Saturday, October 19, 2019

Rationality Rules vs. Craig’s Causal Premise (p. 4)

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Rationality Rules vs. Craig’s Causal Premise
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Conclusion



Woodford’s replies relied heavily on fallacious and confused reasoning (the straw man fallacy in particular). Judging from the YouTube comments on Woodford’s video, many viewers didn’t notice that Woodford was attacking straw men. Granted, it’s understandable why they might not have known about Craig including both efficient and material causes for the “has a cause” notion because Woodford (for whatever reason) omitted mentioning that important fact. But even so, even if Craig had only the efficient cause in mind, Woodford’s attack on the first justification where Woodford concluded “This isn’t a distraction; it’s a refutation” would still be a distraction and not a refutation of any claim Craig actually made in the video clips. Woodford also accused Craig of a black-and-white fallacy Craig never made, and a fallacy of division Craig never made. Why did so many viewers not notice this?

Think of how clever politicians dodge a question; they give an answer that contains material closely related to the actual question but nonetheless doesn’t answer it. Red herrings and straw men have a greater chance of hoodwinking the audience when the material is closely related to the matter at hand while still being irrelevant. For example, given the context, the position “If something [like the universe] can come into being from nothing, then it becomes inexplicable why just anything or everything doesn’t come into being from nothing” is similar to the claim “If the universe (the whole) came into being uncaused, then some things within the universe (the parts) are uncaused.” The positions are so similar one could understand how they could be confused for being the same claim when they aren’t. I’m not saying Woodford was deliberately deceiving his audience. In fact I think he probably wasn’t and that he made sincere errors in his thinking. You can try to spot such errors yourself by asking the following questions when person B attacks the position of person A:
  • What is person A’s actual position?
  • What is person B’s objection, and does this objection actually attack A’s position?
  • Is there a gap between what is claimed and what is shown when B attacks A’s position?
If one asked these questions, they might have noticed that “creation and causation are not two sides of the same coin” doesn’t attack Craig’s actual claim of “Something cannot come into being from nothing” supporting premise 1’. Even if Woodford showed that “creation and causation are not two sides of the same coin” there’s a gap between this and refuting the idea of “Something cannot come into being from nothing” supporting premise 1’.

Straw men and red herrings are tragically common on the internet, and we should be careful about not only spotting such errors but being careful to avoid making them ourselves.

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Rationality Rules vs. Craig’s Causal Premise (p. 3)

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Rationality Rules vs. Craig’s Causal Premise
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Craig’s Second Justification: The Inexplicability Objection



At around 11:35 of Craig’s video, Craig says:
If something can come into being from nothing, then it becomes inexplicable why just anything or everything doesn’t come into being from nothing. Think about it; why don’t bicycles and Beethoven and root beer out of nothing? Why is it only universes that can come into being from nothing? What makes nothingness so discriminatory?
Woodford responds by strawmanning Craig again, claiming Craig made a fallacy of division he never made. For those who don’t know, the fallacy of division is the fallacy of incorrectly inferring something is true of the parts because it is true for the whole. The example Woodford gives is this:
  1. The United States is rich.
  2. The United States has citizens.
  3. Therefore, the United States’ citizens are rich.
In the case of Craig, Woodford believes it’s something like “If the universe (the whole) came into being uncaused, then some things within the universe (the parts) are uncaused.” But this is a straw man; Craig never made this claim. To see how this fallacy of division (FOD) claim is not the same claim as Craig’s inexplicability claim, note how “The universe came into being uncaused and nothing within the universe is uncaused” is logically inconsistent with the FOD claim but logically consistent with Craig’s inexplicability claim (there’s no self-contradiction in the universe beginning to exist uncaused but it being inexplicable that anything and everything within the universe doesn’t come into being from nothing). Woodford never attacks Craig’s actual claim here.

So why does Craig’s inexplicability claim matter? One reason is that, if true, it would seem to imply that “Something cannot come into being from nothing” is not merely the best explanation for why anything or everything doesn’t come into being from nothing, it’s the only explanation!

There might be another reason. At around 11:54 to 12:16 of Craig’s video, Craig says:
Why is it only universes that can come into being from nothing? What makes nothingness so discriminatory? There can’t be anything about nothingness that favors universes for nothingness doesn’t have any properties. Nor can anything constrain nothingness since there isn’t anything to be constrained.
It seems that Craig might believe it would be special pleading to say that universes can come into being from nothing but not other stuff like root beer and bicycles. Note that the reason behind this doesn’t have anything to do with “The parts have the property simply because the whole does” but rather the nature of nothingness itself.

Craig’s Third Justification: Empirical Evidence



Craig says at around 12:17 of his video that “Common experience and scientific evidence confirm the truth of premise 1’.” Although Woodford doesn’t quote Craig’s third justification Woodford does kind of allude to it. He says this at around 7:03 to 7:29:
Sure, nobody sincerely believes that macroscopic things can pop into existence without a cause, and for good reason: our empirical observations and more importantly, our objective verifiable evidence clearly shows that when macroscopic things ‘begin to exist’ they do so via causation. However, and this was Scott’s excellent point, the exact same objective, verifiable evidence equally shows that all new macroscopic things are comprised of material that already existed. Hence Craig and his ilk are cherry-picking in the extreme. They are confidently asserting that macroscopic things are caused in the classical sense, and yet they’re rejecting that all new macroscopic things are merely the rearrangement of already existing material.
Does it follow that Craig and his ilk are cherry-picking observations? No, because not all inductive predicates are created equal. To illustrate, consider this inductive argument:
  1. All observed humans came from other humans (whether via the standard way, in vitro fertilization, or whatever).
  2. Therefore, all humans came from other humans.
If Woodford rejects this conclusion, does it mean he’s cherry-picking observations? No, that would be just as non sequitur as believing Craig and his ilk were cherry-picking observations. Whether you’re a creationist or evolutionist, you’ll probably recognize that there’s something wrong with this inductive argument. The problem is that not all inductive predicates (the predicate here being “came from other humans”) are “projectible” i.e. reasonable to extrapolate for the given extrapolation region. We have excellent reason to believe the predicate of (1) is not projectible. Similarly, Craig believes we have excellent reason to believe a predicate like “comprised of material that already exists” for the sample class of “new observed macroscopic physical objects” is not projectible. What reasons are those? Well, the universe began to exist and something cannot come into being from nothing, which together imply that the universe (a presumably macroscopic physical thing) was a new thing that did not have a material cause.

Woodford accuses “Craig and his ilk” of “confidently asserting that macroscopic things are caused in the classical sense” but this doesn’t seem to be true either. Unfortunately Woodford never defines what he means by “classical causation” but presumably he means the causation of classical mechanics, which is deterministic and has the cause temporally precede the effect. Craig doesn’t believe either criteria holds for all macroscopic objects, especially the universe. Craig believes the universe began to exist and he also believes the universe’s cause was simultaneous with the effect, and he believes God indeterministically caused the universe into being.

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Rationality Rules vs. Craig’s Causal Premise (p. 2)

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Rationality Rules vs. Craig’s Causal Premise
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Craig’s First Justification, Part 2: Denying Premise 1’



In one of Woodford’s clips William Lane Craig says:
To claim that something coming into being from nothing is worse than magic. When a magician pulls the rabbit out of a hat, at least you’ve got the magician, not to mention the hat. But if you deny premise 1’ you’ve got to think the whole universe just appeared at some point in the past for no reason whatsoever. But nobody sincerely believes that things, say, a horse or an Eskimo village can just pop into being without a cause.
At around 5:47 to 6:33 Woodford addresses the claim that denying premise 1’ means you’d have to believe the whole universe came into being sometime in the past for no reason at all (i.e. came into being uncaused), to which Woodford promptly replies, “Except no, we don’t.” Except logic says, “Yes, we do.” Seriously, one can rigorously prove this using symbolic logic. For those who are logic savvy (if you’re not, see parts 1 and 2 of my introductory logic series which contains all the information needed to follow the proof I will show; otherwise I will come back to plain English in a little bit), here are the propositional variables:
  • B = the universe began to exist.
  • C = the universe has cause of its beginning.
We can rigorously prove that believing the denial of premise 1’ (i.e. ¬(B → C)) means you logically have to believe that the universe began to exist without a cause (i.e. B ∧  ¬C).
  1. ¬(B → C)

  1. ¬(B ∧ ¬C) indirect proof assumption
    1. ¬B ∨ ¬¬C 2, De Morgan’s Law
    2. ¬B ∨ C 3, double negation
    3. B conditional proof assumption
      1. ¬¬B 5, double negation
      2. C 4, 6 disjunctive syllogism
    1. B → C 5-7 conditional proof
    2. ¬(B → C) ∧ (B → C) 1, 8 conjunction
  1. B ∧ ¬C 2-9 indirect proof
Formal logic aside, how does Woodford dispute Craig’s claim? Woodford attacks a straw man and accuses Craig of a black-and-white fallacy (also known as “false dichotomy”) he never made: the universe either has a cause or it popped into being from nothing, when a third option to this false dichotomy is that the universe did not begin to exist (it always existed) and had no cause. Craig never says “Either the universe popped into being uncaused or it had a cause” in any of Woodford’s clips, nor does premise 1’ (“If the universe began to exist, then the universe has cause of its beginning”) imply any such dichotomy. The actual dichotomy premise 1’ implies is that either (a) the universe did not begin to exist; or (b) it had a cause. (I could use symbolic logic to prove this, but if you think about it and remember that 1’ says “If the universe began to exist, then the universe has cause of its beginning” you might see why this would imply that either the universe had a cause or it had no beginning.) So saying the universe is both uncaused and never began to exist would not at all constitute denying that if the universe began to exist, then the universe has cause of its beginning. If one denied premise 1’ and justified that denial by saying the universe always existed and was never caused, that would be committing the red herring fallacy.

If you had trouble with the symbolic logic showing that denying the first premise meant you’d have to believe the universe began to exist uncaused, here’s one way to think about it: denying “Everything that begins to exist has a cause” commits you to believing there is something that began to exist that had no cause; denying “Every universe that began to exist had a cause” commits you to believing there’s a universe that began to exist without a cause, and if you narrow that claim to just this universe as 1’ does, denying 1’ commits you to believing our universe began to exist without a cause. Craig was absolutely right and Woodford just didn’t understand the logic of the situation.

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Rationality Rules vs. Craig’s Causal Premise (p. 1)

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Rationality Rules vs. Craig’s Causal Premise
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Introduction



Stephen Woodford has a YouTube channel called Rationality Rules and he posted a video titled Creation and Causation (a Reply to Dr. Craig) responding to justifications of William Lane Craig’s premise 1’ “If the universe began to exist, then the universe has cause of its beginning,” which Craig contrasts from the less modest claim premise 1 “Whatever begins to exist has a cause of its beginning” (which Craig has had different wordings for, e.g. “Everything that begins to exist has a cause”). In this article I’ll go through Woodford’s replies.

Craig’s First Justification, Part 1: Coming into Being from Nothing



Before getting to the first justification I’ll explain some philosophical terms. A material cause is the stuff something is made out of, and an efficient cause is that which produces an effect. For example, when an artist creates a wooden sculpture, the wood is the material cause and the artist is the efficient cause.

Craig’s first justification is that “Something cannot come into being from nothing.” At 3:22 to 3:24 Woodford says that “to say that something has come into being is to say that something has begun to exist, that it’s been created” and later says the first sentence (“If the universe began to exist, then it has a cause”) is about causation, and the second (“Something cannot come from nothing’”) is about creation. But it’s really about both. For Craig, a premise like “Everything that begins to exist has a cause” includes both material and efficient causation. You can see that in this Reasonable Faith webpage but you can also see it in the very Kalam Cosmological Argument video Woodford clips from (1:08:11 to 1:08:29):
Now in the first premise, the premise doesn’t stipulate what kind of cause there has to be for what begins to exist. It’s just saying that something can’t come into existence without some sort of a cause—a material cause, an efficient cause, whatever.
So to say that the universe began to exist without a cause means beginning to exist with no efficient cause and no material cause, i.e. coming into being from nothing.

Woodford doesn’t seem to understand this, and he goes on an inadvertent tangent about quantum mechanics (which he doesn’t correctly understand) and classical causation that doesn’t really go anywhere relevant in addressing Craig’s actual claim.

In talking about quantum superposition Woodford says “we see atoms both excited and not excited at the same time (which calls into question the law of noncontradiction)” which is misleading at best. There’s quantum mechanics, which has loads of math that is very good at making successful empirical predictions, and there are various empirically indistinguishable interpretations of quantum mechanics which put forth ideas about the underlying reality behind the math. I’ll spare you the mathematical details of eigenvalues and such (I recommend David Z. Albert’s excellent Quantum Mechanics and Experience for a gentle introduction to that sort of thing) instead giving a rough general idea behind the math. In some cases we have a mathematical structure representing the state of an object (e.g. an electron) and another mathematical structure called an operator that acts on the state to tell us what measurement we’d see for a given property (e.g. if the electron would be “spin up” when measured along a particular axis) if we did a particular measurement.

In some cases, quantum mechanics will tell us “If you do that measurement, you’ll definitely get this result.” But in some cases, the state is in a superposition such that it can’t give us a definite answer as to what our measurement will be when combined with the operator, and quantum mechanics instead gives us the probabilities of the measurement results. So what’s really going on here behind the superposition math? One idea is that the object (e.g. electron) in question doesn’t have a definite property value for the property being measured until it’s actually measured. An even crazier idea, which Woodford presents here, is that the object both has the property and doesn’t have the property at the same time. However, that sort of contradiction is nowhere in the math of quantum mechanics. Mathematics can represent contradictions, and there are absolutely no contradictions in the math of quantum mechanics. The idea that a self-contradiction is present behind the math is an interpretation of quantum mechanics, and it is not a very plausible one.

Superposition confusion aside, Woodford kind of contradicts himself in this video at around 5:04 to 5:29, because he says quantum mechanics “hasn’t been shown to violate the law of conservation of energy. Every atom is accounted for; everything, so far as we know, is created from already existing material” (the conservation of energy isn’t exactly true since photon energy can be lost as space expands, but let’s ignore that for the nonce) yet he says we have billions of things “coming into being” without a “classical cause and perhaps even without a cause at all.” No, not without a cause at all, because he just conceded that all those things coming into being came from pre-existing material which means all those things had material causes.

At 5:29 to 5:40 Woodford concludes with:
Thus creation and causation are not two sides of the same coin, and it’s a mistake to treat them as such. This isn’t a distraction. It’s a refutation.
It’s a distraction because it doesn’t refute any position Craig actually put forth in the clip Woodford showed. Quantum mechanics doesn’t do anything to show that things can come into being with no efficient cause and no material cause. Nor did anything Woodford say about quantum mechanics (as flawed as it was) show that causation and creation (coming into being) aren’t closely related. Nor did Craig claim they were closely related, at least not explicitly.

But surely Craig at least implied creation and causation were closely related when used he “Something cannot come into being from nothing” to justify premise 1’? Yes, but specifics matter; the specific relation here is one of justification, viz. “Something cannot come into being from nothing” justifying “If the universe began to exist, then it has a cause.” If the universe began to exist without a cause (efficient or material) then it came into being from nothing, and if something cannot come into being (creation) from nothing, then premise 1’ is true, and causation and creation are intimately related in that sense. Perhaps there is a sense in which creation and causation are not closely related, but they are closely related in the sense of justifying premise 1’ and nothing Woodford said about quantum mechanics etc. addressed this relation. Woodford offered a lot of distraction but no real refutation of Craig’s actual claim here.

Woodford could perhaps be forgiven for not realizing that Craig left it open whether the cause in 1’ is efficient or material (despite what Craig clearly said in the video Woodford quoted from), but even if it were an efficient cause Woodford’s reply still wouldn’t work. Suppose that by “cause” Craig only meant “efficient cause.” Would “Something cannot come from nothing” fail to justify “If the universe began to exist, then it has a cause”? No. In this context the “universe” includes all of contiguous physical spacetime, so if the universe began to exist at time t it couldn’t have a material cause because a material cause would be pre-existing material at some time t* < t, in which case the universe (which includes all of contiguous physical spacetime) existed at time t*, contradicting the claim the universe began to exist at t. So if the universe began to exist it could not have a material cause, and if it began to exist without an efficient cause also, then it began to exist without a material cause and without an efficient cause, i.e. it came into being from nothing. So “Something cannot come from nothing” still relevantly justifies premise 1’.

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