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Tom
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Date Joined Jul 2001
Total Posts : 10353
| Posted 10/4/2006 10:48 AM (GMT -6) |   | |
The Kalam argument for the existence of God is well-known. Bill Craig is probably its best-known champion today. I like the argument, the whole cause-effect argument for an ultimate and necessary cause for all continent things. So…
Craig adds something to this. He argues further that there’s good reason to believe that this ultimate first-cause is ‘personal’. It basically says that ‘effects’ can’t be greater than their ‘causes’. If the ‘effect’ is personal (that’s ‘us’), the ‘cause’ can’t be less than personal. Personal effects require at least personal causes. Greg also argues this I think in Letters.
I like the feel of this, but I don’t think it really works. Not sure. Do physical effects require physical causes? Non-process theists would say ‘No’. So why should ‘persons’ who are caused require a ‘person’ as their ultimate cause? What of this whole ‘effects can’t be greater than causes’ argument? I’m not seeing it.
And for those theists who also embrace an evolutionary explanation of human origins, wouldn’t it clearly be the case that the effect can be (and is) greater than the cause? I mean, don’t evolutionists embrace evolutionary explanations for ‘sentient volitional personal consciousness’ anyway? So how would such theists then argue, “No, there has to be a ‘personal’ explanation for a ‘personal’ universe (which we are)”?
Besides, aren’t those who affirm creation ex nihilo committed to the belief that effects are greater than their causes in some sense? Sans creation you have ‘GOD’. After creation you have ‘GOD + CREATION’. If creation is really distinct from God, then the sum total of reality after creation is 'greater' than the sum total of reality before creation. So by ‘greater’ Craig must mean ‘qualitatively’. But that’s really hard to establish then, isn’t it?
Tom
Post Edited (TGB) : 10/4/2006 10:51:53 AM (GMT-5) | | Back to Top | | |
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One Love
Registered Member
Date Joined Jan 2003
Total Posts : 13888
| Posted 10/4/2006 11:25 AM (GMT -6) | | It doesn't work.
The best thing to do is to think in terms of PROCESS CATEGORIES. People really need to stop demonizing it.
Process categories give all of reality a "mind-like" quality (prehensions, etc.) that makes it REASONABLE within the system that Ultimate Reality itself (God) ALSO has a "mind-like" quality. That's why Whitehead STARTED OUT with experience (derived from human experience)...and lead to an idea of GOD.
Yes.
"All is full of love." -- Bjork
"God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in them." -- 1 John 4:16b
Post Edited (MephEternal) : 10/4/2006 11:30:55 AM (GMT-5) | | Back to Top | | |
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Laika
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Date Joined Mar 2003
Total Posts : 2433
| Posted 10/4/2006 11:48 AM (GMT -6) | |
TGB said...
Craig adds something to this. He argues further that there’s good reason to believe that this ultimate first-cause is ‘personal’. It basically says that ‘effects’ can’t be greater than their ‘causes’. If the ‘effect’ is personal (that’s ‘us’), the ‘cause’ can’t be less than personal. Personal effects require at least personal causes. Greg also argues this I think in Letters.
I like the feel of this, but I don’t think it really works. Not sure. Do physical effects require physical causes? Non-process theists would say ‘No’. So why should ‘persons’ who are caused require a ‘person’ as their ultimate cause? What of this whole ‘effects can’t be greater than causes’ argument? I’m not seeing it.
Can random, mechanical processes produce consciousness?
I'm sure evolutionary biologists have a theory but until they can reproduce this, it's not science. 
TGB said...
Besides, aren’t those who affirm creation ex nihilo committed to the belief that effects are greater than their causes in some sense? Sans creation you have ‘GOD’. After creation you have ‘GOD + CREATION’. If creation is really distinct from God, then the sum total of reality after creation is 'greater' than the sum total of reality before creation. So by ‘greater’ Craig must mean ‘qualitatively’. But that’s really hard to establish then, isn’t it?
God, a complex system, and His creation, a simpler system produced by a more complex system. What's the problem?
never say you're bitter, jack
bitter makes the worst things
come back
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Tom
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Date Joined Jul 2001
Total Posts : 10353
| Posted 10/4/2006 12:22 PM (GMT -6) | | It still looks ot me Mephi like those who wish to affirm an evolutionary history fact the problem of explaining how unconscious impersonal non-sentient matter could produce conscious sentient personhood. So we just say that there is no such thing as absolutely unconscious impersonal non-sentient matter. We say, with Process, that all reality is in some minimalistic way 'conscious' and 'sentient'. Perhaps this just means that God is present upholding and sustaining all matter and that he can't help but "show up" in all things. That would explain how God would be able, perhaps, to "guide" the evolutionary process toward its biblical climax in humankind--a non-divine conscious sentitent person with whom God may relate personally. But this technically amounts to a denial of the fundamental tennets of evolution. You've got something that looks historically like evolution, but you've got this consciousness (God) "at work" in the whole thing, in every part of the whole thing.
I guess I'm saying theists who affirm evolution should be more forthright in the ways they fundamentally deny what evolution would seem to entail. Ken Brown (Finding Darwin's God, from Brown University, a believer and an evolutionist) is honest about this. He says evolution is compatible with theism so long as theists keep God entirely OUT of the evolutionary process, which means creation might never have gotten to sentient consciousness. God might never have had anything with whom/which he could relate personally. But that appears to conflict with the "intentionality" and "purposive" that characterizes God's choice to create. Creation moves with purpose, intention, and design (yes, design) toward conscious sentience as its climax. Evolution disallows this. Deism would be a version of theism that's consistent with evolutionary history. But a purposeful, intentional, active, interrelated, integrated God-world relation? I'm not seeing that.
Tom
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Tom
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Date Joined Jul 2001
Total Posts : 10353
| Posted 10/4/2006 12:43 PM (GMT -6) | | | I don't think Alan would mind my posting a personal note of his (emailed to me) on this question:
-------------- Hi Tom,
I’ve always found Craig’s extension of the Kalam to demonstrate a ‘personal’ God somewhat strained. His main line of argument for this seems to presuppose an undifferentiated time before creation with regard to which we can meaningfully ask why creation began at t0 rather than at t-1. But this conflicts with the overall thrust of the kalam argument, which points to an absolute beginning of time.
What I think Craig has in mind, however, is something like ‘agent causation’. If there is an absolute beginning of time, then we cannot account for the first event by saying that it is the cause of a prior event, or else we contradict the very fact we’re trying to explain. So ‘event causation’ can’t work. Some other kind of causation is needed, and agent causation is a plausible candidate. Thus, instead of saying that all events are caused by prior events, we can say that some events are caused by free agents, which are of a fundamentally different category than events.
On the issue of whether the effect can be greater than its causes, where ‘causes’ includes all of the factors responsible for the effect, I’m inclined to say that this is impossible. It would mean getting something for nothing. A free lunch. I say ex nihilo nihil fit. Is ‘God + Creation’ greater than ‘God’ alone? In a purely quantitative sense, perhaps, but qualitatively I would say no. And it’s the qualitative sense that matters here. Even process theists would agree. For them, personal creatures don’t emerge out of the qualitatively non-personal, but out of the qualitatively proto-personal. In other words, process thinkers generally subscribe to a doctrine called ‘panpsychism’, the view that all existing things are personal, at least in a rudimentary sense. Modern day materialists, however, generally want to say that the personal can emerge out of the wholly non-personal. I think that’s nuts.
Regards,
Alan
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Similitude
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Date Joined Apr 2004
Total Posts : 4968
| Posted 10/5/2006 8:41 PM (GMT -6) | | | Tom: I guess I'm saying theists who affirm evolution should be more forthright in the ways they fundamentally deny what evolution would seem to entail.
Jeff: Yeah, I'm with you. Van Till talks about a "fully gifted creation" but then says creation is being continuously sustained by God. I have know idea what it means to say something is "fully gifted" and yet utterly dependent upon the continuous sustaining agency of God for it's very current state of being. I don't have the categories to make sense out of that.
On the other hand, I tend to think that the verse that speaks of "upholding all things" probably has more to do with bearing than sustaining. I think it's the same greek root. What this means, to me, is that God has the power to create something that just simply exists in parallel with Himself.
But even then, what evidence do we have that genetic information is continually increasing? It seems to me that the best evidence shows that genetic information is decreasing apart from intelligence just like all other information (even with all the mind-boggling repair mechanisms in the cell!). No matter which way you look at the "sustaining" issue, positing macroevolution in the materialistic sense is just positing a "materialism of the gaps." To simply say the physical creation is "fully gifted" enough to naturalistically/materialistically evolve dirt into conscious, volitional beings does not make it so--we need evidence to warrant that claim.
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Truth Aficionado
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Date Joined Dec 2003
Total Posts : 1544
| Posted 10/5/2006 10:32 PM (GMT -6) | |
"With me, the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man's mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy. Would anyone trust in the convictions of a monkey's mind...? "—Charles Darwin 
Sahid said...
"‘effects’ can’t be greater than their ‘causes’"
What proof is there for this claim? Even if it can be proven with the purely physical, what justifies moving it into the realm of personality and choice? Looks like wishful thinking like all the others. People keep wanting to make Christianity the "smart" choice, a "rational" belief.
Love is like a ball in a game of catch: throw it and it will come back to you; hold onto it and that ends the game. | | Back to Top | | |
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skeptic griggsy
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Date Joined Oct 2006
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| Posted 10/17/2006 5:59 AM (GMT -6) | | | When Craig tries to show there can't be an actual infinity, he shows the same about God. And the personal needs explaining. | | Back to Top | | |
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Ronald A. Newcomb
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Date Joined Mar 2002
Total Posts : 45
| Posted 12/31/2006 9:05 PM (GMT -6) | | in the KCA each argument lays the ground for the next, each supports the next, however, when we get to personality the argument ends. The personal aspect of the argument needs to be supported, if you are trying to support a personal God, and can be done with a different argument, a first cause argument.
From the scientific viewpoint (inducing things from observations), no personality we have ever experienced coming into being has done so without a person being some level of cause, so there is no precedent for the idea that personality can spring from nothing.
What KCA does well is to limit the choice to one rational choice and one irrational choice. For someone to argue that the cause was non-personal, leaves them hanging with a kind of spontaneous generation of personality or a degradation of personality to a reductionistic biochemical effect.
Unfortunately, being postmodern in outlook, many people don’t have a problem believing it because we have been steeped in a culture where we rarely look for THE answer, instead, are satisfied with any answer.
Philosophically, of course, this is insufficient. Personality is more than biochemical and reductionism really explains nothing. We revert to first causes argument, where did personality come from if not from a God with a personality?
As for effects being greater than their cause, again, we have never observed it and there are good theories in each field to explain why it cannot be so. If we use an analogy of bread making, we can’t make a loaf with more mass than the flour we begin with. With biological information, we can’t make something we don’t have instructions and materials to make, and so forth.
As for your God+Creation question, this poses some very interesting problems which I won’t delve into, but since God is omnipotent, and e=mc^2, remove the constant and Energy=Mass, God being the (owner? Source? Generator?) holder of all energy, the total mass/energy cannot be greater after the creation than it was before creation unless God is making new energy. If he can create new energy, then he has the capability to increase the total energy/mass, then, yes, God+Creation is greater than God alone unless you say that God is the energy and we revert to pantheism. If God merely uses energy that pre-existed the creation, then the answer is “no” to the question.
Remember though that Genesis 1 does not require any number of things to be created, such as dimensions (see my subject “TIME”) or energy itself. Nor does it prevent there from being other, let’s say, parallel universes in this case I mean other kinds of created things such as angels or so forth. We simply do not know, the text is not exhaustive, though it is often held forth as being exhaustive. (For clarity, read Gen 1-3 in KJV in simple English and that is exactly what I believe, I am a young earth creationist.) It doesn’t give details about the creation, it merely gives a brief summary of it. Nor does it describe the beginning of time, and so forth (apologies to Bill Craig, he got most of it right, but time is not created, again, see the subject “TIME.”)
I for one have not considered this so I won’t take a stance, but these are the choices.
Ronald A. Newcomb
R.A.Newcomb
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Similitude
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Date Joined Apr 2004
Total Posts : 4968
| Posted 1/1/2007 12:34 PM (GMT -6) | | Tom: I mean, don’t evolutionists embrace evolutionary explanations for ‘sentient volitional personal consciousness’ anyway?
Jeff: Ron ressurected this thread at the same time I've been listening to the BeyondBelief lectures. You're comment here is interesting, because there are a good number of materialistic evolutionists that deny the existence of free-will. But I would assume they do this because they see naturalistic materialism as too barren, conceptually, to account for it (I do, too). But wouldn't the same thing be true of sentience/consciousness? If sentience and consciousness can emerge from a non-sentient, non-conscious reality, then why not final causes? I don't see why one is any less mysterious than the other. I've never heard any one posit a materialist category that can account for the ORIGIN of any of the three.
And although the notion of final cause does not implicitly entail the origin of them, it PROVIDES for the POSSIBILITY of their origin, insomuch as a final cause is a sui generis notion that is not defined narrowly in terms of its range of possibilities. I don't know how to account for emergent properties, however, in terms of the PRE-emergent attributes of matter. And to suppose that new attributes can willy-nilly pop into existence into the created order is to suppose that our categories are not competent to substantially apprehend reality, if those attributes are supra-categorical. Indeed, with such a will-nilly view of reality, why not suppose that intelligent causes simply EMERGED to account for life? Emergence ought to be an egalitarian notion, eh?
You really need to check out www.beyondbelief2006.net when you get a chance. It shows just how insufficient and over-narrow the categories of the materialists really are. Interestingly, there are atheists on the video lectures that see no way to account for a rational system of ethics in a materialistic epistemology. And the only way the others do (that I've seen, thus far) is to assume that such a system has just recently been available, due to scientific discovery. As if there could have been no rational system of ethics just 200 years ago. I did see one defense of Spinoza's view. But Spinoza didn't believe in free-will, so I can't imagine what help he provides in formulating an ethical system.
One of the claims by one lecturer, which I found a bit amazing, was the claim that they (the atheistic materialists) believe in an epistemological methodology of FORTHRIGHTRIGHTNESS and FULL DISCLOSURE. That's almost laughable seeings how the anti-ID materialists not only oppose the teaching of ID, but the teaching of problems in the evolutionary hypothesis (which are profound and ubiquitious--to the extent that someone like Flew finally gave up on atheism, even though he remains a mere deist). Moreover, there have been occasions over the last few decades where materialistic evolutionists have intentionally tried to keep some of their conclusions secret lest creationists exploit them for their own cause. Politics is alive and well in science as it is in all human organizational life. Those on top do not want to relinquish that position.
Post Edited (jefscott) : 1/1/2007 11:43:35 AM (GMT-6) | | Back to Top | | |
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