An advantage of
blog posts is that we can focus on particular points within philosophy,
theology, or apologetics. One of these things can be the kalam cosmological
argument, as popularized by William Lane Craig. A very common formulation of
his first premise is, “Whatever begins to exist had a cause.” One of the most
common rebutting defeaters to that premise is to say, “But quantum events don’t
have causes!” Craig usually has, as part of his response, “The virtual
particles come from the quantum vacuum, and the quantum vacuum is a sea of
energy, and not ‘nothing’.” I think many people are confused at this response,
and don’t understand why it’s relevant. It’s my burden in this post to show why
it is relevant, and why it means the skeptic’s objection here is the actual
irrelevancy.
First, we have
to explain what the first premise is actually claiming, and what it is not.
This is crucial to a full understanding of the kalam. The “causal premise”
claims that if something begins to exist, then it had a cause for its beginning
to exist. It does not claim that
“Whatever events occur had a cause,”
or something like that. Why is this important?
Because the
objection is that quantum events do
not have causes for those events occurring. Now some of us will see right away
the issue: the skeptic is responding to things beginning to exist in terms of
events occurring; it’s a category mistake. What the skeptic would need is to be
able to say that the virtual particles come into existence and do so from no
cause, or from nothing whatsoever. However, the entire point of the quantum
vacuum that produces these virtual particles is that it’s just not “nothing,”
it is a sea of energy, which is in fact “something.”
So we can see
here it’s through the connecting of the dots we do when we understand both
Craig’s causal premise and the objection’s claim that we understand the
objection is actually irrelevant. Moreover, and incidental to this critique, is
the naïve philosophy of science often demonstrated in this objection. The
objection assumes an indeterministic interpretation of the empirical data, when
the data is actually equivalent with a variety of interpretations—some of which
are indeterministic, and some of which are deterministic, and it’s not the data
that can tell us which one is right. For all we know, the apparent indeterminacy
is merely epistemological—that is, it merely appears to us as though these
events have no causes. But beyond this, the whole point is that even if it
turns out the events have absolutely no causes, it won’t follow the virtual
particles have no causes for their beginning to exist; that cause will be the
sea of energy of the quantum vacuum; the particles do come from somewhere.
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