Lecture: Is science the only way...

[Yerda]

...to know anything about anything?

http://christianevidence.org/blog/entry/is_science_the_only_way_to_know_anything_about_anything

The link contains a video of the lecture. In it Peter Williams argues that the belief that science is the only way of gaining knowledge is scientism which is self-contradictory and ultimately anti-scientific.

He then presents a couple of arguments that point towards God's existence which you've probably seen before but he gives it enough nuance to make it interesting (well, to me anyway). He first attempts to show that a universe from nothing is philosophically unsound. From nothing comes nothing and attempts to describe the physical situation where the quantum vacuum is nothing are problematic. His first argument follows from this. Syllogistically it goes something like:

P.The available evidence suggest the universe has a beginning. This means, he argues, that there is a first physical event.

P.Every physical event has a causal relationship to other events. A first physical event cannot be caused by another physical event (due to the meaning of the word first).

C.Therefore the first physical event has a non-physical cause.

It seems valid insofar as the conclusion follows from the premises. I don't know enough cosmology or metaphysics to say whether the premises are sturdy. I invite you people to comment.

The next argument is a design based that I find suspicious because he invokes William Lane Craig and William Dembski who both strike me as untrustworthy and it seems to argue against the evidence of biological evolution - but we can get around to that later.

By way of balance here is the rational wiki page on the cosmological argument. http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Argument_from_first_cause

For the record, I'm an atheist.

 

[Monk Of Reason]

Seems like its simply a first cause argument that has been re-hashed over and over again. The current answer is we simply don't know. We are even currently debating weather there was a beginning to the universe or not. What happened before the universe would be something we can't even begin to speculate.

The problem with theists that argue this point is they hear scientists say "we don't know" and they hear people say "we have no idea what could have happened 'before'" and get all wet and giddy with the fact that it is the perfect place for them to set down their "god did it" nest. From there they set up straw houses and then straw towers and straw skyscrapers.

 

[Yerda]

Seems like its simply a first cause argument that has been re-hashed over and over again.

Aye, it is. He makes reference to findings in science and is careful to note that his premises are tentative which I found kind of refreshing.

 

[George-ananda]

First, I strongly disagree with the statement that; Science is the only way to know anything. There is much not understood about the human experience (such as the strong cases suggesting beyond the normal (paranormal) experiences). Science is limited to the reach of our physical senses and physical instruments. What lies beyond that is not currently in the domain of science. Most of the matter in the universe is outside the range of our senses and instruments. Human experiences can also tells us about the universe.

Secondly, the argument that nothing comes from nothing seems strong to me. Quantum activity requires waves of possibilities that are not nothing. Where did they come from? But anyway the cosmological argument can be debated forever apparently and my evidence and reasons for my belief are not much concerned with the cosmological argument.

 

[Skwim]

...to know anything about anything?

http://christianevidence.org/blog/entry/is_science_the_only_way_to_know_anything_about_anything

The link contains a video of the lecture. In it Peter Williams argues that the belief that science is the only way of gaining knowledge is scientism which is self-contradictory and ultimately anti-scientific.

He then presents a couple of arguments that point towards God's existence which you've probably seen before but he gives it enough nuance to make it interesting (well, to me anyway). He first attempts to show that a universe from nothing is philosophically unsound. From nothing comes nothing and attempts to describe the physical situation where the quantum vacuum is nothing are problematic. His first argument follows from this. Syllogistically it goes something like:

P.The available evidence suggest the universe has a beginning. This means, he argues, that there is a first physical event.

P.Every physical event has a causal relationship to other events. A first physical event cannot be caused by another physical event (due to the meaning of the word first).

C.Therefore the first physical event has a non-physical cause.

In other words

All M are P

All S are T
_____________

All K are not T
​

It seems valid insofar as the conclusion follows from the premises.

Not in the least.

I don't know enough cosmology or metaphysics to say whether the premises are sturdy.

The first, "The available evidence suggest the universe has a beginning." is fine.

The second, "Every physical event has a causal relationship to other events," is not. It must contain one of the elements, M or P, from the first premise, and this one doesn't..

The next argument is a design based that I find suspicious because he invokes William Lane Craig and William Dembski who both strike me as untrustworthy and it seems to argue against the evidence of biological evolution -

Good suspicion. Hold onto it.

 

[A Vestigial Mote]

"We don't know" is about the best you can get, honestly. And I would guess that no matter how much evidence there is that we are able to gather (even along the lines of trajectories of untethered universal bodies taken from a macro-view, or the ability to carbon-date remote neighboring galaxies), we'll never actually be able to make the claim that we know.

But this is no less true for people of faith. They have no "evidence" except imperfect and assuming texts about "the beginning" that were written in all cases by (*gasp*) ordinary men.

And since believers never seem to tire of saying that there had to be a beginning, and because of that, there couldn't have been "nothing" to spark that beginning - trying to make it as basic as "something can't come from nothing" - I will never tire of spitting back at them the question of where God came from for the exact same reasons. You get nothing but conjecture and excuses from that point on in the conversation, of course because (well what do you know?) they don't really know.

Not that this matters all that much, but I'm of the opinion that the universe has always existed - all the matter has simply always been. Think of how long it apparently existed before we were here, and do we really see an end to it? Honestly? I also believe that gravity eventually draws it all back inward, to a "center" of sorts. Bodies of matter so dense that some sort of "threshold" is reached, and it is forced to explode outwardly again, starting it all over. It supports seeing things that point to a common "starting point", it supports the perceivable interaction between galactic bodies on a universal scale - with entire galaxies colliding and becoming even greater draws of mass, pulling on other matter ever further outward from themselves. It supports a "reset" of radioactive properties we use in carbon-dating, since it would be something like the processes of the sun that are constantly ongoing with heavy amounts of fusion and elemental matter conversion happening constantly as the mass is combined and recombined by the crushing forces of gravity - hence the ability to tell how long ago the last "explosion" occurred. Orbiting bodies are ever-falling - they will eventually meet the object they are drawn toward, no matter how "perfect" their orbit seems to be balanced. It is only a matter of time - of which there is, literally, an infinite amount. Of course, I don't really know either.

 

[Rick O'Shez]

P.The available evidence suggest the universe has a beginning. This means, he argues, that there is a first physical event.
P.Every physical event has a causal relationship to other events. A first physical event cannot be caused by another physical event (due to the meaning of the word first).
C.Therefore the first physical event has a non-physical cause.

I think it's more accurate to say that the evidence suggests our ( current ) universe had a beginning - that means there may well have been a "physical" cause for it.
Also cause and effect appears to be a feature of space-time ( our universe ), so talking about cause and effect prior to space-time ( our universe ) is somewhat tenuous anyway.

Basically we still have no idea where our universe came from, what came before it, and so on.

 

[Unification]

...to know anything about anything?

http://christianevidence.org/blog/entry/is_science_the_only_way_to_know_anything_about_anything

The link contains a video of the lecture. In it Peter Williams argues that the belief that science is the only way of gaining knowledge is scientism which is self-contradictory and ultimately anti-scientific.

He then presents a couple of arguments that point towards God's existence which you've probably seen before but he gives it enough nuance to make it interesting (well, to me anyway). He first attempts to show that a universe from nothing is philosophically unsound. From nothing comes nothing and attempts to describe the physical situation where the quantum vacuum is nothing are problematic. His first argument follows from this. Syllogistically it goes something like:

P.The available evidence suggest the universe has a beginning. This means, he argues, that there is a first physical event.

P.Every physical event has a causal relationship to other events. A first physical event cannot be caused by another physical event (due to the meaning of the word first).

C.Therefore the first physical event has a non-physical cause.

It seems valid insofar as the conclusion follows from the premises. I don't know enough cosmology or metaphysics to say whether the premises are sturdy. I invite you people to comment.

The next argument is a design based that I find suspicious because he invokes William Lane Craig and William Dembski who both strike me as untrustworthy and it seems to argue against the evidence of biological evolution - but we can get around to that later.

By way of balance here is the rational wiki page on the cosmological argument. http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Argument_from_first_cause

For the record, I'm an atheist.

If we came from the cosmos, and stardust.. Etc.... It wouldn't be too farfetched that everything in the cosmos is also within ourselves. The cosmos can be a duplicate of our own brains/minds/hearts. If we knew ourselves from within, on more and more micro-levels, we would know the cosmos. The very beginning of things formed and created/evolved would rest within us. So, no... knowledge of something is different than knowing. One doesn't need science to know within themselves. Theories, what is commonly accepted is knowledge of and not knowing. One can truly know their external environment from macro down to the tiniest micro levels by knowing within themselves from macro down to micro levels first. The potential is latent. While all of the brain is being used, perhaps it's storage memory is only 10% used, and the remaining 90% of unused energetic ram in the hippocampus, etc. is available to be unlocked and discovered from within.

The death of a star looks like the birth of a cell. Our eyes resemble that of a nebula. The synapses and filaments that run through our brains look exactly like photos of dark matter of the universe.

13.85 billion years ago, an end could have come...13.85 billion years ago, a beginning could have come. 13.85 billion years ago, 90% of the cosmos could have remained while the other 10% burst out of a singular black hole combining with what was leftover.

But yes, even if there has been beginnings and endings and alterations over and over in cycles for 700,00,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 trillion years, it is difficult to justify that everything has just always been here or created itself. It would be more rational to seek a natural way of creation or something completely radical yet natural. Or there is a slight malfunction in laws.

 

[viole]

P.The available evidence suggest the universe has a beginning. This means, he argues, that there is a first physical event.

Let's forget for the moment that "beginning" makes sense only when you have a temporal context already in place.
The same with space. It would be like saying that the Universe began somewhere, which is absurd.

I wonder why people are so fixated with the "when" and not with the "where". Actually, I know why, but this is another topic.

P.Every physical event has a causal relationship to other events. A first physical event cannot be caused by another physical event (due to the meaning of the word first).

C.Therefore the first physical event has a non-physical cause.

This argument is so question begging on so many levels that it offers an embarrassingly large plethora of indipendent rebuttals. Today, I am in the mood of challenging the "first" attribute.

Where is the necessity of a "first" cause? I can easily devise a model that entails an infinite causation process that unfolds in finite time and has no first event. I am not saying it is true, but I think it would obtain.

Ciao

- viole

 

[LegionOnomaMoi]

P.The available evidence suggest the universe has a beginning. This means, he argues, that there is a first physical event.

P.Every physical event has a causal relationship to other events. A first physical event cannot be caused by another physical event (due to the meaning of the word first).

C.Therefore the first physical event has a non-physical cause.

In other words

All M are P

All S are T
_____________

All K are not T
​

The first premise doesn't have the form "all M are P" but "there exists an X with the property T
, specifically there exists an event that occurred prior to any other" or (more formally)
Let E be the set of all (physical) events indexed by temporal order. There exists an event e1 ∈ E s.t. it is the first element of the set and therefore there exists no element of E which occurred before e1.
The second premise actually makes two claims. The second follows from the first premise and the first part of the second premise as well as the assumption that causes can't coincide with or precede effects:
P2a: Every physical event has a causal relationship to other events.
P2b: The event e1 ∈ E has a relationship causal relationship to other events, but (by virtue of being e1, the first (physical) event) these relationships must be that of "cause" not "effect"

The third premise is really a rephrasing of the second part of the second premise along with its assumptions: The event e1 ∈ E has no causal relationship to any preceding cause (there are none) and any causal relationships to other events must be that of "cause" not "effect" (there is no physical event which causes it).

The first, "The available evidence suggest the universe has a beginning." is fine.

The second, "Every physical event has a causal relationship to other events," is not. It must contain one of the elements, M or P, from the first premise, and this one doesn't..

It's not a simplistic syllogism of the type you gave. For one thing, it can't be formulated using propositional logic but requires at the least predicate logic:
Let Ex be "x is a physical event", Px be "x has a preceding physical event", and Cx be "x is caused by a physical event". Then the argument may be formulated more formally by something like.
∃x(Ex & ~Px)
∀x(Cx → Px)
Conclusion: ∃x~Cx (from 1,2 by universal and existential elimination)

 

[psychoslice]

Of course science isn't the only, just as religion isn't the only way, there is no true way, life is ever flowing, it doesn't need you or me to control it, religion or science only really gets in the way.

 

[ThePainefulTruth]

...to know anything about anything?

http://christianevidence.org/blog/entry/is_science_the_only_way_to_know_anything_about_anything

The link contains a video of the lecture. In it Peter Williams argues that the belief that science is the only way of gaining knowledge is scientism which is self-contradictory and ultimately anti-scientific.

He then presents a couple of arguments that point towards God's existence which you've probably seen before but he gives it enough nuance to make it interesting (well, to me anyway). He first attempts to show that a universe from nothing is philosophically unsound. From nothing comes nothing and attempts to describe the physical situation where the quantum vacuum is nothing are problematic. His first argument follows from this. Syllogistically it goes something like:

P.The available evidence suggest the universe has a beginning. This means, he argues, that there is a first physical event.

P.Every physical event has a causal relationship to other events. A first physical event cannot be caused by another physical event (due to the meaning of the word first).

C.Therefore the first physical event has a non-physical cause.

It seems valid insofar as the conclusion follows from the premises. I don't know enough cosmology or metaphysics to say whether the premises are sturdy. I invite you people to comment.

The next argument is a design based that I find suspicious because he invokes William Lane Craig and William Dembski who both strike me as untrustworthy and it seems to argue against the evidence of biological evolution - but we can get around to that later.

By way of balance here is the rational wiki page on the cosmological argument. http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Argument_from_first_cause

For the record, I'm an atheist.

Science is the only way to discover or validate information as objective Truth. But there are other aspects of Truth that are beyond science, like art, love and justice.

 

[LegionOnomaMoi]

Science is the only way to discover or validate information as objective Truth.

How is this possible to do in the sciences?

 

[ThePainefulTruth]

How is this possible to do in the sciences?

The scientific method.

 

[LegionOnomaMoi]

The scientific method.

There isn't any.

 

[psychoslice]

Thank whatever for me that there is science, it saved my life with prostate cancer, something that a god in the sky could never do!!.

 

[ThePainefulTruth]

There isn't any.

Then life is an illusion and we don't exist. Yet, here I am. If there is no science, then there is no objectivity, only subjective Truth, but that would mean chaos. But I don't see chaos, just the opposite, exquisite natural law. If that's an illusion, it can only be from one mind, and that mind must be mine. If one imagines being imagined, they are only the figment of someone's original imagination. I don't think anyone could rationally survive such irrational imagination. In fact you would go insane trying to delve that rabbit hole.

 

[Twilight Hue]

Thank whatever for me that there is science, it saved my life with prostate cancer, something that a god in the sky could never do!!.

Never will either. Sky God's just make lousy doctors.

Happy to hear of the successful outcome!

 

[Yerda]

Maybe.

I like that wee image.

In other words

All M are P

All S are T
_____________

All K are not T​

I was going to say that I don't think we need any quantifiers, but then @LegionOnomaMoi demonstrated that it works with quantifiers. What do you make of his post?​

 

[Yerda]

This argument is so question begging on so many levels that it offers an embarrassingly large plethora of indipendent rebuttals.

I had several of my own while watching it. I did kinda like it though.

Where is the necessity of a "first" cause? I can easily devise a model that entails an infinite causation process that unfolds in finite time and has no first event. I am not saying it is true, but I think it would obtain.

I'd like to hear more about that.