Kwayera said:
I tried. One of my main initial contentions is that the author speaks as a philosopher, not as a scientist. It is a narrative of rhetoric and apparent logical conclusions; his idea of Hilbert's Hotel is actually logical fallacy.
I'm curious to know what you mean by "his idea of Hilbert's Hotel is actually logical fallacy."
His use of Hilbert's Hotel seems somewhat shakey to me because he only concludes that the idea is "absurd" not that it is logically impossible (the kind of claim which would be required to exclude the possibility categorically). His treatment of necessity/possibility are somewhat dicey, in particular the distinction he attempts to make between (1) logical possibility, (2) metaphysical possibility and (3) natural/real/actual possibility. In particular, many accounts of possibility will tend to merge (1) with (2) and so his desire to make part 2.11 of his argument fly (that
an actual infinite cannot exist) would clash, on some accounts, with his desire to keep the infinite within the realms of the logically possible (no doubt to keep the mathematicians/set theorists at bay).
I really think he needs more than apparent absurdity to show the impossibility of the existence of an actual infinite, i.e. empirical evidence that the universe is finite in some critical respect, or a logical argument against infinity (of the sort that would upset/anger the mathematicians). Nonetheless, on face value it seems reasonable that contingent objects must eventually rely for their existence upon necessary ones. I'm sure better arguments could be made.
BradCube said:
Ahh, see your arguing with a whole point when you don't need to. The point he was trying to make was that the universe is not infinite - if you already believe that, then there is no problem.
The Kalam cosmological argument can be summarized to:
1. Whatever begins to exist has a cause of its existence.
2. The universe began to exist.
3. Therefore, the universe has a cause of its existence.
That, is pretty much all this article entails - it does not delve much into why he believes that this cause is God (I'm pretty sure that there are other articles with his opinion in those areas). If you agree with the above points of the argument, what do you peronsally attribute to the cause of the beginning of the universe?
In broad terms I agree with the argument you state there (given certain restrictions on what is meant by the term 'universe'). However, all that argument really does is get you on the same page as those who seek a naturalistic explanation of the universe - as you identify, it doesn't show that the cause of the universe must be god, only that a cause is required for that which begins to exist. All we need in our explanation is some kind of necessary (i.e. non-contingent) 'thing' which is such that it could generate a universe such as ours. The structure of this fundamental substance (as we might call it) is best left, in my opinion, to the physicists, mathematicians and philosophers rather than the theologians (my opinion is largely due to the kind of methodologies these respective groups use; the former three tend to be open to novel explanations whereas the theologian is restricted by their belief system to engage in an
ad hoc patch making exercise).
For an example of the kind of entities you might expect to be proposed you could consider structures from mathematical physics like
branes in M-Theory (for a note of irony: M-theory / stringtheory are perhaps controversial in a manner similar to the 'god hypothesis' in so far as it is supposedly questionable whether they are even falsifiable at this point in time). Unfortunately the complexity of theories such as these makes it near impossible for us plebs to even have a crack at guaging their plausibility.