Reddit reviews Theism, Atheism, and Big Bang Cosmology (Clarendon Paperbacks)

I hope you’ll excuse me for thinking that I’m a better judge of my intended meanings (and the extent to which I manage to express them in language). After all, I have more experience of my own intentions, attempts at linguistic communication, and success and failures, than you do (having known myself for just a bit longer than you have). But nice try playing Freud or Skinner there.

If I’ve been getting the logic backwards, it’s because that’s how you presented it. You said, and I quote, that “religion is bogus [metaphysical claim] because it talks about things we have no experiential connection to (that’s an epistemological angle, not psychological).” At first you clearly based your metaphysical claim on your epistemological claim. But then you almost immediately went and reversed the logical priority, basing your epistemological claim on the very same metaphysical claim it was meant to support, saying that “no one will ever experience the elements, because they don’t exist.” Curiously, you added a parenthetical in which you expressed your original logical priority (metaphysical claim based on epistemological claim) negatively, saying, “there’s absolutely no reason to assume that something exists for which we have no epistemological connection to.” If you don’t want me to get the logic of your claims backwards, then don’t waffle back and forth so much, eh?

And no, I have not been speaking directly of religion/God, as that has not been my present interest (there you go again, Mr. Psychoanalyst). I’ve been speaking of the kind of prima facie warrant that religious experiences confer. These experiences do not give philosophers reason to assume theism. It gives them warrant to explore theism and debate theism. Examples of this can be found in volumes such as J.J.C. Smart and J.J. Haldane’s book, Atheism and Theism. We find a similar example in William Lane Craig and Quentin Smith’s exchange in Theism, Atheism, and Big Bang Cosmology.

See, the psychologist of religion asks, “What psychological mechanisms are involved in the production of religious belief?” Whereas the philosopher of religion asks, “What purported grounds are offered for religious belief? What is the logical status of these grounds?”

I would hardly call an interest in a philosopher an “obsession” (and there you go being dramatic again). I’m not interested exclusively in Kierkegaard, though he is a strong interest of mine. I’ve also read works by numerous thinkers spanning the history of philosophy: Thales, Xenophanes, Heraclitus, Parmenides, Democritus, Plato, Aristotle, Epictetus, Plotinus, Saadia, Augustine, Boethius, Avicenna, Anselm, al-Ghazali, Abelard, Averroës, Maimonides, Aquinas, Scotus, Ockham, the Conimbricenses, Poinsot, Hobbes, Descartes, Locke, Leibniz, Berkeley, Hume, Reid, Kant, Mill, Nietzsche, James, Peirce, Frege, Russell, Sartre, MacIntyre, Searle, Derrida, and many others. (If there are any you wish to seriously discuss, I’m more than happy.)

Yes, I can see outside the Kierkegaardian perspective (and if I couldn’t, I’d be a pretty poor Kierkegaardian, as his perspective requires serious engagement with numerous other perspectives, including Socratic, Hegelian, Kantian, and so on).

Please note that my use of Kierkegaard is not all positive. You should already know this, as I’ve mentioned before that I do not accept his negative attitude toward natural theology.

In any case, I’m sorry to see you feel that strong philosophical interests are a sign of sickness. Why are you even here, exactly?

>As if character strings like "pure actuality" have an inherent meaning

That's why I've made a vow to stop using technical terminology, even clearly explained technical terminology. :)

>If that quote from Barker is all you got, then you've got hardly any evidence for your claim: He repeats the correct argument a few sentences later.

He claims that the original argument is that everything has a cause, and that philosophers have been busy trying to patch this up ever since. The opposite is true, in fact. The "everything has a cause" version is a modern distortion.

You don't have to look far to find plenty of examples like this. Here is another one. He thinks Aquinas is saying that the prime mover started the universe off in the past.

This level of distortion of an opposing viewpoint is a sign of ideology, not rational thought. The conclusion is already firmly in place, and now lets see whats wrong with the argument because we already know the conclusion is false. I put this into the box right along with the Disco 'Tute's distortions of evolution.

>Almost anyone seems vulnerable to misunderstanding

Sure. Craig makes all kinds of crap statements (defending genocide), which doesn't in the least affect his other arguments. In comparison, though, his discussions on cosmology are pretty accurate, and he even collaborated with the aforementioned Quentin Smith on a book on cosmology.. My point is not that infidels makes some mistakes here and there, but that much of their discussion of theistic arguments get the arguments wrong.

> Life began because of a creator. That creator needs a creator

I'm not making that argument. I'm also purposely trying to limit the scope of the discussion for the sake of clarity/simplicity, but you seem determined to overcomplicate things.

I'm focused on two things:

(1) The concept of eternal/uncaused existence is not logically incoherent, however, we know (through evidence) that this is not the case for our universe.

(2) It's possible to formulate a rule whereby one things requires a cause/explanation, but the thing which causes or explains it does not (and in, fact may be a logical necessity).

Note that even taken together, this still falls well short of establishing the existence of god.

The rest goes beyond what I have any interest in proving or defending. If you want to explore this in greater depth, here's a book on it.

I think the main thing to understand is that while people often attack Craig's argument by denying that physics shows the universe began to exist. However, if you read his written versions of the argument (or listen very attentively to his debate speeches), his approach is multidisciplinary; the empirical findings of cosmology are not his main or only reason for holding that the universe began to exist.

His main argument is that an actual infinity of temporal moments cannot exist, and that to say otherwise entails contradictions. One well-known thought experiment to draw out the paradoxes involved in the idea of an actual infinite is known as Hilbert's Hotel: imagine a hotel with infinite rooms occupied by infinite guests. An infinite number of new guests arrive. Even though the hotel is full, the manager may simply move everyone in room n into room 2n to accommodate them. Infinitely many guests have moved into the hotel when it was already full—and yet there are no more guests in the hotel than there were before.

Or consider a thought experiment devised by Craig himself which has become well-known: imagine a library with infinite books. In the library there are infinite red books and infinite black books, so that for every red book, there is a black one. It follows that the library contains as many red books as the total number of books in its collection, as many red books as black books, and as many red books as red and black books combined.

According to Craig, these absurd implications show that an actual infinite cannot even in principle exist in reality. Atheist philosophers like Graham Oppy and the late Howard Sobel have generally been willing, if necessary, to bite the bullet and say that the difficulties in building such a hotel or library are purely physical and practical; if these were overcome, the supposedly absurd situations imagined by Craig could indeed occur in reality. (See page 53 of Oppy's Philosophical Perspectives on Infinity, which was originally going to be the second part of one volume together with his well-known Arguing About Gods, as well as page 187 of Sobel's Logic and Theism.) Quentin Smith argues that Craig wrongly assumes that intuitive relations which hold between finite sets and their proper subsets must also hold for infinite sets. (See page 85 of Craig and Smith's Theism, Atheism, and Big Bang Cosmology.)

The "man counting backwards from infinity" scenario represents an independent argument: Craig holds that even if an actual infinite can exist, an actual infinite cannot be formed by adding one member after another. That is, while it is true that 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + … equals ℵ₀, the numbers are not added one after another, but simultaneously or timelessly. You could not start with any finite number and get to infinity by addition, and it isn't a matter of there not being enough time; you don't "reach infinity" just because you never stop counting. But if we can't count to infinity, how can we count down from infinity? Craig holds that we cannot traverse the infinite in either direction. If the universe has no beginning, then temporal existence has traversed an infinite succession of past events. But this is impossible; for us to have arrived at today, there is an earlier event that needs to have occurred, and one before that, and one before that, ad infinitum, so that we are pushed continually back into the infinite past, making it impossible for any event to occur.

Another thought experiment illustrating this is one originally devised by Al-Ghazali involving the orbits of Jupiter and Saturn. Jupiter completes 2.5 orbits for each orbit completed by Saturn. Suppose they have both been orbiting eternally. Which planet has completed more orbits? The longer they revolve, the further Jupiter gets ahead of Saturn—and yet the mathematically correct answer is that they have each completed the same number of orbits, equal and unchanged since eternity past though it appears to grow; there has never been a time when they have not completed an infinite number of orbits. Moreover, Ghazali asks, is the number of orbits odd or even? Either answer seems absurd, but according to post-Cantorian transfinite arithmetic, it is both.

Dawkins is to philosophy of religion what Camus is to existentialism: there's some interesting shit in there, but most of it is simplistic, and it's popular because the stupid masses can understand them. If you want to be spoonfed ideas -- often incomplete and fallacious ideas -- then by all means stick with Dawkins and Hitchens. If you want some good arguments, and not just some bullshit rhetoric, then check out the following books:

Theism, Atheism, and Big Bang Cosmology

The Cambridge Companion to Atheism

Philosophy for Understanding Theology