Does the first cause theory depend on special pleading?

[achilles12604]

No less than 3 (cog,goat and duke) non -theists have accused me of using a logical fallacy of special pleading with regard to my idea of the first cause theory.

HISTORY:

From The God Hypothesis

Concerning this topic I put forth the following:

If the universe did begin, it must have had a cause. Nothing comes from nothing. If nothing happened or existed, then nothing would be the result. Obviously something happened because we are here. So something changed. Changes require causes.

This cause had to have certain requirements.

1) It must have been space less or at the very least outside of the confines of this universe.

2) It must have been timeless. Time it is shown by Einstein and others after him directly interacts with matter and space inside this universe. It is a factor which exists inside this universe. If there was no universe then there would be nothing to interact with. Hence the cause of the universe must be timeless.

I followed this with :

First you need to define a person. Then define the start of the person.

then you can identify the cause of that start. What you have done is list a series of results of different causes. But each of these steps had a cause which allowed it to be so. Likewise each of these steps would not have occurred except that something took place. Without that something, the step would not have occurred.

Lets say (because I am personally against abortion) that a person exists after conception. Before conception it is not a person but rather two sets of genes.

The genes come together and combine DNA which begins the growth process.

Strictly speaking the combining of the DNA is what caused the person to exist.

Quote:
Why must the existence of the universe have a cause? I'm not particularly well versed on universe theory, but I am aware that there is a line of thought whereby this universe is one in a long line of universes that expand, collapse, expand, collapse. Do they need a cause?


I am familiar with this theory. It is no longer accepted by scientists in every secular area of society (not to mention Christian).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steady_state_theory

Each step has a cause all the way back to the formation of the universe. So we are back at the "first cause".

I am making one assumption. That the universe did have a cause. However I am making this assumption based on 100% of the observable data ever collected or witnessed by mankind since our existence. There has never been an occurrence which did not have a cause.


If the universe was uncaused, and yet began, then you must explain how nothing changed, and yet the universe changed. It is a logical impossibility. Either the universe (or something which became the universe) changed, or nothing happened. But we know something happened, so something changed. Changes require causes. And around we go.

To this I received the following replies:

Cogitoergosum wrote:
What caused God to exist?
Or are you going to invent a special plea for GOD.

achilles12604 wrote:

Now if the universe began to exist and thus needed a cause, this cause had to meet certain criteria.

Criteria that you will invent to fit GOD.

Duke of Vandals wrote:

Cogitoergosum wrote:
What caused God to exist?
Or are you going to invent a special plea for GOD.

Cogi has asked an important question one which Christians do create special pleas for.

Goat Wrote:
You then declare God to be the one thing that 'always' existed, thereby giving
God an attribute that is not given to anything else. Because you say evertying was 'caused' to exist but god, you are using the logical fallacy of "Special Pleading".

From http://www.nizkor.org/features/fallacie ... ading.html

Quote:
Special Pleading is a fallacy in which a person applies standards, principles, rules, etc. to others while taking herself (or those she has a special interest in) to be exempt, without providing adequate justification for the exemption. This sort of "reasoning" has the following form:


You are giving the special attribute to God of 'not being caused', and evertying else to 'have a cause'. There is no reason to do that, except to try to 'define' god into place.

So lets investigate the possibility of me using a special pleading in my logic.


Using Goats link to special pleading fallacies we get the definition of special pleading.

Description of Special Pleading

Special Pleading is a fallacy in which a person applies standards, principles, rules, etc. to others while taking herself (or those she has a special interest in) to be exempt, without providing adequate justification for the exemption. This sort of "reasoning" has the following form:

1. Person A accepts standard(s) S and applies them to others in circumtance(s) C.
2. Person A is in circumstance(s) C.
3. Therefore A is exempt from S.

The person committing Special Pleading is claiming that he is exempt from certain principles or standards yet he provides no good reason for his exemption. That this sort of reasoning is fallacious is shown by the following extreme example:

1. Barbara accepts that all murderers should be punished for their crimes.
2. Although she murdered Bill, Barbara claims she is an exception because she really would not like going to prison.
3. Therefore, the standard of punishing murderers should not be applied to her.

This is obviously a blatant case of special pleading. Since no one likes going to prison, this cannot justify the claim that Barbara alone should be exempt from punishment.

Using their breakdown I will hence forth apply it in this manner:

G = God
U = Universe
CTC = criteria for cause


The claim made by these three non-theists is that I am using special pleading in reference to God.

The case I made about the universe is that anything which begins to exist must have a cause. Despite goat's demands that I prove this, it is a universally accepted scientific theory. If goat wants to debate this universally accepted fact then start a thread on it and I would like Goat to back up his demand for proof with at least ONE scientific source (author, magazine, anything at all) which agrees with him claim that something can in fact come from nothing and that things spontaneously occur without any reason what so ever.

Moving on with THIS topic, I made the following claims:

1) Anything which begins to exist, must have a cause.

2) The universe began to exist.

3) Therefore the universe must have a cause.

So long as my one assumption (anything that begins to exist must have a cause) is correct, this logic follows along correctly. So there is no fallacy here.

Next I wrote that the cause for the universe must have several attributes.

(disclaimer: before beginning I would like to point out that I am aware of the multiverse theory and that this totally unproven theory allows for the cause of THIS universe to be within another space and time. But then the problem is simply moved out one more universe so for the sake of moving the topic at hand along, I am going to assume only this universe exists)

1) It must be space less. By this I mean it must be outside the confines of the universe it created. This is because the cause of the universe can not depend on the universe's existence. Since the universe (remember my disclaimer) encompasses all matter, anything without anything, (no matter, space,etc) can be defined as space less.

http://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/ask_a ... 0902a.html

http://www.newton.dep.anl.gov/newton/as ... AST224.HTM
Author: janette l gubala
What is beyond space?

Response #: 1 of 1
Author: asmith
Nothing! Either space goes on forever (is infinite) or it comes back around
in some kind of closed loop, but the way we understand space right now, it
is impossible for it to have any edges, and so there is no direction you
could point and say "50 yards in that direction space ends". Since there
are not any ends, there is not really any way to understand what "beyond"
means. But there could be other things that "exist" that are somehow
outside our own universe - parallel universes!

2) It must be timeless since without reference to space, time is meaningless. Einsteins theories show us the direct correlation of time and matter.

Now the universe does not fit these two criteria for obvious reasons. Therefore going back to my original point, the universe (U) can not fit the criteria for the cause of the universe (CFC).


Christian theology presents a God which does fit these criteria however. We portray him as both outside space and timeless. Also the design of God came BEFORE the criteria for creation.

So the argument we are just designing God to fit the criteria isn't valid since God pre-dates the criteria.

We can not be molding the criteria to fit God because the criteria for the cause of the universe is fixed. For example I could not make the claim that being 5'5" was a criteria for the cause of the universe because it invalidates the logical order of things because for anything to be 5'5" it must have something to compare to and it must already exist, both of which are impossible without the universe's existence.

So we Christians present a God whose characterizes were in existence before the question about the criteria for cause of the universe was asked. It is just a happy coincidence that the criteria of God and the criteria for the cause of the universe are the same. (or is it?)



IS MY ARGUMENT SPECIAL PLEADING?

The person committing Special Pleading is claiming that he is exempt from certain principles or standards yet he provides no good reason for his exemption.

This is the key sentence in deciding if I am guilty of special pleading or not. The standards I have set for the universe and deny for God fall into my first premise:

[center]Whatever begins to exist requires a cause[/center]

I say that this premise DOES apply to the universe and it DOES NOT apply to God.

Here is my reasoning for this.

Why it does apply to the universe:

Within this universe, every experience and experiment conducted by mankind shows that if nothing happens, then nothing happens. If you do not plant a seed, then a tree will not grow. However if a tree does grow, then a seed MUST have been planted. There is no alternative. Since this rule is consistent throughout the entire universe, it is logical to think that this same law applies to the universe itself. In addition to this we have evidence of such a beginning. We have discovered the once hypothetical background radiation which would have followed an explosive beginning to the universe. Red light shift indicates that all other galaxies are moving away from us. This would be very likely if the universe did have an explosive beginning but unlikely if the universe always was.

Why it does not apply to God:

Did God begin to exist? Scientifically there is no answer. The only answer can be found in theology and that answer is no.

It is important to remember here that I am not changing or reinventing God so he fits with the criteria of this argument. The idea that God was eternal dates back to at least the writing of genesis which is well before the BCE./CE switch. So I am not fitting the facts to God, not am I fitting God to the facts. They are both the same.

Once again the CFC of the universe is fixed. If the universe began (which is an accepted analysis of science), then its cause must fall within certain guidelines, which I established. The fact that the God described in the bible happens to fit these guidelines is not the product of theology but rather of coincidence.


CONCLUSION:

With my reasons for applying the criteria to the universe and not to God in mind I can safely say that I have not committed the logical fallacy of special pleading.

The only case in which I would have done this is if God was supposed to be held to the same standards as everything else within this universe. From Goat's source :

[center]2. Person A is in circumstance(s) C.[/center]

But the God of Christianity does not fit into the circumstances applied to the universe. The laws of the universe don't apply to God simply due to his nature.

Looking at this from the other side, if the laws of this universe applied to God, then god could not have been the first cause because he would be dependent on the universe. But then we are still left with the problem of the cause of the universe.

In essence what I am trying to say in as lengthy manner as possible is that whatever caused the universe, IS NOT bound by the laws of this universe. Therefore, I can not be guilty of special pleading because person A (God) is not in the circumstances described for and applied to the universe itself.

[Furrowed Brow]

I just had another thought about virtual particles.

With regard to virtual particles, is it, or is it not true that they are a theoretical and untested hypothesis?

Now this next part is important to read correctly because I can be very easily misunderstood. I personally do not doubt the existence of virtual partilces. This being said, while I can very easily accept the existence of virtual particles, dispite thier lack of study, I can not accept that anyone here can be sure that these particles are in fact uncaused. We are unsure of virtual particles existence, much less their characteristics. So isn't it just as plausible that if they do exist, the do in fact have a cause which is of yet unknown? If this were the case then the LCE of the universe would remain intact and there would be no violation.

Honest and open question . . .

Are we sure that virtual particles do not in fact have a cause which we are unaware of? After all it was once believed that flys spontaniously appeared until studies were conducted and fly's eggs were discovered.

I think the answer is yeah sure. There may always be the possibility of a hidden variable. However, the reason virtual particles gained a foothold in theory is, as I understand it, and I think we now need QED, is that Heisenbergs uncertainty principle opens a window of opportunity for something to pop in and out of existence, as long as the probability of its duration and energy when multiplied are not greater than h. So the attitude is, we have a rule that permits this to happen, without the need for the event to be caused.

It is like there is no rule against something popping into existence out of nothing, but as soon as it does that there are some rules it cannot then break- rules like travelling a distance no further than its Compton wavelength.

I suspect your appeal for a hidden variable stems from the common sense need to impute a cause where there is an effect. But we get our common sense from inductive logic and observations. Which for millennia have only been use to negotiating macro sized objects and phenomena.

That said we should always be open to the possibility of a deeper explanation, and not use "well the quantum world is weird" to justify accepting weird interpretations of quantum phenomena. However, there is still no logical justification to hang on blindly to a seed/tree view of causality.

Bringing this back round to your OP. These kind of considerations turn your argument into and "If....then...." argument.

[achilles12604]

I just had another thought about virtual particles.

With regard to virtual particles, is it, or is it not true that they are a theoretical and untested hypothesis?

Now this next part is important to read correctly because I can be very easily misunderstood. I personally do not doubt the existence of virtual partilces. This being said, while I can very easily accept the existence of virtual particles, dispite thier lack of study, I can not accept that anyone here can be sure that these particles are in fact uncaused. We are unsure of virtual particles existence, much less their characteristics. So isn't it just as plausible that if they do exist, the do in fact have a cause which is of yet unknown? If this were the case then the LCE of the universe would remain intact and there would be no violation.

Honest and open question . . .

Are we sure that virtual particles do not in fact have a cause which we are unaware of? After all it was once believed that flys spontaniously appeared until studies were conducted and fly's eggs were discovered.

I think the answer is yeah sure. There may always be the possibility of a hidden variable. However, the reason virtual particles gained a foothold in theory is, as I understand it, and I think we now need QED, is that Heisenbergs uncertainty principle opens a window of opportunity for something to pop in and out of existence, as long as the probability of its duration and energy when multiplied are not greater than h. So the attitude is, we have a rule that permits this to happening, without the need for the event to be caused.

I read up on this and Heisenberg's uncertainty principle is what can allow this to violate the conservation of energy. However it says nothing about the origins of the particles. so long as the particles stay is very short, the disruption to conservation of energy is minute.

I think that the cause for these particles would have little to do with the principles governing their existence. I could be totally off.

[Confused]

Achilles:

Quote:

Description of Special Pleading

Special Pleading is a fallacy in which a person applies standards, principles, rules, etc. to others while taking herself (or those she has a special interest in) to be exempt, without providing adequate justification for the exemption. This sort of "reasoning" has the following form:

1. Person A accepts standard(s) S and applies them to others in circumtance(s) C.
2. Person A is in circumstance(s) C.
3. Therefore A is exempt from S.

The person committing Special Pleading is claiming that he is exempt from certain principles or standards yet he provides no good reason for his exemption. That this sort of reasoning is fallacious is shown by the following extreme example:

1. Barbara accepts that all murderers should be punished for their crimes.
2. Although she murdered Bill, Barbara claims she is an exception because she really would not like going to prison.
3. Therefore, the standard of punishing murderers should not be applied to her.

This is obviously a blatant case of special pleading. Since no one likes going to prison, this cannot justify the claim that Barbara alone should be exempt from punishment.

Your premise fails one one major point: you are claiming God is exempt from needing a first cause but you provide no adequate reason why. You claim the Universe must have a first cause based on science, cosmology, physics, etc.... We trace back to the big bang etc.... Ok. I might not agree that you can prove the universe needed a first cause, but I still can see the special plea when you fail to provide any reasoning as to why God doesn't require a first cause. You use science etc.... to validate the universe requiring a first cause, but only a book to show that God didn't require one. That is hardly adequate or equal reasoning. Without relating God to being the first cause of the universe, the argument still fails to show why God didn't require a first cause. To fall back on religious belief is a fallacy since there exists no logic behind it.

[Confused]

I just had another thought about virtual particles.

With regard to virtual particles, is it, or is it not true that they are a theoretical and untested hypothesis?

Now this next part is important to read correctly because I can be very easily misunderstood. I personally do not doubt the existence of virtual partilces. This being said, while I can very easily accept the existence of virtual particles, dispite thier lack of study, I can not accept that anyone here can be sure that these particles are in fact uncaused. We are unsure of virtual particles existence, much less their characteristics. So isn't it just as plausible that if they do exist, the do in fact have a cause which is of yet unknown? If this were the case then the LCE of the universe would remain intact and there would be no violation.

Honest and open question . . .

Are we sure that virtual particles do not in fact have a cause which we are unaware of? After all it was once believed that flys spontaniously appeared until studies were conducted and fly's eggs were discovered.

I think the answer is yeah sure. There may always be the possibility of a hidden variable. However, the reason virtual particles gained a foothold in theory is, as I understand it, and I think we now need QED, is that Heisenbergs uncertainty principle opens a window of opportunity for something to pop in and out of existence, as long as the probability of its duration and energy when multiplied are not greater than h. So the attitude is, we have a rule that permits this to happening, without the need for the event to be caused.

I read up on this and Heisenberg's uncertainty principle is what can allow this to violate the conservation of energy. However it says nothing about the origins of the particles. so long as the particles stay is very short, the disruption to conservation of energy is minute.

I think that the cause for these particles would have little to do with the principles governing their existence. I could be totally off.

But it also never shows an an elementary particle can cease to exist since kinetic energy can't be totally eliminated. An electron discharges its photon when a collison occurs. The photon then leaps across a gap to join with another electron. The point at which an electron and a postitron (its opposite) collide is the vertex at which point the photon is released. Since the universe is made of innumerous amounts of matter and antimatter, the photon has no problem joining up with another electron. It is a continuous cycle in which it makes no claim about the origin of the first particle. There is just as much validity behind saying it has always existed as there would be to say God has always existed. Either way, elementary particles aren't claiming they needed no first cause, you are claiming that God didn't.

[Furrowed Brow]

I read up on this and Heisenberg's uncertainty principle is what can allow this to violate the conservation of energy. However it says nothing about the origins of the particles. so long as the particles stay is very short, the disruption to conservation of energy is minute.

I think that the cause for these particles would have little to do with the principles governing their existence. I could be totally off.

Exactly. The principles accepted by science (at present) say nothing about a prior cause. It is a license. Not a prescription. The motivation to keep pursuing the notion there should be a prior cause, is a common sense prejudice. But nature does not have to obey common sense. Moreover, seed/tree causality is a common sense prejudice that does not make for a logical principle.

[jjg]

The first cause arguments that were synthesized by Aquinas have little to do with physics, but with how our minds participate with reality to obtain knowledge.

The argument from motion for example runs like this;

Motion is the transition from what is potential to becoming actual as realized as an idea in our minds.

Mind must participate with reality for true knowledge to occur.

If humans exist than a mind must realize us as well. It's the anthropic principle.

It's a view that God is conveying ideas through the material world the way a sculptor uses material to convey an idea through a sculpture.

[The Duke of Vandals]

I see Achilles discarded his invalid argument back on page 6 after my challenge proved the wording to be invalid. However, his new argument supports Dawkins' anthropic principle.

7) Anything effecting a change before the organization of the universe must be outside of the universe and its laws in a physical manner, a temporal manner and/or, have very different "laws" or characteristics attributed to it so that it does not conform to the above "cause and effect law" attributed to this universe.

The anthropic principle is usually applied not to planets but to universes. Physicists have suggested that the laws and constants of physics are too good as if the universe were set up to favour our eventual evolution. It is as though there were, say, half a dozen dials representing the major constants of physics. Each of the dials could in principle be tuned to any of a wide range of values. Almost all of these knob-twiddlings would yield a universe in which life would be impossible. Some universes would fizzle out within the first picosecond. Others would contain no elements heavier than hydrogen and helium. In yet others, matter would never condense into stars (and you need stars in order to forge the elements of chemistry and hence life). You can estimate the very low odds against the six knobs all just happening to be correctly tuned, and conclude that a divine knob-twiddler must have been at work. But, as we have already seen, that explanation is vacuous because it begs the biggest question of all. The divine knob twiddler would himself have to have been at least as improbable as the settings of his knobs.

Again, the anthropic principle delivers its devastatingly neat solution. Physicists already have reason to suspect that our universe everything we can see is only one universe among perhaps billions. Some theorists postulate a multiverse of foam, where the universe we know is just one bubble. Each bubble has its own laws and constants. Our familiar laws of physics are parochial bylaws. Of all the universes in the foam, only a minority has what it takes to generate life. And, with anthropic hindsight, we obviously have to be sitting in a member of that minority, because, well, here we are, aren't we? As physicists have said, it is no accident that we see stars in our sky, for a universe without stars would also lack the chemical elements necessary for life. There may be universes whose skies have no stars: but they also have no inhabitants to notice the lack. Similarly, it is no accident that we see a rich diversity of living species: for an evolutionary process that is capable of yielding a species that can see things and reflect on them cannot help producing lots of other species at the same time. The reflective species must be surrounded by an ecosystem, as it must be surrounded by stars.*

Achilles goes on to postulate that god is the thing that "set the knobs" to what they are today, but we know this to be nonsenical. Complex things don't just happen and "always existed" is a tremendous cop out.

But I digress.

To quote Achilles again, his special pleading is by asserting there is a thing outside the universe called "god". We have no evidence a thing called "god" existed inside or outside our universe. All observed evidence suggests a thing called god is completely impossible.

So, kudos for revising your argument and not conceding the debate, but your revised stance is still untenable. Ultimately, you are simply trying to justify "goddidit" which is not a justifyable / logical / acceptable / tenable position.

-----------------
Sources:

* http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/dawkins ... index.html

[achilles12604]

The first cause arguments that were synthesized by Aquinas have little to do with physics, but with how our minds participate with reality to obtain knowledge.

The argument from motion for example runs like this;

Motion is the transition from what is potential to becoming actual as realized as an idea in our minds.

Mind must participate with reality for true knowledge to occur.

If humans exist than a mind must realize us as well. It's the anthropic principle.

It's a view that God is conveying ideas through the material world the way a sculptor uses material to convey an idea through a sculpture.

Actually the "first cause" argument goes futher back to Plato, not Aquinus. He simply used it as I do.

[achilles12604]

I see Achilles discarded his invalid argument back on page 6 after my challenge proved the wording to be invalid. However, his new argument supports Dawkins' anthropic principle.

7) Anything effecting a change before the organization of the universe must be outside of the universe and its laws in a physical manner, a temporal manner and/or, have very different "laws" or characteristics attributed to it so that it does not conform to the above "cause and effect law" attributed to this universe.

The anthropic principle is usually applied not to planets but to universes. Physicists have suggested that the laws and constants of physics are too good as if the universe were set up to favour our eventual evolution. It is as though there were, say, half a dozen dials representing the major constants of physics. Each of the dials could in principle be tuned to any of a wide range of values. Almost all of these knob-twiddlings would yield a universe in which life would be impossible. Some universes would fizzle out within the first picosecond. Others would contain no elements heavier than hydrogen and helium. In yet others, matter would never condense into stars (and you need stars in order to forge the elements of chemistry and hence life). You can estimate the very low odds against the six knobs all just happening to be correctly tuned, and conclude that a divine knob-twiddler must have been at work. But, as we have already seen, that explanation is vacuous because it begs the biggest question of all. The divine knob twiddler would himself have to have been at least as improbable as the settings of his knobs.

Again, the anthropic principle delivers its devastatingly neat solution. Physicists already have reason to suspect that our universe everything we can see is only one universe among perhaps billions. Some theorists postulate a multiverse of foam, where the universe we know is just one bubble. Each bubble has its own laws and constants. Our familiar laws of physics are parochial bylaws. Of all the universes in the foam, only a minority has what it takes to generate life. And, with anthropic hindsight, we obviously have to be sitting in a member of that minority, because, well, here we are, aren't we? As physicists have said, it is no accident that we see stars in our sky, for a universe without stars would also lack the chemical elements necessary for life. There may be universes whose skies have no stars: but they also have no inhabitants to notice the lack. Similarly, it is no accident that we see a rich diversity of living species: for an evolutionary process that is capable of yielding a species that can see things and reflect on them cannot help producing lots of other species at the same time. The reflective species must be surrounded by an ecosystem, as it must be surrounded by stars.*

Achilles goes on to postulate that god is the thing that "set the knobs" to what they are today, but we know this to be nonsenical. Complex things don't just happen and "always existed" is a tremendous cop out.

But I digress.

To quote Achilles again, his special pleading is by asserting there is a thing outside the universe called "god". We have no evidence a thing called "god" existed inside or outside our universe. All observed evidence suggests a thing called god is completely impossible.

So, kudos for revising your argument and not conceding the debate, but your revised stance is still untenable. Ultimately, you are simply trying to justify "goddidit" which is not a justifyable / logical / acceptable / tenable position.

-----------------
Sources:

* http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/dawkins ... index.html

Actually I didn't think I changed my argument. Could you show me what principles changed?

[The Duke of Vandals]

Actually I didn't think I changed my argument. Could you show me what principles changed?

Reworded... changed. toe-MATE-oh... tah-MOT-oh.

It makes little difference. You set out to prove your argument doesn't rely on a special pleading. As I and others have demonstrated, it most certainly does.