Christian historian Dr. Wallace Marshall and I are debating whether or not enough evidence points to the existence of a god. For background and format, and Dr. Wallace’s opening statement, see entry one. For subsequent entries, see index.

This time we are still focusing on the Kalam Cosmological Argument: in response to Dr. Marshall’s latest response, due to limitations of space I will here summarize only the essential points I think need to be acknowledged.

That the Evidence Points to Atheism (IV)

by Richard Carrier, Ph.D.

I hope Dr. Marshall will acknowledge the following.

Noting a Logical Impossibility Is Not Begging the Question

In the absence of anything to realize any physical laws (and it does not matter whether physical things need exist or not to do that), no physical laws will exist. Including causal laws. So the first cause cannot be governed by such a law. Because it is a logical contradiction to claim causal laws exist before causal laws exist.

Similarly, it’s a logical impossibility to exist nowhere and still exist, or to never exist and still exist. These are directly contradictory claims. Mathematical objects, for example, insofar as they even exist, certainly cannot exist “before” time any more than they could exist north of the North Pole.

Actual Infinities Are Not Impossible

Marshall has cited no living mathematician, expert in transfinite mathematics, who says actually infinite quantities can’t exist in reality. I have cited nearly a dozen who concede they can. Including all of Marshall’s own cited sources

As I noted (in my last and previous replies), Marshall’s “position is refuted in the very introduction to the collection of essays Dr. Marshall cites.” I also explained how Marshall is misunderstanding a quote lifted from Herb Silverman; as I confirmed with Silverman himself. I even double checked; Silverman concurs, “the concept of infinity could have been created by human beings, but that doesn’t mean there can’t be actual infinities,” but rather that “there [is] no real number ‘infinity’ that can be treated as other real numbers.”[1] Just as all my other cited sources confirm.

Infinity only produces paradoxes when we incorrectly assume it conforms to the axioms of finite arithmetic. Zeno made the same mistake when he used paradoxes to argue movement is impossible. He was wrong. Marshall is likewise wrong.

All living experts agree it’s not valid to argue that because infinite quantities behave differently than finite ones, therefore they cannot exist. All Marshall keeps saying is that they behave differently. He has never provided a deductively valid syllogism getting from “they behave differently” to “they don’t exist.”[2]

Even Marshall’s insistence that you have to “add up” an infinity to have one is false. If there’s no beginning, there’s no need for anyone to have started adding. If there are infinitely many places to be (as past eternality entails), it’s invalid to insist there are no places we can be. Indeed Marshall’s quotation of Oppy is disingenuous here; Oppy’s saying these absurdities are only alleged is not conceding Marshall’s argument. To the contrary, Oppy extensively refutes it.[3]

When will Marshall acknowledge this?

We Don’t Know What Precedes a Quantum Threshold

Marshall does not understand why many cosmologists disagree with the conclusions of the BGV theorem (I’ve cited several). It’s not merely that it relies on undemonstrated assumptions. It’s that one of those assumptions is known to be false: that reality can be described without quantum mechanics.

As Vilenkin explained in the very letter to William Lane Craig that Marshall previously cited:

The question of whether or not the universe had a beginning assumes a classical spacetime … [but] quantum fluctuations in the structure of spacetime could be so large that these classical concepts become totally inapplicable. … This is what I mean when I say that we do not even know what the right questions are.

Hence in Vilenkin’s response to the Carroll-Chen model, all Vilenkin actually says is that the BGV theorem proves time must still go back to a quantum instability; he does not say what may or cannot have preceded that instability.[4] He defines a beginning not as Marshall does (as the beginning of everything that ever existed) but as the timeline we are now on being “past-geodesically incomplete,” meaning, it stops at some point in the past at some kind of “quantum collapse,” beyond which we cannot know what exists or existed.[5] Because we have no theory of quantum gravity. So at that point of collapse, “we do not even know what the right questions are.” Much less what the answers are.

That’s why, for example, Sean Carroll says the BGV does not address what might precede the quantum event described in the Carroll-Chen model. All it does is establish that there was one. But quantum indeterminism entails all bets are off at that point. The BGV says nothing about that. It nowhere states that quantum instability prevents there being something else beyond that horizon. Only that this horizon must exist.

This is not addressed by Aguirre and Kehayias, whom Marshall quotes concluding “it is very difficult to devise a system … that does nothing ‘forever’, then evolves.” No one here is talking about a quantum system that “does nothing forever,” but an endless series of quantum instabilities that resolve in endlessly repeated Big Bang events, exactly as Aguirre and Kehayias demonstrate,[6] particularly in conjunction with Carroll and Chen.

Simultaneous Causation Eliminates Any Need of Transcendent Causes

Nevertheless, for convenience, even though it’s unknown, I’ll heretofore assume spacetime had a beginning in accord with the BGV theorem, which I noted Susskind demonstrated (and the BGV authors agree) entails a vast multiverse prior to and causing our local Big Bang.

As I’ve noted, the only logically possible location of the first cause is simultaneous with its effect, as Marshall concedes it may be. But that eliminates the final step of the KCM. If a first cause can exist, uncaused, simultaneous with its effect, then it is no longer the case that a seed of spacetime cannot be that cause. 

Marshall is proposing the first uncaused cause is a bizarre, extremely complex entity never evidenced anywhere in science. But I, and science, propose the first uncaused cause is a singular empty point or quantum of spacetime. One or the other (god or quantum) “just exists” for no reason. But we can show that on far fewer assumptions than God requires, and on known science, a primordial point of spacetime as first cause can explain all current observation.

Quantum examples simpler and better supported exist in science.[7] I’ve elsewhere demonstrated even a completely lawless first state will produce the observed universe.[8] God is certainly not simpler than an empty state devoid of all contents and extension; yet such a state inevitably produces a random multiverse owing to its very instability: because it’s logically necessarily the case that an empty state governed by no laws inevitably spawns a random outcome among all possibilities, which are infinite in number, ergo the probability of a single state—like remaining nothing—is infinity to one against.[9]

So there is just no way to get to God here.

-:-

Such is my latest response.

Continue on to Dr. Marshall’s response here.

-:-

Endnotes

[1] Email from Herb Silverman to Richard Carrier, “Re: Marshall’s Reply” (14 May 219). Note, for reference, that in mathematical notation, infinities are categorized as the set of hyperreals, not the set of real numbers that Silverman references, because infinite quantities do not have a location on a number line.

[2] This is well explained by Louis J. Swingrover in his position paper “Difficulties With William Lane Craig’s Arguments for Finitism.” See also Wes Morriston, “Craig on the Actual Infinite,” Religious Studies 38.2 (2002): 147-66; Landon Hedrick, “Heartbreak at Hilbert’s Hotel,” Religious Studies 50.1 (2014): 27-46; Graham Oppy, “Inverse Operations with Transfinite Numbers and the Kalam Cosmological Argument,” International Philosophical Quarterly 35.2 (1995): 219-21.

[3] Oppy, “Inverse Operations,” op. cit. Even in the very book Marshall quotes, Oppy goes on to challenge that these are absurdities, not agree they are: Philosophical Perspectives on Infinity (2009), pp. 48-275.

[4]  Audrey Mithani and Alexander Vilenkin, “Did the Universe Have a Beginning?” (20 April 2012).

[5] See Leonardo Gualtieri and Valeria Ferrari, “Black Holes in General Relativity” (2011), p. 7, noting that a past-incomplete geodesic means ending at an actual or coordinate singularity. That actual singularities are impossible on quantum mechanics, and thus we do not actually know what happens at (much less before) a “coordinate singularity,” see my discussion in “The Big Debate: Comments on the Barker-Carrier vs. Corey-Rajabali Team Debate” (2004).

[6] Anthony Aguirre and John Kehayias, “Quantum Instability of the Emergent Universe” (2013), p. 5.

[7] For example, as I’ve already mentioned, Lawrence Krauss, A Universe from Nothing (2012); Dongshan He, Dongfeng Gao, and Qing-yu Cai, “Spontaneous Creation of the Universe from Nothing” (4 April 2014); even, essentially, Marshall’s own cited source, Aguirre and Kehayias, op. cit., and Sean Carroll and Jennifer Chen, “Spontaneous Inflation and the Origin of the Arrow of Time” (27 October 2004).

[8] Richard Carrier, “The Problem with Nothing: Why The Indefensibility of Ex Nihilo Nihil Goes Wrong for Theists” (29 August 2018).

[9] As is fully explained and demonstrated with ten numbered propositions in “The Problem with Nothing,” op. cit., which I’ve cited in every entry in this debate.

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