The KCA is a Sound Argument

Achtung! I have to make two important notes before getting into the main substance of Pro’s argument. First, Pro has miscited Hawking. Pro states that nothing has no potentiality to do anything, and then cites page one hundred and thirty six of A Brief History of Time as support for this. As a person who owns a copy of a book, I re-read this page to see if his citation was accurate. It turns out that page one hundred and thirty six is a discussion about inflation, and has nothing to do with Pro’s assertion. I have a link to a PDF file of the book in order to check the soundness of my claims (http://www.fisica.net...) Secondly, Pro has extensively plagiarized from William Lane Craig’s Reasonable Faith website. Pro’s entire 776 character paragraph starting with “Hawking and Mlodinow advocate” is taken from a William Lane Craig article (http://www.reasonablefaith.org...). Pro makes no attempt at giving William Lane Craig credit for these words, thus passing them off as his own, constituting plagiarism. Pro argues that god is the final cause of the universe. I’m not sure how this sentence makes any sense. In Aristotle’s metaphysics, a final cause is the end purpose of something. For example, the final cause of a dinner table is for people to put food on it. Stating “god is the final cause of the universe” is synonymous with stating “the end result of the universe is god”, which makes little sense from a theistic perspective, because the universe does not give rise to god in classical theism. The final cause of a dinner table is putting food on it because that is the purpose of building the table, but would anyone seriously suggest that god is a result of the universe, rather than the cause? We should also remember that the KCA is a debate about the existence of the universe, not the purpose of the universe, so final causes are irrelevant to the resolution anyway. Pro agrees that the studies I cited regarding premise one are verifiable. It is therefore established that the causal principle is not obvious to a large amount of people. This is sufficient to make my point, because it now clear that the first premise cannot be established on the grounds that it is obvious or self-evident. Pro has failed to respond to many important arguments against the first premise. First, he has failed to answer the argument that we have no experience of the Big Bang singularity, so our rational faculties, as something created by experience, cannot be used to tell us whether or not the Big Bang singularity had to have a cause. Second, he failed to respond to the argument that many of our metaphysical intuitions that we took to be necessarily true have been disproven by scientific evidence. Finally, he failed to respond to my argument against the soundness of inductive reasoning. This leaves Con with three powerful reasons against the first premise. Pro asked why we don’t see things randomly popping into being if something can come from nothing; I answered this argument in two ways. The first way I answered the question was by pointing out that we live in space-time, which is being. When we say that something came from nothing, it means that something came from absolute-non being. Considering this, it’s perfectly obvious why we don’t see tigers coming out of nothing all the time. The simple reason is that if a tiger popped into being in front of us, it would not have come from nothing, because there is existent space-time, so it would never be a true nothing. Again, how can we experience a tiger coming from non-being if we occupy being? I have to admit that I don’t understand Pro’s rebuttal. What about my argument entails that a tiger can cause itself to come into being? Pro never explains why, so I have to dismiss his rebuttal due to a lack of argumentation. The second way I answered this question was that the atheist can hold that the Big Bang singularity came from nothing due to the absence of physical laws, but we do not see something coming from nothing today because there are physical laws. Pro’s rebuttal is to (plagiarize) summarize Hawking’s top-down cosmology, but he never connects this to the argument I was making. Finally, if we are to understand the word random to mean that something happens at a moment in time which cannot be explained in terms of previous causal conditions, then science has shown that random things do occur. There are random events in this definition because of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, which states that the position and velocity of a particle cannot be precisely known at one moment in time. This means that if we have a particle X at T1, we cannot precisely determine its position and velocity, entailing that our predictions of the conditions of particle X at T2 must be indeterministic. Therefore, something happens at a moment in time (T2) which cannot be explained in terms of previous causal conditions (T1). (Quentin Smith advances a similar argument on pg 121 of Theism, Atheism, and Big Bang Cosmology.) Pro continues to contradict himself when he talks about nothing. He first states that nothing has no properties, but then states that it has “no potentialities”, “no constraints”, “is governed by physical laws” and gives it the property of being that which god created the universe out of. Pro is giving properties to nothing while stating that it has no properties! Pro is actually proving that something can come from nothing. By stating that nothing has no properties, he is also committing himself to the proposition that “Nothing does not have the property of being incapable of producing something”, entailing that nothing is capable of producing something. (Of course, he could argue that nothing lacks the property of being able to produce something, but my point here is that his reasoning cuts both ways.) Moving to physical cosmology, Pro has once again failed to answer the entirety of my case. I presented an argument which demonstrated that there is a sense in which the universe could have caused itself to come into being in a way which is not self-contradictory. Pro never addressed this argument. Considering Pro’s failure to respond to my all of my arguments against the first premise, we should also keep in mind that I have established the plausibility of the universe coming into being without cause. I also brought about a scenario that explains the first instant of the universe in terms of an infinite amount of simultaneous causation among elementary particles, providing two predictions of this hypothesis that have been confirmed by experimental evidence, all of which was ignored by Pro. I'm not sure about the remaining points that Pro makes in regards to this argument. Pro is talking about lapses or intervals between simultaneous cause and effect relationships. The word simultaneous means that it is ocurring at an instantaneous moment, entailing that there are no lapses or intervals, but everything happens at the same time. It's simply impossible to have temporal intervals or lapses of time when talking about simultaneous causation.Since I have some extra room, I will briefly address some arguments brought up by Pro in support of P2.We can represent the beginning of the universe as a Cantor set. A cantor set involves taking an interval [0,1], and cutting out the middle thirds so that we have two intervals, [0, 1/3] and [2/3, 1]. If we imagine the beginning of the universe as the interval [0,1], then we can see that the universe is brought into being by these intervals. The interval [2/3,1] is caused by the interval 2/3, which is caused by the interval [0,1/3]. This constitutes n=1 of a Cantor set. Now, the theist can ask what causes the interval [0, 1/3]. The answer is to repeat the same process with the interval [0, 1/3], taking two intervals with a length of 1/9th at n=2. Since this process can be repeated until n=infinity, the atheist can provide an explanation of the beginning of the universe by stating that each interval of space-time is caused by another interval. (See video for an introduction to the Cantor set.) http://www.youtube.com... The beginning of the universe and thermodynamics. Pro tries to use the laws of thermodynamics to prove that the universe had to have a beginning. Firstly, there are models of an infinite universe which are consistent with the laws of thermodynamics (http://wwwphy.princeton.edu...). Secondly, physics simply can't establish whether or not the laws of entropy would apply to the early history of our infinite universe, so in the words of Wes Morriston, "The best we can conclude from this is that the history of entropy had a beginning". ("Doubts about the Kalam Cosmological Argument")Finally, Pro overstates the support for the second premise when he says that it's "very much agreed upon by philosophers and cosmologists". While it is true that most cosmologists accept the Big Bang theory, this is different from saying that most cosmologists accept that the universe had a beginning. The Big Bang theory is the result of general relativity, and general relativity is not a complete explanation of the universe, as it has yet to be married with quantum mechanics. Models which combined quanutm mechanics and general relativity are called quantum gravity models. Some quantum gravity models have a beginning of the universe, and others do not; Physics has not shown either class to be right or wrong. When we look at the models of physics which are complete explanations of the universe, there is simply no consensus as to whether or not the universe had a beginning.In conclusion, Pro drops too many points and arguments, plagiarzes, miscites, and overstates the case for his argument. Vote Con. Vale