NOTE: This was written by Josh and originally posted on Atheism is Dead (True Freethinker‘s predecessor)
I was doing a bit of link-chasing tonight when I ran across this article critical of William Lane Craig’s KCA. Just a few thoughts…
Although Dr. Craig’s support for it is uneven, I find the arguments used by atheologians in this regard to be inadequate also. The energy used to argue “infinity” is energy wasted, when modern cosmology does not posit that the universe is infinite, and when the term itself is ontologically negatively defined. While infinity has great use in mathematics, it is a mathematical abstraction, nothing more: and we should not attempt to apply it any more than we should seek a perfect circle or the square root of -1.
This is a revealing sentence. I’ve always been struck by the claim of “ontological negativity”, but I must admit that I don’t quite understand it. For example, atheists will throw around this little zinger that we can’t understand what “supernatural” is without the natural, or the immaterial without the material. Putting aside the “so what” answer, is that really true? Is infinity ontologically negative? And what would that mean? While I can’t grasp what infinity is, I certainly believe an unlimited thing could exist with having some kind of negativity buried at its core. But I digress…
He does support it elsewhere by using two arguments: our observation of the caused entities around us, and causality as a principle of human thought. Dr. Craig is no doubt aware, however, that to infer a necessary causality on a whole — the universe — on the basis of observation of such attribute in the parts — the existents around us – is a fallacy of composition. The attribute being transposed here, being caused, is relational and therefore cannot be transposed. Thus he cannot generalize from caused entities around us to the universe in this matter.
This is the heart of the matter. I’ll ask you all to do a bit of thinking about what he just said about the fallacy of composition. Is it really true that it is improper to- in all cases and at all times- infer a characteristic from the parts to the whole? Bricks are hard, and I suggest that the hardness of a wall can be inferred from the composition of a collection of hard things. On the contrary, there are new properties that arise from collections of lower level properties. To flip it backwards, just because water molecules are wet does not mean that quarks are wet. What we need to consider, then, is the nature of causality and the universe as a whole and in parts.
I’d say that our observation of causality in everyday life is evidence that effects must have causes. There is no physical substance known as cause, and there is no reason to think that all this physical stuff around us necessitates causality. From those intuitions (which, I believe, are reasonable and ought to be believed by every thinking person) we come to the conclusion that causality governs the physical.
But back to our problem with the jump from parts to the whole. Of course, there are times when one ought not make that leap. But usually there is an obvious reason not to. For example, if I were to say molecules are tiny, and a wall is made of molecules, therefore this wall is tiny, you would cry foul. That is because there is something blatantly quantitative that carries over when you are adding things like sizes. But hardness does not add up this way (in the case of bricks and the wall) because it is qualitative. To the best of our knowledge, is there something qualitatively different about the universe-as-a-whole from the universe-in-parts? There are some differences, obviously. Some parts of the universe are very hot. Is the universe itself hot? Or, parts of the universe are dark, but that wouldn’t suggest that the sum total of physical substances is dark (the question seems nonsensical).
All of this to say that the first premise of Craig’s argument is something that rests on an “either you see it or you don’t”. If you don’t see why causation is not just some physical maneuvering within the parts of the universe, then the best I can do is point out the same intuition in different lights until you get it. It seems like a lot of ad hoc escapism, but maybe there are good reasons for denying the universality of causation. I just don’t know of any.