A quick note on causality (4 Viewers)
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The argument from the principle of causality usually goes as follows:
1) Everything that exists (comes to existence) in nature has/needs a cause.
2) The universe exists but has no traceable cause.
Therefore, a supernatural being caused the universe.
Nothing new, whats wrong with it?
Whats wrong with it is (1) Everything that exists (comes to existence) has/needs a cause. Where the hell did we get that principle from? why does everything need a cause?
The usual response: From experience, we learn through induction that everything needs/has a cause except for the universe.
I say: Hell No! that is not what we experience. That is not what we learn from Induction.
What we do learn from experience (induction) is that we observe things ALREADY EXISTING in a certain form, changing to another form. We never witness something beginning to exist from nothing. We never witness anything that resembles the godly creation.
What we witness is matter/energy already existing in nature in a certain state, changing to another state. We never witness something coming from Non-existence to existence.
Its the same as the law of conservation of energy: Energy can neither be created nor destroyed but can be changed from one form to another. We see this with matter too.
Nature satisfies and fulfills the chain of causality in this sense. There is no invisible causes that needs us searching for something outside of the universe. Causes and effects are traceable IN nature.
This makes (1) a wrong premise.
If you alter it to: Every change in the manner of existence of an already existing object needs a cause. The whole argument for God falls apart; the circularity of causality is perfect without him, satisfied in nature.
That is not to mention, that we are not justified if we claim that causality (either versions) applies on the universe as a whole VS the operations of its parts.
1) Everything that exists (comes to existence) in nature has/needs a cause.
2) The universe exists but has no traceable cause.
Therefore, a supernatural being caused the universe.
Nothing new, whats wrong with it?
Whats wrong with it is (1) Everything that exists (comes to existence) has/needs a cause. Where the hell did we get that principle from? why does everything need a cause?
The usual response: From experience, we learn through induction that everything needs/has a cause except for the universe.
I say: Hell No! that is not what we experience. That is not what we learn from Induction.
What we do learn from experience (induction) is that we observe things ALREADY EXISTING in a certain form, changing to another form. We never witness something beginning to exist from nothing. We never witness anything that resembles the godly creation.
What we witness is matter/energy already existing in nature in a certain state, changing to another state. We never witness something coming from Non-existence to existence.
Its the same as the law of conservation of energy: Energy can neither be created nor destroyed but can be changed from one form to another. We see this with matter too.
Nature satisfies and fulfills the chain of causality in this sense. There is no invisible causes that needs us searching for something outside of the universe. Causes and effects are traceable IN nature.
This makes (1) a wrong premise.
If you alter it to: Every change in the manner of existence of an already existing object needs a cause. The whole argument for God falls apart; the circularity of causality is perfect without him, satisfied in nature.
That is not to mention, that we are not justified if we claim that causality (either versions) applies on the universe as a whole VS the operations of its parts.
"We never witness something beginning to exist from nothing. "
But that's precisely the point of the argument. How would the universe begin to exist from nothing?
Change you premise 1 to : Everything that begins to exist in nature needs a cause outside itself.
I'm going to follow your argument for a second here. Say nature adequately satisfies the causality principle by simply causing itself to exist.
So the universe is just a causal chain with many events occuring within it. How did that causal chain begin to exist in the first place? Was this chain caused by another chain(alternative universe) and that chain by another and so on and so forth...? If that is the case, we would have an infinite regress of causal events. And this is logically impossible.
My bad, i didn't set up an epistemological back ground.
See humans learn by induction. All whats in the mind comes from the senses.
Through our senses we experience things.. these become impressions which then become ideas in the mind. With these senses you only experience objects in time but you never sense causality itself. Causality does not exist in the objects themselves as you cannot infer any causes or effects just by looking at an object on its own (without performing any act on it & without having previous conceptions of it). You infer cause and effect relations when you experience multiple events in which two objects are contiguous, constantly conjoined & successive in time. In other words, when you see the same shit happening over and over again and you pick on a pattern.
For example, I leave the pen in mid air and it falls to the ground. If you witness that event for the first time ever in your life, you wouldn't draw any conclusions of cause and effect relations between leaving the pen and it falling. But when you leave the pen and it falls again! you start to see a pattern. Whenever you see this event repeated more and more.. you'll get more confident in the causal relationship between them.
Thats basically how we know about cause and effect relations between objects...thats how science works... by Inductive reasoning. and so if something is never experienced then we can't really induce anything about it. Thats why Metaphysics is usually BS.. because it extends what we experience to 'spiritual' realms and other dimensions or places we never can never know anything about like pre-the singularity point.
And so any law or maxim or rule (even philosophical ones) are accepted only if they have their roots in experience. Experience of an event MORE THAN ONCE.
I am basically summarizing some empiricist stuff mostly by Hume so you might not get the point but i am trying.
Now back to the initial argument, where did you get that rule "everything that BEGINS TO EXIST NEEDS A CAUSE"
The law of conversation of Energy/matter/mass all say that energy/matter/mass can neither be created nor be destroyed but can be transformed from one form to another.
So actually your rule which says everything that begins to exist needs a cause is not rooted in experience yet somehow a lot of people take it for granted. They mistake the reproduction of human beings for the changes in things. In other words, your cause of existence is your father and his cause is his grand father and so on...etc.
so based on that they infer that you begin to exist because of your father etc. But thats an inaccurate analogy. If you dont see the difference ask me because thats too much writing.
Now as i said before we can induce about causal relations through EXPERIENCING an EVENT MORE THAN ONE TIME AT LEAST... even two times wouldnt be enough.. sometimes hundreds of patterns go by us every day and we never realize their existence.
Now the only event ever of a change from non-existence to existence (even though i am not sure thats what the big bang is) is the beginning of the universe (if there is such thing) and that happened ONCE and CANNOT be EXPERIENCED at all. So no inferences about it can be made.
Changes in already existing stuff from one form to another is an effect and needs a cause and thats based on experience (our only source of knowledge about causality). But stuff beginning to exist is NOT based in experienced and no inferences can be made about.
That doesn't mean that this change doesn't need a cause, it means that we cant know if it needs one or not.
So if you ask me does the universe need a cause following that line of argument I would tell you I do not know and i have good reasons to not know.
and so only a suspense of judgment would be the only rational decision to take based on this argument.
I've actually wrote a paper about this that i was supposed to send to 2 people on here but i cant find the thread for some reason.
If you or someone else is interested, pm me your e-mails and i'll send it over.
I'll keep this simple. You argument.
1) Our knowledge is based on our experience.
2) Something beggining from nothing was never experienced. It cannot happen.
Therefore, we cannot deduce or assume anything metaphysical or of/relating to matter arising from non-matter. We simply don't know.
That's an interesting way of looking at it. However, what you said actually supports the cause for theism if anything. Allow me to ellaborate.
Nothing begins to exist from absolutely nothing, right? The universe, however, began to exist at one point. Because of our experience and our maxims and postulates of causality and what not; it would be inconceivable to suggest that the universe popped into being uncaused, from nothing. That's actually the entire point of the cosmological argument. That something cannot begin to exist from nothing, and we know this from basic empirical knowledge.
So my argument goes as follows.
1) Non-matter cannot give rise to matter
2) The universe(matter) came into being.
Therefore, the universe must have been caused by something.
I am not contesting the fact that causality applies to objects that had a previous form and cannot apply to objects that had nothing preceding it. I am only adding to that that matter could not have popped into being out of nothing, uncaused.That objects that had no previous form of matter cannot exist in the first place unless it was supernaturally caused. The Big Bang is not a special case in which nothing suddenly became something uncaused. Such a case cannot exist unless some kind of supernatural force intervened, since that force is necessarily atemporal.
i agree
I will Kill you one day 
Mate, we have no rules or maxims about things changing from nonexistence to existence.. We cannot claim that it needs a Cause and we cannot claim that it doesnt.
A suspense of Judgment is the only rational choice.
Mate, we have no rules or maxims about things changing from nonexistence to existence.. We cannot claim that it needs a Cause and we cannot claim that it doesnt.
A suspense of Judgment is the only rational choice.
Because we have no rules or maxims about things changing from nonexistence to existence, the universe could not have come into existence from nonexistence, something must have existed for it to be possible for the universe to begin to exist. It must have had a cause.
Everything we know suggests that nothing just pops into being out of nothing. The universe apparently did suddenly pop into being, thus, we can state that it was Not out of nothing.
You can suspend your judgement all you want, but it will get you nowhere. Virtually every prominent scientist today acknowledged the divine implications of the Big Bang, and most notably, Stephan Hawkings, did not like that and tried to develop alternative models to the one we had that could give rise to a naturalistic explanation rather than a supernatural one. All those models failed.
I give up anyway. I urge you to read about this topic if you're interested. See what the experts have to say and why before you suspend your judgement.
Thats a rule/maxim (a made up one that i was attacking), unless you are suggesting that the universe did not change from a state of nonexistence to a state of existence.. but rather the universe's beginning is just a change from one form of existence (inside God or whatever) to another form of existence (the one one we see today) like how we see matter changes. The big bang is an example of this... the singularity point exploding creating what we see today and then collapsing then exploding again and so on... but still we do not know were the singularity point comes from.
If you were suggesting that the universe changed from none-existence to existence then my original post is sufficient answer.
If you were suggesting that the universe change from one state of existence to another state of existence then i think you are explaining the big bang theory.. or simply trying to add another theory preceding the big bang to answer the question (where did the thing that exploded in the big bang come from) . you will have exactly the same problem again of either using ''the made up maxim'' or having a need to create a previous state of already existing state of existence ad infinitum.
Keep tracing it.. you'll find the same problem always showing up working by either rules.. it just keeps getting more abstract as you multiply the cause.
You cant determine a first cause when the rule you use already assumes that every state is preceded by another state.
If you were suggesting that the universe changed from none-existence to existence then my original post is sufficient answer.
If you were suggesting that the universe change from one state of existence to another state of existence then i think you are explaining the big bang theory.. or simply trying to add another theory preceding the big bang to answer the question (where did the thing that exploded in the big bang come from) . you will have exactly the same problem again of either using ''the made up maxim'' or having a need to create a previous state of already existing state of existence ad infinitum.
Keep tracing it.. you'll find the same problem always showing up working by either rules.. it just keeps getting more abstract as you multiply the cause.
You cant determine a first cause when the rule you use already assumes that every state is preceded by another state.
Yes.
I don't know how your post provides a sufficient explanation to how something came from nothing. What you said was that there was no explanation, or rather we must suspend our judgement for that matter because we don't know anything about matter arising from non-matter. This is a typical fallacy known as argumentum ad futurum, it is an argument to the future (possible events). It is a sub fallacy to argumentum ad ignorantium; an argument from ignorance.
From what we know today. It is logical and reasonable to conclude that since a viable naturalistic explanation for what caused the Big Bang does not exist, a supernatural explanation is necessary. Your first post does not solve the problem at all. Suspending judgement is not an answer.
I don't know how your post provides a sufficient explanation to how something came from nothing. What you said was that there was no explanation, or rather we must suspend our judgement for that matter because we don't know anything about matter arising from non-matter. This is a typical fallacy known as argumentum ad futurum, it is an argument to the future (possible events). It is a sub fallacy to argumentum ad ignorantium; an argument from ignorance.
From what we know today. It is logical and reasonable to conclude that since a viable naturalistic explanation for what caused the Big Bang does not exist, a supernatural explanation is necessary. Your first post does not solve the problem at all. Suspending judgement is not an answer.
I'm not saying this to argue. I'm only saying this state the facts:
BIG BANG THEORY, as it says, is only a theory and will not be proven until it can explain how matter condensed to be at certain points (galaxies, stars ... etc). Let me elaborate, the theory says that the whole universe was at some point when time=0. Then it exploded creating universe as we come to know billions of years later. In such explosion, we infer that there are no external forces since there are nothing outside the universe. Going good? To create massive particles from the original mess at the beginning you need really high energy, and indeed there were such energy. You see, the theory states that there were no protons, neutrons .. etc. There were no typical subatomic particles which we typically know. instead there were the principle particles the ones that can't be pulled apart to create smaller particles.
Okay, the hinge here is, in such a mess, there are no determining forces nor enough gravity between those particles for them to assemble and gather up at such points, unless we infer that those particles were unevenly distributed within the original point which is impossible because it's a point! All of which will result in an evenly distributed matter throughout universe with the same density all over. Meaning, this universe cannot be created by Big Bang Theory.
Mind you, strong and weak forces do not work outside the ensemble in which they exist. Hence, a quark cannot affect, using the strong force, a quark outside it's proton, neutron or whatever. And a proton cannot affect, using weak force, whatever particle thats outside its nucleus. And even if those two works they would cancel one another apart.
so please, before talking about big bang theory to be that event which caused universe to exist, please do work on proving it!
BIG BANG THEORY, as it says, is only a theory and will not be proven until it can explain how matter condensed to be at certain points (galaxies, stars ... etc). Let me elaborate, the theory says that the whole universe was at some point when time=0. Then it exploded creating universe as we come to know billions of years later. In such explosion, we infer that there are no external forces since there are nothing outside the universe. Going good? To create massive particles from the original mess at the beginning you need really high energy, and indeed there were such energy. You see, the theory states that there were no protons, neutrons .. etc. There were no typical subatomic particles which we typically know. instead there were the principle particles the ones that can't be pulled apart to create smaller particles.
Okay, the hinge here is, in such a mess, there are no determining forces nor enough gravity between those particles for them to assemble and gather up at such points, unless we infer that those particles were unevenly distributed within the original point which is impossible because it's a point! All of which will result in an evenly distributed matter throughout universe with the same density all over. Meaning, this universe cannot be created by Big Bang Theory.
Mind you, strong and weak forces do not work outside the ensemble in which they exist. Hence, a quark cannot affect, using the strong force, a quark outside it's proton, neutron or whatever. And a proton cannot affect, using weak force, whatever particle thats outside its nucleus. And even if those two works they would cancel one another apart.
so please, before talking about big bang theory to be that event which caused universe to exist, please do work on proving it!