If only it were this easy.
The bare bones of the argument, shamelessly lifted from Wikipedia:
1. Everything that has a beginning of its existence has a cause of its existence;
2. The universe has a beginning of its existence;
3. Therefore, the universe has a cause of its existence.
I’m not going expound on it too much about all of this—you can just hit that Stanford link for a good round up. But be sure to read up on the refutations of it. The first link there on the search, the post author posits the idea of a “yniverse”, which gives birth to our own universe, God unneeded. Well, that was easy.
There’s some good back and forth in the comments section, but supposing this yniverse exists, it says nothing about the God creating the universe, or even that God exists; you’ve only succeeded in pushing the question back another universe-unit. It only works as a non-theistic explanation if you are already presupposing atheism. The same goes for the Kalām argument itself, but that one seems to receive the brunt of the circular fallacy accusations.
In a related incident, Jill had posted a quote from Michael Shermer on her facebook:
Even if God is hypothesized as the creator of the laws of nature that caused the universe (or multiverse) to pop into existence out of nothing—if such laws are deterministic—then God had no choice in the creation of the universe and thus was not needed.
Eh? All Shermer did was switcheroo the property of determinism from God to the universe. God is not immutable, the universe is. Therefore, God is not really a god but a lesser being of undisclosed origin subject to the superiority of physical laws. The universe’s laws are deterministic because God, if He exists, is not. Theism isn’t true because atheism is.
But really, this illustrates the subtle philosophical dodging that atheists can do: that the universe/yniverse model, sans God, accepts certain properties of God, like perhaps His infinity or His creative capacities, and attributes them to the an x-verse. You have some the properties of God that you have to accept and applies them to the universe—no outlying messy beliefs of the supernatural to deal with. It’s the perfect crime.
It goes back to what I mentioned before about atheism needing to find divine qualities somewhere. If you’re of the scientism bent you’ll find it in the universe. Or if you’re the humanist type you will find it in the spirit of man; the political type, the state. The need for the supernatural seems inescapable.
Closing thought on a semantic issue: though some skeptics rightly state if you’re an atheist there was no “science” at the beginning of the universe, because science as a process needs rational actors to sensually perceive and apply inductive logic, the two building blocks of the process. If you’re a theist (and not a pantheist) you can easily say, in a rather crude manner, that science did exist and even was used to create the universe if presuppose God a sensually perceiving and logicizing agent.
Photo of the Flammarion woodcut ripped from a post on the Commonsense Atheism site, the author of which may or may not have ripped it from somewhere else.
9 Comments
I think Shermer’s argument is actually quite elegant and philosophical. If the state of nothingness is unstable to the point that it is compelled to create something, then it will create regardless of a divine power. But the ephemeral–or not so ephemeral–state of nothing is difficult to wrap the mind around, and why is God not necessarily a part of it? God could be the essence of this “nothing” that was compelled to create.
No, it’s an okay argument, but I don’t think he’s saying anything new as a critique of divine creation. He’s relying on the natural cause framework which is fundamentally inconclusive on metaphysical matters. It’s kind of like saying we know that boiling water changes its state from a liquid to a gas–we know the processes that drive it and the laws involved and the principles it illustrates, therefore God is not needed to make water boil.
The real question (I think I’ve mentioned it in a previous post), is whether or not true creation (something out of nothing) can happen without God. If it can, then Shermer is correct even though his reasoning isn’t sound. Even as a Christian I can’t be sure of the answer of that one. I don’t think revelatory (Biblical) knowledge as we have it now addresses it, so we would need to introduce personal revelatory knowledge to conclude it.
And considering that nothingness is simply defined as without space and time, then nothing is a convenient term for what we don’t know. Hence, we are back at square one, with so much knowledge and no understanding what it is to be outside the confines of ourselves.
But is that how Shermer would define nothing? I imagine, for an atheist, that they would define nothing as “something” that could not be apprehended by the tools of epistemology. As in, if logic or sense perception, etc., cannot “pick up” on it, then it doesn’t exist.
That might be true for theists as well, though there can never be nothing because God would always be something.
I’m coming back a little late, and I don’t have the copy of the Scientific American that contains that article, but I’m reasonably sure that nothing was simply the term he used for being without space and time.
Do you think God is nothing, by that definition?
I would say no, but I want to hear your ideas first.
I would have to say that….I don’t know. I don’t what or where God is. God may be outside space and time, but does that exactly define him? I don’t think so. Head-splitting stuff.
Yeah, this isn’t easy.
If something isn’t in space or time then I don’t think it can’t be apprehended through the Western epistemological framework. Things like concepts and possibilities come close to something not existing but existing (to us), but with no universe(s) would there still be concepts and possibilities? I don’t think according to Shermer there would be.
One way you could say God is something is if you believe God could incarnate him/itself into space time, so that leaves room for some religions to infer that. But if you already believe in God’s existence you don’t need an incarnation into the material realm as a proof, so you’re kind of stuck unless you already accept it, right?
Disqus confuses me more than cosmology.