Is the Cosmological Argument a Compositional Fallacy?

The whole video:

Yes, I do have a Patreon account, thank you for asking:

My Twitter:

My facebook:

Here’s my society6 store if you’re interested in my pretentious minimalist poster designs:

[peet]

The Kalam Cosmological Argument (KCA) is this:
Everything that begins to exist has a cause.
The universe began to exist.
Ergo, the universe has a cause.
This is basically a minor re-formulation of the classic cosmological argument, or First Cause argument.
But in the original argument, the distinction of things that 'begin to exist' was absent, leading to a conundrum: you can't say that everything has a cause, then claim that God has no cause.
So it was tweaked a bit to clarify that it means, well, everything that isn't God.
Because, presumably, God exists eternally and uncaused.
If you found that assertion a little presumptuous, well, you'd be right.
But the Kalam isn't immediately concerned with what the cause actually is.
There are other arguments for that.
The Kalam itself aims simply to establish that the universe requires a cause.
Simply put, it's an unsound argument because it commits a fallacy of composition.
"The universe", regardless of how it's defined (multiverses, etc.), is not the same kind of thing as objects within the universe.

The fact that causality is observed to affect matter, energy or objects within the universe does not imply that causality must apply to the universe itself.
Indeed, it doesn't make much sense to talk about causality without time, space, matter, and energy; nor does it make any sense to talk about things "beginning to exist" without respect to time – a property of the extant universe.
That's really all that needs to be said to demonstrate the argument as unsound.
Theologians have ways of trying to dodge these things though, so read on for a more detailed explanation if you wish.

Premise 1
These kinds of arguments are tricky because they involve words that can have multiple meanings; to address the argument, we have to specify precisely which meaning of the words we're using.

"Everything"
What, exactly, is meant by "everything"?
We can't be talking about supernatural things, because we don't know whether they exist.
They might, but that's speculative, and you can't use speculative things as the basis for the premise in a logic proof.
And we obviously can't be talking about the universe itself, because that would be assuming the conclusion in the premise – aka circular reasoning.
So we have to be talking strictly about things within the physical universe, because we can observe them.

"begins to exist"
Here the argument runs into a problem.
Little within the physical universe truly 'begins to exist'.
You may decide that 'you' began to exist at the moment of birth, or conception.
But the atoms that compose you are many billions of years old, forged in the crucibles of ancient stars that exploded in supernovae.
What we think of as 'beginnings' are usually just arbitrary constructs.
Matter and energy simply change.
It's much more accurate to say the following:
"all events and effects are the outcome of prior causes".
The problem though is that this isn't always the case – in a quantum vacuum, virtual particles pop in and out of existence without a prior cause.
This is sometimes dismissed by the theist with the assertion that a quantum vacuum is not 'nothing', thus it has not been demonstrated that something can come from nothing.
But it's a moot point – the argument is not that virtual particles are coming from nothing, but that they are coming into existence without a cause.
Ironically, their instantaneous materialization is perhaps the best example of something 'beginning to exist'!

"cause"
What is meant by the word "cause"?
Causality is a physical phenomenon which we only know to exist within the universe.

But just because causality works within the universe, it doesn't mean causality applies to the universe.
For that to work, we have to posit some kind of 'supernatural causality', unbound by the physical laws of our universe.
But again, such a causality, while possible, is purely speculative.
If it does exist, how would we know?
If it isn't constrained by the laws of the universe, why assume it's anything like physical causality at all?
Because speculative phenomena cannot be used in the premise of a logical proof, the first premise must be strictly limited to observable physical causality.
Based on the everything above, we can re-formulate the first premise to be both linguistically and scientifically accurate, but theists aren't going to like it:
All effects within the universe observed at Newtonian scales are the outcome of a prior physical cause.

Premise 2
How do we know that the universe began to exist?
Well, point of fact, we don't.
Theologians use the cosmic singularity – the moment at the epoch of the Big Bang when all the laws of physics break down – as the moment the universe began to exist.
But it's not that simple.
Beginning and time as Stephen Hawking has pointed out, ''it only makes sense to talk about the 'beginning' of something in reference to time.''
The universe cannot begin to exist because, if the universe did not exist, there would be no time in which it could begin to exist!
The theistic objection is that this is only valid if we are using physical measures of time.
But as with causality, this only introduces another speculative quantity: 'non-physical time'.
Perhaps it exists, but what is it?
How might it work?
How might it differ from physical time?
Again: speculative things are not valid premises for a logical proof.
The use of the cosmic singularity as the 'beginning' is misguided.

From Wikipedia: "Extrapolation of the expansion of the Universe backwards in time using general relativity yields an infinite density and temperature at a finite time in the past. This singularity signals the breakdown of general relativity."

This distinction is pivotal: it is not the 'laws of physics' that break down, but the equations of general relativity.
If we use the equations of quantum theory instead, the infinities of the singularity disappear; instead, the universe becomes smaller and smaller, eventually reaching the Planck epoch.
And until we have a theory of quantum gravity, we won't know what was really going on.
We can see clearly that the second premise is entirely unfounded.
But, to be charitable, we can re-frame it in a way that more accurately reflects the science, and complete the argument:

All effects within the universe observed at Newtonian scales are the outcome of a prior physical cause.
If we go backward in time, the equations of general relativity yield infinities when the universe reaches the end of the Plank Epoch, requiring us to formulate a quantum theory of gravity to understand the nature of the universe.
Ergo, the universe has a cause.

Obviously, once we phrase the argument in a way that is clear about the meanings of the words and is scientifically accurate, it becomes a hilarious non-sequitur.
The reality is, we do not know how the universe got here.
Atheists are often accused of arguing that something came from nothing, but we have no reason to believe the universe came from anything else at all.
Perhaps the universe doesn't truly have an 'origin'.
It may be, per Hawking's No Boundary proposal, that the universe simply is.
Per some ideas in string theory, it may cycle infinitely in expansion and contraction.
But we just don't know yet, and there are still some very big hurdles in physics to overcome before we'll even have a chance at knowing.
In countless discussions with theists I've had over the years, they've asserted that, in the absence of God, the burden is on the non-believer to provide an alternative explanation.
This is false.
The fact that a naturalistic explanation is either unapparent or unknown does not render a theistic or supernatural explanation valid by default.
The skeptic's only burden is to demonstrate (as I've tried to do) that an argument like the Kalam has failed to prove what its proponents claim it proves.
"I don't know" is an epistemologically valid alternative.
That's actually one of the most liberating parts about being a non-believer: realizing that it's okay to say, "I don't know!"

[Overonator]

Grayling just schooled Williams in what a fallacy of composition is.

[claudiaquat]

1 Anything that begins to exist has a material explanation for its existence.
2 The universe began to exist.
C The universe has a material explanation for its existence.

fixed

[GreenmanDave]

So comparing the universe to a brick wall, does that mean we're all just bricks in the wall... all in all... ?

[paulmitchum]

A brick wall without cement holding it together is a pile of bricks. It also has to be wall-ish. Also, we know how to make a brick wall, but we don't know how to make a universe. You may now collect the remains of your metaphor.

[Mr.Unacceptable]

A brick wall is not brick-wallish. It's made of silicon iron carbon and other elements.

[donsample]

In order to argue that God created the universe from nothing, you have to first concede that God is nothing, otherwise you're still starting out with something.

[skewCZ]

This reminds me of the (inefficient, unfortunately) sorta-not-really-exchange between TheoreticalBullshit and William Lane Craig, where Scott brought up that very idea, that if one is ready to throw away material causes (which creation ex-nihilo requires ), he should be equally open to throwing away efficient causes, or indeed both of them.

[LogicAndReason]

No, it's (Cosmological Argument) just total non-sense.

[boblarson]

Airplanes made out of things that can't fly
The universe-Contains caused events but is uncaused itself since it the set of all caused events.

[pauligrossinoz]

So is a universe made up up natural things also a "natural-ish" universe?

And exactly where do "super-natural" gods fit into a natural universe? Asside from the obvious - _those god's are merely figments of people's imagination._

[robertfelton]

Same old bullshit "cause and effect" argument.

[TheJakeSweede]

you have an interesting channel with good content which i enjoy and it also gives me stuff to think about, so keep making stuff

[ClassicalTheist]

I don’t think you understand what Aristotle meant by material cause or efficient cause. The material cause simply follows upon a thing being composed of matter and form, whereas an efficient cause follows upon something simply being existentially contingent. A material object by definition is caused by its constitutive material parts, and an existentially contingent reality is by definition existentially derivative of an efficient cause. Thus it is not a fallacy of composition to say that if the universe is composed of beings that are existentially contingent, it would require an efficient cause, because the very nature of an efficient cause is such that its necessity follows a thing being existentially contingent. The cosmological argument would say that if there is one reality that is existentially contingent, it requires an efficient cause. But this chain cannot go on to infinite or else reality would solely be composed of realities whose existence is derivative, the consequent to which would yield to universal non-being.

[seraphonica]

the brick wall example is always a challenge to me. my go to example is water. water is made up of hydrogen, a gas at room temperature, and oxygen, a gas at room temperature. thus, by the same logic as the Kalam, water must also be a gas at room temperature. and yet...

[dienekes]

I wall is not a "brick wall" if it only contains a smattering of bricks. It is only a "brick wall" if it contains at least a majority of bricks. It is, therefore, an invalid analogy to say that because _SOME_ events in the universe are contingent that the entire universe is contingent is like a wall made entirely of bricks is a brick wall. The analogies just don't line up.

[redsparks]

How many bricks have to removed from a brick wall before it is no longer a wall? Does a wall only have to made of bricks? I don't agree with ex nihilo however maybe another approach to this argument is through Gestalt psychology where the whole is "other" than the sum of its parts and therefore in a certain respect has an independent existence.

The universe of "stuff" that clumps together has an independent existence from the individual forces that form the constants of physics but of course the "stuff" would not clump together without those individual forces that form the constants of physics

My "self" has an independent existence from the individual cells that cooperate to form my body but of course my "self" would not exist without the cooperation of those individual cells.

A Buddhist approach would be through the doctrine of Sunyata (emptiness) and the doctrine of anicca (impermanence). Nothing is causeless but all things are impermanent. So the beginning of all things is a seething mass/sea/void of probability that is never zero, but if it is then it is impermanent.

[MrPlatonist]

Please, make longer videos! (Do what you want, but it would be nice with some deeper analysis from you).

[rchuso]

What's the opposite of an "efficient cause"? An "inefficient cause"?

[Marques]

OMG I HAVE THOUGHT ABOUT THAT!!! THANKS TMM