, when nothing exists, no law of physics exists yet that requires anything to be actualized by something else.
B) What triggers such an event?
Nothing triggers it. Because no law of physics exists that requires events to be triggered at all.
C) Where does all that Matter/energy come from?
Nowhere. Because no law of physics exists that limits where matter and energy can come from or how much can arise that way.
You are working from the assumption that laws of physics already exist (your whole boiling pan of water analogy requires laws of physics to already exist setting the requirements you imagine). But that’s invalid. When nothing exists, nothing exists. Including all those laws of physics you are assuming exist that are needed for water to boil (or anything else).
Get into the correct set of assumptions: nothing, means you can’t assume any law of physics exists. None. So you can’t say what “can’t” happen. That requires there to be something to stop it from happening. But if nothing exists to stop anything from happening, literally anything can happen.
” ‘A) Are you saying the potential Universe actualizes itself?’
“Nothing actualizes it. It is spontaneous. Because there are no laws of physics preventing that. Indeed, when nothing exists, no law of physics exists yet that requires anything to be actualized by something else.”
You’re essentially talking about unbound telesis (UBT), which the metaphysician Chris Langan has modeled in depth in his Cognitive Theoretic Model of the Universe (hereafter “CTMU”):
“In the CTMU, UBT is the ground-state of existence arrived at by stripping away the constraints of reality. Since there are no distributed constraints to limit its content, UBT is all-inclusive, infinite potential, and the source of all freedom. Reality is created by filtratively emerging from this potential by the process of telic recursion. Since reality has a self-defined informational boundary distinguishing it from its complement (unactualized potential or unreality), it has recognizable content and structure. On the other hand, UBT is ‘a realm of zero constraint and infinite possibility where neither boundary nor content exists.’ ”
See, if you’re interested, http://ctmucommunity.org/wiki/UBT.
You should review Langan’s work (he has recently published two papers in a philosophy journal). Your review would, I think, make for an interesting blog post, at the very least. He’s a theist.
None of those come close to the way you tried to define spacetime does away with the obvious contingency of spacetime. Spacetime is clearly a body since it can be finite or infinite and contain matter. Also it can fail to exist and is contingent upon physical laws which means they have potentialities that need to be actualized. In the “The Matter Myth” they note, “The key question then becomes: how did space (strictly speaking, spacetime) come into existence? Many physicists, even today, balk at the puzzle*, and are content to leave the matter to the theologians. But others argue that we must expect gravity, and hence spacetime, *to be as much subject to the quantum factor as anything else in nature ” (Davies and Gribbin, “The Matter Myth”, pg. 162).
This is obvious because space-time is not immutable, it is has body because it contains matter and is dependent upon something else for it’s existence namely quantum mechanics just like the rest of nature is. Aquinas and Aristotle (who actually originated the potency and act idea) would say this is because space-time is a potential that needs to be actualized by undergirding physical laws,
“Spacetime is clearly a body since it can be finite or infinite and contain matter” is a moot point. Because Feser presents no deductively valid arguments from “can be either finite or infinite” or “can contain matter” to the need for anything prior to or other than spacetime (see “The Neoplatonic Proof” above). So there is no argument here in need of rebuttal. You are changing the definition of “body” in a way that no longer applies in any of Feser’s proofs. Spacetime is not a body in the sense any of Feser’s proofs require. Trying then to mean something else by “body” produces an equivocation fallacy.
If you doubt this, then find the numbered premise in any of Feser’s syllogisms (not his commentary, his actual proofs) that declares “body” to be that which “can be either finite or infinite” or “can contain matter,” or that declares anything that entails either. When you fail to find such, you’ll then realize he has no proofs deriving from such a premise. Therefore such a premise is of no use in rescuing Feser.
You misunderstand what a potential is. Again this is all based on the metaphysics of change. For example a hot coffee has the potential to become cold if actualized by cold air. A rubber ball has the potential to melt if actualized by heat. Change is going from potential to actual. Aristotle said, “something must be moved by something else”. This is what makes change work in reality and we observe change all around us. So you have a misunderstanding of what potentiality is in Aristotlelian metaphysics.
“Aristotle argued that potentials exist inherently in everything, without anything further needing to be the case”
That is not true at all. Aristotle argued that potentials need to be actualized and that when you extrapolate backwards you arrive at a prime mover that has no potentials to be actualized and can actualize everything else:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unmoved_mover
Thomas Aquinas’ argument from motion is an expanded version of Aristotle’s prime mover argument. Thomas Aquinas was an Aristotlelian who study Aristotle heavily and combined his thought with Christian theology.
“A cube has the potential to become a sphere”
False. Aquinas noted that potentials are based on the inherent nature of a thing. For example does a rubber ball have the potential to become a chicken? No, potentials are rooted in a thing’s nature as it actually exists. So a rubber ball in principle cannot have the potential to become a chicken. A cube does not have the potential to become a sphere. Again Aristotle used potentiality and actuality to explain the metaphysical reality of change. Do we observe warming coffee cups in microwaves and then opening it up to see a puppy inside? No.
I think you are confused.
When Aristotle and I talk about potential and actual, we mean logical potentials from physical actuals. All this stuff you go on about regarding what it takes to realize a potential is irrelevant. It remains a potential of all the actual things involved. Or else it does not. The latter condition is called in modal logic an impossibility.
This is what Aristotle and I mean. We are already including what you are talking about in the actuals that realize the potentials. “Heat” for example is just another actualization of a potential from an actual. Saying “we need heat” is just repeating what I said: actual things can potentially realize potential things; all you have to do is reconfigure them (basically, just move stuff around, reshape it, etc.). For example, heat is always a potential outcome of spacetime on String theory. No God needed. That’s the point.
As to there needing to be an ultimate mover, even if that argument were sound (it has been abandoned by philosophy for hundreds of years now because it’s not), that doesn’t get you to God. We can explain all shaping of spacetime (including production of matter, heat, motion) by appeal to all manner of mindless and random first events in spacetime. Cosmological science has been doing this for decades now. No God needed.
You also don’t appear to have a good grasp of modern science.
“Does a rubber ball have the potential to become a chicken?” Yes. It does. We know how to transform atoms. We’ve done it. All one need do is convert the atoms in a ball into the atoms needed for the chicken, and arrange them in the needed geometry (see Santa Claus Machine). This is indeed how a ball called an egg becomes a chicken. Although in that case the atoms are already gathered and just need to be moved into the geometric configuration. But even if an egg started out as 100% rubber, any mass of rubber is just a collection of quarks. And the difference between rubber and the materials comprising a chicken are merely a question of how you arrange the quarks. So any mass, whether of rubber or anything else, has the potential to be rearranged into a chicken.
That’s what an Aristotelian potential means. It just requires the right impetus to actualize the potential. Until then, the potential exists within the actual, for that very reason. And the question of what impetuses exist or are likely or unlikely, and what realizes these probabilities, is well sussed by physics. Indeed, there is even a calculable probability that a rubber ball will become a chicken by inevitable, mindless, quantum mechanical process (it’s just a probability so small you won’t likely see it happen; but given an infinite universe, it inevitably will). So once again, no God needed.
This is why you can never get a deductive argument to God Feser’s way.
The only way to prove a God exists is empirically, by ruling out all competing alternative explanations of what we observe. And so far, the God theory has been consistently losing that contest for over two thousand years now.
Regarding essence and existence.
In your article you compared essentialism to phlogiston! Essentialism is based on what we assign to objects at a purely superficial level. Not what they ‘have’. Of course science has undermined it!! There are a bunch of ways that you can understand essentialism:
Metaphysical Modal Essentialism : There are properties that objects have in any possible world in which they exits.
Nomic Modal Essentialism : There are properties that objects have in a physically necessary sense. That is, in any physically possible world in which they exist they have those properties.
Real Definition Essentialism : There are properties that provide a “definition” or metaphysical analysis of what it is to be a given thing.
Kind Essentialism : For an object to belong to a kind it must necessarily have some specific set of properties.
The list goes on. Further, some of these can be mixed and matched. Often when people say that science has undermined essentialism they really mean that science has undermined one specific incarnation of essentialism as in the Standard Encyclopedia of Philosophy article “The Death of Essentialism”. For example, people often think that biological kinds can’t be defined in terms of their first order properties. However, there are other kinds of essentialism that are left unscathed by critiques like this. Perhaps biological kinds are to be defined in terms of other features (for example Jantzen 2014 defines them in terms of dynamic symmetries). This kind of view might be welcomed by some essentialists. There are a bunch of different ways to understand essentialism and whether or not science has undermined the view depends on what the target is. Often these are fairly specific metaphysical views and there are views in close proximity which aren’t undermined by the science.
Basically, the problem with the scientistic types is that they fail to realize that, before scientists start cutting dogs and horses up into little tiny bits and examining the tiniest bits of the bits (e.g., DNA), they already have to know what they’re testing and examining. They have to know what dogs are in order to figure out what the composition of dog DNA is. Science by definition presupposes essences.
Again essentialism is said in many ways. Presumably, the sense that I intend here is that things are what they are, independently of our thoughts, attitudes, etc., and that things are the same as other things, insofar as they are a certain kind of thing, and things are different from other things, insofar as they are not both things of a certain kind.Thus, Fido is really a dog. Insofar as he is a dog, he is the same, qua dog, as Rover and Lassie. He is also really different, qua dog, from Flicka, who is a horse. So no, science hasn’t undermined it. People make this claim, but it’s inherently a dumb claim. To deny essentialism in that sense is to render the universe completely unintelligible and science impossible. Asserting that science has abolished essences (as I and Feser define it) is about as stupid as saying that science has abolished sense realism. It’s self-refuting nonsense.
Also the essence/existence is only one way to show that spacetime is composite. At this point it is simply insane for you to say spacetime is non-composite when all the science says it is contingent and has an explanation for it’s origin. You are in pure denial buddy. Spacetime is neither homeomorphic nor isotropic. It has the qualities of a composite. You also had the audacity to say spacetime essence is it’s existence. I mean really? Even my atheist philosophy friends would laugh at this joke. Clearly spacetime can fail to exist. If something’s essence is equal to it’s existence it should not only be non-composite, which spacetime is clearly not, but exist in all logically possible worlds.
Also I will say this, set theory definitely doesn’t explain anything that the classical view of essence was supposed to explain. For example, an essence of X explains the similarities we see between those with essences like the one that X has, and it also explains the differences of things that have essences different than X. With set theory, there is no real or objective reason why some members belong to one set rather than another set. So I fail to see how set theory is supposed to explain anything interesting here.
Essentialism has long since been refuted. It was replaced with semantics. And here you are confusing semantics (which are arbitrary human distinctions based on differences in shared patterns of observed arrangement) with metaphysics. Precisely the error that made Aquinas a pseudoscientist.
There is no “Essence of Dog.” There are simply shared physical patterns of arrangement we arbitrarily choose to label with the code word dog. We then ask what makes a dog a dog. And the rest is science. No essences. Just existence (materials and their arrangement). If you knew anything about the history of cladistics (and how we have changed the boundaries and definitions of species according to semantic choices and not essences, because essences don’t exist) you’d already know what I was talking about.
It is both false and irrelevant that “there is no real or objective reason why some members belong to one set rather than another set.” It is irrelevant because categorization is a human invention. We choose not to call cats dogs. Just as we choose to call them both mammals. There is no cosmic essence that demands we do either. And it is false because there are objective differences in the arrangement of materials that make up a dog vs. a cat (from morphological to genetic), and objective differences in the causal history of their origins (just as there are objective differences in the causal history of the United States and Australia). Likewise everything else we categorize.
You also seem not to understand how set theory works. Set theory is based on actual objective differences between members of non-overlapping sets—because if they had no differences, they would be the same set. Hence the Law of Identity in formal logic. Which differences we choose to give names to is meanwhile an arbitrary human decision; which is why different languages and dialects categorize things differently and why things are categorized differently in different periods of time even in the same language.
This is why grocers categorize tomatoes as vegetables while biologists categorize tomatoes as fruits. Different dialects, different choices. Keying on different distinctions.
You said potentials have a range of probablities. No they don’t. Potentials are directed towards a specific actualizations and potentials are rooted in things as they actually exist. You also have to understand Aristotle’s metaphysics like form and matter.
Allow me to reiterate my points.
1 – Whatever goes from potential to actual has a cause. Spacetime goes from potential to actual, so therefore spacetime has a cause.
2 – A necessary being cannot be composed of parts like physical laws and spacetime is because if it were it’s existence would be contingent upon something combining it’s parts, in which case, it wouldn’t really be necessary at all.
3 – Spacetime is clearly a body since it can be finite or infinite and contain matter.
4 – Space can bend, go out of existence, come into existence (via tunneling), and can fail to exist.
5 – Spacetime is composite because it has proper parts: SPACE AND TIME and operates based on contingent regularities.
6 – Also spacetime does have a body. Saying that space isn’t located anywhere is incoherent because space IS location itself. Also time completely warps around black holes, so time is not immutable. Time is the measurement of change.
7 – Space-time is not immutable since it is dependent upon something else for it’s existence namely quantum mechanics just like the rest of nature is as Gribbin noted. “The key question then becomes: how did space (strictly speaking, spacetime) come into existence? Many physicists, even today, balk at the puzzle, and are content to leave the matter to the theologians. But others argue that we must expect gravity, and hence spacetime, to be as much subject to the QUANTUM FACTOR as anything else in nature ” (Davies and Gribbin, “The Matter Myth”, pg. 162).
Nice example of you dodging the question. I asked for syllogisms. Proofs. You give me more undefended and ignorant assertions. This is evidently all you have.
“You said potentials have a range of probablities.”
No. I didn’t. I said potentials in an actual state of no restrictions have probabilities. In other words, they don’t just “have a probability.” Only in a state (an actual state) where there are no rules, forces, or limits preventing random things from happening, is it the case that random things must necessarily happen. It is a logical necessity. You can’t deny this without asserting a logical contradiction. And as logical contradictions cannot exist, so also your contrary conclusion cannot be true.
And indeed, there is always a cause. In the case of the Merdae Fit argument, the cause is the actual state of there being nothing (other than what is logically necessary, i.e. the absence of logically contradictory states or events): the absence of restraints, causes random outcomes. That’s a causal state. And it requires no other cause before it. By definition, “nothing” is a state that lacks everything, including preceding causes.
The claim that a necessary being cannot produce parts is false. So you are conflating what spacetime is (everywhere the same, not decomposable into anything but itself), with what it then causes once it exists (particles and forces and regions and geometric laws). All contingent things (like laws and constants of physics) are caused by spacetime. They are not identical with spacetime (except any that are logically necessary, but logical necessities require no causes; a logically necessary being obviously comes with all logically necessary properties). You would know this if you had actually read the article you are here pretending to comment on. Maybe you should actually read it?
“Body” is not defined as “can be finite or infinite and contain” things by Feser. And there is a reason that’s so. Because he couldn’t get a proof with it. So if you want to prove that on this new definition of body you have contrived that you can show a necessary being cannot have a body in this new sense, show me the syllogism. Otherwise, you have no argument.
It is not established that all spacetime can ever cease to exist once it does exist. And that once it exists it can shrink, grow, and reshape entails nothing with respect to the necessity of its existence. Just as God can change his mind and even change his form (like acquire, kill, and discard a body) and change his disposition (do things at one time that he didn’t do at another) and still be a necessary being, so can a shapeable spacetime still be a necessary being. Again, show me the syllogism that proves otherwise. There is a reason Feser doesn’t. But give it a shot. Let’s see your syllogism. Otherwise, you have no argument.
Spacetime is not a “composite” in Feser’s sense. And there is a reason for that. He couldn’t get a proof with your definition. So if you want to redefine what “composite” means, you now need to produce a syllogism proving that on your new definition of composite, necessary beings cannot be composites in that new sense. Let’s see the syllogism. Otherwise, you have no argument.
Your sixth point betrays the fact that you didn’t read the article you are pretending to comment on. Please read the article. Spacetime requires no location precisely because it is a location. Thus it is dependent on nothing but itself. It therefore meets the conditions required of a necessary being. And time is a dimension, an actual location; not just some “measurement of change.” Read up on General Relativity. Please. And again, that time and space can be reshaped has no bearing on whether it can be a necessary being. Just as God can change over time (change his mind, take actions one moment he didn’t another, and so on) and still be a necessary being. But even if you want to eliminate the Christian God with your strict notion of what can be a necessary being, you still have to produce a syllogism proving it. Prove that a necessary being logically cannot itself undergo any change over time. Let’s see the syllogism. Otherwise, you simply have no argument.
Finally, there is no evidence spacetime is “dependent” on anything, much less “quantum mechanics.” I honestly don’t think you know what “quantum mechanics” is. But your one quote only states a speculation. Speculations don’t get you proofs. Worse, that speculation is essentially what I am proposing: they go on to say that if the quantum nature of matter allows spontaneous matter formation without a cause, it can do so for spacetime. This is just another way of restating my Merdae Fit argument: in the absence of restraints, outcomes are random (this is ultimately what they mean by “quantum”; they then work out a mathematics of it). Their entire point is that no further cause is necessary.
I read your response and it is no refutation at all. It is just more strawman and misunderstandings of what a composite is yet again. Spacetime is a physical entity and has proper parts. That is undisputable in the field of physics and not a single atheist philosopher or scientist I have read would dispute that. It is just you. This misunderstanding is not coming from my side it is coming from you confusing metaphysics with physics. Spacetime is emergent. It does not create laws it emerges from laws:
Google: “Space Emerging from Quantum Mechanics”
Spacetime is also metaphysically composite and is also a contingent entity. No one is disputing this. You are the first atheist ever I have heard that tried to argue spacetime is non composite. It is pretty embarrassing.
Another thing is that you keep mentioning Feser which shows how ignorant you are of the literature on the topic because these arguments don’t originate with him and he is just one of many scholastic philosophers.
The fact that you are arguing that space-time is a necessary being is ridiculous. No, just because something doesn’t have a location doesn’t mean it is a necessary being. You clearly don’t understand what a necessary being is. Necessary being is something non-contingent which spacetime clearly is. I challenge you show me any atheist philosopher or scientist that says that space-time is a “necessary being” and not contingent. I challenge you. And again you cannot say a necessary being is emergent.
Basically right now I am arguing against your fringe views of spacetime that no respectful philosopher or scientist would hold to.
So Spacetime is dependent on quantum mechanics meaning it operates according to them. Read the article by Sean Carroll. You have the nerve to say I don’t understand science but here you are saying spacetime is a necessary being and non-composite! Hilarious! I shared your claims with an atheist buddy mine who said your views are “insane” because no one disputes the contingency of spacetime.
This isn’t just speculation. For example even though loop quantum gravity and string theory are different models posited to unite classical physics and quantum mechanics BOTH theories have spacetime as emergent. Spacetime is dependent on quantum entanglement and emerges from it:
Classical physics from quantum entanglement:
Google: “Entanglement is necessary for emergent classicality in all physical theories”
Time from quantum entanglement:
https://arxiv.org/abs/1310.4691
See this interview with leading quantum loop gravity theorist Fotini Markoupoulou who says “spacetime is not fundamental” (see 4:00-4:25): Google: “Closer To Truth Asks Fotini Markopoulou: Why Is The Universe So Breathtaking?”
Here is a paper on string theory Dr. Horowitz arguing showing that space-time is emergent:
Google: “Spacetime in String Theory”
The evidence has piled up since then.
Also to say that space-time is the ultimate reality assumes local realism is fundamental. But naive/local realism was falsified way back in 2007 by Dr. Anton Zellinger and others:
Google: “An experimental test of non-local realism”
So many physicists today say space-time is “illusory”, “a hologram”, “emergent”, etc because all of the math and physics and showing that it is contingent. Spacetime emerges from quantum mechanics:
Google: ‘A THIN SHEET OF REALITY: THE UNIVERSE AS A HOLOGRAM”
So it isn’t just Sean Carroll’s personal speculation. You have to keep up with the science. Spacetime is contingent and the evidence for it is overwhelming.
All the current science leads to space-time being emergent and it is confirmed not by mere speculation but experiments like the one done way back in 07 by Anton Zellinger that showed that local realism (or spacetime) is not fundamental:
Google: “Quantum physics says goodbye to reality”
There are many lines of evidence that lead to the conclusion that space-time is emergent. But again the dominant theories today are loop quantum gravity and string theory and spacetime as emergent is a consequence of both models. You can call it speculation, but that is denying the evidence. For example in Phys.org article titled, “Spacetime—a creation of well-known actors?”, the author notes:
“What is spacetime? The absolute, unchanging arena of events? Or perhaps it is a dynamic creation, emerging in some way on a certain scale of distance, time or energy. References to the absolute are not welcome in today’s physics. It is widely believed that spacetime is emergent. It is not clear, however, where the process of its emergence takes place”
Google: “Spacetime—a creation of well-known actors?”
So apart from how exactly it emerges, which loop quantum gravity theorists and string theorists fight about, the evidence is clear that space-time is emergent. So again you are arguing from a fringe view not held by any physicist I know of. Spacetime is not absolute or the ultimate reality. It is composite, contingent and emerges from quantum entanglement as most physicists conclude whether or not they favor loop quantum gravity or string theory. So therefore it is potential that needs to be actualized by something else.
Interesting that you still present no syllogism. I’ve asked you repeatedly now to present an actual logical proof. You keep avoiding it. This tells me all I need to know: you have no actual argument. Just undefended assertions. And long word-walls of irrelevancies.
Present a syllogism that proves spacetime cannot be a necessary being. Or admit you cannot. All else is vanity.
“When Aristotle and I talk about potential and actual, we mean logical potentials from physical actuals. ”
That is NOT what Aristotle means. I have read all of Aristotle and numerous commentaries. What Aristotle means by potentiality and actuality is metaphysical change. He was attempting to refute the Greek philosopher Parminides who said change was an illusion because something cannot come from nothing. He isn’t saying things “need” to be actualized but that they “are” actualized and the only way for a potential to be actualized is if something actual already exists in order to actualize it. Aristotle is accounting for the change is a feature of the world.
No, a rubber ball does NOT have a potential to be a chicken. A potential is rooted in a thing as it actually exist. To rearrange the atoms in such away to change it’s substantial form, as Aquinas would put it, is to completely change what it actually exists as and to give it new potentials which would make it a completely different rubber ball. But again Aristotle is referring to change. We don’t observe unintelligible changing like books turning into birds, water becoming potato chips, shoes becoming horse, etc. That is why Aristotle argued that change is rooted in something as it actually exists. He was trying to explain the intelligibility of change and argue against the Greek philosopher Parminides.
Regarding your last comment.
I am not going to respond to already refuted assertions such as, “science has long refuted essentialism” which I already thoroughly addressed previously. Also calling it semantics is not an argument. Respond to my arguments regarding the fact that science presupposes essentialism, respond to the fact that I distinguished between many kinds of essentialism.
Essentialism has been refuted by science. It is no longer any part of science. Not even as a presupposition. It’s in the same dust bin as astrology and vitalism. And I have not just claimed, but demonstrated repeatedly that essentialism is a confused reification of semantics. I even directed you to an entire section of this article proving the point. That’s called an argument. You have not responded to it. You don’t even show any signs of having read it. Much less of having understood it.
“[T]he only way for a potential to be actualized is if something actual already exists in order to actualize it” is exactly what I’m saying. You are so clueless here you actually think you are saying something different than I am! This is exasperating. Please pay more attention and actually make an effort to understand what we are talking about. Otherwise you’re just wasting everyone’s time here.
I have given you all the proof available and you just call it “speculation” and have your own model which is rejected by physicists. Also there is no need for a syllogism. It doesn’t prove anything in philosophy and is only used to show that an argument is structually valid. I can make a syllogism about leprechauns existing too.
You have been given scientific and metaphysical proof for space-time being contingent and at this point your denial is just pure insanity because it is obvious to anyone. You are the first person I have ever come across that tried to argue that spacetime is absolute.
Holy Moses. You reject logic!!?? Wow.
You now refuse to present a single syllogism. And declare all logical arguments unsound. Even Feser’s! This is too hilarious.
If you can “prove” Leprechauns exist by your use of logic, that proves your use of logic is unsound.
Do you even know how to produce a valid and sound argument? Do you even know the difference between validity and soundness?
Do it. Give me a logically valid syllogism. With only true premises. You cannot prove Leprechauns exist with that; that’s why it is a respected method. It’s why Feser uses it. Don’t give me your invalid methods that you admit can prove any false thing true. Give me an argument using a method we all know only proves true what is true.
That method is a syllogism. In which no premise can be denied. And which is formally valid.
Let’s see a single syllogistic proof from you. Just one.
If you can’t do it, then you have no argument. Just unprovable assertions. Just as I’ve been telling you. Over and over again.
No, you don’t understand what a syllogism is in philosophy. I learned this in my first semester in logic. A syllogism is only for structural purposes. Nothing more. It doesn’t prove anything.
Again. I demonstrated many times that space and time is composite of parts. Read the article by Carroll. He says space is just a collection of wave functions and stuff. String and loop quantum gravity theorists say spacetime is emergent and holographic. Read the articles I presented to you. It’s in accordance with Feser’s definition of composite.
Um. A proof proves. That’s the point.
You can’t just make assertions and claim there is any truth to them. You have to prove they are true. If you are proving them to a probability, you are engaging in inductive proof and are dealing with hypotheses and empirical claims. That means you need evidence your claims are true, and enough evidence to make the claim’s falsity unlikely. But you are here talking about modal logic. Not evidential claims. You are not claiming you have evidence that spacetime is not the necessary being. You are claiming spacetime cannot be a necessary being. That’s not an empirical assertion. It’s an analytical assertion: it is an assertion regarding what is possible or impossible. That can only be known to be true from a logical proof.
In other words, you can’t just “say” x is impossible. You have to prove it. And the only way to prove an impossibility is by syllogism, in which none of the premises can be denied, and the conclusion follows with logical necessity from those premises.
There is no other way to argue that spacetime “cannot be a necessary being.” So either you have a syllogism proving that. Or you have no argument for it at all.
It is not an argument to say “spacetime is a composite being in the sense x, therefore spacetime cannot be a necessary being.” Because that is a non sequitur. You have to show that entities that are composite in that sense cannot be necessary beings. You have never given any argument for that latter claim. Therefore you have no argument to the conclusion at all.
Spacetime cannot be necessary based on what it is. You were already shown to be wrong by vast empirical science which you call speculation. The consensus view in physics is that spacetime is contingent and emergent. Case closed.
You also don’t understand what a composite is in metaphysics. Space and time are two proper parts so are metaphysically composite so that if one part were missing there is no concept of spacetime. That is easy to understand for any philosophy student. Learn what a necessary being is in philosophy, learn what a composite is in metaphysics. You are the first atheist that I have come across arguing that space-time is absolute. Why? Because it is an insane idea. You have to reject all science and common sense philosophy to hold to it.
No, a syllogism doesn’t prove anything. Take a philosophy course on logic or watch a YouTube video on a syllogism. A syllogism just shows that an argument is logically valid by putting it in simple steps, but the premises can all be false so it doesn’t prove anything. For example:
P1. Whatever begins to exist has a cause.
P2. The Universe began to exist.
C. Therefore the Universe has a cause.
This argument is logically valid and follows from the premises to conclusion. But it doesn’t prove anything because the premises can be false.
No that isn’t a non-sequitur. If spacetime is composite it isn’t a necessary being. You are confused about composites and necessary beings in philosophy. Not my problem.
You still have presented no argument. You just keep asserting “spacetime cannot be necessary based on what it is” and never give any proof of that claim or any other. It’s thus just an idle claim. There is no reason to believe it. Because you can’t even think of one to present here.
Instead of giving me a proof that anything you claim is true (like that spacetime being “composite” in your newly defined sense contradicts its being a necessary being: still a claim you have never proved, nor even presented an argument for), you resort to repeating obsolete, long-refuted syllogisms in pseudocosmology.
The absence of anything to prevent any random thing from happening will cause any random thing from happening. Logically necessarily. Therefore, the Universe has a cause, even if it began as nothing. No God needed. And as this entails, as a logical necessity, spacetime, spacetime is as logically necessary as what a nothing-state must logically necessarily cause. In no way does spacetime being “composite” in any sense you mean, change the fact that spacetime is then still a necessary being.
So that doesn’t get you anywhere, even if the syllogism were sound. And you admit it isn’t sound!
There is no evidence that the first premise is true. That things that begin in spacetime must have a cause, does not entail or even imply spacetime itself must have a cause. So we cannot establish that “whatever” begins to exist has a cause. All evidence regarding it is inside spacetime, and not of spacetime itself. Indeed, as causes must precede their effects in time, it is logically impossible for space-time to have a cause! Therefore, the first premise isn’t just undemonstrated—it is demonstrably false!
There is also no evidence the second premise is true. We cannot determine on present evidence whether our universe began or is past-eternal. Spacetime may have always existed, all the way back into eternal past. Like any necessary being could. And if spacetime had a beginning, there still was never any place or time that spacetime didn’t exist, because spacetime will then have existed at every moment of time that exists. By definition! And that which always exists, is a pretty good candidate for a necessary being.
So where here do you have any demonstration that spacetime is not a necessary being? I fail to see it.
I’ve already refuted everything you are claiming. Not only in the article you are here commenting on and pretending to have read, but in my rebuttals to Feser already published. I need nothing more to dismiss you.
You need to work harder to be taken seriously here. Mere undefended assertions aren’t going to cut it.
You are really missing the point and you are going on about various theories like String theory for no reason based on a misunderstanding. Spacetime is composite because it has proper parts: space and time, operates based on contingent regularities and is composed of essence and existence. The idea that because nature is composite it cannot be fundamental comes from a Greek philosopher by the name of Plotinus (204 – 270 CE) who was one of the greatest Greek philosophers after Aristotle. His writings influenced later pagan, Christian and Islamic philosophers. Plotinus argued that fundamental reality is not composed of parts and that there is one absolute reality that is absolutely simple and not composed of parts. He referred to this reality and godlike entity as “The One”. Plotinus would argue that you are confusing something being composite with being made of matter. Matter isn’t the only way for a thing to be composite. There is composition of words in a sentence. There is composition of sets and operations in a set-theoretic abstract algebra. There is composition and how things interact with each other. So spacetime is clearly composite and therefore cannot be fundamental whatsoever since it’s ontology depends on proper parts.
Another reason why space-time is composite is because like everything else in physical reality it is made out of two metaphysical parts: essence and existence.
Thomas Aquinas wrote that non-physical things like angels are composite because they are made of essence (what they are) and existence (that they exist). Aquinas was drawing from the Greek philosopher Aristotle who was the first to notice this metaphysical distinction. Aristotle noted:
“What human nature is and the fact that man exists are not the same thing” (Anal. post. 92b 10–11).
Here Aristotle is saying that essence does not follow existence. I can know all the physical properties of an alien, but simply knowing it’s essence does not follow that such a being exists in reality which means that things have two metaphysically separate components that make them a reality : essence and existence. Likewise this can also be applied to spacetime because one can conceive of spacetime without knowing if it exists. There is a possible world where spacetime doesn’t exist, so spacetime is made up of essence and existence, which follows that it is composed of metaphysical parts and therefore composite. But for fundamental reality the essence and existence distinction doesn’t exist. For a purely actual being like God his essence is his existence which was noted by later Jewish, Christian and Islamic Aristotlelians like Moses Maimonides, Thomas Aquinas, Ibn Sina, Ibn Rushd, etc.
Thomas Aquinas tied in the thought of Aristotle and Plotinus to argue that the grounding of existence cannot be composite and have an essence-existence distinction because that would mean it would have unrealized potentials that need to be actualized by something already actual. Remember that whatever goes from potential to actual has a cause. Namely something with underived casual power to actualize everything else without needing to be actualized itself which is what Aquinas called a purely actual being or in Latin “Actus Purus” would have to be the ground of all being.
Also read again what Paul Davies and John Gribbin said. Spacetime is dependent on physical laws just as much as everything else in nature is, so by definition spacetime cannot be necessary since it’s ontology depends on something else, so needs something else to actualize it.
Also spacetime does have a body. Saying that space isn’t located anywhere is incoherent because space IS location itself. Also time completely warps around black holes, so time is not immutable. Time is the measurement of change.
Space does not have “composite parts” in the sense required by Feser’s argument. We have no evidence that if you break up spacetime it ceases to be spacetime but becomes something else. Therefore spacetime is not a composite. No matter how you reshape, cut it up, whittle it down, or expand it, it remains spacetime, with the same fundamental properties common to all spacetime. Again, point to the numbered line in which syllogism in Feser where you can replace his definition of composite with yours and still get a logically valid conclusion. There is none. So you are just creating yet another equivocation fallacy. Fallacies don’t work. That’s why they are fallacies.
Meanwhile, that essence-existence nonsense is already refuted in my article (see “Thomistic Proof”). Which, it’s becoming apparent, you didn’t read. Essences don’t exist. They were an ancient and medieval semantic error that have been eliminated by modern science.
Likewise, there is no sense in which Davies and Gribbin said spacetime is “dependent” on independent physical laws. I think you are confused about what the word “dependent” means. Philosophically, there are no laws of physics, should you remove them, that make spacetime go away; other than laws that are logically entailed by spacetime and thus not composite but necessarily combinant. Davies and Gribbin have only said that spacetime adheres to certain laws, and either does so necessarily (and thus not dependently) or does so locally (and therefore not dependently); spacetime may follow other laws in other places; we can explain all that by appealing to different configurations of spacetime; and there is no evidence supporting any other explanation above that one. None of Feser’s arguments get around this. And you haven’t located any premise in any syllogism that does.
So first you try to redefine “body” contrary to Feser, and attempt to use your new definition in Feser’s syllogism, but can’t locate the premise or syllogism in his book where that would work, and it actually doesn’t. His conclusion does not follow from your new definition. So your new definition does not rescue his argument; it destroys it. Then you try to redefine “composite” contrary to Feser, and attempt to use your new definition in Feser’s syllogism, but can’t locate the premise or syllogism in his book where that would work, and it actually doesn’t. His conclusion does not follow from your new definition. So your new definition does not rescue his argument, it destroys it. And then you ignore this and go full circle and try insisting on using your new definition of body again. Not evidently having heard it just explained to you why that destroys rather than rescues Feser’s argument.
Maybe try reading my article; paying more attention; and being more careful with your reasoning.
And I don’t need to correct Feser’s premises. These are not his arguments. He is just one thomist philosopher who borrows arguments from Brian Davies, Odeberg, Anscombe, etc. They come from Aristotle, Aquinas, and Plotinus. Also saying that space-time is non contingent is fringe. It’s contingency follows that it is composite, but you keep thinking of matter when I gave you several examples of composites. It’s baffling.
Oh I see. You have no defense of Feser. Okay.
So let’s see your formal syllogism that bests Feser and gets the result you want with only true premises.
Then we can talk about that and not Feser’s failure to discover any.
It really baffles me that a professor in the 21st century is presenting aristotelian and aquinian proofs of the existence of God, as something new and groundbreaking, ignoring that they have already been debunked by Immanuel Kant in his Critique of Pure Reason. I mean, every student who attended philosophy classes in high school should know about this. Even Aquinus himself acknowledged that they were not real proofs, but only paths guiding us in our inquiry, in our understanding of god (he even called them “the five ways”, not ” the five proofs”).
And they all boil down to this type of reasoning: everyday objects I deal with all tend to behave in this particular way or have this property I just made up in my mind, therefore this must also apply to the whole chain of events in the whole universe and even to the formation of the universe itself.
The problem is, nobody has ever witnessed the process of universe formation, so we don’t know which logic should apply to the ultimate causes of the universe. We can’t derive metaphysics from our understanding of physics (and aristotelian understanding of physics was pretty sloppy and uninformed, by the way).
By the way, I just made up a parody of aristotelian and aquinian reasoning, which I thought could well have been authored by Voltaire’s character Pangloss:
“We all know that objects have a natural tendency to fall into heavier, bigger and more stable objects. Imagine you are having dinner and your glass slips out of your hand, spilling water on the table. Isn’t the table heavier and firmer than the water? And imagine now that the table falls on the floor (one leg had been eaten by termites): isn’t the floor firmer and bigger than the table? And imagine now an earthquake shaking your building and making your apartment floor fall all the way down into the ground. Isn’t the ground more stable than the apartment floor?
And isn’t the earth itself constantly falling into the sun, remaining into its orbit only due to its angular velocity?
From all this we should conclude that every object in the universe (apples, planets, stars and galaxies, everything) sooner or later should fall into another object (heavier, bigger and more stable), which in turn should fall into another, etc. But of course we can’t have an infinite chain of events. From that we conclude that there must exist something towards which everything in the universe is heading, something which is the firmest of all grounds, and this infinetely stable ground which is not supported by any other grounds we call God. Checkmate atheists!”
Feser has said in talks and his book intro that he is not saying anything original just with a different spin so to speak.
It really baffles me that a professor in the 21st century is presenting aristotelian and aquinian proofs of the existence of God, as something new and groundbreaking, ignoring that they have already been debunked by Immanuel Kant in his Critique of Pure Reason. I mean, every student who attended philosophy classes in high school should know about this. Even Aquinus himself acknowledged that they were not real proofs, but only paths guiding us in our inquiry, in our understanding of god (he even called them “the five ways”, not ” the five proofs”).
And they all boil down to this type of reasoning: everyday objects I deal with all tend to behave in this particular way or have this property I just made up in my mind, therefore this must also apply to the whole chain of events in the whole universe and even to the formation of the universe itself.
The problem is, nobody has ever witnessed the process of universe formation, so we don’t know which logic should apply to the ultimate causes of the universe. We can’t derive metaphysics from our understanding of physics (and aristotelian understanding of physics was pretty sloppy and uninformed, by the way).
By the way, I just made up a parody of aristotelian and aquinian reasoning, which I thought could well have been authored by Voltaire’s character Pangloss:
“We all know that objects have a natural tendency to fall into heavier, bigger and more stable objects. Imagine you are having dinner and your glass slips out of your hand, spilling water on the table. Isn’t the table heavier and firmer than the water? And imagine now that the table falls on the floor (one leg had been eaten by termites): isn’t the floor firmer and bigger than the table? And imagine now an earthquake shaking your building and making your apartment floor fall all the way down into the ground. Isn’t the ground more stable than the apartment floor?
And isn’t the earth itself constantly falling into the sun, remaining into its orbit only due to its angular velocity?
From all this we should conclude that every object in the universe (apples, planets, stars and galaxies, everything) sooner or later should fall into another object (heavier, bigger and more stable), which in turn should fall into another, etc. But of course we can’t have an infinite chain of events. From that we conclude that there must exist something towards which everything in the universe is heading, something which is the firmest of all grounds, and this infinetely stable ground which is not supported by any other grounds we call God. Checkmate atheists!”
I watched the video: “Kenny Rhodes & Richard Carrier Discuss the Existence of God” and came here to see your treatment of the issue (and I also read the comments in this page).
I have two objections to the argument of ontological necessity.
(1) There is no reason to think there is anything necessary. Every being is contingent on another contingent being. We never find anything necessary at all (whatever that means). Actually, this argument can be used against the theist, as I’ll show below!
P1. Every being is contingent on another contingent being.
P2: The universe is a contingent being.
C: Therefore, the universe is contingent on another contingent being.
So, the theist will say the previous contingent being requires another being to hold it’s existence, but infinite regress cannot exist, because it’s not a causal chain.
However, (and this leads to my second objection), I see no reason to accept this absurd claim.
As an example, I will use the human body.
You’re contingent on your organs to exist. Your organs depend on cells. Your cells depend on molecules. Your molecules depend on atoms. Atoms depend on protons. Protons on quarks. But wait. What composes the quark? (God, they will say. Because he is the necessary substrate that ends the chain)
Maybe, there are smaller particles that compose the quark and smaller ones that hold them together (that’s just hypothetical, but possible), and even smaller ones that compose the smaller particles that compose the quarks and so on. Why can’t we have an infinite regress of smaller particles holding them together?
In the comments above, it’s written that spacetime is composite (search for “ScientificAmerican – What is spacetime?” in the internet) . But even if it’s composite of a quantum state of some sort, we can still say the composites of the state are also composed of an infinite regress of smaller parts. And this is supported by the deductive proof that everything is contingent on other contingent beings and nothing necessary at all. And if everything is contingent, then it’s necessarily the case that there is an infinite regress of contingent smaller parts (composing and holding them together).
What do you think, Dr. Carrier? Is there a problem with my argument?
Oh and I didn’t talk about the other arguments (like essence) because these were totally refuted in your article.
Well, to be charitable, the idea of an ontological argument is to prove that intuition wrong. In other words, the whole point of an ontological argument is to provide a reason to think there is a necessary being.
So the question defaults to whether any such arguments succeed.
That doesn’t follow necessarily though. (Pun intended.)
“Every being is contingent on another contingent being” is a hypothesis; until you deductively prove it true, we don’t really know it’s true or that its probability of being false is 0 (even if we could give reasons to believe that probability is low).
There is also an important sense in which that statement can’t be true. We can say, for example, that existence is past eternal and thus it’s contingent facts infinitely back in time, no first fact. But we still have to explain why that infinite string of contingent facts exists instead of some other (or none at all). And that is what an ontological argument usually is about; not trying to prove there was a temporally first cause (that’s a different argument, called the cosmological argument), but that there has to be a “buck stops here” explanation for why anything exists at all, and why the thing that does exist is that thing and not something else. To say it’s “contingent facts all the way down” creates a peculiar paradox that seems hard to credit. The question then becomes why on earth would we need an infinite string of explanations to explain an infinite series of events? Isn’t just one ultimate explanation far more likely by Occham’s Razor? Etc.
That’s not an ontological argument, though; that there probably is a final explanation (a reason everything exists that itself needs to further reason to be true) “because Occham’s Razor” is an empirical or inductive argument. But IMO still probably correct. It’s just there isn’t any reason to believe that final fact is a complex ghost mind. It could simply be “cosmic random chance” or a “brute fact” that simply doesn’t have any explanation beyond blind luck.
Some physicists do entertain this possibility. But most think it’s not parsimonius. They point out it’s far simpler if there is a quantum mechanical limit on the smallest separable part of anything; and we actually do have some evidence that’s the case.
Although traditional superstring theory has another explanation for those observed quantum limits that could sustain an infinite divisibility ontology: smaller particles slip into recurved dimensions so we just never can see them and they never affect anything in our universe. In fact, there could be infinite dimensions on traditional string theory: geometrically after six, the formula for the radius of any hypersphere, even an infinitely dimensional hypersphere, is the same as a six dimensional hypersphere, and superstring theory finds that we need no more than six recurved dimensions to explain all known particles, which might not be a coincidence. The presence of more recurved dimensions just has no observable effect on the laws and constants of physics. But M theory, a generalization of string theory, proposes 7 additional dimensions rather than 6, so who knows.
More importantly, even if it wasn’t, that’s not what “composite” means in Feser’s argument. Feser does not define “composite” as “having parts”; he defines “composite” as having parts such that breaking a thing into its parts, you no longer have that thing, but something else. In other words, the parts are different from the thing they compose. Thus, a human broken into parts is atoms, but an atom is not a human. Thus, humans are composite. And he has to define composite this way, because otherwise his syllogisms fail to be valid (and thus he can’t get the conclusion he wants).
But suppose spacetime has a smallest “part” (as it does for example in quantum loop gravity theory, for example): each such part of spacetime is still spacetime. It’s not something “else.” It has all the same properties as spacetime always has. So that kind of spacetime is not composite in Feser’s required sense. Which is why spacetime satisfies his syllogisms, a fact he didn’t notice. You can cut up spacetime all you want; what you have left over is still spacetime.
It’s also possible of course that there is no smallest spacetime part; that spacetime is infinitely divisible as you suggest. But the same conclusion follows: no amount of “cutting up” of spacetime gets you anything else left over but spacetime. It’s spacetime all the way down.
Thank you for responding to my question. I’m very grateful. Really appreacite it.
““Every being is contingent on another contingent being” is a hypothesis; until you deductively prove it true, we don’t really know it’s true”
But I just demonstrated every object, we know of, is dependent on something else to hold its existence. There is no example (except for spacetime if it’s really fundamental) of something that doesn’t depend on something else to exist.
“But we still have to explain why that infinite string of contingent facts exists instead of some other (or none at all).”
I would say this is a brute fact, and cannot be explained even from the theistic perspective. In the article “Internal and External Causal Explanations of the Universe” Quentin Smith wrote:
“What explains why W1 is actual rather than some world in which it is true that God created a different universe? And what explains why WI is actual rather than some world in which it is true that God does not create any universe?
If God’s decision to create the universe is free, and his freedom is understood (as it is standardly understood by classical theists) on the libertarian model of free will, then there can be no reason why it is true that God created the universe. God freely decided to create the universe and thus his decision has no cause and is not logically determined to occur.
If there is no reason why it is true that God created the universe, then the truth of this proposition cannot explain why the world W1 is actual. The truth of the proposition, God created the universe, explains why many conjuncts of Wl are true (for example, it explains why it is true that the universe exists) but it cannot explain why the maximal proposition W1 is itself true. The reason for this is that if there is one conjunct of W1 whose truth is unexplained, then the truth of W is unexplained. The truth of a conjunction has an explanation only if the truth of each of its conjuncts has an explanation. There is an explanation of the truth of the conjunction, it is raining in Kalamazoo, Michigan and there is a supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way Galaxy only if there is an explanation of the truth of it is raining in Kalamazoo, Michigan and an explanation of the truth of there is a supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way Galaxy. We have seen, however, that the conjunct, God created the universe, has no explanation. It follows, therefore, that there is no explanation of why the world W1 is the actual world rather than some other possible world.”
“The question then becomes why on earth would we need an infinite string of explanations to explain an infinite series of events? Isn’t just one ultimate explanation far more likely by Occham’s Razor? Etc.”
Because it’s a deductive conclusion based on the fact that everything is contingent on another contingent being and nothing necessary (necessary in the sense that it’s not composite and the other stuff).
So, Occham’s Razor doesn’t apply because, if my argument is correct, a ‘necessary’ being is not even a metaphysically possible explanation. If you have two (or more) plausible explanations for some fact, then you can use the Razor, however, we cannot even accept the theist proposal since it does not follow from the facts we see in the world; namely; we never see anything necessary but everything is composite and contingent.
And there is an important thing here that I noted just now. I’m not talking about an infinite series of EVENTS. I’m talking about an infinite regress of smaller composites. We’re talking about an essential ordered series.
“It could simply be “cosmic random chance” or a “brute fact” that simply doesn’t have any explanation beyond blind luck.”
I totally agree with that. However, it would be special pleading to say everything (we know of) is composite, but the universe is not. Even if this is not the case.
“he defines “composite” as having parts such that breaking a thing into its parts, you no longer have that thing, but something else.”
Ohh, I see now. But I think another theist (that is not Feser) would ask what is holding the smaller parts together to form the whole. You would say the laws of physics, and then he would say the laws of physics also need some explanation. So, you would end needing to explain another contingent thing.
You actually didn’t demonstrate that. You just asserted it.
Theists trying to carry off an ontological argument are trying to disprove deductively the hypothesis that everything is contingent (and IMO they have all failed). But no one has ever proved the contrary though, either. We have no deductive proof known that everything is contingent. So we just don’t know which it is.
I’ve presented arguments in favor of concluding that it’s false (temporally in Merdae Fit and atemporally in Sense and Goodness without God, pp. 84-85, which now I think you need to read: it more fully proves the Occham’s Razor argument I just briefly summarized to you above), but those arguments are inductive, not deductive.
That’s an inductive argument, not a deductive argument. See the difference?
And it’s not a good one.
“I have never seen an x, therefore there is no x” is not deductively valid; just because you haven’t seen one, doesn’t mean there isn’t one. One can get such an argument to a probability there is no x, but not automatically: a lot more else needs to be the case before not seeing an x means even probably no x’s exist. And here, you don’t have that something extra; worse, you have the opposite:
“I have never seen an x, therefore there is no x” is especially invalid when you are unlikely to see an x, so your expectation that you should have isn’t even sound; and here that’s the case: an ultimate cause by definition will be singular (there will only be one of them in all of existence). So you won’t ever see any but the single one there is, which by definition precedes all time (and thus only existed billions of years before you could have “seen” it) and grounds all fundamental physics (and science has not grounded all fundamental physics yet, e.g. we don’t know what the fundamental ground of the Standard Model is, so you can’t have “seen” this x yet either). So the assumption that you should have “seen” this x by now is false. You therefore cannot even sustain this as an inductive argument to even merely the improbability of x.
You can say that. But saying isn’t proving.
Moreover, that something must necessarily be true is still true if that something is “existence is a brute fact.” Because either its being a brute fact is not necessary, and therefore is some outcome of random chance—but in which case the ultimate random event selecting what would exist is the necessary being and so you still have a necessary (hence ultimate) being—or its being a brute fact is itself the necessary being (i.e. no other possible state of affairs could have existed, i.e. all other possibilities had a probability of exactly zero, which entails the brute fact has a probability of fully 100%, which is what a necessary being is by definition).
In other words, even if your hypothesis is “existence is a brute fact,” you still are left with: either that had a probability of being the case of 100% (in which case it is a logically necessary state and therefore all of existence itself is the necessary being) or it had a probability less than 100%, in which case you still have to explain how we got this existence as a brute fact instead of the other possibilities chance could have selected instead, and any answer to that question just gets you to another necessary being.
Unless somehow it doesn’t. Which is my point: no one has deductively proved these sequences always end with something that is necessarily the case, or don’t. We can therefore only inductively infer what’s most likely; not what’s certain.
Note that not all theology says it is. Plenty of theologies allow god was not free in this choice. So you are now getting hyper-specific as to which theologies you are talking about. Which means we are no longer talking about whether there must be a necessary being; you have now slipped into arguing only over whether certain gods can be such a being. Which is not the same thing.
That’s not a deductive conclusion. You just asserted it. Assertion is not deduction.
And you can’t assert x as a reason to believe x. That’s a fallacy of circular argument.
But that’s not what theists are talking about. So you have again dropped the question of whether there is a necessary being, and changed subjects to arguing only what that being is.
The necessary being could be temporal (e.g. the first cause) or not (e.g. the past could be eternal and thus have no first cause); and if not, the necessary being will be ontological (e.g. the ultimate substrate that explains why things are the way they are, which substrate itself requires no further explanation of why it is the way it is). Neither is a question of it being geometric (whether there is a “smallest part” or “smallest thing” and what then it must be). That just isn’t what anyone in this conversation means by “necessary being.”
No one, not even Feser, says the universe is not composite. It is by definition composite, even using his weird definition of composite. So you seem to have gotten confused here.
Correct. And so on ad infinitum. Unless there is a “buck stops here” explanation such that no further explanation is needed. I give an example of a nontheistic explanation of that kind in Merdae Fit. But that’s only applicable on a first-cause reality; if reality is past eternal (and we just don’t yet know whether it is or not), then a “buck stops here” explanation will be the reason why a certain eternal reality exists rather than some other (which “other” options will include “nothing,” i.e. a nothing-state that remains a nothing-state, such that nothing then ever exists). Nontheistic possibilities for this I discuss in Sense and Goodness without God.
In reality, theism doesn’t really work here, because any god you pick becomes just another arbitrary optional reality you still have to explain, i.e. why does a god exist at all? And why that god and not some other? Theists are aware of this problem, which is why they try inventing ontological arguments: they want to solve this problem by answering those two questions with “our god is a logically necessary being, so there actually is no other possible reality that could obtain”). They just never succeed at finding such an argument, despite continually claiming they have.
“And some of his premises I take no issue with at all, like Premise 11, which argues that even if we are looking at an infinite past chain of contingent events, why “that infinite series as a whole exists at all would remain to be explained””
Each part of the universe is sufficiently caused by earlier parts and the existence of the universe as a whole is entailed by the existence of all of the parts that compose this whole. The obtaining of this entailment relation between the causally explained parts and the universe they compose is the sufficient reason why the universe exists.
The term “the universe” is used merely as an abbreviation of “all the states that exist” or other plural phrases that refer to all the states. There is no individual that is distinct from all the states and that is composed of all the states; the whole of all the states is identical with all the states, and its existence is either uncaused, or caused by God, or entailed by the existence of the states.
Now, you could ask: But why does this universe exist rather than other kind of universes or no universe at all?
The problem here is that we’re used to think of things in contexts. For example: why did the driver of a car chose the street A instead of B. There is a sufficient reason for that. However, when talking about the universe as a whole, there is no “context” where it happens or exists. There was never a “street” A or B for the universe. “universe” means “all of physical reality”. So it there is no sense in which it could have been different.
So, this is a fallacy of composition. To think that things that happen inside the universe must happen to the universe as a whole is wrong.
In addition, it is crazy to ask for a sufficient reason for an eternal universe. Since there was never a time when the universe could have been different.
Incorrect. If other arrangements were logically possible, we have an unexplained observation: why this sequence and not some other exists.
The only way to avoid this conclusion is either to show that there are no other logically possible arrangements (and thus, for instance, no physical constant could ever have been different, no person could ever have not existed, etc.), which physicists would love to do but have gotten nowhere near to doing; or to show that all possible arrangements do exist (e.g. some form of completed multiverse theory), ditto; or to show that any random selection of arrangements would be at least as likely to produce observers (and thus there is nothing remarkable about the conjunction “random draw from infinite options and observers asking how to explain it”), which is what I attempt to do, but only with conjectures I show to be more probable than not—it’s still not a scientifically verified fact.
Only those three options leave nothing to explain. Otherwise, our existence is improbable; so why do we exist?
“We got lucky” is possible, but remains by definition improbable. That might still be more probable than wildly more harebrained explanations like giant magical ghosts did it—so we could still conclude the explanation is “mere luck.” But that would then still have to be argued (and I have also argued that).
And still we have to explain the mechanism: why was one sequence randomly chosen over all others? Why is there only one? (Which raises the question: Is there only one?)
In other words, not just Why is there something rather than nothing (also remaining unexplained), but Why is there this specific thing?
“Composition fallacies” don’t apply here.
“If other arrangements were logically possible, we have an unexplained observation: why this sequence and not some other exists.”
I agree. But the argument is this:
P1: Whatever exists in a bigger context has a sufficient reason.
P2: The universe does not exist in a bigger context.
C: Therefore, the universe has a sufficient reason.
It simply does not follow.
Every example that you can present to me that does have a sufficient reason is embedded in a bigger context.
As the example I gave you: why did the driver choose street A rather than B? If there were never a “street B” for the driver to choose, then it would be meaningless to ask why he didn’t choose this street. It’s like asking for a reason why a logically necessary being exists. You can do it, of course. But does this really make sense to you?
“to show that all possible arrangements do exist (e.g. some form of completed multiverse theory)”
I think Max Tegmark proposed this in his book: “The mathematical universe”. Where he says every universe does exist.
Other response which I think may be feasible is presented by Quentin Smith.
He wrote: “There is also an argument for the more general thesis that it is logically impossible that there be an explanation of why any possible world is actual. Each possible world contains among its conjuncts both necessary propositions and contingent propositions. Take any contingent proposition T that belongs to any possible world W. Suppose W is actual and that T is true. T’s being true explains why W is true only if T explains why each conjunct in W is true. But no contingent truth T is such that T’s being true explains T’s being true. Since T’s being true cannot explain why T is true, T cannot explain why each conjunct in W is true. Therefore, T’s being true cannot explain why W is true. Nor can any necessary truth explain why W is true, since no necessary truth can explain why any contingent proposition is true and the maximal proposition W is contingently true. Consequently, it is logically impossible that there be an explanation of the truth of W. For any possible world W, if W is actual, it is logically impossible that there be an explanation of why W is actual.”
Source: Internal and External Causal Explanations of the Universe
That isn’t the argument.
The argument is:
P1: Whatever is, if it could have been different than it is, there must be a reason it is what it is and not something else.
P2: The universe could be different than it is.
C: Therefore, there must be a reason it is as it is and not something else.
This applies to every possible model of the universe, from past finite to past eternal. Doesn’t matter. There is no escaping it: there has to be a reason it is that and not something else.
Unless you can refute P2. Hence my point. But there is no evidence P2 is false. So that dodge is unavailable.
Case in point: “I think Max Tegmark proposed this in his book: “The mathematical universe”. Where he says every universe does exist.”
Right. This is his attempt to refute P2: if every possible universe exists, then we don’t have to explain why this universe is the way it is, because it could not be otherwise (we could be in a different universe, but this one would still exist, with us in it, necessarily).
Problem is, there is no evidence every possible universe exists. Tegmark just pulls that out of his ass.
Similarly, Smith just makes assertions, presenting no evidence for any of those assertions being true.
Yes, by definition, this universe (or whatever contingent causes produced it) must either have been chosen without cause at random or have been chosen by some fundamental necessary cause (i.e. a final cause that could not have been any different than it is, e.g. could not have not existed, could not have had different properties, etc.).
There is no third possibility. But the first makes the universe extremely improbable, which leaves any explanation of the universe that is more probable more believable. The entire point of cosmological arguments. So you can’t escape a good explanation by saying “maybe it’s a far worse explanation” (blind luck). That’s illogical. And the second can’t be ruled out, as if we omnisciently can know in advance what necessary truths don’t exist. (It is simply false that “no necessary truth can explain why any contingent proposition is true”; I cannot fathom why Smith could not think of half a dozen kinds of necessary truths that can do that; although they tend to do it by necessitating random selection, which gets us back to problem one.)
Hi, Richard!
In the sixth paragraph that falls under the section called “Argument One: The Aristotelian Proof”, you say that, “Feser doesn’t actually present a valid logical argument for it being the substrate he defines.” You don’t even specify which of all the inferences in the argument is the invalid one. Please do me, and all of your readers, the crucial favor of citing which conclusion or intermediate conclusion in Feser’s argument was invalidly drawn from the preceding premises. Maybe I missed the place where you explicitly pointed it out. In which case, kindly direct me to that portion of your text, please.
With regards to your argument concerning a multiverse universe coming from nothing, it is about as fishy as Zeno’s paradox, at least at first glance. However, only after visiting the link to your Ex Nihilo Onus Merdae Fit will I offer my thoughts of it.
However, in the brief remarks that you make about this argument, you say that “But what happens when you take away everything except that which is demonstrably logically necessary? Not what we ‘conjecture’ or ‘wish’ were logically necessary; no, we don’t get to cheat. No circular arguments. Only what we can actually formally prove is logically necessary. And that means, prove now, not at some hypothetical future time.”
I’m confused as to why you would make the above claims. Formal logic did not exist 10,000 years ago. So, contrary to what your claims appears to saying, “the ability to prove it now” is not necessarily true about logically necessary things. As history has shown, it may be the case that there are logical necessities that we can not prove until some future time. Also, I don’t see precisely what you mean by a logically necessary “thing”. In the context of logic, logical necessity almost always applies specifically to propositions. By “things” so you mean “propositions”? For instance, do you consider the law of non-contradiction (which is a proposition) to be a logically necessary “thing”?
Thank you, Richard.
I do that literally in the paragraph after the one you just quoted. I identify the error in Premise 41. Please read the article. And please explain why you didn’t read the article, didn’t even read the next paragraph after the one you quoted, before sending this comment.
That doesn’t mean the facts logic then discovers didn’t exist 10,000 years ago. It’s not like logically contradictory things could exist until humans invented logic. Logically contradictory things have never been able to exist. Formal logic simply discovered what those things are.
The same thing Feser does. That which is logically necessary is that which could not not exist because its not existing would entail a logical contradiction, and logically contradictory states of affairs cannot exist.
The LNC is logically necessary in all universes in which distinctions exist, because that is the universe it literally describes. It is not necessary in universes in which distinctions don’t exist. But we will never find ourselves in one of those (because minds, to exist, require distinctions to exist, so minds can only exist in the other kind of universe, every one of which universe will thus by definition be described by the LNC).
If you want to explore the Aristotelian ontology of logic this follows from see his Metaphysics 1006-1007 and my discussion here.
“And please explain why you didn’t read the article, didn’t even read the next paragraph after the one you quoted, before sending this comment.”
And would you like to ask me if I have stopped beating my wife? Your remarks mistakenly assume in the first place that I didn’t read the next paragraph. I read it and hoped earnestly that your reply to me would not direct me to the next paragraph, since then your philosophical incompetence would be showing.
A premise is not an inference. I asked for an inference to be revealed to me, not a premise. Specially, I asked for you to point out to me an invalid inference (in Feser’s Aristotelian argument). The next paragraph says nothing about an inference, you just talk about how premise 41 is not true because it presents a false dichotomy. But Carrier, a false premise does not render an argument invalid. A valid argument may commit a false dichotomy and still be valid.
An argument is valid if and only if it is impossible that the premises are true and the conclusion false. An invalid argument is such that it is possible for the premises to be true and the conclusion false. You provide no proof of the invalidity of the pertinent portion of the Aristotelian argument (which CANNOT be done by describing a logically possible state of affairs in which premise 41 is false, but CAN be done by describing a logically possible state of affairs in which the premises are TRUE and the CONCLUSION is false). I’m afraid you have slipped with regards to understanding the necessary and sufficient conditions of invalidity.
Now, you responded to the next portion of my post by saying “That doesn’t mean the facts logic then discovers didn’t exist 10,000 years ago.”
Your reply does not object to anything I stated, but even seems to be conceding my point where I said that 10,000 years ago there would have been necessary truths that were, as yet, unproven through formal logic. What I subsequently pointed out, and what you seem to have ignored, is that 10,000 years ago there would have been necessary truths properly characterized as “we can not actually prove them formally now.” It is entirely possible for there be a logical necessity which we can not formally prove now, but might be able to at some hypothetically future time. And so, you were wrong when you said that “Only what we can actually formally prove is logically necessary. And that means, prove now, not at some hypothetical future time.”
Finally, you responded to my question about the meaning of the word “thing” by stating “That which is logically necessary is that which could not not exist because its not existing would entail a logical contradiction, and logically contradictory states of affairs cannot exist.”
No, no. I didn’t ask what it meant to be logically necessary. The word I put in quotation marks and asked about was the word “thing”. You speak about logically necessary “things”. In my experience with logic, though, logical necessity ranges over propositions, not vaguely over “things”. A PROPOSITION is logically necessary. In speaking of logical necessary “things”, are you referring only to propositions, as is common? Your language suggest that you think logical necessity can apply directly to beings or objects, rather than to propositions. This is odd and I just wanted you to clarify what “things” ranges over when you speak of logically necessary “things”? Are these “things” the propositions, objects, both, or what?
Your reply regarding the LNC is rather interesting. You say that, “The LNC is logically necessary in all universes in which distinctions exist, because that is the universe it literally describes. It is not necessary in universes in which distinctions don’t exist.”
Do you think that a universe with no distinctions is logically possible?
Besides, the LNC can not be formally proven in a non-circular fashion. All formal proofs that we might undertake assume the law of non-contradiction. So, this is another reason why you were mistaken when you said that “NO CIRCULAR ARGUMENTS. Only what we can actually formally prove is logically necessary. And that means, prove now, not at some hypothetical future time.” All caps are mine.
Thank you, Richard.
That premise is a false lemma. The argument it is in is therefore unsound. He presents no valid argument to the truth of that premise. Nor any evidence for that premise being true. And I presented conclusive evidence the premise is false. His argument is therefore cooked. That’s why Feser’s argument fails. If you can’t follow that line of reasoning, I cannot help you.
As for whether human languages and human tools existed 10,000 years ago while the facts they are able to discover did, I don’t see you making any relevant point.
Meanwhile, a universe in which there are no distinctions may be possible. But we could never find ourselves in it. So its possible existence is irrelevant to us.
Reply to your December 28, 2019 comment.
Hi, Richard!
Thank you for your patience.
On December 28th, I accused you of making mistakes in proving invalidity. In your reply to me on the same day, you attempt to dodge this accusation by implicitly claiming that you never called the relevant portion of Feser’s argument invalid; you only meant to say that there was an absence of a valid argument to premise 41 (rather than the presence of an invalid argument from premise 41). For instance, in your Dec 28th comment, you say “[Feser] presents no valid argument to the truth of [premise 41]. Nor any evidence for that premise being true.”
I’m not convinced that your dodge is successful. In my comment on December 21, I pointed out that your attack on Feser’s argument is incomplete because you do not specify which inference in Feser’s argument is invalid. In response to me on December 23rd, your immediate retort is that “I do that literally in the paragraph after the one you just quoted.” On the basis of your response on December 23rd, you do not deny having called an inference in Feser’s argument invalid. Indeed, you addressed my December 21st remarks by affirming to have specified which inference in Feser’s argument is invalid. It was AFTER I replied on the 28th and revealed your jumbling of the concept of “validity” that you then rushed to implicitly claim that you never called an inference of Feser’s argument pertaining to premise 41 invalid. But it seems that you did make such a call, which, as I pointed out, was a striking mishandling on your part of what it means for an argument to be invalid.
Moving on, you say that “As for whether human languages and human tools existed 10,000 years ago while the facts they are able to discover did, I don’t see you making any relevant point.”
The conclusion I reached was that you were wrong in stating that “Only what we can actually formally prove is logically necessary. And that means, prove now, not at some hypothetical future time.” Do you have a rebuttal to my conclusion? Alternatively, if you agree that you were wrong in making those claims, then why do you not see this error as relevant?
So far, it seems that you have been brushing my objections to your comments under the rug. Moving on, you say that “Meanwhile, a universe in which there are no distinctions may be possible. But we could never find ourselves in it. So its possible existence is irrelevant to us.”
The idea that there is a possible universe in which the LNC is not logically necessary might be of extreme interest to logicians and relevant to their work.
And such an idea might also be relevant to you, me, and other of your readers if it gave us cause to doubt or be confused about certain aspects of your position. For instance, you state that the LNC is logically necessary in some universes but not in others, such as a universe without distinctions. But then you state that a universe without distinctions may be possible. How do these two claims make logical sense? The LNC cannot be a logical necessity in some possible universes but not in other possible universes because a proposition does not change its modal properties from one possible universe to another. If the LNC is logically necessary at the actual world, then there is no possible world in which it fails to be so. So, if a universe without distinctions is possible, then the LNC is a logical necessity there, given that it is a logical necessity in a world with distinctions.
Thank you, again, Carrier.
That is a correct reading of what I argued.
The conclusion of his syllogism is unsound, owing to its dependence on an invalid premise.
You seem to have been confused then. I argued that his conclusion does not follow because his premise 41 is logically invalid (it is a false lemma). If you misunderstood that, consider yourself corrected. You now should understand my argument correctly.
Yes. As I stated. Insofar as you are confusing human languages with material facts. It is not relevant when human logics were invented. The conclusions those invented systems arrive at regarding what is logically necessary remain true even in the absence of those languages and logics. They are discoveries, not inventions. Just as with mathematics.
Meanwhile, what we have not yet discovered (e.g. logically necessary truths we have yet to prove are such), cannot be claimed to be known by us (and thus cannot be used as premises in arguments to conclusions we are expected to believe true).
It’s not clear to me why you are struggling with this.
Indeed. That’s why many have written about it, from as early as Aristotle, the first logician to make the point I just did.
One might semantically dispute whether any conventional definition of “universe” would apply to a state-of-being not described by the LNC, but that’s just semantics. As Aristotle pointed out, any such state would simply be void of any content (as any content would entail a distinction, and thus would be described by the LNC). What you want to “call” that state (a “universe” or anything else) is irrelevant. All we need know is that we cannot exist in such a state, cannot have come from such a state, and no such state exists anywhere around us. So who cares about it?
Hi, Richard!
Thank you for your continued engagement with me.
In your January 18th reply to me, you state:
“You seem to have been confused then. I argued that his conclusion does not follow because his premise 41 is logically invalid (it is a false lemma). If you misunderstood that, consider yourself corrected. You now should understand my argument correctly.”
Yes, you bet I was confused. Again, in your December 13th post, you quote me and then respond to your quotation of me:
In the sixth paragraph that falls under the section called “Argument One: The Aristotelian Proof”, you say that, “Feser doesn’t actually present a valid logical argument for it being the substrate he defines.” You don’t even specify which of all the inferences in the argument is the invalid one. [this is your quote of my post]
I do that literally in the paragraph after the one you just quoted. I identify the error in Premise 41. Please read the article. And please explain why you didn’t read the article, didn’t even read the next paragraph after the one you quoted, before sending this comment. [this is your response to that quotation]
Notice that the last sentence you quote from me is “You don’t even specify which of all the inferences in the argument is the invalid one.” And your immediate response was that “I do that literally in the paragraph after the one you just quoted”. In other words, you claim to literally specify which inference in the argument is the invalid one. So, you can imagine how confused I am that you are suddenly deny having called an inference in Feser’s argument invalid.
Anyways, your December 18th post does not improve upon your mishandling of what validity is. You’re still misunderstanding the term. Validity is a property of inferences or arguments, not of statements. Premise 41, a statement, is not invalid, even it is false.
Moving along, you say, “Yes. As I stated. Insofar as you are confusing human languages with material facts. It is not relevant when human logics were invented. The conclusions those invented systems arrive at regarding what is logically necessary remain true even in the absence of those languages and logics. They are discoveries, not inventions. Just as with mathematics.”
Once again—I’ve said this before—you are not rebutting anything that I have claimed. I never claimed that the “conclusions those invented systems arrive at regarding what is logically necessary” do not “remain true even in the absence of those languages and logics”. I said the very opposite of what you attribute to me. I myself claimed that even in the absence of human language, the logical truths we are now aware of would have remained been true. That was my whole point! Since 10,000 years ago there were necessary truths which we, lacking formal logic at that time, could not formally prove until some future time, it follows that you were wrong in stating that “Only what we can actually formally prove is logically necessary. And that means, prove now, not at some hypothetical future time.”
Let me put it to you again, for good measure. Ten thousand years ago human beings did not have a system of formal logic and did not have methods of conducting formal proofs—which you seem to agree with. And ten thousand years ago there were logically necessary truths—which you seem to agree with. THEREFORE, ten thousand years ago there were logically necessary truths which we could not formally prove (until some future time when formal logic would be invented). On this basis, I criticized you for stating that “Only what we can actually formally prove is logically necessary. And that means, prove now, not at some hypothetical future time.”
Also, you seem to have also overlooked my statement that the law of noncontradiction is a logically necessary truth which cannot be non-circularly proven. All formal proofs assume the LNC. Thus, you also mistaken to exclude circular arguments from the conditions of necessary truth hood. You had said, “No circular arguments. Only what we can actually formally…”.
I’m curious whether you have any reply to the objection I gave against your idea that a universe without distinctions may be possible and the LNC is not a necessary truth at such a world. I offered an objection along the lines that propositions, such as the principle of non-contradiction, do not lose their modal status in different possible worlds. It is fine with me if you want to make no comment to my objection, but it is an interesting topic to pursue.
Thank you, Richard, for your patience and engagement.
I do in the article. I show exactly why P41 is a false lemma. And therefore why no conclusion from it is sound. And thus why Feser’s arguments all fail
Why are you still confused by this?
And I answered that what we cannot prove, we cannot claim to know. Ergo, no knowledge ensues from this.
Why are you still confused by this?
Tautologies are proofs. So there is no requirement that a proof not be circular in the sense of a proper tautology. You must be confusing the fallacy of circular argument (which assumes a premise that can be false is true in order to prove that premise true) with tautological proofs (which prove the conclusion true by proving there is no possible way for it to be false).
Hence for anything to be logically necessary, it only must be that the conclusion cannot be false. For example, the proposition “all bachelors are not married” is a tautology. It is also necessarily true. It cannot ever be false (without changing the meaning of the words, but that’s the difference between sentences and propositions, and we are talking about the proposition; I am assuming here that you understand that). Likewise, “distinctions cannot exist when distinctions do not exist” cannot ever be false. For the same reason. Because there is no possible way for it to be false, its being circular is not an objection. Just as with bachelors. That’s not what I’m talking about when I say “no circular arguments”; I am referring by the latter to the fallacy of circular argument, not proper tautologies, which are logically necessary by virtue of their contradictory always being an empty set.
You stated no intelligible objection. If you want to imagine a world without distinctions that contains distinctions, you will be able to contrive nothing meeting that condition. The set is empty. That is what it means to be logically necessary: there is no possible state that meets that description.
In premise 41 the forms “exists in individual particular things” isnt what Aristotle argued “forms are intrinsic to the objects”? It’s hard to understand the aristotelian act and poctence. I cant find in the Metaphysics and Physics the idea of the forms existing potencially. I’d appreciate if you could answer my question. Farewell.
I can’t understand your poor English so I am not entirely certain what you are asking. But the answer seems to be already in the article, with links, so please read the whole thing. In particular:
And:
See also this previous thread on this subject; and this one.
Aristotle discusses the subject in Metaphysics 9 and Metaphysics 7. Here is an article explaining it.
The upshot is: Aristotle pointed out that forms do not exist independently of the actual, particular things that manifest them, except as other things those actual, particular things can potentially be reshaped into. Thus he distinguished between actual forms (those that are manifest) and potential forms (those that could be manifest, e.g. by reshaping a shoe into a box, but until such time, are not manifest). He also did speak of matter as the potential, and form the actual, i.e. when matter is actually shaped a certain way, the form (that shape) is then actualized, and thus matter is a potential (as it can be continuously reshaped) and form fundamental (as it is what matter can be reshaped into). But when we are speaking of what Feser is speaking of, the question of how forms exist or where they exist, modern English translates Aristotle as forms being both actual and potential: actual forms are those actualized in matter, and potential forms are those actualizable in matter; the latter forms do not exist anywhere when unactualized. They remain solely a potential inherent in any matter that can be shaped into a given form.
And in this case, we would reduce this to spacetime, rather than matter, a concept Aristotle was not yet aware of: it is spacetime that can be reshaped into any form, and its ability to do so is what determines what forms can and cannot exist, and how it is shaped determines what forms actually exist and what forms do not actually exist but potentially do, e.g. as a shoe that can be reshaped into a box: the form of “box” exists in the shoe as a potential reshaping of the shoe, and it is spacetime that makes that possible, as all shape is geometry, and all geometry actualized is spacetime. Spacetime is thus the fundamental “prime material” of all things. Without spacetime, there can be no forms; with spacetime, nothing else is needed for there to be forms.
This is a conclusion one would be forced to reach by Feser’s own logic, using a correct Premise 41 (by correcting the false lemma inherent in it), and it would support some variant or analog of string theory in physics. Whether that turns out to actually be the case can only be determined by physics.
Hi, Carrier!
Thank you for your patience and responses.
You said on February 8th that, “I do in the article. I show exactly why P41 is a false lemma. And therefore why no conclusion from it is sound. And thus why Feser’s arguments all fail”
You are not addressing my remark. I did not say the conclusion from it is sound, nor did I say that all of the premises were true. What I said is that you have not shown any argument or inference in the Aristotelian argument to be INVALID. And I requested that you specify the invalid argument or inference, per your claim to me that there is one. In your article, you said Feser does not give a valid argument for his conclusion. You say, “But he doesn’t actually present a valid logical argument for it being the substrate he defines.” So I commented by asking you to specify the invalid argument or inference given by Feser. You actually responded saying that you literally did just that.
No, you did not “do just that” and you never have, however, even after I keep bringing it to your attention. P41 is NEITHER an argument NOR an inference. Moreover, the Aristotelian argument is not rendered invalid just because P41 is a “false lemma”. An argument is valid if and only if it is impossible for the premises to be true and the conclusion false. P41-P43 constitutes a disjunctive syllogism—a valid argument form, Dr. Carrier.
Also, and I’ve said this before, you are apparently contradicting yourself with regards to explaining what your position is, anyways. I claimed you had not specified which inference in Feser’s argument is invalid and requested that you do, and you responded on December 23rd saying that you did just that. But on January 13th, I offered this alternative interpretation of your position: that there is an absence of any valid argument for premise 41, rather than the presence of some invalid argument from premise 41. And you responded on January 18th saying you agreed that this alternative interpretation is the correct interpretation of your position! That there is no invalid argument present! But then in February 8th, you quote my request again and, in immediate response to it, you say once more that answering my request is what you did! (Of course, you proceed to NOT specify any invalid argument or inference). You have some serious flip-flopping going on, here, even after I already brought it to your attention that there was flip-flopping.
Moving on, you say that: “And I answered that what we cannot prove, we cannot claim to know. Ergo, no knowledge ensues from this.”
Well, here is a more accurate summary of what your “answers” have consisted of: misrepresentation of my comments. Your December 23rd post misrepresented my position by making it seem that I was saying that the facts of logic discovered by formal logic didn’t exist prior to formal logic. I responded to tell you what my position truly was. However, your January 18th post gave the same misrepresentation of my position even after I corrected you on what my position actually was with regards to the laws of logic.
Anyways, in your January 18th post you did also add the rather trivia and random claim that “what we have not yet discovered…cannot be claimed to be known by us.” However, this does not (in any clear way, at least) rebut my argument that you were wrong to think that “what we can formally prove now is logically necessary”.
What is truly damaging to your position is that on January 18th you yourself admitted that logical necessities can hold in the absence of us having formal proofs for them. You said “the conclusions those invented systems arrive at regarding what is logically necessary remain true even in the absence of those languages and logics.” In broad daylight you deny your own claim that only what we can formally prove now is logically necessary. So let us consider that discussion concluded.
Moving on, you say that, “Tautologies are proofs. So there is no requirement that a proof not be circular in the sense of a proper tautology.” And you say that, “That’s not what I’m talking about when I say “no circular arguments” I am referring by the latter to the fallacy of circular argument, not proper tautologies, which are logically necessary by virtue of their contradictory always being an empty set.”
You said only what we can formally prove is logically necessary. I’ve already shown that statement to be false, which even you agreed to without seeming to realize it. So, raising this point about the LNC was merely my additional critique of your view, to have fun with. Let me have a bit more fun with it, though.
A proof in logic is a sound argument. That is to say, a proof in logic is an argument that is valid and has only true premises. There is no proof in logic of the LNC that does not assume the LNC. Why? Because the notion of validity depends upon the LNC. For an argument to be valid is, to put it one way, for an argument to be such that it would be a contradiction for its premises to be true and the conclusion false. Formal proofs assume LNC in order to claim validity and so cannot support LNC without reasoning in a circle. I do not see you denying anywhere that “a tautological proof” of LNC is not circular. You just say that it is not required that they not be circular. Indeed, that actually seems like a confession that my claim is right—after all, if you didn’t think they were circular, then why mention that there is no requirement for them not to be circular? Hence, LNC is often considered axiomatic and accepted it without proof.
Thank you, Carrier.
You keep attributing things to me I never said, in an attempt to change the subject. I don’t fall for that.
This is what happened:
I proved P41 is a false lemma. Feser’s arguments that employ it are therefore unsound.
Do you have a response to that, or is all you have to offer here just irrelevant word walls?
Hi, Carrier, it’s Ezra. A couple of weeks ago I sent a response to you. I’m curious what happened to it, if maybe you did not receive it and I should resend it because I see that what I wrote has not been posted yet.
If you are a Patreon or PayPal patron, let me know (and under what name so I can verify). Your email address in that case can be whitelisted so you don’t have to await my processing of moderation queue.
Otherwise, you have to wait. Inordinately long comments take extraordinary amounts of time to read and address, and don’t earn income, so they always sit untouched until I find spare time to get to them. That’s unlikely to happen this month. Paying work and essential life duties always take priority.
“You keep attributing things to me I never said, in an attempt to change the subject…I proved P41 is a false lemma. Feser’s arguments that employ it are therefore unsound. Do you have a response to that, or is all you have to offer here just irrelevant word walls?”
Well, THAT would be a change of subject and irrelevant, Carrier. In my very first post, half a year ago, I started by asking you to show me which conclusion or intermediate conclusion in Feser’s argument was invalidly drawn from the preceding premises. You have responded saying you did that. Half a year later, however, you still have not shown me where Feser’s argument is invalid, seem to be flip-flopping, and I even make known that P41-P43 is a Disjunctive syllogism, a valid argument form, all of which are very relevant observations for me to make and conclude the discussion. I lay that out in the BEGINNING portion of my May 11th post.
Next, in my very first post I challenged your claim that “Only what we can actually formally prove is logically necessary. And that means, prove now, not at some hypothetical future time.” After a period of you misattributing claims to me regarding this issue, I pointed out that you ended up admitting that you were wrong about this, which is a very relevant observation for me to make and brings that discussion to a conclusion. I lay that out in the MIDDLE portion of my May 11th post.
Finally, in my very first post I asked you about the nature of logic, particularly with regards to the LNC. In the FINAL portion of May 11th I defend my position, which is a relevant thing for me to do.
Half a year later, my May 11th post is, therefore, still relevant and right on track from beginning, middle, to end. In fact, it seems the discussion has been largely wrapped up, and in my favor without you seeming to realize it. If you want to say that these are not topics that you desire to discussion, that’s fine, but don’t disguise the request by making it sound like I have deviated from topics we have been discussing right from the start. Also, you have not explained what it is I attributed to you that you never stated.
Thank you, Carrier.
You are trying to convince a historian that history went differently than it did? By making false claims about documents on his own blog?
Please.
Here is what actually happened:
You said: In the sixth paragraph that falls under the section called “Argument One: The Aristotelian Proof”, you say that, “Feser doesn’t actually present a valid logical argument for it being the substrate he defines.” You don’t even specify which of all the inferences in the argument is the invalid one.
I responded: I do that literally in the paragraph after the one you just quoted. I identify the error in Premise 41. Please read the article. And please explain why you didn’t read the article, didn’t even read the next paragraph after the one you quoted, before sending this comment.
You responded: A premise is not an inference. I asked for an inference to be revealed to me, not a premise.
I answered: That premise is a false lemma. The argument it is in is therefore unsound. He presents no valid argument to the truth of that premise. Nor any evidence for that premise being true. And I presented conclusive evidence the premise is false. His argument is therefore cooked. That’s why Feser’s argument fails. If you can’t follow that line of reasoning, I cannot help you.
In other words, I proved in my article, the one you are commenting on, that Feser gives no valid argument for Premise 41 being a proper lemma (that its options exhaust all logical possibilities and thus it does not violate the Law of Excluded Middle). You claimed I didn’t say that. I proved I did.
A year now, and numerous back and forths, and you still haven’t read my article nor are making any response to what it said, and still have not acknowledged my answer to your question.
You claimed I didn’t say something. I proved I did. End of story.
If you choose to refuse to listen to what just happened here, I honestly can’t help you.
Let me just add that one doesn’t necessarily have to accept the super speculative and complex Superstring theory here. There are simpler ways. For instance, one could appeal to Sean Carroll’s Everett interpretation of QM where only the physical wave function exists and everything else (even spacetime) is emergent from it.
Plus, I’ve found a very interesting paper based on Geometrodynamics where the author wrote:
“Here we shall return to a three-dimensional cyclic-universe model, in which the distinction between matter and space is abandoned, as was proposed by Wheeler [6] and some other authors [7]. That is, we shall regard the matter particles as stable configuration patterns of a moving manifold (space), assuming that the notion of geometry is dynamical and that the properties of matter are underlied by the geometry of spacetime, which is the approach accepted by many authors [8]”
Source: “A cyclic universe with colour fields” by V. N. Yershov
While you’re busy trying to rescue your position by flashing your credentials, I am standing awestruck at what a hole you’ve dug yourself into.
You say to me “You claimed I didn’t say that. I proved I did.” The second sentence of these two is correct. You have proved that you said “Feser gives no valid argument for Premise 41 being a proper lemma”. I myself acknowledge that you said that, so your proof is superfluous and I have no idea why you brought it up. Besides, you don’t quote a passage from me in which I state that you didn’t say that! So, you are leaving the entire first sentence unsupported. Indeed, NOWHERE in the portions of the discussion that you paste—in the portions that you yourself declare to be what really happened—do I deny that you said that. Thus, even according to your own post in August, I never did deny that you said that.
Let’s continue having a look at your August 1st works against you.
In my very first post I claimed that you do not specify which of all the inferences in Feser’s Argument is the invalid one. You cannot consistently deny that I stated that because you have pasted this into your August 1st comment and said that it is what really happened. In reply to my claim, you state that you literally did just that (that is, you reply that you specify which inference in Feser’s argument is invalid). You cannot consistently deny that you replied this because you pasted this in your August 1st comment and said that it is what really happened. I have pointed this out to you again and again, Carrier. But you have not, in fact, specified any invalid inference. You have said that premise 41 is a false lemma and the argument is unsound. But a false lemma is not an inference and just because an argument is unsound, that doesn’t mean it is invalid. So you have done nothing to intelligently defend the existence of an INVALID INFERENCE in Feser’s argument, which is what you told me there was because when I said that you have not specified which inference in Feser’s argument is invalid, you responded by saying that you did specify as much. You yourself paste the portions of our discussion in which you reply to me that you did specify which inference is invalid. And you say of those portions that this is what really happened.
Indeed, premises 41-43 constitute a valid argument form. So, you are mistaken about the inference from premise 41 (and 42, which goes with it) being invalid.
Now, let me deal with three lies in your post: “A year now, and numerous back and forths, and you still haven’t read my article nor are making any response to what it said, and still have acknowledged my answer to your question.”
First, I have read your article. I have even quoted passages from it and gave reflections on them. What a groundless accusation to make. Secondly, I did respond to what your article has said. Again, I’ve literally quoted passages from it and responded to those passages. And I did acknowledge your initial Answer to me: by saying that what you have provided me is not an invalid inference! It was clear to me long ago that you are careless in how you read people’s posts and even your own posts. You accused me last time of changing subjects even though I have been discussing the same three topics since December. I have shown that you misrepresent my position, even twice, and even after I corrected you on what I said. And I even show where you have contradicted yourself. You flat out blundered your way through our whole discussion, and now on August 1st you yourself posted the evidence that puts the final nail in the coffin.
Thank you, Richard.
I see no response here to what I’ve said. You just keep repeating the same statements I have debunked now half a dozen times. I see no need to continue. Any sane person who suffered to read this thread this far will already know what just happened. And I’m content with that. Waste no more of my time.
You see no response to what you have said? Fascinating! Since you can’t see it, shall I describe it to you? In the second sentence of my post, I QUOTE you as saying “You claimed I didn’t say that. I proved I did.” And I RESPOND to it. Then in the middle portion of my post, I REFERENCE your documentation of what really happened. I RESPOND by saying that, although you are oblivious to it, you document your reply in which you claim to have specified which inference in Feser’s argument is invalid. And in the last portion of my post, I QUOTE three claims from you and RESPOND to each one. If you couldn’t see all the quotes, references, and replies, you need to schedule an eye check-up. Or (with the next person you hold a discussion with) pay attention to what’s going on. You wasted your own time by being careless with your responses.
Thank you, Richard.
Notice you never once mention what argument we are even talking about in that last paragraph.
It is evident you don’t even know.
Feser uses a premise that is not validly derived from any premises. That premise is a false lemma.
That is what I said, and what I proved, and what tanks nearly every argument Feser deploys, as they nearly all depend on that invalid premise.
You have not responded to this, my actual argument, ever. You have instead obfuscated on points unrelated to anything I actually said and argued, and have never addressed or fixed the actual flaw I revealed in Feser’s work, even after I have explained both facts to you repeatedly.
And that’s that.
Continuing to evade or deny this doesn’t get you anywhere. You have no defense of Feser. And you have no pertinent critique of my refutation of Feser.
Why are you still responding to me and increasing the embarrassment of your situation? You said “Notice you never once mention what argument we are even talking about in that last paragraph. It is evident you don’t even know.”
I evidently don’t know? What an embarrassing thing to say! What does the evidence show? In my first post, I speak of the remarks you made “In the sixth paragraph that falls under the section called “Argument One: The Aristotelian Proof”. Then on December 18th, I say again that we are discussing the premise 41 in Feser’s Aristotelian argument. On February 7th, I say again that my concern is with respect to your claims about the Aristotelian argument. On May 11th, I say once more that premise 41 of the Aristotelian argument is one of our topics of discussion. I guess you didn’t see any of that, either, or keep track of it as a historian would.
You say, “You have instead obfuscated on points unrelated to anything I actually said and argued,”
Well, that’s false. I discussed your statement and argument about logic necessities, for one example.
you say, “and have never addressed or fixed the actual flaw I revealed in Feser’s work, even after I have explained both facts to you repeatedly.” And ” You have no defense of Feser. And you have no pertinent critique of my refutation of Feser.”
Is this supposed to make me look bad? I’m not committed to addressing or fixing the flaw in Feser’s argument. The comments I made in my first post are what I committed to.
Anyways, in my Sept 11th post, I said I put the nail in the coffin and I did indeed. If you would rather that I don’t comment unless I am specifically addressing or fixing the alleged flaw in Feser’s argument, then you are welcome to say that. Thank you, Carrier.
Uhuh. Writing a long complaint letter and denying everything that just happened is not embarrassing me here.
Maybe you don’t realize other people actually can read this thread. You can’t gaslight them on what happened in it.
It is both embarrassing and poignantly ironic (since you are a historian) that you said I evidently don’t know what argument we are talking about despite the fact that several of my posts have made it explicit that we are discussing a remark you made regarding premise 41 of the Aristotelian argument. That’s another way in which you aren’t keeping track of what’s happening.
Anyways, my September 11th post is the final nail in the coffin. I rest my case, for now.
Dude. You aren’t responding to anything I said about Premise 41.
You just keep making up stories about what we weren’t talking about.
Premise 41 is a false lemma. It therefore violates the Law of Excluded Middle.
The argument it contains is therefore fallacious.
All of Feser’s arguments contain some version of it.
Therefore all of Feser’s arguments are fallacious.
There is nothing else to discuss here. And your trying to avoid that actual fact with irrelevant word walls is a waste of everyone’s time.
Its been established that I know what argument we are talking about.
September 11th post. Thank you and have a good day.
Right.
Because you have no response to the fact that I said Premise 41 is a false lemma, rendering all of Feser’s arguments fallacious, and I was right.
And that’s that.