Page 129 in A Brief History of Time. Matter from nothing since the total energy of creation is zero.
JThunder, would you please get to responding to post #78? This is at least the third thread where I asked you for clarification and you ignored me.
Call it something other than God then. Why are so many people conflating Aquinas’s arguments? I still haven’t seen anything in this thread that clearly refutes the proof for the Unmoved Mover (let’s call him “Fred”). “The premise is false,” isn’t helpful for me.
JThunder, thanks for your cites (and to anyone else who can address the quantum issue). Snarky_Kong, I’m no physicist, but I don’t think your cite refutes JThunder’s assertion. It sounds cool, though.
A) The premise IS false. Or at least not established to everyone’s satisfaction. There is nothing to my knowledge that rules out an infinite chain of movers. That isn’t even addressing the other premise, that every thing needs a mover.
B) Aquinas did not prove that there was ONE unmoved mover, but simply that a class of things existed which break the chain of infinite regress. It could have been many of them. There is no reason to suppose that they are supernatural or out of the ordinary at all, except for having no outside mover.
C) There is just no way to get to “some things aren’t caused” from the premise that “everything has a cause” without some slight of hand. Others have noted the distinction between natural things that need causes and supernatural things that don’t, but it is curious that Aquinas doesn’t even mention this. Even so, we’ve simply redefined “supernatural” to mean “without a cause” without establishing any other property that this causeless thing may have. It is hasty to call this God, or even Fred, especially considering there may be many of them, and that they may be entirely unremarkable in every other way.
There’s no conflation. Aquinas called it God.
You can say it isn’t helpful all you want, but it stands as the refutation. Aquinas makes two assertions without support. He does not prove that everything needs a cuase (and on the quantum level, we now know it doesn’t), and, probably more significantly, he provides no reason for why a chain of cause and effect can’t be infinite.
His failure to support his premises is already enough to invalidate his arguments, but it’s even worse than that for him because his premises are not just unsupported, but actually, demonstrably false.
Yes, it does. Quantum fluctuations affect particles - in other words, they move them without a cause. And it happens all the time, everywhere. So not only is it untrue that there are no uncaused events; uncaused events permeate the universe.
An infinite regress would require properties that make the regress self-denying. The regress is composed of moved movers, the only such entities that apparently exist within such a regress as you’re suggesting. An infinite regress, then, is illogical.
They are supernatural by definition, in that “natural” are the moved movers–everything–that exist in the universe we inhabit. “All that exists,” then, can’t be limited to the universe of moved movers, though that’s all we see through natural means.
Call this entity or class of entities what you will; by definition they exist in a different realm, one unconstrained by the prohibitions of our detectable universe; this entity or class of entities either are their own cause, or require no cause. Such an entity or entities must exist, or our universe as it works does not.
But he needn’t have. And this proof doesn’t assign the properties of God, beyond requiring no cause. That’s the conflation–Aquinas deals with that elsewhere.
Can you expand on the quantum explanation?
How so? That’s what I’m asking.
I am not reading that OP. I have faith that Richard Dawkins is always right.
It’s been said before–if there’s such a thing as an unmoved mover, then there’s no reason to limit it to being the first mover–such a “Fred” could in fact start things moving anywhere along the chain he wants to.
Why is that a problem? Because it means this is untrue:
And that is essential to Acquinas’ argument that there is one, unitary first mover. It means there’s no infinite regression that must end in a first mover.
Acquinas is trying to use classical logical reasoning–offering premises, and then offering an argument. He contends that the argument is valid–if you put in true premises, you get a true conclusion.
The problem is that his conclusion is inconsistent with his premises.
one premise (actually the conclusion of a previous logical argument) is
“whatever is in motion must be put in motion by another.”
The conclusion is
“Therefore it is necessary to arrive at a first mover, put in motion by no other.”
This isn’t possible with what logicians call a valid argument–the whole concept of such an argument is that if the premises are true, the conclusion must be true. Invalidity means that the argument itself isn’t proof that the conclusion is true.
Here, the premise establishes a rule that all moving things need a mover that is also a moving thing. The conclusion is that “God” exists , and he can move other things without having a mover.
If the conclusion is true, the premise is false–there is something that can move other things without having a mover. But that means that the whole structure of the argument fails–as my first comment notes–that it only proves the need for a first mover if it is true that no moving thing can exist unless it has a mover that is also a moving thing.
Note well that an invalid argument doesn’t mean that you can’t put in true premises and get a true conclusion-- (e.g. All men have two legs, I have two legs, therefore I am a man), but that it isn’t inevitable that putting true premises in leads to a true conclusion- (All men have two legs, Foghorn Leghorn has two legs, therefore Foghorn Leghorn is a man).
If he didn’t, then it wouldn’t be a proof of God.
Not true. Aquinas does not give any such qualified definition, and even if he did, there would be no reason to call it a proof of God.
Where? Show me the line of argument he uses to get from Prime Mover to omnimax God.
It’s already been mentioned several times. Quantum events occur all the time with becing “caused.”
Quantum physics disproves the first premise, and Newton’s First Law disproves the second. An object in motion will stay in motion forever unles acted on by another force. That means infinite motion is possible even under Newtonian physics.
Isn’t it equally valid to say that the entity is constrained by the prohibitions of our universe–but that our universe does not prohibit unmoved movers?
And if we do that, then we have no infinite regression-things can start other things moving, and there’s no first point that starts everything else going–the first mover starts some things going (some of which may stop–some may not), the second mover starts some other things going, and so on and so forth until today, when it’s still happening–such that the first mover is entirely irrelevant as to why things are moving today?
Let me be clear: I’m not an unalloyed fan of Dawkins. I haven’t even read his book. But Acquinas’ reasoning is problematic on its own terms.
While there’s a good deal of truth to all of this and there’s no scarcity of douchebaggery in the world, it doesn’t excuse the way he acts. After all, my point was that it’s his own cause he’s hurting, and as such whether his actions are defensible is irrelevant. Those sorts of demographic struggles against the majority opinion are ultimately won with doses of normality and inspiration, not by being inflammatory. There’s something to be said for being the bigger man.
I must be missing something. It seems like you’re just asserting that infinite regress is illogical. I’m not seeing your argument.
They are not supernatural by definition. They are unmoved by definition, but only supernatural by fiat. Aquinas failed to establish that it is impossible for anything natural to move by itself, and therefore your conclusion that the class of “First Movers” is supernatural is false.
See above. Here you take the unwarranted leap from “uncaused cause” to “existing in a different realm” and “unconstrained by the prohibitions of our detectable universe”. And the certainty of your last statement is unwarranted as well, considering that we are debating a hypothetical: Namely, that the premises are true, which may be an article of faith on your part, but it has not been shown to be so.
Rolken, will you please point out where Dawkins displays this douchebaggery? I’ve yet to see him say anything offensive to anyone, except insofar as to challenge them on their dogmatic beliefs.
Anybody who dares question religion and isn’t intensely apologetic about it will always be called a douchebag.
Precisely – supernatural by definition only. Just like everything that is green is supernatural if it is thus defined. The problem is just that the definition is pretty much meaningless due to being arbitrary. I’ve asked the question before: given two things, one supernatural, the other natural, how do you determine which is which? If it merely is the one that could be its own cause, in what way then is the term supernatural meaningful in any other way than as a shorthand for ‘things that can be their own cause’? And in what way does ‘things that can be their own cause’ differ from ‘things that are green’ (other than being perhaps a little harder to catch)?
In other words, how are you not just putting a couple of things into a box, writing ‘supernatural’ on it, and then claiming that you have proven the existence of the supernatural?
I see it as slightly different–the argument stratocaster is asserting is that (1) “the world couldn’t exist under the rules I propose about how the world works,” and (2) “the world does exist,”
(3) “therefore, something outside the rules I propose makes the world exist.”
I offer a replacement for (3), which I will call (3’). “Therefore, the rules I propose about how the world works are wrong, and one way of demonstrating that is that the logical implication of the rules I propose about how the world works is that the world doesn’t exist”
In this model, the “supernatural” is something that only serves to fix the problem in the conceptualization of how the world works. To put it another way, either the argument is wrong, in which case the world’s existence is consistent with the laws of physics, or logically, we can’t exist unless “the supernatural” makes the world work. I posit that the more reasonable answer is that the argument is wrong.
I’m maybe not getting you fully (it’s late), but how is saying there’s ‘something outside’ the (arbitrary) proposed rules not essentially the same as what I assert, i.e. taking some assortment of things and putting a supernatural sticker on them?
Calling religious people delusional is not “challenging” their beliefs any more than you would be “challenging” my post by calling me an idiot. It is, in fact, possible to both firmly disagree and maintain civility towards the audience.