December 22, 2024
Q
I need some answers for these fallacies that God is the first cause.
I just ran your argument through ChatGPT to check for the logical fallacies you’ve committed and you’ve actually committed 6 of them. Here’s the list.
The argument that a god is the “first cause” of the universe and that the universe cannot be eternal involves certain logical fallacies.
Special Pleading: This fallacy occurs if one assumes the universe requires a cause but claims that God does not. If everything must have a cause, the same rule would logically apply to God,
Begging the Question: This fallacy arises if someone assumes the conclusion that a god exists to prove that the universe was created by that god. The argument presumes what it seeks to prove (i.e., the existence of a god as the first cause).
Argument from Ignorance (Argumentum ad Ignorantiam): This occurs when a lack of scientific or naturalistic explanations for the universe’s origins is used to conclude that a god must be the cause. Just because science doesn’t have a complete answer does not mean a supernatural answer is valid by default.
Composition Fallacy: This fallacy occurs if one assumes that because things within the universe are caused, the universe as a whole must also have a cause. Properties of individual parts do not always apply to the whole.
God of the Gaps: This fallacy involves invoking a god to fill gaps in human understanding. It relies on attributing unknown or unexplained phenomena to divine intervention instead of accepting that they are unknown.
Non-Sequitur: If the argument jumps from “the universe needs a cause” to “therefore, a god is that cause,” it’s a non-sequitur. The conclusion (a god exists) does not necessarily follow from the premises about causality.
Each of these fallacies can weaken the argument by making assumptions, ignoring alternative explanations, or failing to justify key steps in the reasoning process.
Mike
United States
Dr. craig’s response
A
My title for this Question of the Week was suggested to me by the fellow who screens the questions for me. It really is frightening how bad AI can be! I deal with most of these objections and more in my talk “Objections So Bad I Couldn’t Have Made Them Up: The World’s Ten Worst Objections to the Kalām Cosmological Argument”. So here I’ll be brief.
1. Special Pleading: The causal premise is not that “Everything must have a cause” but that “Everything that begins to exist has a cause.” So there is no special pleading. The argument arrives at an absolutely first cause that never began to exist.
2. Begging the Question: The argument obviously does not assume that God exists. The two premises are that Everything that begins to exist has a cause and that The universe began to exist. These are religiously neutral statements that make no assumption about God’s existence. Therefore, the argument does not beg the question.
3. Argument from Ignorance: The argument does not infer God’s existence on the basis of scientific evidence (or the lack thereof). The scientific evidence is adduced to prove one thing only, that The universe began to exist. That is, again, a religiously neutral statement that can be found in almost any textbook on astronomy and astrophysics. The question is the degree to which the scientific evidence makes that premise probable.
4. Composition Fallacy: The argument does not infer that “because things within the universe are caused, the universe as a whole must also have a cause.” There is no reasoning from part to whole whatsoever in the argument. It would be ridiculous to think that because a part of the universe is caused, therefore the whole thing is caused. Rather the relevant inductive argument for the causal premise is that when we survey the class of things that begin to exist, we find that they always have causes. Therefore the causal premise enjoys an enormously high degree of inductive evidence in support.
5. God of the Gaps: This is really the same objection as (3) above. The kalām cosmological argument is a deductive argument, whose conclusion follows necessarily from the truth of the two premises. The first uncaused cause is not assumed to be God; rather certain properties of this transcendent cause may be deduced on the basis of further arguments I provide. I invite the critic to deal with those arguments.
6. Non-Sequitur: As mentioned in (5), the kalām cosmological argument does not “jump from ‘the universe needs a cause’ to ‘therefore, a god is that cause’.” Rather, I give deductive arguments proving that the first cause of the universe is a beginningless, timeless, spaceless, immaterial, personal Creator of the universe of enormous power.
All this should reinforce a healthy scepticism concerning the capacity of AI to deal with philosophical issues and arguments. Think for yourself!
– William Lane Craigback to questions
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