Apologetics and first cause argument

[Grantref]

This is a continuation of the discussion that Rosuav, Grantref, Seridia, and some other people had on Citizen last night. First off I want to say that I am not attacking anyone's religious beliefs, only discussing the arguments they use to attempt to rationally reconstruct those beliefs.

Rosuav brought up a first cause argument, which in essence consists of the following parts:

1) All events must have causes.
2) The beginning of the universe is an event.
3) The beginning of the universe must have been caused.
4) This cause is God.

This argument seems to be flawed to me. First, the statement 'all events must have causes' is a general statement of a number of physical laws that scientists have formulated regarding the behavior of objects. Newton's first law of motion is among these, which states that every object in a state of uniform motion tends to remain in that state of motion unless an external force is applied to it. This is generally observed to be the case. However, there is no proof that this generalization holds for all cases under all circumstances. Most especially, it is a statement about the movement of objects through space and time and has nothing to say about the origin of the universe which, physicists believe, marked the beginning of the existence of space and time itself.

As noted during the citizen discussion, there are indications from quantum theory that events may happen without a cause. The unstable particles in radioactive atomic nuclei decay at a predictable rate en masse however there is no way, as far as any physicists have been able to determine, to predict when a particular particle will decay. Moreover, there does not appear to be any direct cause of this decay. If you were to put a neutron (which is not stable except inside an atomic nucleus) in a little pocket universe that contains nothing but that neutron, it would decay after an indeterminate amount of time, without any outside force acting on the neutron.

In addition, there is strong evidence that there is a constant flow of so-called virtual particles popping into existence throughout the universe. These occur in pairs, with one particle possessing positive mass/energy (recall that per Einstein mass and energy are equivalent) and the other possessing negative mass/energy, thus there is no net production of mass/energy. This is similar to the way that you can manipulate mathematical equations by adding or multiplying the same amount on both sides, except that there is evidence that this actually happens and is not just a mathematically possible result. That evidence is that there are times when the pair of virtual particles can acquire energy from another source, such as from the gravitational field of a black hole, and transform into a real particle which can be detected.

This is complicated but the bottom line is that there is no proof that the assumption 'All events must have causes' holds true for all events in all conditions. By using this as the basis of the argument, one is begging the question, i.e. assuming a proposition that is essential to the conclusion and for which there is no known proof.

Moreover, there is no way to move logically from point 3 (The beginning of the universe must have had a cause) to point 4 (the cause of the beginning of the universe is God). In Underpants Gnome style, this argument would be better written as:

1) All events must have causes
2) The beginning of the universe is an event
3) The beginning of the universe must have had a cause
4) ???
5) PROFIT!!! Err, I mean, GOD!!!

Why assume that the cause is God? Is it not equally conceivable that there exists a Meta-universe within which What-We-Normally-Think-Of-As-The-Universe exists, and the cause of WWNTOATUniverse may have occurred in the Meta-universe. As for what caused the Meta-universe, we have no information about it therefore we cannot say anything meaningful about it. It may have always existed. Or there may be an infinite progression of meta-meta-meta-....-universes.

In summary, I have enumerated two different logically possible alternatives to the first cause argument above:

1) It is not true that all events need to have causes. The universe was uncaused and happened spontaneously.

2) The universe was caused, but the cause was not God.

[Sebboe]

I look at it this way.

Statement: God created the universe.
Question: Who created God?
Statement: God was always there.
Question: If one can believe that why can't one assume the universe was always there (in some form or another)?

[ogron]

I don't think it makes much sense to discuss things like this at all. No matter what you figure out or what new arguments you may come up with you'll never be able to prove whether or not there is a god or what things he might have caused/done. Everything is subjective and there's where little you can know to be true. All you can do choose to believe in what you find most likely to be true. In religion as well as science.

I'm a fairly religious guy myself but I don't want to believe in a god because someone points to things in natural science and says "God!". I believe in what makes sense to me and for me it's about faith not facts or science.

[Quilandros]

Originally posted by Sebboe
I look at it this way.

Statement: God created the universe.
Question: Who created God?
Statement: God was always there.
Question: If one can believe that why can't one assume the universe was always there (in some form or another)?

The thing is I think we can Prove that the universe wasn't always there, based on measurement of things like how fast stuff is travelling and so forth - we can trace that back to a starting point. On the otherhand Proving that God exists, or that He was created or pretty much anything about Him by scientific measurement isn't really possible. Smiley face!

[Pyrosama]

Originally posted by Jabriol
1) All events must have causes.
2) The beginning of the universe is an event.
3) The beginning of the universe must have been caused.
4) This cause is God.

For the person who came up with this outline:

If I follow this correctly, then is not the creation of God an event in itself? For how else does such a being come to be? And if so, can you prove, aside from your very bold statement, what this cause happened to be (could it be man)? If not, then the first statement, "All events must have causes" is a fallacy.

[Grantref]

I wasn't directly quoting anyone, but summarizing the basic argument that I saw others making. They may have a legitimate claim that I have not correctly represented their argument and am therefore guilty of erecting a strawman to knock down, but if so they would need to present a first cause argument distinct from what I posted and lacking the flaws that I pointed out.

[Mei]

This is complicated but the bottom line is that there is no proof that the assumption 'All events must have causes' holds true for all events in all conditions. By using this as the basis of the argument, one is begging the question, i.e. assuming a proposition that is essential to the conclusion and for which there is no known proof.

True, there is no proof, but this is the nature of things. The things you mentioned are relatively new discoveries, but we haven't concluded yet that there is no cause. Instead we continue to look into these things because for something to have no cause is almost unthinkable and completely contrary to common understanding.

[Sebboe]

Originally posted by Quilandros
The thing is I think we can Prove that the universe wasn't always there, based on measurement of things like how fast stuff is travelling and so forth - we can trace that back to a starting point. On the otherhand Proving that God exists, or that He was created or pretty much anything about Him by scientific measurement isn't really possible. Smiley face!

We can't prove the universe didn't exists. We can prove that it is expanding and therefore if we reversed time it would be contracting and at some point you would get to a point where it was no longer able to contract but there is nothing to say that it wasn't in a static state for all time prior to the moment when it started to expand.

I'm not saying there is or isn't God.
I'm not saying the universe has or hasn't always been there.

I'm just saying that whatever question you ask about the Universe can also be asked about God.

I'm agnostic, not athiest and I think these debates can be fairly interesting as long as people remain respectuful of other people's opinions.

[Grantref]

Originally posted by Mei
True, there is no proof, but this is the nature of things. The things you mentioned are relatively new discoveries, but we haven't concluded yet that there is no cause. Instead we continue to look into these things because for something to have no cause is almost unthinkable and completely contrary to common understanding.

The problem with assuming that the universe fits with common sense is that our common sense of what is and is not plausible evolved to deal with the scales we normally encounter. On scales of the quantum, or on time scales on the order of billions of years, or at speeds close to the speed of light, our common sense no longer produces reliable results. That is why we need to use theories like relativity, which tells us things which are almost unthinkable and completely contrary to common understanding take place at speeds close to the speed of light. For example, the faster things go, the more they mass, and they get schrunched up from front to back. These things are completely at odds with our common sense experience which is that things stay the same shape and mass no matter what speed they move at. We also need quantum mechanics to tell us things like that electrons are either waves or particles depending on how you look at them (but never both at the same time) and that one can know the position of a particle but not its velocity, or its velocity but not its position, due to the effect of observation on that being observed. This is at odds with our common experience in which particles are particular, waves are wavy, and never the twain do meet. Also, our common experience is that observation takes place objectively, with no effect on that being observed.

The commonsense concept that events need causes is based on our experience in the scale that we normally encounter. It is a generalization based on observation. It is not a Law, handed down from on high.

[Lokrian]

This is sort of interesting. This is the second time I have heard the concept now that something about quantum physics or how things act near the speed of light or whatnot is counter to "common sense". The first time I heard it, the man used the word "counterintuitive".

I don't really see that. Once a person makes the discoveries about such things, and I think esepcially about the wave vs particulate nature of light, they make more common sense, not less. I mean, what makes no sense is trying to keep a fully particulate picture of a photon when they behave as they do in experiments. It is common sense to me then to abandon the earlier model in favor of one more workable.

Science, inasmuch as it deals with observation and experimentation, is about as common sense as things get. You look at something. You measure it. You do something. You measure it.

To me it is the same thing with God. People you talk to who really believe, almost to a person, have had some sort of physical experience which for whatever reason they interpret as "God". Furthermore, most people experiment with the concept and so forth throughout their lives. Some people turn their backs on it when this or that experiment fails, some don't. Some claim God never fails them.

The question for me was never so much, "Is there a God?" but rather, what is the nature of life and reality. In piecing it all together, I expeienced God in the way the Bible explains, and furthermore experienced people in much the way the Bible explains, and so my faith grew. Whenver I have ever tried to get atheists to explain the things that I have questions about, I am met instantly will rolling eyes, declarations that the things I am wondering about don't matter or INDEED! don't exist in reality but are just imagined by me. I am even told that I don't have any business expecting explanations from Atheists since theirs is the "default position" or whatever, and if I were only honest with myself I would understand this.

Over the years, I have grown tired of the whole debate, and have even found a number of verses in the Bible that lead me to believe I was wrong to have gotten so worked up about it to begin with. Still, when conversations like this pop up I find myself inexorably drawn to them in spite of myself.

The search for God, for me, was very much an internal one. I think that while it may be true for many that the world itself makes some indication that there is a God, the place you will meet Him face to face is in your heart, not in the equations of your Calculus and Physics texts. Einstein might tend to disagree, but then I was never quite as impressed with him as many people seem to be from a philosophical standpoint.