Russell's Objection to the Cosmological Argument
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An outlining of Bertrand Russell's objection to the Cosmological Argument (St. Thomas Aquinas) and an explanation of the Fallacy of Composition.
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If the Universe just is then wouldn't it be the uncaused cause. Bertrand seems to be saying that the universe is the necesary being, but the Universe did have a beginning 13.7 billion years ago at the big bang, atleast thats what most people think. So what happened there? Nothing? I'm pretty sure Russel said this before the big bang theory was popularly held.
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Yay! Thank you so much for this!
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This objection has already been refuted by William Lane Craig.
He has never argued that because every part of the universe has a cause, therefore the whole universe has a cause (that would be fallacious). Rather the reasons he has offered for thinking that everything that begins to exist has a cause, are these:
#1 - Something cannot come from nothing (to claim that something can come into being out of nothing is worse than magic! If you deny premise one of his argument, you have to think that the whole universe just appeared at some point in the past for no reason whatsoever. Nobody sincerely believes that things like a horse or an Eskimo village, can just pop into being without a cause).
#2 - If something can come into being from nothing, then it becomes inexplicable why just anything or everything doesn't come into being from nothing.
Just think about it...
Why don't bicycles, Beethoven and beer come into being from nothing? Why is it only universes that do this? What makes nothingness so discriminatory? There can't be anything about nothingness that favours universes, because nothing doesn't have any properties, nor can nobody constrain nothingness, since there isn't anything to be constrained.
#3 - Common experience and scientific evidence confirm the truth of the first premise in his cosmological argument.
Premise one is constantly verified and never falsified. It's hard to understand how any atheist committed to modern science, could deny that premise one is more plausibly true than false in light of the evidence. Now notice that the third point is an appeal to inductive reasoning, not reasoning by composition. It's drawing an inductive inference about all the members of a class of things, based on a sample of the class. Inductive reasoning underpins all of science and is not to be confused by reasoning of composition, which is a fallacy. This objection is ultimately aimed at a straw man of the objectors own construction. -
Fantastic. You clarified things very nicely. Might I add, in support of Russell's criticism, that a set can have different properties than its constituent parts. Another example might be: if I have a music album of nothing but six five-minute tracks, the album as a whole is much longer than five minutes when I considered as a set.
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Could you make a video on Kants moral theory please
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Thank you for the video it helped a lot!
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Thanks for the video!
Here's my objection to Russell's objection. I don't think the cosmological argument in question relies on the premise that the whole must have a property that all parts have. Rather, I think it relies on the premise that the whole must have a property that all parts and all combinations of parts have.
In other words, Russell is objecting to the premise that a set must have a property that all its members have, while I think the argument needs, instead of that one, the premise that a set must have a property that all its non-empty proper subsets have.
The brick wall problem does not apply to this second premise. All the members (individual bricks) of the wall may be small, but not all the subsets of the wall are small, assuming the wall is big and there are many bricks. Taking away one brick should give a subset of the wall that is also big. Therefore, the second premise does not lead to the incorrect conclusion that the entire brick wall is small.
This second premise can still be used by the cosmological argument, however. Not only is every member of the universe contingent, but every subset of the universe is contingent, because no subset of the universe exists necessarily. -
+Ellie L Here's the original cosmological argument for the existence of God: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lX-2htH5wnM
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how is this linked to the existence of God?
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hmm but its very easy to see how many small things amount to big thing, but much harder to see how many red things together could anything but red - or a bit more remote from our everday lives how necessity could emerge from a collection of contigent things -at least in some cases it seems that you can reason from the parts to the whole
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My own version of the cosmological argument:
1. If a thing is limited in power, then its behaviour is being controlled or affected by something outside itself.
2. Therefore a thing is unlimited in power if its behaviour is not controlled or affected by anything outside itself.
3. The whole of existence is not controlled or affected by anything outside itself (since there is nothing outside it).
4. Therefore the whole of existence is unlimited in power.
5. Therefore something is unlimited in power.
6. Therefore, God exists.
(Note that step 3 does not necessarily entail that all parts of the universe are unlimited in power. For example, a team composed of you and Obama is able to declare war, but that doesn't mean that a team composed only of you is able to declare war.) -
But what if the universe does have a cause? This objections rides on the idea that the universe "might not" necessarily be bound by the same linear logic of causation - however neither side has sufficient evidence as far as I know.
Of course, we can say the same way about Aquinas' argument in that he assumes that the universe "does" for a fact have a cause. Then we run into a problem how on his side God was exempted from the law of causation, and conversely how on the opposition claims that the universe is exempted from causation.
In a formal debate, how can we resolve this? Do we just say that Aquinas' argument is insufficient to establish the existence of God considering the problems above?
To add, I hear some apologists respond by saying that God is infinite, and is therefore not subject to infinite regress, and at the same time pointing at "scientific evidence" such as the BGV theorem to prove that the universe DOES have a beginning.
Again, how do we resolve this? -
It looks like you use the Russel objection that sufferes on the falacy of equivocations conflating cause/ an action/something dynamic with a static property of an object, like small brick of the wall.
In addition, I will add that Russels talks about the fallacy of composition here not at cosmological argument , since briks are small doesn't not imply that the wall is small(here openes another discussion-is not small compared with the wall, is bigger obviuosly). The whole movie is a non-sequitur: because the bricks are small then wall is not not small which discount the efficient cause(of course argument is not sound), so please consider the points I addressed . -
The size of the wall depends on how many bricks in it
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So, the bricks are contingent but the wall isn't? That's just absurd.
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Considering Thomas's Five Ways, the universe is never mentioned as a whole. For example, in the First Way, the argument would concern some chain of changers, such as a tree being blown in the wind, the wind moved by the heat from the Sun, the Sun burning because of nuclear reactions, the nuclear reactions because of gravity, gravity because of mass, and so on. So in the First Way at least there is no reasoning from part to whole at all. So I don't see how Russell's objection applies.
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Carneades, what's with the lower-left corners of your videos? Something is in the way covering the words sometimes...
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I find syllogisms a good example for why fallacies of composition/division are fallicious: Just because each premise on its own doesn't prove the comclusion doesn't mean, that the syllogism containing thos premises doesn't.
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"the universe just is", science has debunked this long ago. The universe had a finite beginning. It has not always existed, as modern cosmology shows us.
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