Causing Incoherence to Exist

I was continuing discussion on Richard Carrier vs. the Apologists but the format of the blog posting system made a detailed conversation difficult, so I decided to continue here. My core argument is that the premises of Kalam are incoherent. I also think some of the responses are as well.

But what do we mean by incoherent?

Richard interpreted that to mean logically impossible, but my intent was that incoherence is a property of the semantics of the words. Statements are incoherent when they don’t make sense or only make sense with a very narrow and unwarranted reading of the statement. The following argument follows a fairly standard analytic tradition analysis of examining the meaning of statements. I am currently fond of David Lewis’s school of thought on semantics, where the meaning of words exist as a combination of mild referential attachment, coherence within a network of other words, and, importantly, some words within that network achieve what is called “reference magnetism” in that they are tied to reality in significant ways and pull at the meaning of other words.

For instance, consider Premise 1 of a modern take on Kalam:

All things that begin to exist have a cause.

OK, so what does begin to exist mean? And how about cause? Let’s unpack “begin to exist,” first. We might say in our everyday world of people that, say, cars begin to exist at some point. But when is that point? For instance, is it latent in the design for the car? Is it when the body panels are attached on the assembly line? Is it when the final system is capable of car behavior? That is, when all the parts that were in fact designed are fully operational? Does a defective car then not exist?

How about a person? Certainly not when the egg is inseminated, though a potential for a person arises then. Maybe at birth? But that excludes the development of the personality that, in fact, never ends. The human body itself is in constant flux.

Even a planet has issues. Given current hypotheses about planetary accretion, at what stage is the planet complete and fully existing?

We might have some traction at the atomic level. When an atom spontaneously decays into its decay constituents, those new atoms do begin to exist, though it is just a separate part of the original. We can come back to the causation in this case in a minute.

Now we also have the problem of causation. What caused the car, the person, or the planet to exist? Many, many factors led to their process along the way that makes them take on the forms they have: physical law, happenstance of component parts, directed action by agents, etc. And we might colloquially say they are caused by these factors, but it really does not provide any additional value beyond that.

The decaying atom case raises an interesting issue of causation. As far as we can tell, the specific atom that decays is random. Not pseudo-random, but actually random as in unpredictable. What is the cause in this case? The nature of the universe and physical laws?

When we come to the fundamental follow-on premises in the Kalam syllogism, we build on this incoherence in major ways. For instance, the next premise is that the universe began to exist. There is a sense that that might be true given the big bang hypothesis, but it might also be the case, given cyclic models, that the universe just goes through periodic big bangs. That certainly seems more like the transformational kind of “beginning to exist” described above. There are physics arguments against that based on entropy running things down over time that is stretched to infinity, but that kind of claim does require that entropy and physical laws are conserved between aeons, multiverse bubbles, etc., and that those laws are sufficiently well understood under the conditions of these radical cosmological alternatives.

Let’s deal instead with what we actually know and what is observationally verifiable. Still, we can treat the beginning of this universe as possible, though exactly when the beginning is remains controversial and slightly incoherent.

Now on to the third premise, which is treated as a conclusion of 1 and 2: therefore the universe has a cause. It’s incoherent since 1 at least is incoherent and we can’t identify what it would mean to be a cause of the universe. There are some theories and they build on physical law and hypothesize about how that law could potentially work to make the universe “emerge.” In this case the emergence is from a quantum vacuum that doesn’t quite meet the Kalam expectations of nothingness. And then there are alternative theories. Few of them have yet achieved the gold standard of having good observational—and of course not laboratory—tests to see whether they are valid.

Which leads us to the final conclusion that there must be a causer who is uncaused and something like a god or gods with special powers that govern the previous non-times before the existence of the universe. I say “non-times” because you can see for yourself the discussions of A versus B theories of time that are put forward. Some of these are bolstered by physical theories and arguments, and some of them by deductive considerations.

Moreover, we have these ideas about a god or gods that must have certain properties in order for our universe to pass through this veil from non-being to universe/cosmos. Not only is the basic claim suspect and incoherent in that it has no correspondence to any kind of creation event in ordinary existence, but it assumes that we can deduce the properties of an uncaused causer immaterial thing.

What a strange argument! Why should we expect logic and deduction to carry over to the properties of that non-universe causer? We could just posit anything, really, like fanciful ether pigs who fart universes. Or giant mushroom spores that erupt them. Or, and I’m kind of fond of this one: that “real” nothingness is both nothing and has a nonzero probability of erupting into something. It has an Ouroboros quality of looping around to itself; it’s also similar to vacuum fluctuations-style ideas.

So what are we left with? I assert a continuing process of scientific discovery and unraveling of what we can know, rather than scholastic speculative philosophy built around incoherent ideas. I analogize with quantum mechanics. It seems counter-intuitive quite often. It is also very well tested on many fronts. But we don’t know yet whether an Everettian multiple worlds model of explanation might be better than a Penrosian wave collapse model, or just a Copenhagen approach. Analogizing to ordinary experience has not helped unravel the distinctions between the approaches, but the parts and relationships between them are nevertheless as coherent as we can make them. A wave function has a definition that is predictive, unlike ideas like “exist” or “cause.” The wave function has a semantic grounding in a reference magnetism that pulls us always back to what seems to be real about it.

When we deal with cosmology we also need to deal with grounded meanings that are tied to observational verifications. That’s where the money is.

ADDENDUM: Let’s see if we can clean up the mess of Kalam with some redefinition:

As far as we can tell, stuff in the universe changes form and does so according to physical laws and a chain of causation, with some exceptions to the latter in the atomic and quantum realms, as well as some potential unknowns (dark matter, alternative gravities, future physics #8, etc.). Maybe the universe as a whole is subject to the same chain of causation in terms of it changing form from whatever it was before the big bang (depending on the cosmological theory) to this universe we experience? What can we say about those causes given current theory? We need to investigate and find out. Premature conclusions are the hallmark of intellectual sloppiness.

Oh well, at least I tried…

ADDENDUM 2: How about a light that is turned on in a box with a hole? The light beam does begin to exist in a fairly finite period of time. Unfortunately, though the beam beginning to exist is predicated on an agent flipping a switch, it is quite unlike the Kalam-style uncaused causer. The agent has all the causation/beginning problems of a person and the machinery involved is governed by physical laws, is composite, and has a complex history of causation itself. It’s just like much of what we think is in the universe. We still seem to be missing something in trying to extend these kinds of semantics to a Kalam-style claim with any coherence.