Yes, but in an abstract sense: everything that happens appears to be the result of some prior events that look like they were necessary for the observed thing to have come to be – what we normally refer to as “cause and effect.” But the essence of your observation remains valid, namely that we cannot legitimately extrapolate our (limited) experiences within the strict confines of the universe to conditions beyond it. There is no epistemologically sound defence for the assumption that conditions inside our universe are even remotely the same as those outside it because we can’t, almost by definition, escape the universe, even in thought. So you can’t then say that our notions of “cause” transcend the universe and apply to it as a whole when judged from some imagined external and all-encompassing bird’s-eye vantage point. To do so is to delude yourself into thinking (or to pretend) that you have a privileged supra-natural perspective. The idea of “cause,” however loosely we might like to understand the term, may be entirely inappropriate for the production of universes because we have no way of knowing that our understanding of “cause” is either sufficient or correct in such a larger context.
Again, this is a much deeper question than it seems at first. On the one hand, everyone has an intuitive grasp of “cause and effect” – flick the switch and, depending which way you flick it, the light turns either on or off. On the other hand, when we start digging deeper, we discover that causation comes with a slew of philosophical difficulties that funnel down into the induction problem: “whenever X happens, Y happens next; therefore X causes Y.” Until we encounter an exception, we will insist on the “therefore…” Here, I am not speaking about confusing correlation and causation. I am speaking about causation as we normally understand it: the cue ball, struck just right, nudges the blue into centre pocket, earning you five points. But think about the bottomless regress of levels of explanation – elastic collision response, material properties and composition, conservation laws, atomic interactions, electromagnetic attractions and repulsions, atomic structures, quantum states, quarks and gluons, Feynman paths, etc., etc., etc. – that would go into a comprehensive account of sinking the blue ball. Think about how it is purely empirical that one level of explanation relates to – is causally connected to – the next one up or down. Think about the non-smooth transition of going up or down a level and you will see that causation is a very, very odd thing indeed.
Yes, but a prior causeless effect was known: radioactive decay. There is no known way to cause a given atom to spit out radiation (alpha, beta or gamma). There is no known way to speed up or slow down or in any sense to influence radioactive decay. Atoms and particles decay as and when they “feel like it” and they simply won’t be pressured to do it sooner or later. That is not to say that we can’t describe the overall behaviour of a large collection of them. Far from it, we can do so quite reliably, and the more atoms or particles we have, the more accurate our models become – an object lesson in the hazards of committing fallacies of composition – but we cannot make any meaningful statements about when any specific individual constituent will “decide” to decay. Similarly, Heisenberg uncertainty places statistical limits on the detail that can be known about reality. These limits are not about accuracy of measurement. They are, as far as we can presently tell, reflective of an intrinsic “fuzziness” in nature. They allow for uncaused and acausal events, and the effects I named in an earlier post.
If he says so outright, he’s considerably more forceful than your usual theologian. But no, he hasn’t proved any such thing. As outlined by others and myself, there are too many obvious objections to this recycled argument. The most obtrusive stumbling block is that the conclusion seriously exceeds the warrant of the premisses. In a nutshell, the argument tries to smuggle in “god” as a stopgap for our (present) ignorance.
Everyone’s entitled to a character defect or two, I suppose.
'Luthon64
