32 CAREER-ENDING mistakes about the Kalam and contingency arguments

In this third installment of my common mistakes series, I cover mistakes relating to the Kalam cosmological argument and contingency arguments.

OUTLINE

0:00 Intro
1:12 Mistake #73
16:39 Mistake #74
20:00 Mistake #75
20:49 Mistake #76
45:12 Mistake #77
46:35 Mistake #78
48:32 Mistake #79
51:16 Mistake #80
53:15 Mistake #81
54:49 Mistake #82
1:00:51 Mistake #83
1:03:19 Mistake #84
1:04:56 Mistake #85
1:06:56 Mistake #86
1:07:09 Mistake #87
1:10:18 Mistake #88
1:17:23 Mistake #89
1:18:02 Mistake #90
1:18:56 Mistake #91
1:20:37 Mistake #92
1:22:25 Mistake #93
1:23:25 Mistake #94
1:25:17 Mistake #95
1:26:49 Mistake #96
1:34:14 Mistake #97
1:37:04 Mistake #98
1:38:21 Mistake #99
1:46:30 Mistake #100
1:48:37 Mistake #101
1:49:33 Mistake #102
1:52:16 Mistake #103
1:56:12 Mistake #104
1:56:46 Conclusion

CORRECTIONS

54:37 I should have written and said “Nothing in science shows that *none* of (a)-(d) hold.”

RESOURCES

THE USUAL...

[MajestyofReason]

*_Corrections and List of Mistakes_*

_Corrections_

At 54:37, I should have written and said “Nothing in science shows that _none_ of (a)-(d) hold.”

_Kalam mistakes_

1:12 Mistake #73: Confusions about paradoxes
16:39 Mistake #74: “From nothing, nothing comes” as a motivation for the Kalam’s CP
20:00 Mistake #75: “If everything has a cause, then what caused God?”
20:49 Mistake #76: Ignoring non-causal explanation
45:12 Mistake #77: The Kalam commits the fallacy of composition!
46:35 Mistake #78: The Kalam equivocates on the word ‘cause’
48:32 Mistake #79: Nothing ever begins to exist + not being willing to accept mereological nihilism
51:16 Mistake #80: The cause of the universe must be spaceless, timeless, immaterial, enormously powerful, and personal
53:15 Mistake #81: Science proves the universe began to exist!
54:49 Mistake #82: The illicit slide from ‘finite past’ to ‘universe began to exist’
1:00:51 Mistake #83: The endless future is a potential infinite
1:03:19 Mistake #84: Ignoring that stage two even exists
1:04:56 Mistake #85: Merely asserting that there can’t be an infinite past because today would never arrive
1:06:56 Mistake #86: Krauss showed that the universe could have come from nothing!
1:07:09 Mistake #87: Wood’s painful tweet
1:10:18 Mistake #88: Paucity of imagination about what a first cause might be
1:17:23 Mistake #89: Assuming indeterminism → uncaused
1:18:02 Mistake #90: Merely assuming a tensed view of time in defending the Kalam
1:18:56 Mistake #91: Mistakes surrounding Hilbert’s Hotel
1:20:37 Mistake #92: Causal finitism automatically entails a finite past
1:22:25 Mistake #93: Totally overlooking arguments _for_ the possibility of actual infinites

_Contingency argument mistakes_

1:23:25 Mistake #94: Atheists can’t answer “why is there something rather than nothing?”
1:25:17 Mistake #95: Merely assuming that a necessary thing can’t cause contingent things
1:26:49 Mistake #96: “I can conceive of the universe not existing, therefore the universe is contingent”
1:34:14 Mistake #97: Composition entails contingency
1:37:04 Mistake #98: Claiming the only kinds of explanations are personal and scientific
1:38:21 Mistake #99: Confusing contingency with dependence and necessity with independence
1:46:30 Mistake #100: Confusing _necessarily existent_ with _couldn’t have been otherwise_
1:48:37 Mistake #101: If something begins, it can’t be necessary
1:49:33 Mistake #102: Necessary truths can’t be explained
1:52:16 Mistake #103: Being far too swift in stage two of the contingency argument
1:56:12 Mistake #104: Naturalists can’t accept a necessary being + naturalists have to reject the PSR

[sunblaze]

Thank you for trying to sort some reason out of the chaos of Kalam arguments! As an average Kalam defender, this is really helpful.

[boringturtle]

"for more, refer to my Hilbert's Hotel video."

Loving the use of the singular here. Really burying the lead.

[JohnnyHofmann]

Great video. You’re helping me level up philosophically!

[MiladTabasy]

Thanks for your intelligble and useful content. It is very valuable for me that your goal is informing others rather than becoming famous.

[amAntidisestablishmentarianist]

I feel useful and satisfied after listening to your videos.

[ILoveLuhaidan]

Listening to this while driving to university and back, first one is really interesting! It is like a composition fallacy in reverse.

[thesuitablecommand]

The thumbnail made me think this was posted by Rationality Rules haha. Not disappointed though! Looking forward to watching :)

[christophernodvik]

You are incredibly talented one of a kind amazing a national treasure boy. I have had my horizons broadened by your videos . Good luck!

[StefanRu]

Great Video! Some of my own thoughts- I think philosophy can be really hard to get into. Therefore I would like to add three own problems, or "accessibility- hurdles" as maybe food for thought.

When someone says "A thing outside space time exists", the confidence and simplicity of the sentence can put a wall over your eyes (and also hide further entailments). It's like mentally drawing a circle, calling it spacetime, and then drawing a point outside, and boom, object out of spacetime imagined. It is a simple sentence, so it can seem like a simple idea and that everybody conceives the same concept there. This seems to boil down to two problems:

Firstly- Not taking more about the details about what is actually intuited and meant.

Secondly - Philosophizing to quickly (again, especially towards layman, like myself- e.g. an apologist shouldn't walk in a church, give a sermon about "first necessary causes" with no time to breathe and just expect everybody to grasp this in five seconds).

The unrelated, third point- limiting the scope of an explanation, yet not mentioning it. I would be delighted if a debate would start with: "Me and my opponent agree about moral judgements being facts, but would like to inform you that there are other views like xyz".

Anyways, keep up the good work!

[TheProdigalMeowMeowMeowReturns]

Bring on David bentley Hart for a debate on CT

[ellyam]

How is it that all of your latest videos have been nothing but bangers?

[CosmoPhiloPharmaco]

45:12

The fact that things that begin in spacetime must have a cause, does not entail or even imply spacetime itself must have a cause. All evidence regarding it is inside spacetime, and not of spacetime itself. Physicist Don Page wrote:

"We learn our ideas of causation from the lawfulness of nature and from the directionality of the second law of thermodynamics that lead to the commonsense view that causes precede their effects. But then we have learned that the laws of physics are CPT invariant (essentially the same in each direction of time), so in a fundamental sense the future determines the past just as much as the past determines the future. It is just from our experience of the one-way causation we observe within the universe, which is just a *merely effective description and not fundamental, we cannot logically derive the conclusion that the entire universe has a cause, * since the effective unidirectional causation we commonly experience is something *just within the universe and need not be extrapolated to a putative cause for the universe as a whole."*

[HeyHeyHarmonicaLuke]

Lately I've been noticing a lot of the equivocation mistake regarding the Kalam, where people support 'P2: the universe began to exist' with quotes from astrophysicists about the big bang being a beginning of our universe. This should lock them into using a local definition of universe, as astrophysicists aren't saying the big bang was the beginning of the whole cosmos, and there is no other spacetime anywhere in reality. However by the time we get to the extended kalam, the cause supposedly has to be spaceless and timeless 'because it is the cause of _all space and time_'. This shows they've switched to a broad, cosmos-style definition of universe.

So depending on how we interpret this equivocation (whether P2 is using a narrow or broad definition of universe), the Kalam is either logically invalid, or valid but the support given for P2 is completely irrelevant - it's as if someone was meant to support a money bank existing, and instead they showed photos of a sand bank by the river.

[tan_x_dx]

One of the (many) problems I have with the Kalam is its assumption of singularity: the assumption that there was only ONE thing responsible. This same unjustified assumption is made with many other apologetic arguments, for instance, the design argument (why would you assume there's only ONE designer? Is it not possible for something to be designed by committee?).

The problem is that the kalam asserts without reason that everything that comes into existence has "A" cause - that is, only one cause.

This is blatantly false. I'd say that in general, things that come into existence have AT LEAST ONE cause. This is what we observe throughout our universe. And why stop at two? There can be any number of causes necessary for an event to take place.

Here's a more concrete example: Suppose you have a simple electrical curcuit: there's a battery for power, a light bulb, and 100 switches connected in series, one after the other.
At the start, all switches are in the off position. Flip the first switch. The light bulb remains unlit. Now flip the second switch, same result. Keep flipping until the 99th. The bulb is still off.
Now flip the 100th switch. Now all switches are in the on position and so electricity flows. This causes the light bulb to light up, and emit photons.


These photons have certainly "come into being", therefore the Kalam asserts there must have been A cause. But in this example, there was no singular cause; instead there were 100 independent causal events required.

Theists also seem to misunderstand the notion of "first cause". A first cause is "that which has no causal precedent". That says absolutely nothing about how many independent first causes there can be. The property of being "first" is a local property - not a global property. "First-ness" is a non-exclusive predicate.


To put it another way, suppose Alice claims to have come first in a marathon. But Bob also claims to have come first in a marathon. How can both statements be true? Simple, there's more than one marathon being run, and each person came first in their respective races. Just because you came first in one marathon does not mean you came first in all marathons.

Now, when discussing causality, the common visual metaphor is a line of dominos, with the first in a chain being the "first cause". In this model, that first domino obviously has no prior domino, and so something external to the system is required to make it topple. Nothing wrong here.
But here's the problem: Here's a second line of dominos. With its own first domino. And here's a third line. And a fourth. And so on.

Thus, there can be arbitrarily many independent causal chains, each with their own first cause.

Now consider a large domino with two independent chains leading into it. The first chain topples in sequence, leading up to the large domino, but the large domino remains untoppled. Then the second chain topples, and it's only after the combined weight of the first chain AND the second chain, that the large domino topples, and continues onwards. A single causal chain is INSUFFICIENT.

And who says that these multiple causal chains of dominos have to be toppled by just one entity? I knock over a line, and you knock over a different line. This system has TWO PRIME MOVERS.

Thus the kalam fails to even establish monotheism, as there is no reason to suppose a single causal prime being for all causal chains.

[nasrullahtoprak]

I appriacite you for being honest and critiquing New fools movement ı wish you have the Best life with your family and Happy life brother ı am a muslim but for your honesty ı congrate you

[scottneusen]

#78 absolutely is equivocating. He specifically doesn't say efficient cause because he wants people to assume the general use cause. Using a different term to disguise what you mean is the whole point of equivocating.

[thecloudtherapist]

Mistake no. 105; Just cos it's out there, it doesn't mean every other claim/hypothesis/theory can be rationally explained nor does it enjoy popular support or that it's plausible, so I should not look at adding it to my list of mistakes.

[MyContext]

I appreciate your depiction even as it requires a fair amount of reconciliation depending upon how one models/classifies various terms.

It might be useful for me to review your modeling just to make sure I have even made the proper reconciliations.

[thesuitablecommand]

For #79, I favor embracing miriological nihilism and rejecting that "I exist" as a thing unto myself. That doesn't mean that I don't exist in any form, however. I could still say that the arrangement if things which would constitute me exists. The oattern of me exists within the arrangement of fundamental particles. And that pattern hasn't always existed, and it began to exist at some point in the past. But I am an abstract thing at the fundamental level. There is nothing fundamental about me. I am an emergent phenomenon of all these more fundamental things interacting and being arranged in such a way. I can be destroyed and rebuilt ten times and then those ten copies of me can all be destroyed, but no concrete stuff was ever destroyed or created. If Craig wants to say that the universe came into being in an analogous way to myself coming into being, that means that the universe was constructed out of fundamentals which pre-existed it in some way. Because that is how I came to be, and how chairs come to be, and rocks and bicycles.