Apparently, he also takes issue with my statement that such counter-arguments are pop objections that are generally not found in the scholarly literature regarding the argument (Which is true, by the way). I apparently have no right to say this because I’m a layman myself (Which I am, but that doesn’t stop me from pointing out the fact that they are just pop objections — he’s arguing tu quoque). I’ll be issuing a response within a few days. This post is simply to point out his response.

Keep all comments appropriate.

Nocterro wrote: Philosopher William Lane Craig has often stated, as one of the conditions of a good argument, that the premises must be more plausible than their negations. I disagree with this, on the grounds that it does not always apply – there are counterexamples. Consider this:

1. My neighbor’s dog is outside.
2. It is raining.
C. My neighbor’s dog is outside and it is raining.

This argument is valid – the conclusion follows from the inference rule known as “conjunction introduction”: if p is true, and q is true, then the conjunction p and q is true.

Now, it might be quite plausible, when considered alone, that my neighbor’s dog is outside; after all, his dog is almost always outside. It might also be very plausible that it is raining; perhaps I have looked outside and seen that it is raining. However, I might not be very certain at all that the conclusion is true – who would leave their dog outside in the rain? Should I think it’s plausible to accept this conclusion, just because both 1 and 2 are plausible? Surely not.

One might object by saying that 1 is not plausible because it is raining. This, however, is erroneous; and even supports my point. To say such is not to consider the plausibility of 1 at all; rather, one is instead actually commenting on the plausibility of the conclusion.

So, when should we accept the conclusion of an argument? I employ a modification of Craig’s method. First, I check the argument’s validity. If the argument is valid, I put all of the premises on the “left”, and the negation of the conclusion on the “right”. I then ask myself which is more plausible (or, which “side” I am more certain of. If it is the left, I accept the conclusion of the argument. If the right, I do not. For example:

Left:
1. My neighbor’s dog is outside.
2. It is raining.

Right:
C/N. Not (My neighbor’s dog is outside and it is raining).

If I am more certain of the conclusion’s negation (perhaps because I believe that my neighbor is home, and cares for his dog), then I do not accept the argument.

Let’s run through another example, with an argument often proffered by Dr. Craig:

Left:
1. Whatever begins to exist has a cause.
2. The universe began to exist.

Right:
C/N. not (The universe has a cause).

Of course, different people will have many different views on the plausibility of these premises and conclusion. Most people will not be certain at all that “the universe does not have a cause”. However, one may in fact be even less certain of 1. Depending on rough probabilities, one may be justified in rejecting this argument based on the uncertainty of 1 alone. In any case, these subjective probabilities, combined with this analysis of what makes an argument “good”, serve very well to explain why certain arguments are convincing to some but not to others.

Craig responds:

It’s scary how really desperate these people are becoming! Far from raising valid points, Pranav, these objections are just worthless, based on fundamental misunderstandings. The fellas who posted these criticisms on You Tube, if they continue their study of philosophy, are going to be very embarrassed someday about these videos.

Let me back up and take a run at your question. What makes for a sound deductive argument? The answer is: true premisses and valid logic. An argument is sound if the premisses of the argument are true and the conclusion follows from the premisses by the logical rules of inference. If these two conditions are met, then the conclusion of the argument is guaranteed to be true.

However, to be a good argument, an argument must be more than just sound. If the premisses of an argument are true, but we have no evidence for the truth of those premisses, then the argument will not be a good one. It may (unbeknownst to us) be sound, but in the absence of any evidence for its premisses it won’t, or at least shouldn’t, convince anyone. The premisses have to have some sort of epistemic warrant for us in order for a sound argument to be a good one.

This is why question-begging arguments are not good arguments. A person is guilty of begging the question if his only reason for believing in a premiss is that he already believes in the conclusion. For example, suppose you were to present the following argument for the existence of God:

1. Either God exists or the moon is made of green cheese.
2. The moon is not made of green cheese.
3. Therefore, God exists.

Now this is a sound argument for God’s existence: its premisses are both true and the conclusion follows from the premisses by the rules of logic (specifically, disjunctive syllogism). Nevertheless, the argument is not any good because the only reason for believing the first premiss to be true is that you already believe that God exists (a disjunction is true if one of the disjuncts is true). But that’s the argument’s conclusion! Therefore, in putting forward this argument you’re reasoning in a circle or begging the question. The only reason you believe (1) is because you believe (3).

So, soundness is not sufficient for making an argument a good one. Something more is needed concerning the warrant the premisses have for us. Following the lead of George Mavrodes (Belief in God, 1970) and Steve Davis (God, Reason and Theistic Proofs, 1997), I’ve argued that what is needed is that the premisses be not only true but more plausible than their opposites or negations. If it is more plausible that a premiss is, in light of the evidence, true rather than false, then we should believe the premiss.

I trust that this clears up the gross misunderstanding propagated in a You Tube video that when I say that the premisses of a good argument must be more plausibly true than their negations, I’m positing a range of additional truth values in between true and false. No, I presume the classical Principle of Bivalence, according to which there only two truth values, True and False. There are different degrees of plausibility, not of truth, given the varying amounts of evidence in support of one’s premisses.

Moreover, in a valid deductive argument, like the kalam cosmological argument, any probabilities assigned to the premisses are not used to calculate the probability of the conclusion. (I actually prefer to speak of plausibility rather than probability to avoid the problem that it is often difficult to assign probability values to the premisses; but never mind.) If the premisses are true, then it follows necessarily that conclusion is true, period. It’s logically fallacious to multiply the probabilities of the premisses to try to calculate the probability of the conclusion. That’s why you wind up with the clearly wrong results that you did. In a sound deductive argument the most we can say about the probability of the argument’s conclusion is that it cannot be less than some lower bound; but it could be as high as 100%.

So with respect to your first example, we have here a valid deductive argument, since from (2) and (3), we may infer

3*. A&B

and from (1) and (3*) it follows logically that (4). All we need to find out is whether there are better reasons to believe (1), (2), and (3) rather than their opposites. If there are, then you have a good argument for (4). The probability of (4) doesn’t even enter the picture.

As for your second example, this is also, as you note, a valid argument. So you just need to find out whether the evidence makes each premiss more likely to be true than its negation. The misgiving you share is simply evidence that (2) may not be more plausible than its negation. You’re entitled to look at all the evidence relevant to (2). If it’s raining or 40 degrees below zero or you heard your wife say your neighbor was taking his dog to the vet today, etc., you may well have good grounds for thinking (2) is not true. You might know, e.g.,

1*. If it is raining, my neighbor takes his dog inside.

It follows from (1) and (1*) that (2) is false. But if, on balance, the evidence supports (1) and (2) rather than their opposites, then you’ve got a good argument for (3).

So if these are really “the main issues raised atheists and skeptics on the Internet against [my] third criterion,” we’re in great shape, and they are in deep trouble.

Edit from Tim: While we’re on the subject of our website, if you’ve tried to send me an email using the email address timothy [at] scaeministries.org  in the past few months and have received no reply, please email editor [at] philapologia.org  Our email accounts were inadvertently deleted when we switched off our old domain name.  Until now, we’ve neglected to update our contact links with our new contact information.

1. It’s not even clear what the idea of something being complex and immaterial is supposed to mean.  Complexity has always been understood in reference to physical systems.  A computer, for example, is complex because it contains a large number of intricate and highly ordered parts.  Accordingly, how do we make sense of immaterial complexity?  What does it even mean?  Unless some adequate understanding of it can be provided, it just seems to be a category mistake to apply complexity to an immaterial being.

Perhaps the critic can define complexity in terms of having many different mental states or thought processes.  But I see several problems with this.  Firstly, it’s not intuitively obvious — at least to me — that this type of complexity requires an explanation.  Second, it’s not clear how this should be considered “complex.” Mental states and processes are had by a mind, they aren’t exactly “parts.”  They thus don’t contribute to the complexity of a mind.  Suppose that I have a power strip.  Would it be any more complex if I plugged something into each outlet?  No.

2. Writes Robin Collins: “[W]e have metaphysical reasons for thinking that minds, do not, by their inherent nature, require high levels of internal complexity… Perhaps the strongest argument for this thesis is that we normally experience our own conscious self as a single, unified center that is aware of the world and can act in the world.   For example, I am currently simultaneously aware of the hum of the air conditioner, the sound of my hands typing and the letters on my computer screen.  I cannot explain this experience by supposing that my self has three parts and that one part is experiencing the hum, the other my typing, and the other is seeing letters on the computer screen, for then there would be three separate experiencers, one corresponding to each part.  But there seems to be only one experiencer — I — that perceives all things.  Thus, it seems that I must suppose there is one unified experiencer that cannot be reduced by a bunch of parts.”¹

What Collins is saying that the mind is composed of only one part, the “I” which is aware of everything.  It would be a mistake to think of my mental life as a bunch of parts, as that would be supposing that there is a different “I” which corresponds to each part.  He further writes: “Indeed, if one thinks that the “I” — that thing behind the scenes that is conscious, that does the thinking and the like — is simple, as we have been suggesting, then it follows that a person’s power to perform what philosophers call basic actions must be simply and thus without any further structure.”²

3. God is thought of as a necessary being.  Even if it were true that God is complex, it does not follow that he requires an explanation.  Philosophers have long considered God to be necessarily existent — that is, his non-existence is impossible.  To assume that it’s even possible that God has an explanation for his existence is to presuppose that God is a contingent being.  But such a supposition makes no sense.  God is by definition the greatest possible being (That’s simply what we mean by the term “God”).  As Keith Ward  has said, “To fail to grasp such an idea is to fail to grasp what God is.” What could God’s existence be contingent on?  Nothing, which is one of the reasons why God is thought to be necessarily existent. To say that God is contingent is to say that there is something greater than God which he owes his existence to — but then we’re not really talking about God anymore.

1. Robin Collins, “Hume, Fine-Tuning, and the ‘Who Designed God’ Objection” in James F. Sennett and Douglas Groothius (eds), In Defense of Natural Theology: A Post-Humean Assessment (Downers Grove, IL: Intervarsity 2005) p.196
2. Ibid, 197

Date of War: June 15th, 2010

The U.N and U.S might have tried to stop it but no one could contain these two fierce opponents as they head onto the most powerful collision mankind has ever seen. Previously, Tim and VP had been debating homosexuality in the IRC several months ago and somewhere along the line they were determined to have a formal war (or debate) on the issue of whether homosexual marriage should be legal.

This debate unfortunately had to be postponed until Tim finished school and had made the necessary preparations to engage in that debate. In the meantime, Tim had done some research on natural law and created some blog posts that elaborated his argument. VP saw these posts and decided that the debate should be on the morality of homosexuality instead and Tim agreed.

So, for those who don’t know who VP is, he’s a Christian theist who believes the Bible does not condemn the kind of homosexuality that he supports and that there is simply no good reason (apart from special revelation, at least) to suppose that homosexuality is immoral. During the wait though, VP wasn’t sure if Tim would keep true to his word and decided to create a petition (along with Jean’s support, of course) that you can access here.

VP felt that Tim was making blog posts but was taking his time with the debate and thought that action needed to be taken so Isaac had suggested to create a petition for making sure Tim follows through. I should also mention here that Tim has a number of enemies that literally consider him to be an evil dictator and these people desire to see him “pwned” in this debate. I won’t mention any names but there’s quite a history behind that.

Here we are now, waiting for that promised day to come. I’m excited about this debate because both opponents have great intellectual prowess and I am currently looking forward to evaluate the best arguments from both sides. For me this debate is not about who wins per se as much as it is about who has the truth. Once this debate takes place on debate.org I will be sure to link to it on the blog.

Is there someone that you want/expect to win? If so, why?

We’re all too familiar with the word “apologetics” at this blog and sometimes it can become synonymous to atheists as someone who defends magical fairies. Rhetoric, logic, arguments, etc, are all part of the process of attempting to convince the other side and our goal here at Rational Thoughts is to do just that in a rationally compelling manner. Whether we have succeeded is of course a matter of debate but that’s what makes this interesting. Discussion allows us to be corrected and helps us gain a better understanding of how critics think in order to seek the truth.

Wait, let’s stop right there. Do we (the bloggers) really seek the truth? This “seek the truth” slogan sounds appealing but it can sometimes be so overused that we don’t actually examine ourselves to see if it holds true in our lives. Or if we do, the slogan can become a mere disguise that makes us seem honorable to the public. This is especially easier to do under a blog that has a “thinking statue” with a cross as a logo and the title “Rational Thoughts”. It gives us an ability to hide under such symbols and consequently people are led to think we’re truth-seekers.

While I’m not proposing that we wish to intentionally deceive anyone, it is still possible that we are not as open as we think ourselves to be. Let’s be honest here, who would not want to affirm that they seek the truth? Unless this person thinks the truth is relative or fruitless, it is probably something that we’d want to claim. The real “truth” is, we’ve all had an ulterior motive of some kind, whether it be to win an argument or mock those who disagree with us. That’s not to say that there can’t be a dribble of good desires along with that ulterior motive or that we can never be honest truth seekers, but unless you’re perfect or something, it’s happened to you too.

I am bringing this up because it has happened to me more than you know and a quick glance at this blog will show that we have only been defending our beliefs (or attacking others) and not expressing any personal struggles or appreciation to our fellow skeptics. This is something that I want to correct, not through showing ourselves to be better than who we really are but by allowing our readers to be familiar with our foolishness, struggles and in a more positive light, show our appreciation for skeptics who keep us in line. I’m hoping that we can also do the same for you. I’ll expand on these thoughts in future posts.

Let us know in the comments if you think we’re deceivers or truth seekers and feel free to share your struggles in this area as well.

The Leibnizian Cosmological Argument:

We have a dilemma: The universe is either dependent or it is not dependent. If it is dependent, then its existence is explained by something else (That’s the definition of being dependent).  Now, the entity in which the existence of the universe is grounded cannot itself be a dependent being, otherwise we create an infinite regression.  If there is a never ending chain of explanations, then nothing ends up getting explained! It’s like trying to jump out of a bottomless pit — there is no foundation.  This entity must thus be an independent entity, otherwise known as God.

On the other hand, if the universe is not a dependent entity, then that implies that the universe must exist in every possible state of affairs, since it is not dependent on anything.  But surely the universe could have not existed, so there must be a reason why there exists something rather than nothing.

The Thomistic Cosmological Argument 1 (This comes from J. P. Moreland):

“Suppose that I went to you and said, “Could I borrow a typewriter?” And you said, “Absolutely. I don’t own one, but let me borrow one, and I’ll give it to you.” So you go to someone and say, “I’d like to loan a typewriter to my friend. Could I borrow one from you?” And the person says, “Absolutely. Unfortunately, I don’t own a typewriter. Let me go get one.”

“Well, if you keep doing that, then no one is going to get a typewriter, because everyone is a borrowing lender that has to get a typewriter first. Eventually, you’re going to have to stop with somebody who just has a typewriter who doesn’t have to borrow it first.”

“Now, the same thing is true for existing. If I have to be given existence by something before I can give existence to my children, whatever gave existence to me – if it had to get existence from something else, you eventually have to stop with something that just has a typewriter – that just exists and doesn’t come from anywhere.”

The Thomistic Cosmological Argument 2 (This comes from David Beck):

“Imagine you are seeing for the first time, a train moving past you. Baffled, you wonder how the boxcar is moving. You come to realize that it is being pulled by another boxcar in front of it, and so on, down the tracks beyond your view.”

“This picture allows us to visualize the various naturalistic scenarios so commonly heard in our society that attempts to describe how it is that things come to be in our world. “The cosmos is a great circle of life,” we are told. But, stringing boxcars all the way around the world in a circle until the last one hooks up to the first will still not explain the motion of even the first boxcar. And just so, if contingent things cause each other to exist in a closed circle, there is nothing to initiate the causality, nothing ever starts.”

“..The only explanation for the moving line of boxcars is that somewhere there is a locomotive powerful enough to pull the whole train while it itself does not need to be pulled. So the idea of a first cause is fuller than it might at first appear. It is the initiating cause of existence of everything in the system of causes, and it exists without any cause or dependency whatsoever. It is strictly uncaused. Note that it is not self-caused, as if it had deficiencies or needs that it is capable of supplying by itself. It is strictly uncaused, unlimited, infinite.”

The Kalam Cosmological Argument:

The universe either began to exist or it didn’t begin to exist.  If it began to exist, then its beginning was either caused or uncaused.  If the universe was caused, then the cause is either personal or impersonal.

Picture the universe like a balloon.  Science tells us that the universe is constantly expanding, similar to how a balloon expands when it’s inflated with air.  If we take an expanding balloon and go backwards, we see that it becomes smaller and smaller.  The same is true of the universe.  If the universe is currently expanding, then there must have been a point in the past where it was incredibly small.   Now just as balloons don’t inflate themselves, there had to be a cause for the beginning of the universe.  This cause couldn’t have been determined by nature, since we’re trying to explain how nature itself began.  Thus, the cause must have been a free agent who had the willpower to create.  We call such a being God.

It seems he side-steps my entire defense of P1, and simply asserts that it’s possible for God to cause something which does not exist to begin existing. How? He doesn’t know. God just “can”, he seems to think.

I proposed that God did so through “willing” an idea into existence. The whole purpose of the article was to lend credibility to this position and Scott has done nothing to discredit this. Like I said before, I have yet to encounter a sufficient explanation for why this would be impossible for God to do. He caused an idea (the universe) to exist and while I might now know how that works, it is not required to recognize it as a possibility. The burden of proof is therefore on Scott to show that this is an impossibility.

His computer analogy is inapplicable, as writing computer software is not the act of causing non-existent material to begin existing ex-nihilo, as God is purported to have done with the universe.

Of course, I said as much in the article. The computer analogy sought to refute the premise that “nothing which exists can cause something which does not exist to begin existing”. Something which exists (the programmer) can indeed cause something which did not exist (the computer program) to begin existing. What started off as a mere idea had then been formed into reality by being programmed. The analogy is quite applicable once you recognize it’s intended purpose, which is to show that premise one is improperly phrased and false.

I provided a thorough demonstration that it is logically impossible for something which exists to cause something which doesn’t exist to begin existing, as it entails a logical contradiction (that something would need to exist prior to itself, and thus exist and not-exist simultaneously). My critic would need to reconcile this contradiction, but unfortunately didn’t even make an effort to mention it in his counter-argument. Then he pretended that he’s never seen anyone demonstrate the logical impossibility of God creating the universe ex-nihilo…. Convenient.

The problem here is that you treat non-existence as if it were some object that God was causing. This logical contradiction is something I agree with but it isn’t relevant to theism. God took an idea that existed within Himself and caused that idea to exist as a reality. Where is the logical contradiction in that? It seems to me that all you’re basically saying is that God can’t cause X to exist because X would need to “exist” for Him to cause anything. Well, it exists in His mind!

He also tried to argue that Premise 1 must be false because of the logical impossibility of the contrary (something coming into existence from nothing). Aside from the fact that I haven’t even made this claim (and don’t need to), there is nothing *logically* impossible about something coming into existence on it’s own. This is just a baseless assertion on his part. If anything, it would appear to violate laws of causality, but this is the exact reason for the entire first half of my video, which he was quick to dismiss. In any case, laws of causality are *not* laws of logic, and it has never been demonstrated that something beginning to exist un-caused is an issue of logical impossibility, as no known law of logic would be broken.

That’s not what I tried to argue. Premise 1 is clearly false because the computer analogy showed how it is possible for something to cause that which does not exist to begin existing. What I attempted to do is rephrase the premise to what I thought avoided the criticism. This revision was based on ex nihilo nihil fit, which I believed was what you were trying to argue but it appears that was a wrong interpretation. How could you sanely reject that out of nothing, nothing comes? This has nothing to do with the law of causality and everything to do with logical principles that must be true by definition. What puzzles me further is that you claim God cannot cause X (which is really nothingness) to exist because it’s a logical contradiction but don’t realize that it’s a contradiction because of ex nihilo nihil fit. You’ve just destroyed your own argument!

It IS logically impossible, however, for something which exists to cause something which does not exist to begin existing. Again, this is because it would entail a logical contradiction. (And once again, a computer programmer writing software is not an example of this.)

The computer analogy is, however, an example of the act of causing an entity that did not previously exist into existence. You’re speaking of creating something from nothing it seems because that’s the only way to rule out the analogy. Then again, you think something from nothing is possible so that’s not a viable option. With that kind of thinking, your response goes nowhere.

His final objection is that the conclusion of my argument doesn’t follow from its premises even if they were true, since he does not understand how “God doesn’t exist” can follow from “God caused the universe to exist”. Of course, I addressed this objection in my follow-up video, entitled “Klarifying Kalam Kraziness”. Premise 5 (which says that God caused the universe to exist) is clearly tongue-in-cheek, and could have just as easily been worded to say, “God is DEFINED as a being who caused the universe to exist”. Yet this seems to have escaped my critic.

I should’ve addressed this more thoroughly in the first article but at the time it was just an after thought. God is not defined as a being who caused the universe to exist because that’s not a descriptive element of His divine nature. Rather, I see it more as an event that we invariably prescribe to God but disproving this event would only demonstrate that He did not cause the universe to exist. That’s the only real logical conclusion that I can see following from this argument.

In short, he didn’t even adequately *address* my argument, let alone refute it.

Have you changed your mind now? Good! (Just kidding)