We are here debating the Kalam Cosmological Argument from a deistic rather than theistic perspective. Carlo Alvaro is taking the affirmative; Richard Carrier the negative. See our initial entry for all the details, including an index to all entries yet published.
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Dr. Alvaro has not presented any evidence for his P1 or P2. I have presented evidence against both.[1]
I. Premise 1 Remains Unproved and Probably False
All Alvaro offers in support of P1 are observations of current laws of physics. But current laws of physics cannot describe conditions prior to the production of those laws of physics. Therefore “causal laws exist now” cannot be evidence that “those same laws always existed.” Alvaro needs to prove that P1 holds even prior to the contingent production of causal laws like P1. Otherwise it is false.
By contrast, I have proved the following: since P1 has still not been formally proved to be logically necessary by any valid or sound syllogism, so far as we know it is impossible for P1 to be true before the contingent production of P1. The first state of existence, if there was one, therefore cannot even in principle have been governed by P1. If P1 was not necessary, it was brought about; if it was brought about, there was a condition prior to P1 in which P1 did not yet hold. Yet P3 requires P1 to hold in precisely that condition. Since it does not, P1 is false in precisely the condition required for it to prove P3.
Accordingly, I demonstrated the consensus of experts in cosmological science rejects P1, publishing and accepting under peer review many spontaneous creation models.[2] There is therefore no basis for amateurs to believe in P1. Alvaro has cited not even a single cosmological scientist who believes in P1, nor even a single peer-reviewed argument for it in the actual field of cosmological science.
II. Premise 2 Remains Unproved and Probably False
I demonstrated that all mathematicians and theoretical physicists agree that actual infinities are possible and that current cosmological observations are consistent with a past infinite series of prior states. Therefore, the overwhelming consensus of experts on this matter reject Alvaro’s P2. There is therefore no basis for amateurs to believe in P2. Alvaro has cited not even a single living mathematician or theoretical physicist who believes in P2, nor even a single peer-reviewed argument for it in the actual field of cosmological science.
By contrast, I cited dozens of actual papers, books, and even recorded interviews of actual experts rejecting P2 and Alvaro’s every attempt at arguing for it. This includes interviews with Borde, Guth, and Vilenkin who authored the Borde-Guth-Vilenkin (or BGV) theorem: every single one of them agrees even their finding, which proved a classical spacetime must be past-finite, does not prove time had to be, because timelines can pass through quantum singularities and thus bypass the requirements of classical spacetime.[3]
III. P3 Is Both Moot and False
Accordingly, P3 remains unproved. But even if P3 happened to be true, Alvaro has not proved its first cause had any properties of a deity. It could be a spontaneous uncaused event, or any atheistic brute or necessary first-state of physics. Thus all godless first-cause cosmological models in peer-reviewed science journals remain untouched by Alvaro’s conclusion. Yet they all omit any intelligence. Whereas no theistic cosmological model has ever passed peer review in a cosmological science journal. Atheism is therefore more probable on existing science.
IV. Catalog of False Claims
Alvaro implied (albeit shadily avoiding actually claiming) that his colleague, astrophysicist Michio Kaku, teaches that “the Big Bang theory says that there is no spatiotemporal dimension prior to the singularity.” Kaku publicly teaches the opposite.[4] No living theoretical physicist teaches what Alvaro claims.
“If anything could come into existence by nothing, then anything could—even now!” No. As I explained, P1 will only be false in conditions ontologically or temporally prior to (not after) the production of an observed causal physics. This is why things don’t violate causal laws now; but could before they existed.
“Also, he must show an object that came into existence by nothing.” No. As I explained, even by Alvaro’s own expansive definition of “something,” I cited many possible spontaneous and minimal-first-cause creation cosmologies that do not require his definition of “nothing.” That refutes P1.
“The Kalam does not argue that everything is governed by P1.” I never said it did. Alvaro ignored what I actually said (that he has to show P1 is necessarily and thus not contingently true) and converted it into something I did not say (that P1 is only true if every possible thing is governed by it). He never answered what I actually said. That is a drop.
“Actual infinity leads to logical contradiction.” Alvaro presented no formal syllogism or proof of this. He only made assertions, all of which refuted by me, and by experts on the logic of transfinite sets, as I extensively cited.[5] Among those is Bertrand Russell, who concluded, “objections to infinite numbers, and classes, and series, and the notion that the infinite as such is self-contradictory, may thus be dismissed as groundless.”[6] This conclusion has never been overturned in any peer-reviewed mathematics journal.
“You cannot traverse an actual infinity.” No one has to. As I repeatedly explained. A finite person can be born, live, and die at any point in time in an infinite timeline; they do not have to ‘cross’ the whole series first. This was the kind of argument Russell formally disproved.[again, 6] All mathematicians expert in transfinites now agree with Russell and me.[7]
V. Conclusion
Alvaro claims to have proved “the god that brought the universe into existence is eternal” and “was not brought into existence by anything else,” and that the “Kalam is sound” so “the conclusion must be true, which means that the universe was brought into being by something else—a god.” But Alvaro never presented any argument for any fact being a “god,” much less for any first-cause being a god. Those statements are therefore false.
It does not follow, from anything Alvaro has said across this entire debate, that any eternal or necessary fact that may have produced reality is a ‘god’. That the set of conceivable eternal or necessary facts includes gods does not entail or even imply that it only contains gods. Plenty of non-god candidates reside in that set. The expert field of cosmological science is full of them. Whereas no ‘god’ theory has ever passed peer-review there. So the Kalam argument is dead.
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Endnotes
[1] Both facts are established in my last entry: Dr. Carrier’s Third Reply to Alvaro.
[2] For example, Maya Lincoln and Avi Wasser, “Spontaneous Creation of the Universe Ex Nihilo,” Physics of the Dark Universe (2013); cited in Note 4 of my First Reply. Also as cited there, the published cosmological models of Krauss and Vilenkin (among others) also invoke uncaused first states. I also repeatedly cited my debate with Marshall and notes therein and among them is the Carroll-Chen model, which also invokes uncaused first states (the spontaneous initiation of reality).
[3] See Note 7 of my Third Reply to Alvaro. See in particular there: Alex Vilenkin in “Before the Big Bang 9” (particularly timestamp 21:07ff.) and Physicists & Philosophers Debunk the Kalam Cosmological Argument (featuring Penrose, Hawking, and Guth, among others) and Physicists and Philosophers Strike Back. And there are a dozen more sources cited there.
[4] See The Multiverse Theory / Michio Kaku at Scientific Thinking, and see the rest of his remarks clipped there in the full interview, Michio Kaku: Future of Humans, Aliens, Space Travel & Physics | Lex Fridman Podcast #45 (start at minute 8). And see The Big Bang Wasn’t the Beginning on Michio Kaku’s own website.
[5] See, again, Note 7 of my Third Reply to Alvaro.
[6] Bertrand Russell, The Principles of Mathematics, 2nd ed. (1938), esp. § 3.23 and all of § 5 (e.g. 5.43). This is one of the foundational texts of modern mathematics.
[7] Again, in Note 7 of my Third Reply to Alvaro (and in notes in prior replies as well), I cited numerous professional mathematical textbooks and anthologies establishing this.
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Read Dr. Alvaro’s Closing Statement
Can you clarify, please? “P1 Remains Unproved and Probably False”; I take P1 as meaning “determinism is valid” (but then, contradicted by P2, which I agree with your assessment of). I agree that P1 is unproved and possibly false, but I fail to see where the ‘probably’ comes from. I don’t think any amount of theorizing can provide that.
I don’t know what you mean. P1 does not entail determinism. Quantum indeterminism is compatible with it, for example. The cause of indeterministic events in that ontology is then the quantum substrate, whether that’s a property of spacetime or the fields comprising it, or something else. So that would still satisfy P1.
P1, as stated in the syllogism, is not “sometimes P1,” but “always P1,” i.e. that P1 holds true in all possible conditions. I showed that it cannot hold in the one condition it must hold for it to entail P3: the state of affairs before any contingent physics was produced.
There can be necessary physics (as opposed to contingent), which is what Alvaro was trying to claim for his “god,” though he never showed the necessary first cause was a god rather than just some foundational physics (some physical fact that cannot not obtain); but he also never established “all things” (and his argument requires this to mean all possible contingent things) “that begin to exist came into existence by something else.”
It is self-evident that something could come into existence spontaneously and thus not “by” something else (I cited numerous examples in the cosmological science literature). That is why Alvaro needed to prove that this is not self-evident and that it is actually logically impossible. Otherwise, it is possible. And therefore the “all” in P1 is false.
I did mention the possibility of translating his words into a trivial conclusion, e.g. by semantically calling spontaneous generation itself “something else” and therefore getting P1 to be true because it is then a tautology. But if he took that road, he would be eliminating his case for god, because then P3 is only trivially true and thus cannot get him anywhere, as it would then include even spontaneous generation!
Indeed, one might even suggest that P1 (as Dr. Alvaro has framed it) cannot fill the role he wants it to, as it undermines itself.
“All things that begin to exist came into existence by something else” seems clearly to presuppose a concept of causation that involves sequence. It’s not quite “post hoc ergo propter hoc” (a fallacy), but it at least assumes that things that “begin” are, in fact, post hoc in relation relation to whatever might have given rise to them. (Allowing that the phrase “came into existence by” is unavoidably ambiguous, still I think this implication is clear.) A cause and effect arising simultaneously would be indistinguishable from spontaneous generation, which (as you note) he rejects.
But if that’s so, then the beginning of time—which Dr. Alvaro insists on, refusing for other reasons to consider non-finite time—cannot logically be subject to that form of causation, simply because there is no prior moment in which any “something else” could have brought it into being.
Or am I missing something here?
No. You are correct. Alvaro never fixed this problem despite my urging him to repeatedly. It is logically impossible for something to exist before time so as to have “brought it about,” which means P1 cannot apply to time and is therefore, again, false precisely in the condition it needs to be true to produce his P3.
There can be semantic ways around this (as you note, embracing simultaneous causation, or what I call “ontological causation”), but they don’t rescue his goal (which was deism, even though he never presented any argument for deism).
Once you allow simultaneous causation, time can then cause itself to exist—or anything else could (since the first cause need no longer predate time, it can literally then be anything)—and there is no route to needing an epicycle like god.
A good conclusion. It addresses all the problems I had with Dr. Alvaro’s arguments. I’ve been disappointed by the philosophical arguments. I have long noticed that you cannot use such philosophical arguments without a familiarity in the actual science of the Big Bang. In antiquity philosophers based their philosophy in the observation of the natural world. At least this debate gave me the opportunity to update my knowledge of the state of the field.
Learning stuff, and acquiring more sources for it, is always the best benefit of a well-defended debate.
Alas, to my disappointment, Dr. Alvaro never cited even a single source honestly or pertinently in the entire debate. So he turned himself merely into a mere foil for my educating the audience. Which I could have done without him. I had hoped for something better.
P1 states that “Everything that begins to exist has a cause.” This is also known as the principle of sufficient reason.
You write:
But, if it was brought about, it had a sufficient reason, and then the principle of sufficient reason holds true. So your so-called objection is invalid and self-defeating.
I have never objected to the principle of sufficient reason.
So now you seem to be confusing a “reason” with a “cause.”
Once again, you show no signs of knowing what you are talking about, or understanding what I have argued.
Anyone who denies that causality always applies and claims to be able to conceive of an acausal universe denies the Principle of Sufficient Reason. Thus, denying that everything that begins to exist has a cause is to deny the PSR. But to immediately claim that universal causality is caused by an acausal principle, and therefore must be considered contingent, is the height of absurdity.
Nothing changes if, instead of using the term “caused,” you say that the PSR or causality are “grounded” in another principle. This is because what you are challenging is the foundation of the contingent (namely, of that which begins to exist), regardless of whether it is a body or a principle.
In other words, you have managed to demonstrate the universality of the PSR. And you have done so in a rather comical way, since you intended the opposite.
In your final statement, you argue as follows:
Premise 1 (P1) of the argument establishes that everything that begins to exist has a cause.
However, even if this is the case in our universe, for it to also be true in all possible universes and to be always considered true, P1 must be a logically necessary truth.
It has not been proven that P1 is a logically necessary truth.
Therefore, P1 is a contingent fact and, as such, a caused or grounded fact. That is, it is not always true, but only after being caused or grounded.
Now, your arrogance prevents you from seeing the obvious, namely, that you intend to refute the PSR using this very principle. For, if P1 is a caused fact that begins to exist, it confirms that, were P1 not logically necessary, it too would have to begin to exist and thus would also require a cause. Since you have not found any exception to the PSR in this universe and have done nothing but confirm it outside this universe through a vain thought experiment, there is no reason to abandon this principle or limit its applicability.
Still no formally valid and sound syllogism.
I already told you I will not reply to anything but that from you until you comply.
Until then you are wasting everyone’s time here.
I’m sorry I missed replying to Dr. Alvaro’s last entry. I’m less sorry realizing I literally replied to everything he said in his previous post. That he hasn’t provided anything to further support his assertions (like a single peer reviewed article, or direct quote from a modern expert) is borderline insane.
Dr. Alvaro seems to think that his intuitions are sufficient to make strong, sweeping claims about pre-universe conditions. This is not only conceited (why think intuitions should work that way?), but actually stupid (the cutting edge of nearly every scientific advancement shows the absolute worthlessness of human intuition).
That said, if I were to accept everything he claims, I would be forced to accept the Kalam. That’s almost tautological, of course, as his defense of P1 seems to be, “P1 must be true!” But whatever. I accept that he believes the things that lead to an acceptance of the Kalam. I do wish we would have gotten a chance to see how he connects the conclusion of the Kalam to anything resembling a god.
I am disappointed in that as well.
His descent into dishonesty, however, has concluded any possibility of continuing any debate with him.
He is either not honest or not sane. And therefore, no further productive exchanges with him are possible.
Dr. Carrier, it’s been interesting watching you take your “Anything can come from nothing because there’s no thing stopping it” theory out for a spin. I have a question for you though about how you are imagining a true nothing to be. When you imagine this true nothing, and also the ‘anything’ that can spring from it, is it able to interact with anything from our universe at any point in time? Or anything else that has ever existed at any point in time? If so isn’t that true nothing actually defined by an attribute then, namely how it will interact with anything else that exists? If on the other hand the ‘anything’ that can spring from this true nothing is not able to interact with anything else, ever, then it implies this true nothing occupies it’s own plane of potentiality. But isn’t that also a something? For a true nothing, and the ‘anything’ that springs from it, it seems necessary to have this attribute about how it will interact with other things, which implies it’s not a true nothing at all. So if anything has ever existed is it even possible for a true nothing to exist?
No. It only existed as a state of things at t=0. It then transformed into the current state of affairs (a substantial and ordered uni/multiverse). It therefore no longer exists. It existed only in the past.
As to whether it is a “true” nothing, that is semantics. See What If We Reimagine ‘Nothing’ as a Field-State?. The only nothing-state pertinent is the most nothing that can ever have been the case; anything more “nothing” than that (perhaps what you mean by a “true” nothing) is logically impossible and therefore can never have been the case.
If you want to then say “therefore there was something, the Lincoln-Wasser nothing field-state, and it is a logically necessary first cause because it is not possible for anything less than that to have ever been the case” that’s fine. It’s a bit wishy washy with words (since one would not normally call the nothing-field-state as “something” because it is precisely the absence of all actual things and therefore the presence only of pure potentiality that is logically entailed by removing all actual things). But if it feels better to call that nothingness a something, it does no injury to my argument.
You are then just declaring the Lincoln-Wasser nothing field-state the necessary and sufficient first cause of existence.
God is therefore no longer needed (and even under-performs, relative to it, as an explanation of observations: both on empirical and logical priors and on likelihoods).
There is a typo in section IV Catalog of False Claims. In paragraph 3, the sentence “As I explained, even by Alvar’s own expansive definition…” should read “As I explained, even by Alvaro’s own expansive definition…”
Good catch. Thanks. Fixed.
Dr. Carrier wrote:
Ouch. That’s gotta hurt.
One should really be careful when name dropping.
Great debate! I enjoyed reading it!
I have a question regarding “traversing of an actual infinity”. Doesn’t this presuppose the “tensed” theory of time which makes a total mess when trying to interpret theory of relativity? Would a proof of a beginningless universe then refute the view that time actually flows, and confirm the view that passage of time is an illusion of the mind, and not a physical fact?
Not necessarily.
It is true that transfinite timelines are more at home in block theory (B-theory of time). Then existence is just an infinitely long hyperdimensional tube. Location and direction in time is then merely a product of relative position and patterning in the tube. I discuss this in some detail in my section on time in Sense and Goodness without God.
But it would not be logically impossible for an transfinite moment to exist in A theory. Then it’s just a train that has always been running, in much the same way God is supposed to have been (in whatever hypertemporal dimension he is supposed to live in).
However, you should not mistake B-theory as entailing “passage of time” is an illusion. It is only in the same way colors are illusions: nothing outside your brain has a color, but colors do track something that really does exist outside your brain (directly, photon wavelength; indirectly, the physical qualities of objects that affect photon wavelength). So it is not strictly the case that “apples are red” is an illusion; it’s only an illusion at the literal definition of red, but there is still something not at all illusional about why apples register as red. The color codes for a real thing about apples.
The same is the case for time. How it feels and appears to be in time is an illusion (like color), but it still tracks something real (there is still a difference between past and future and things actually do change from past to future). You just have to resituate tense in the context of relativity (what “is” past or present or future is relative to the observer, just like Earth’s velocity is relative to the observer—and yet Earth’s velocity is still very much real).
What I meant by “passage of time” is the view that past and future don’t exist, only present, and that there is a real flow going on in the external world in the sense that NOW disappears when it becomes the past, and the next future moment comes into existence in the form of NOW. So, the subjective sense of time in the mind does not correspond to the actual flow in the external world because there is no flow, only these relations between different “frames” in this “ever-existing” hyperdimensional tube. That would be an example of what an illusion is, not that there isn’t anything, but that it isn’t what it looks like it is.
I have to admit, I still have a hard time reconciling the A-theory with transfinite timeline. The view is so absurd, although not logically impossible. However this (how it appears to me) absurd view, I would point against the A-theory, and not against the possibility of a past-infinite reality.
That would be A-Theory, yes.
And the reason we have a hard time imagining transfinite circumstances is that our brain did not evolve to. Transfinite quantities evade our biologically- and experientially-limited intuitions. That’s why it took eons to invent any mathematics capable of incorporating them correctly, and even then, centuries to get from Newton and Leibniz to Cantor and Russell (setting aside the progress made thousands of years earlier by Archimedes, because it was lost, but even that took thousands of years of civilization and hundreds of years of formal logics to get to, and only the one genius got there so far as we know).
We cannot rely on our intuition in matters for which we have no experience-base and no neurogenetic foundation.
In those affairs, we have to defer to logical formulae to determine what “makes sense” and what does not. Hence the importance of the work of Newton, Leibniz, Cantor, and Russell.
So I don’t agree that the obscurity of transfinite conditions counts against A-Theory, any more than it counts against B-theory (both are compatible with transfinite conditions). What kills A-theory is Relativity, through which we have even empirically confirmed that there is no singular time: time flows at different rates for different observers, and simultaneity differs for different observers, and antimatter is matter moving backwards in time, and photons are their own antiparticle, because light traverses all the time it exists instantaneously, which is why no matter how fast we go, light speed still remains the same for us in all directions, contrary to the predictions of classical Galilean relativity. So it is logically impossible now for A-Theory to be true. Only B-Theory remains to make sense of current observations.
I’d like to get back to the past infinity once more, as I can explain in detail why I find the view to be absurd.
Note that this is only if A-theory is presupposed, otherwise there doesn’t seem to be a problem.
I don’t think anyone should have a problem with actual infinities in reality.
It’s easy to imagine an infinite space with infinite amount of apples in it, just to give a banal example.
What is problematic is when you combine it with the A-theory and the infinite past.
I can write this as an argument:
P1. Infinity is (by definition) inexhaustible.
P2. Given a past-eternal universe, any point in time has an infinite amount of past events preceding it.
C. Infinite amount of past events cannot be exhausted.
Therefore, the next conclusion is that any point in time is unreachable.
To reconcile past-infinity with the A-theory, there has to be something wrong with the argument, but I can’t see what it is.
Now I’m left with this:
If I choose a specific point in time B, then for every point A that comes prior to B,
A to B is exhaustible. Since there is no point in the past A such that A to B is inexhaustible,
B is reachable from every point in the past, so B is reachable.
And yet, from the argument above, B is unreachable.
This is a contradiction.
And the only way out of this, as I see it, is not to go against the argument, but against the idea that there can ever be any point in this
past-infinite A-theory time. So, if there cannot be a possible point A in the past of B, then B cannot be reached after all.
So, now there is no contradiction.
I’m left again with the conclusion that A-theory combined with past-infinite is incoherent.
I’d like to get your thoughts about this. Is there a flaw in my reasoning?
Absurdity is a not a truth criterion. Plenty of absurd things are nevertheless true.
If you want to convert “absurd” into “false” you need either evidence that something is false (which does not appear to be what you are presenting or even could present) or a formal demonstration of a logical contradiction entailing it is false. I do not see this in anything you have presented.
Yet without either of those, you have no epistemic objection to the absurd to offer. This is not a trivial point. Human intuition is simply not epistemically reliable in domains beyond human experience. It does not matter what feels absurd. What matters is what is logically possible. Because everything logically possible, can be actual.
Hence, for example, Cantor was correct to conclude that there are even infinities larger than other infinities (and in fact an infinite number of yet larger infinities). That sounds absurd. It is nevertheless true and all mathematicians accept now that it is the case.
That is not a valid syllogism. Replace the terms with symbols and you’ll see.
P1. If A, then B.
P2. Every point on line L has infinite points preceding it.
C. If every point on line L has infinite points preceding it, then not B.
Notice that your major and minor premise don’t connect. This makes it a non sequitur. The conclusion does not follow. You are trading on an undefined relation you call “inexhaustible” but you never establish that this word has any sense in which it is true of all infinities, or true or not true in the specific case of any point on line L. Your argument is thus gobbledygook.
You need something like:
P1. If A, then B.
P2. If L, then not B.
C. Therefore, if L, then not A.
(a form of modus tollens)
But…how can you get that?
Obviously any line L can have infinite points before it, and finite points after it. This is a perfectly sensible geometric figure. So there is no sense of “inexhaustible” that does not describe that figure or that describes all infinite figures. P1 therefore can be read in a way such that P1 is false or else in such a way that P2 is false. Either way, the argument fails, and the conclusion does not follow.
And please note: this fact about L does not require those previous points to still exist (that is irrelevant to the geometry; functions do not require the phenomena they graph to always exist; that has never been a condition of logical coherence in any calculus).
Meanwhile, your second syllogism is so unintelligible I cannot even figure out how to fix it. It resembles no logical formula I am familiar with.
You need to reformulate it into some recognizable and valid form. Because as written, its conclusion doesn’t follow from any of its premises, and its premises are too convoluted to make any sense.
Try to simplify the premises there into an “if A then B” format like I sampled above, and then try to complete either a modus tollens or a modus ponens, or any other standard formula. Then I can evaluate it.
I really don’t understand when you say that “inexhaustible” is an undefined relation. I don’t see this to be a relation at all, but a property of infinity. Exhaustible in this case is identical (or perhaps very similar) to traversable. I understand that my “argument” was not strictly valid logical argument, but I was hoping that you would understand what I was trying to communicate there.
It was my mistake trying to be technical and not explaining myself in plain words. So instead of the content, it was about the argument’s validity.
Let me try to fix it:
P1. An infinite amount of anything is inexhaustible.
P2. There is an infinite amount of past events.
C1. An infinite amount of past events is inexhaustible (not exhaustible).
P1. Given A-theory, to be possible to get to the present moment, an infinite amount of past events is (has to be) exhaustible (traversable).
P2(C1). An infinite amount of past events is not exhaustible.
C2. Getting to the present moment is not possible.
Modus tollens. If P, then Q. Not Q, therefore not P. P = possible to get to the present moment, Q = infinite amount of past events is exhaustible
This is now a valid argument. Can you evaluate?