Thursday, October 31, 2019

Causation and creation ex nihilo

Happy Halloween, happy reformation day, and happy Melinda's birthday!

I was thinking about causation this morning because I recently had a formal type debate on the Kalam cosmological argument. Although the debate was formal in the sense of having character, round, and time restrictions, it happened over private messages, so I can't give you a link to it. But it doesn't matter. Causation wasn't an issue in the debate. It's just that causation is relevant to the KCA, and since I was thinking about the KCA, I got to thinking about causation this morning.

When WLC (and most people) formulate the KCA, they say something along the lines of, "Whatever begins to exist has a cause." The way it's worded leaves it open to whether we're talking about something beginning to exist ex materia or ex nihilo. This leaves the premise open to certain criticisms, like the spontaneity of radio active decay and virtual particles popping in and out of existence. Whenever I debate the KCA, I don't stick to WLC's formulation of it. Instead, I anticipate certain objections and formulate it in a way that either addresses them or avoids them.

One doesn't need to defend the broad claim that all things that begin to exist require causes because in the KCA, we are talking specifically about the universe beginning to exist ex nihilo. If we stick to defending that, then we don't even need to address things like radio active decay. The premise I typically defend is that it's impossible for something to spontaneously pop into being out of nothing with no cause or reason. That narrows the scope of what needs to be defended and avoids certain criticisms.

One of the criticism people bring against the first premise in the KCA is the fact that nobody has ever observed something coming into existence out of absolutely nothing. Since such an event has never been observed, neither has anybody been able to observe whether such an event typically has a cause or not. Without making such observations, we are not in a position to say that something coming into being ex nihilo requires a cause.

The primary weakness of this argument is the underlying assumption that the only way we could know whether creation ex nihilo requires a cause is through observation. This assumption is problematic for a few different reasons.

One reason is because it's questionable whether anybody ever observes causation at all. David Hume has a chapter on this subject in An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. He argues there that nobody actually observes causation. Rather, we just assume causation whenever we see things conjoined in certain ways in space and time.

I don't want to go into all of Hume's arguments, but consider this thought experiment. Imagine a situation in which a golf club strikes a golf ball, and the golf ball goes flying. But the reason for this series of events isn't that the golf club causes the golf ball to go flying. Rather, there's an invisible spirit that causes the golf ball to move whenever the golf club gets sufficiently close with the right speed. And suppose that's the case for everything in the physical world. Nothing causes anything else in the physical world. Instead, the invisible spirit causes everything to move. And the spirit does it in such a consistent way that there appear to be regularities to it. These regularities allow us to formulate laws and make predictions using formulas and math.

If that's even possible, then it raises the question of whether we're actually observing causation at all. All we're observing is objects moving. When we see a golf club swinging followed immediately by a golf ball flying, and when the timing and location are just right, we just assume that one thing causes the other. If we must be able to observe causation before we can know whether it has occurred, then we would never know that anything had a cause. That doesn't seem reasonable, so that's one reason to doubt the premise that the above criticism is based on.

Another reason is because it's one thing to observe when a cause happens, but it's another to observe when a cause does not happen. How could one ever know, merely from observation, that an event happened without a cause? Suppose we saw a golf ball just take off, but we didn't see any golf club hit it. Could we say it was an event without a cause? We may think it doesn't have a cause because we assume that if there had been one, we would've seen it. But it's always possible the cause eludes our perception. it's always possible when we observe events that there's a hidden cause.

Suppose we did observe something coming into existence out of nothing. How could one observe a cause in that situation? We might say it had no cause because we didn't see one, but that really isn't an adequate reason to think it didn't have a cause. It might have an invisible cause. Or suppose we saw somebody wiggle their nose, and as soon as they did, something popped into existence out of nothing. Even in that situation, we wouldn't be able to tell that the wiggling of the nose caused something to pop into existence out of nothing. So there's just no way to tell, merely by observing, whether something coming into existence out of nothing had a cause or not. And with that being the case, it's irrelevant whether anybody has ever observed something coming into existence out of nothing, whether with or without a cause.

If observation isn't how we would know whether something had a cause or not, then lack of observation is no reason to deny that we know whether something had a cause or not. Our knowledge of causation must come by some other way. I think it comes from a rational intuition. David Hume denied this, but I think he was mistaken.

If you accept quantum indeterminacy, then you'll believe there are quantum events without sufficient causes. Let's grant that for the sake of argument. At best, this would prove that it's possible for something to come to be without a sufficient cause. But it wouldn't show that it's possible for something to come into existence out of nothing. It wouldn't even show that it's possible for something to come to be without any cause at all.

In the case of spontaneous radioactive decay, there may not be sufficient conditions for a decay event, but there are necessary conditions. These necessary conditions include things like the ratio of protons to neutrons. That's why different isotopes have different half lives. The initial conditions of an atom give us a probability of a decay event, and if you get enough atoms of the same element with the same number of neutrons, that probability will average out into a half life for the whole collection. That means the probability is determined by the initial conditions, and that means the initial conditions are necessary for the decay event even if they aren't sufficient to determine the decay event. So even spontaneous quantum events have causes. They just aren't sufficient causes.

In the case of something coming into existence out of nothing, there isn't even a set of initial conditions. There's no "thing" that has properties which serve as necessary conditions or that can give us probabilities. So creation ex nihilo isn't remotely analogous to spontaneous quantum events.

One can merely reflect on creation ex nihilo and see, by a rational intuition, that it's impossible for it to happen with no cause or reason. Lucretius didn't even think it was possible with a cause or reason. I don't know why there are people who can't see this. I've never had the least bit of doubt about it. When you think about it carefully, it appears to be a metaphysically necessary truth. Since it's metaphysically necessary, looking at the physical world isn't how we come to know it. If we could only know it through looking at the physical world, it wouldn't be a necessary truth. It would be a contingent truth. It might be true in one universe but not another depending on the physical characteristic each universe happened to have. It's not a physical law at all because it doesn't merely describe how the physical world happens to be. It's a metaphysical law because it puts constraints on what can or can't happen in the physical world. It's a law that applies to all universes.

The lack of analogy between creation ex nihilo and spontaneous quantum events cuts both ways. Some people try to extrapolate from causes in the physical world to the cause of the physical world. They claim we have physical evidence that something can't spontaneously come from nothing in the fact that every event we observe always has a cause. This is an inductive argument for the principle that all events have causes or that all things that come into existence have causes. But the argument fails because the beginning of the universe is not sufficiently analogous to anything that happens in the universe. So even if we grant determinism in the universe, it wouldn't follow that the universe as a whole has a cause.

You have to be careful when you reason inductively. Imagine a situation in which an alien comes to earth, and for the first week he's here, the only birds he sees are crows, and all the crows he sees are black. But then he finds out, through a friend, that crows aren't the only birds. There's a whole slew of birds that he hasn't seen. Would he be justified in reasoning that because every bird he's seen up until now has been black, that all the other bird species are black as well? Probably not. He may be reasonable in thinking the next crow he sees is going to be black, but that isn't sufficiently analogous for him to think the first chicken he sees is going to be black. He might be justified in having a suspicion about it, but that's all.

In the same way, causal events in the physical world are not sufficiently analogous to the beginning of the physical world to extrapolate from one to the other.

And that's about all the thoughts I had on causation this morning.

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