| Topic: |
Religions > Atheism |
| User: |
"Nico Demusopelous" |
| Date: |
18 Apr 2004 02:24:47 PM |
| Object: |
A First Cause Argument for Don Kresch... |
On 18 Apr 2004 raven1 <quoththeraven@nevermore.com> wrote:
All my premises have
been laid out, so those who wish to dispute my argument must knock off
one or more of my premises. In other words, those who disagree with my
conclusion that, at worst, we have good a priori reason to believe
there was at least one personal first cause, should be clear about
which premises they wish to dispute, and why.
How about your initial premise:
(a) Everything that begins to exist has a cause for its existence.
QM disagrees.
Thank you Raven1, for this response. This was not part part of the
main seven-premise argument (or six premises and a conclusion) that I
gave for the existence of a personal first cause. Nonetheless, I
certainly did presuppose the truth of this premise (on inductive
rather than deductive grounds), thus it is incumbent upon me to
respond to your comments.
I still wonder on what grounds one can conclude that a given event had
no cause. That being said, let me concede to three points:
(1) I am not assuming that an uncaused event is necessarily
impossible (thus I do not assume premise (a) is a necessary
logical truth, though I do consider it true).
(2) Ted King has offered the following article...
http://confer.uj.edu.pl/bell.workshop/doc/laudisa.doc
...as being an argument towards the plausibility of uncaused
events, and I have not yet absorbed the arguments found
therein.
(3) Christopher A. Lee has claimed that there are mathematical
arguments for the uncaused nature of certain events, which
would therefore be a priori arguments - but I have yet to
consider these arguments yet.
The second concession is the main one. Thus far, many have claimed
that events can be uncaused, but only Ted King has attempted to lay
any justification (and he did so by calling to witness the article
linked to above). Between Ted and myself, the ball is in my court, and
the burden is on me to attempt to absorb the arguments found there,
and then explain whether I agree or disagree (or find it relevant to
the discussion).
In the mean time (i.e. until I absorb the article offered by Ted), I
will ask you if you know of any justification for an event being
uncaused. In other words, if we declare an event (such as the decay of
a certain radioactive material or the coming into existence of a
certain particle) to be uncaused, what is the justification for such a
declaration? On what philosophical grounds does one conclude that a
given event had no cause? Do you have any arguments in favor of this
position? Or are you simply employing an ad verecundiam? (By the way,
I do not mean to give the impression that ad verecundiam arguments are
necessarily false).
It seems to me that there is good reason to believe the premise that
everything that comes into existence has a cause for its existence.
Secondly, assuming this premise is not true (i.e. certain things do
come into existence uncaused), where does that get us? On what grounds
would we assume that, for example, the Big Bang was uncaused? It seems
to grind very close to a faith-based position to (arbitrarily?) argue
that the Big Bang simply came from nothing, by nothing (though
admittedly some scientists have asserted precisely that).
The above are my thoughts. I would now like to follow up with the
thoughts that are mostly adapted from an article I was recently
looking over. In other words, what follows are not my thoughts, but
they are thoughts that I wonder how people who appeal to QM to refute
first cause arguments would respond to, thus I will post them here in
order to get the thoughts of others, and continue the discussion from
there. Admittedly, what follows is more in the context of a Big Bang
argument specifically than the simple sort of first cause argument
that I put forth. Nonetheless, there can be overlap between these
sorts of arguments (or we can, for the sake of argument, presuppose
that there is only one causal chain, and further that its beginning is
at or "prior to" the Big Bang), hence there still being some
relevance.
[--------------------------------------------]
Undoubtedly, appeals to quantum indeterminacy have to be the most
common objection to contemporary cosmological arguments, but on
cursory inspection, this objection with demur doesn't seem to warrant
any title apart from pseudo-scientific rhetoric. One must wonder how
much of a substantiated objection to the causal origin of the universe
champions of such an approach think this is (not to mention honest).
As the naturalist philosopher of science Bernulf Kanitscheider writes,
"The violent microstructure of the vacuum has been used in
attempts to explain the origin of the universe as a
long-lived vacuum fluctuation. But some authors have
connected with this legitimate speculations [sic] far
reaching metaphysical claims, or at most they couched their
mathematics in a highly misleading language, when they
maintained 'the creation of the universe out of nothing'...
From the philosophical point of view it is essential to
note that the foregoing is far from being a spontaneous
generation of everything from naught, but the origin of
that embryonic bubble is really a causal process leading
from primordial substratum with a rich physical structure to
a materialized substratum of the vacuum. Admittedly, this
process is not deterministic, it includes that weak kind of
causal dependence peculiar to every quantum mechanical
process."
[SOURCE: Bernulf Kanitscheider, Does Physical Cosmology Transcend the
Limits of Naturalistic Reasoning? in "Studies on Mario Bunge's
'Treatise,'" ed. P. Weingartner and G.J.W. Doen (Amsterdam: Rodopi,
1990), pp. 346-7.]
Thus, quantum indeterminacy hardly seems to count as a viable
counter-example to the causal origin of the universe. Let us pursue
the matter slightly further. When critics of the causal origin of the
universe want us to believe in the coherence and plausibility of their
metaphysical pop-fiction of the universe coming into existence
uncaused out of nothing, they fail to realize the implications of
their proposal. Keith Ward explains,
"A 'quantum fluctuation' is a non-determined change in
such properties as position, momentum and energy, which
occurs in the microworld of subatomic particles ...
there has to be a background space-time, to allow
fluctuations to occur. There have to be quantum fields
with very definite properties of energy, mass and so on
... finally, one has to have in place the probabilistic
laws governing quantum fluctuations ... [therefore] ...
on the quantum fluctuation hypothesis, the universe will
only come into being if there exists an exactly balanced
array of fundamental forces, an exactly specified
probability of particular fluctuations occurring in this
array, and an existence space-time in which fluctuations
can occur. This is a very complex and finely tuned
'nothing'!"
[SOURCE: Keith Ward, God, Chance & Necessity, (Oneworld Oxford, 1997),
p. 40.]
Indeed. Does the proponent of such an approach really think he has
successfully refuted the causal principle by an appeal to quantum
mechanics? Does he even understand the hypothesis of quantum
indeterminacy? Does he really think it is possible that from
absolutely nothing, to have trumpeting elephants come barging out?
Perhaps he will bite the bullet and say yes, but as Ward nicely points
out,
"One day, there might be nothing. The next day, there
might be a very large carrot. Nothing else in existence
whatsoever, but there, all alone and larger than life,
a huge carrot. If anything is possible, that certainly
is. The day after that, the carrot might disappear and
be replaced by a purple spotted gorilla. Why not? We are
in a universe, or non-universe where anything or nothing
might happen, for no reason. Why does this thought seem
odd, or even ridiculous, whereas the thought that some
law of physics might pop into existence does not?
Logically, they are exactly on par."
[SOURCE: Keith Ward, God, Chance & Necessity, (Oneworld Oxford, 1997),
p. 109.]
For my part, I comfortably side with John Locke, who wrote that
"...man knows, by an intuitive certainty, that bare nothing can no
more produce any real being, than it can be equal to two right
angles." [An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Book 4, Ch. X,
Art.3] Hence, in light of the above objections to quantum
indeterminacy, and a clear failure to demonstrate why we should
believe in an uncaused beginning of the universe, we can conclude that
the causal principle stands unscathed.
MATERIAL *ADAPTED* FROM:
http://www.geocities.com/critical_discourse/k_dfnce.htm
.
|
|
| User: "Ron Baker, Pluralitas!" |
|
| Title: Re: A First Cause Argument for Don Kresch... |
19 Apr 2004 01:26:26 PM |
|
|
"Nico Demusopelous" <nicodemus-asks@jesusanswers.com> wrote in message
news:2c68d44e.0404181124.15a16e1e@posting.google.com...
On 18 Apr 2004 raven1 <quoththeraven@nevermore.com> wrote:
All my premises have
been laid out, so those who wish to dispute my argument must knock off
one or more of my premises. In other words, those who disagree with my
conclusion that, at worst, we have good a priori reason to believe
there was at least one personal first cause, should be clear about
which premises they wish to dispute, and why.
How about your initial premise:
(a) Everything that begins to exist has a cause for its existence.
QM disagrees.
Thank you Raven1, for this response. This was not part part of the
main seven-premise argument (or six premises and a conclusion) that I
gave for the existence of a personal first cause. Nonetheless, I
certainly did presuppose the truth of this premise (on inductive
rather than deductive grounds), thus it is incumbent upon me to
respond to your comments.
I still wonder on what grounds one can conclude that a given event had
no cause. That being said, let me concede to three points:
(1) I am not assuming that an uncaused event is necessarily
impossible (thus I do not assume premise (a) is a necessary
logical truth, though I do consider it true).
(2) Ted King has offered the following article...
http://confer.uj.edu.pl/bell.workshop/doc/laudisa.doc
...as being an argument towards the plausibility of uncaused
events, and I have not yet absorbed the arguments found
therein.
(3) Christopher A. Lee has claimed that there are mathematical
arguments for the uncaused nature of certain events, which
would therefore be a priori arguments - but I have yet to
consider these arguments yet.
The second concession is the main one. Thus far, many have claimed
that events can be uncaused, but only Ted King has attempted to lay
any justification (and he did so by calling to witness the article
linked to above). Between Ted and myself, the ball is in my court, and
the burden is on me to attempt to absorb the arguments found there,
and then explain whether I agree or disagree (or find it relevant to
the discussion).
In the mean time (i.e. until I absorb the article offered by Ted), I
will ask you if you know of any justification for an event being
uncaused. In other words, if we declare an event (such as the decay of
a certain radioactive material or the coming into existence of a
certain particle) to be uncaused, what is the justification for such a
declaration?
On what philosophical grounds does one conclude that a
given event had no cause? Do you have any arguments in favor of this
position? Or are you simply employing an ad verecundiam? (By the way,
I do not mean to give the impression that ad verecundiam arguments are
necessarily false).
It is my understanding that QM says that no underlying cause
for certain events can ever be detected and that, in fact, the
existance of an underlying cause would give experimental results
different from what we actually observe.
As I understand it this counter intuitive state of affairs is
also a matter of much curiousity to QM experts and that
they have given it much deliberate attention and experimental
investigation.
It seems to me that there is good reason to believe the premise that
everything that comes into existence has a cause for its existence.
Aren't you arguing that something (God?) has always existed
and did not come into existance?
Did F = ma come into existance?
Why can't nature be uncaused?
Secondly, assuming this premise is not true (i.e. certain things do
come into existence uncaused), where does that get us? On what grounds
would we assume that, for example, the Big Bang was uncaused? It seems
to grind very close to a faith-based position to (arbitrarily?) argue
that the Big Bang simply came from nothing, by nothing (though
admittedly some scientists have asserted precisely that).
I'm not sure it is commonly accepted that the big bang
was uncaused. I believe it is commonly accepted that
we would not be able to see or know anything about
what might have been before the big bang.
It might be that the big bang was 'uncaused' or it
could be viewed that it was caused by nature or
is one part of the universe.
The above are my thoughts. I would now like to follow up with the
thoughts that are mostly adapted from an article I was recently
looking over. In other words, what follows are not my thoughts, but
they are thoughts that I wonder how people who appeal to QM to refute
first cause arguments would respond to, thus I will post them here in
order to get the thoughts of others, and continue the discussion from
there. Admittedly, what follows is more in the context of a Big Bang
argument specifically than the simple sort of first cause argument
that I put forth. Nonetheless, there can be overlap between these
sorts of arguments (or we can, for the sake of argument, presuppose
that there is only one causal chain, and further that its beginning is
at or "prior to" the Big Bang), hence there still being some
relevance.
[--------------------------------------------]
Undoubtedly, appeals to quantum indeterminacy have to be the most
common objection to contemporary cosmological arguments, but on
cursory inspection, this objection with demur doesn't seem to warrant
any title apart from pseudo-scientific rhetoric. One must wonder how
much of a substantiated objection to the causal origin of the universe
champions of such an approach think this is (not to mention honest).
As the naturalist philosopher of science Bernulf Kanitscheider writes,
"The violent microstructure of the vacuum has been used in
attempts to explain the origin of the universe as a
long-lived vacuum fluctuation. But some authors have
connected with this legitimate speculations [sic] far
reaching metaphysical claims, or at most they couched their
mathematics in a highly misleading language, when they
maintained 'the creation of the universe out of nothing'...
From the philosophical point of view it is essential to
note that the foregoing is far from being a spontaneous
generation of everything from naught, but the origin of
that embryonic bubble is really a causal process leading
from primordial substratum with a rich physical structure to
a materialized substratum of the vacuum. Admittedly, this
process is not deterministic, it includes that weak kind of
causal dependence peculiar to every quantum mechanical
process."
[SOURCE: Bernulf Kanitscheider, Does Physical Cosmology Transcend the
Limits of Naturalistic Reasoning? in "Studies on Mario Bunge's
'Treatise,'" ed. P. Weingartner and G.J.W. Doen (Amsterdam: Rodopi,
1990), pp. 346-7.]
Thus, quantum indeterminacy hardly seems to count as a viable
counter-example to the causal origin of the universe. Let us pursue
the matter slightly further. When critics of the causal origin of the
universe want us to believe in the coherence and plausibility of their
metaphysical pop-fiction of the universe coming into existence
uncaused out of nothing, they fail to realize the implications of
their proposal. Keith Ward explains,
"A 'quantum fluctuation' is a non-determined change in
such properties as position, momentum and energy, which
occurs in the microworld of subatomic particles ...
there has to be a background space-time, to allow
fluctuations to occur. There have to be quantum fields
with very definite properties of energy, mass and so on
... finally, one has to have in place the probabilistic
laws governing quantum fluctuations ... [therefore] ...
on the quantum fluctuation hypothesis, the universe will
only come into being if there exists an exactly balanced
array of fundamental forces, an exactly specified
probability of particular fluctuations occurring in this
array, and an existence space-time in which fluctuations
can occur. This is a very complex and finely tuned
'nothing'!"
[SOURCE: Keith Ward, God, Chance & Necessity, (Oneworld Oxford, 1997),
p. 40.]
Indeed. Does the proponent of such an approach really think he has
successfully refuted the causal principle by an appeal to quantum
mechanics? Does he even understand the hypothesis of quantum
indeterminacy? Does he really think it is possible that from
absolutely nothing, to have trumpeting elephants come barging out?
Perhaps he will bite the bullet and say yes, but as Ward nicely points
out,
"One day, there might be nothing. The next day, there
might be a very large carrot. Nothing else in existence
whatsoever, but there, all alone and larger than life,
a huge carrot. If anything is possible, that certainly
is. The day after that, the carrot might disappear and
be replaced by a purple spotted gorilla. Why not? We are
in a universe, or non-universe where anything or nothing
might happen, for no reason. Why does this thought seem
odd, or even ridiculous, whereas the thought that some
law of physics might pop into existence does not?
Logically, they are exactly on par."
[SOURCE: Keith Ward, God, Chance & Necessity, (Oneworld Oxford, 1997),
p. 109.]
For my part, I comfortably side with John Locke, who wrote that
"...man knows, by an intuitive certainty, that bare nothing can no
more produce any real being, than it can be equal to two right
angles." [An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Book 4, Ch. X,
Art.3] Hence, in light of the above objections to quantum
indeterminacy, and a clear failure to demonstrate why we should
believe in an uncaused beginning of the universe, we can conclude that
the causal principle stands unscathed.
MATERIAL *ADAPTED* FROM:
http://www.geocities.com/critical_discourse/k_dfnce.htm
Hmm. (I just skimmed most of that.)
Who says the universe has a beginning?
I don't necessarily accept the big bang as the
beginning of the universe.
I don't necessarily accept the *currently observable
universe* as being the "all that is" universe.
And the idea that the "uncaused cause" has consciousness
is an untenable leap.
--
Ron Baker
.
|
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| User: "Ted King" |
|
| Title: Re: A First Cause Argument for Don Kresch... |
20 Apr 2004 08:27:48 AM |
|
|
In article <2c68d44e.0404181124.15a16e1e@posting.google.com>,
(Nico Demusopelous) wrote:
On 18 Apr 2004 raven1 <quoththeraven@nevermore.com> wrote:
All my premises have
been laid out, so those who wish to dispute my argument must knock off
one or more of my premises. In other words, those who disagree with my
conclusion that, at worst, we have good a priori reason to believe
there was at least one personal first cause, should be clear about
which premises they wish to dispute, and why.
How about your initial premise:
(a) Everything that begins to exist has a cause for its existence.
QM disagrees.
Thank you Raven1, for this response. This was not part part of the
main seven-premise argument (or six premises and a conclusion) that I
gave for the existence of a personal first cause. Nonetheless, I
certainly did presuppose the truth of this premise (on inductive
rather than deductive grounds), thus it is incumbent upon me to
respond to your comments.
If the events/things *in* the physical universe *that we observe* have a cause
(which, by some interpretations of quantum mechanics, is not the case) does that
lead to an inductive inference that the *whole* of the physical universe also
would have a cause, or does it lead to an inductive inference that all *all the
events/things **in** the universe* have a cause? I can see the latter inference
given the assumption that the events/things we observe have a cause (with the
significant reservation that it may not be the case that all the events/things
we observe have a cause), but the former is not as clear to me.
I still wonder on what grounds one can conclude that a given event had
no cause. That being said, let me concede to three points:
(1) I am not assuming that an uncaused event is necessarily
impossible (thus I do not assume premise (a) is a necessary
logical truth, though I do consider it true).
(2) Ted King has offered the following article...
http://confer.uj.edu.pl/bell.workshop/doc/laudisa.doc
...as being an argument towards the plausibility of uncaused
events, and I have not yet absorbed the arguments found
therein.
(3) Christopher A. Lee has claimed that there are mathematical
arguments for the uncaused nature of certain events, which
would therefore be a priori arguments - but I have yet to
consider these arguments yet.
The second concession is the main one. Thus far, many have claimed
that events can be uncaused, but only Ted King has attempted to lay
any justification (and he did so by calling to witness the article
linked to above). Between Ted and myself, the ball is in my court, and
the burden is on me to attempt to absorb the arguments found there,
and then explain whether I agree or disagree (or find it relevant to
the discussion).
What I provided was just an argument that it may not be possible for there to be
a cause in quantum correlations, but even if that argument does not pan out,
that does not imply that there *are necessarily* causes for quantum
correlations. That conclusion would require an argument that goes beyond just
showing that it is *possible* that there *are* causes for quantum correlations,
it would require a sound argument that it is *not possible* for there not to be
causes for quantum correlations.
In the mean time (i.e. until I absorb the article offered by Ted), I
will ask you if you know of any justification for an event being
uncaused. In other words, if we declare an event (such as the decay of
a certain radioactive material or the coming into existence of a
certain particle) to be uncaused, what is the justification for such a
declaration? On what philosophical grounds does one conclude that a
given event had no cause? Do you have any arguments in favor of this
position? Or are you simply employing an ad verecundiam? (By the way,
I do not mean to give the impression that ad verecundiam arguments are
necessarily false).
It seems to me that there is good reason to believe the premise that
everything that comes into existence has a cause for its existence.
Secondly, assuming this premise is not true (i.e. certain things do
come into existence uncaused), where does that get us? On what grounds
would we assume that, for example, the Big Bang was uncaused?
In terms of grounds for not accepting your argument, isn't it sufficient to
provide good reason to think it may be *possible* for the physical universe to
be uncaused, rather than "assume" or claim that it is definitely uncaused?
It seems
to grind very close to a faith-based position to (arbitrarily?) argue
that the Big Bang simply came from nothing, by nothing (though
admittedly some scientists have asserted precisely that).
The above are my thoughts. I would now like to follow up with the
thoughts that are mostly adapted from an article I was recently
looking over. In other words, what follows are not my thoughts, but
they are thoughts that I wonder how people who appeal to QM to refute
first cause arguments would respond to, thus I will post them here in
order to get the thoughts of others, and continue the discussion from
there. Admittedly, what follows is more in the context of a Big Bang
argument specifically than the simple sort of first cause argument
that I put forth. Nonetheless, there can be overlap between these
sorts of arguments (or we can, for the sake of argument, presuppose
that there is only one causal chain, and further that its beginning is
at or "prior to" the Big Bang), hence there still being some
relevance.
[--------------------------------------------]
Undoubtedly, appeals to quantum indeterminacy have to be the most
common objection to contemporary cosmological arguments, but on
cursory inspection, this objection with demur doesn't seem to warrant
any title apart from pseudo-scientific rhetoric. One must wonder how
much of a substantiated objection to the causal origin of the universe
champions of such an approach think this is (not to mention honest).
As the naturalist philosopher of science Bernulf Kanitscheider writes,
"The violent microstructure of the vacuum has been used in
attempts to explain the origin of the universe as a
long-lived vacuum fluctuation. But some authors have
connected with this legitimate speculations [sic] far
reaching metaphysical claims, or at most they couched their
mathematics in a highly misleading language, when they
maintained 'the creation of the universe out of nothing'...
From the philosophical point of view it is essential to
note that the foregoing is far from being a spontaneous
generation of everything from naught, but the origin of
that embryonic bubble is really a causal process leading
from primordial substratum with a rich physical structure to
a materialized substratum of the vacuum. Admittedly, this
process is not deterministic, it includes that weak kind of
causal dependence peculiar to every quantum mechanical
process."
[SOURCE: Bernulf Kanitscheider, Does Physical Cosmology Transcend the
Limits of Naturalistic Reasoning? in "Studies on Mario Bunge's
'Treatise,'" ed. P. Weingartner and G.J.W. Doen (Amsterdam: Rodopi,
1990), pp. 346-7.]
Thus, quantum indeterminacy hardly seems to count as a viable
counter-example to the causal origin of the universe. Let us pursue
the matter slightly further. When critics of the causal origin of the
universe want us to believe in the coherence and plausibility of their
metaphysical pop-fiction of the universe coming into existence
uncaused out of nothing, they fail to realize the implications of
their proposal. Keith Ward explains,
"A 'quantum fluctuation' is a non-determined change in
such properties as position, momentum and energy, which
occurs in the microworld of subatomic particles ...
there has to be a background space-time, to allow
fluctuations to occur. There have to be quantum fields
with very definite properties of energy, mass and so on
... finally, one has to have in place the probabilistic
laws governing quantum fluctuations ... [therefore] ...
on the quantum fluctuation hypothesis, the universe will
only come into being if there exists an exactly balanced
array of fundamental forces, an exactly specified
probability of particular fluctuations occurring in this
array, and an existence space-time in which fluctuations
can occur. This is a very complex and finely tuned
'nothing'!"
[SOURCE: Keith Ward, God, Chance & Necessity, (Oneworld Oxford, 1997),
p. 40.]
Indeed. Does the proponent of such an approach really think he has
successfully refuted the causal principle by an appeal to quantum
mechanics? Does he even understand the hypothesis of quantum
indeterminacy? Does he really think it is possible that from
absolutely nothing, to have trumpeting elephants come barging out?
Perhaps he will bite the bullet and say yes, but as Ward nicely points
out,
"One day, there might be nothing. The next day, there
might be a very large carrot. Nothing else in existence
whatsoever, but there, all alone and larger than life,
a huge carrot. If anything is possible, that certainly
is. The day after that, the carrot might disappear and
be replaced by a purple spotted gorilla. Why not? We are
in a universe, or non-universe where anything or nothing
might happen, for no reason. Why does this thought seem
odd, or even ridiculous, whereas the thought that some
law of physics might pop into existence does not?
Logically, they are exactly on par."
[SOURCE: Keith Ward, God, Chance & Necessity, (Oneworld Oxford, 1997),
p. 109.]
For my part, I comfortably side with John Locke, who wrote that
"...man knows, by an intuitive certainty, that bare nothing can no
more produce any real being, than it can be equal to two right
angles." [An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Book 4, Ch. X,
Art.3] Hence, in light of the above objections to quantum
indeterminacy, and a clear failure to demonstrate why we should
believe in an uncaused beginning of the universe, we can conclude that
the causal principle stands unscathed.
MATERIAL *ADAPTED* FROM:
http://www.geocities.com/critical_discourse/k_dfnce.htm
http://cfa-www.harvard.edu/~lli/personal/html/time.html
[quote]
How the Universe could appear from nothing in the first place? In 1982, Vilenkin
came up with the idea that the Universe literally tunnelled its way into
existence, something allowed by quantum theory but impossible on an everyday
large scale. In the classical world, if you have a heavy object lying in a dip
it will need a push to climb over the edge and roll down the other side. But in
the quantum world, there is a small, but non-zero probability that the object
can simply tunnel to the other side of the dip without any outside help. The
only condition is that it does not gain any energy in the process.
So how does this relate to the Universe? Well, say you start with nothing at
all‹not even space or time. Presumably the total energy of this system would be
zero. Is it possible to make a Universe of space, time and matter whose total
energy is still zero? The answer is yes. "You can't create something out of
nothing," says Vilenkin. "But the Universe is an exception. Gravitational energy
is negative and matter energy is positive. In a closed Universe‹one where if you
keep going in one direction you come back to the same point‹the negative energy
of gravity exactly cancels the positive energy of matter, so the total energy is
zero."
[unquote]
Vilenkin is a cosmologist from Crufts University in Mass.
And, in relation to the view that cosmologists do not think there was anything
before the big bang - a Jan. article in Scientific American on Loop Quantum
Gravity Theory says that one of the implications of the theory found by Martin
Bojowald of the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics "indicate that
the big bang is actually a big bounce; before the bounce the universe was
rapidly contracting." (p.75)
Actually, I think the notion that cosmologists have some sort of agreement that
the big bang was the beginning of time and/or space is just not correct. I can
find many examples of exceptions like the one above (Loop Quantum Gravity
Theory) and the temporal span of branes in Brane Theory. Here is just one other:
http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/astronomy/new_universe_020425.html
"The Princeton physicist and his colleague, Neil Turok of Cambridge University,
have developed a whole new theory for how the universe came to be. Their
proposal seeks to explain recently uncovered flaws in the scientifically
accepted model for the origin and evolution of all known things. It describes a
series of big bangs and equally significant crunches that form a never-ending
cycle of rejuvenation and destruction."
Ted
.
|
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|
| User: "Ted King" |
|
| Title: Re: A First Cause Argument for Don Kresch... |
20 Apr 2004 09:07:05 PM |
|
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In article <lodited-B1FCA2.06255220042004@news.la.sbcglobal.net>,
Ted King <lodited@yahoo.com> wrote:
[snip]
If the events/things *in* the physical universe *that we observe* have a
cause
(which, by some interpretations of quantum mechanics, is not the case)
- I should clarify that to mean that by some interpretations of quantum
mechanics at least some events do not have a cause.
Ted
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| User: "Christopher A. Lee" |
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| Title: Re: A First Cause Argument for Don Kresch... |
18 Apr 2004 03:38:34 PM |
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On 18 Apr 2004 12:24:47 -0700, (Nico
Demusopelous) wrote:
(3) Christopher A. Lee has claimed that there are mathematical
arguments for the uncaused nature of certain events, which
would therefore be a priori arguments - but I have yet to
consider these arguments yet.
No, liar, that is yet another of your misrepresentations. You need to
learn what "random" means. And that the quantum level is probabilistic
not deterministic. If it weren't that random, eg only weighted random
then a reason for this could be inferred and investigated.
What part of "atoms decay according to a probability per time
interval" are you pretending not to understand?
But all this is a red herring - you still haven't backed up your
premise that "everything that comes into existence has a cause". To do
this you would have had to investigate everything and find its cause.
Instead, you are extrapolating from the macro level to the quantum
level.
You have also repeatedly ignored the other reasons why your "proof"
fails: that you are going beyond where there is any knowledge to
where there is no information whatever, stopping at at arbitrary point
where there is no reason to do so, and deciding that this is where the
first cause is. And worse, deciding what thit is. When there is no
information at all from which to derive any of this.
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| User: "raven1" |
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| Title: Re: A First Cause Argument for Don Kresch... |
18 Apr 2004 04:01:36 PM |
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On 18 Apr 2004 12:24:47 -0700, (Nico
Demusopelous) wrote:
On 18 Apr 2004 raven1 <quoththeraven@nevermore.com> wrote:
All my premises have
been laid out, so those who wish to dispute my argument must knock off
one or more of my premises. In other words, those who disagree with my
conclusion that, at worst, we have good a priori reason to believe
there was at least one personal first cause, should be clear about
which premises they wish to dispute, and why.
How about your initial premise:
(a) Everything that begins to exist has a cause for its existence.
QM disagrees.
Thank you Raven1, for this response. This was not part part of the
main seven-premise argument (or six premises and a conclusion) that I
gave for the existence of a personal first cause. Nonetheless, I
certainly did presuppose the truth of this premise (on inductive
rather than deductive grounds), thus it is incumbent upon me to
respond to your comments.
I still wonder on what grounds one can conclude that a given event had
no cause. That being said, let me concede to three points:
(1) I am not assuming that an uncaused event is necessarily
impossible (thus I do not assume premise (a) is a necessary
logical truth, though I do consider it true).
(2) Ted King has offered the following article...
http://confer.uj.edu.pl/bell.workshop/doc/laudisa.doc
...as being an argument towards the plausibility of uncaused
events, and I have not yet absorbed the arguments found
therein.
(3) Christopher A. Lee has claimed that there are mathematical
arguments for the uncaused nature of certain events, which
would therefore be a priori arguments - but I have yet to
consider these arguments yet.
Then with all due respect, why don't you get back to us when you do?
It seems we don't have much to discuss until then.
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