insigniff comments on The Neglected Virtue of Scholarship - Less Wrong

177 Post author: lukeprog 05 January 2011 07:22AM

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Comment author: PhilGoetz 05 January 2011 06:05:11PM *  1 point [-]

In another debate with Bill Craig, atheist Christopher Hitchens gave this objection: "Who designed the Designer? Don’t you run the risk… of asking 'Well, where does that come from? And where does that come from?' and running into an infinite regress?" But this is an elementary misunderstanding in philosophy of science.

I agree that Hitchens should have looked to see what answers theists give to that question. (And he might have; since theists usually respond instead by saying that God is eternal, meaning outside of time and cause and effect, and therefore in no need of having a cause.) But I disagree that there are any more substantive objections to theism. "Who designed the designer?" is the best single knockdown argument against theism.

The question "where did God come from?" is not qualitatively the same as the question "how do you know your observation that a dropped bowling ball falls is correct?" In science, the answer to every "why" is something that is known with more certainty. Entropy decreases as you trace the epistemological/causal chain back up its causes. Theism, by contrast, boils down to the claim that entropy always increases as you trace back the causal chain. A being X must have been created by some being Y with greater entropy (complexity). The scientific epistemological chain converges; the theistic one diverges.

ADDED: This is basically the same as Tim Tyler's comment below.

Comment author: insigniff 05 July 2013 09:43:30AM 1 point [-]

Whether or not the first cause argument should be a concern in science, i think Bertrand Russell summarizes its problems quite well:

"Perhaps the simplest and easiest to understand is the argument of the First Cause. It is maintained that everything we see in this world has a cause, and as you go back in the chain of causes further and further you must come to a First Cause, and to that First Cause you give the name of God. That argument, I suppose, does not carry very much weight nowadays, because, in the first place, cause is not quite what it used to be. The philosophers and the men of science have got going on cause, and it has not anything like the vitality that it used to have; but apart from that, you can see that the argument that there must be a First Cause is one that cannot have any validity. I may say that when I was a young man, and was debating these questions very seriously in my mind, I for a long time accepted the argument of the First Cause, until one day, at the age of eighteen, I read John Stuart Mill's Autobiography, and I there found this sentence: "My father taught me that the question, Who made me? cannot be answered, since it immediately suggests the further question, Who made God?" That very simple sentence showed me, as I still think, the fallacy in the argument of the First Cause. If everything must have a cause, then God must have a cause. If there can be anything without a cause, it may just as well be the world as God, so that there cannot be any validity in that argument. It is exactly of the same nature as the Hindu's view, that the world rested upon an elephant, and the elephant rested upon a tortoise; and when they said, "How about the tortoise?" the Indian said, "Suppose we change the subject." The argument is really no better than that. There is no reason why the world could not have come into being without a cause; nor, on the other hand, is there any reason why it should not have always existed. There is no reason to suppose that the world had a beginning at all. The idea that things must have a beginning is really due to the poverty of our imagination. Therefore, perhaps, I need not waste any more time upon the argument about the First Cause." http://www.positiveatheism.org/hist/russell0.htm