Ringtone
Platinum Member
- Sep 3, 2019
- 6,142
- 3,522
- 940
The introduction is original prose by the OP Ringtone.
Atoms emit photons when they transition from an excited state to a low-energy state, and radioactive decay is the process through which an unstable atomic nucleus decreases in mass to a stable one.
In the case of emission, atoms reach the excited state when their electrons gain energy from external photons, which causes the atoms' electrons to jump to higher levels of energy (or to higher orbits). But the wont of electrons is to orbit toward the lower limits near the nucleus, so the electrons will not stay in the higher orbits for long. When the electrons transition to lower orbits, they give off photons equal to the amount of energy that raised them. Electromagnetic emission (or electromagnetic radiation) is spontaneous.
Relative to the electrostatic repulsion between positively charged protons, the combined gravitational attraction between protons and neutrons in atomic nuclei is insignificant because their masses are so infinitesimal. So what holds atomic nuclei together? The repulsive force between the protons in atomic nuclei is offset by the accumulative strong nuclear force between the protons and the neutrons in atomic nuclei, which include the discrete packets of binding energy associated with the strong force between the quarks that comprise the nucleons. But the more protons and neutrons (nucleons) nuclei have, the bigger the nuclei are; i.e., the distance separating the nucleons in nuclei is fixed. Thus, the strong nuclear force is both repulsive at a very small range and attractive over a slightly larger distance. While it's the strong nuclear force that holds the nucleons in the nucleus together, it's the total amount of this force in the nucleus relative to the proton-to-neutron ratio in the nucleus that determines whether the nucleus is stable or unstable. In the simplest terms, an excess number of either protons or neutrons—basically, an excessive amount of energy—in the nucleus disrupts the binding energies of the strong nuclear force in the nucleus making the nucleus unstable. Unstable nuclei try to achieve a balanced state by giving off matter and energy via radioactive decay. Radioactive decay, like electromagnetic emission, is said to be spontaneous because it occurs on its own; i.e., it's not caused by external factors like pressure or temperature. It's said to be random because its rate is indeterminable. Only the probability of decay can be given.
Hence, no immediate causes of these quantum events are observed.
In recent years, some atheists have got it into their heads that these and other spontaneous and/or random events at the quantum level somehow constitute a falsification of the first premise of the Kalam Cosmological Argument. The popularized source of this nonsense is Victor Stenger's God: The Failed Hypothesis: How Science Shows That God Does Not Exist. Unwittingly exposing his philosophical naiveté, Stenger commits a number of significant category errors.
Stenger writes:
First of all, the first premise is not everything has a cause, much less everything has a material cause. This "straw horse," which is incessantly trotted out by atheists, is tiresome. There is absolutely nothing profound about certain categories of things within or without the universe not having immediate or discernable material causes! Atheists in general are notoriously bad thinkers, and atheist scientists are notoriously bad philosophers. The likes of Stenger, Dawkins and Krauss are especially obtuse, mostly because they are ignorant of the pertinent history of ideas. For example, Stenger thinks the Kalam Cosmological Argument is derived from Islamic theology. False! Rather, the late Stenger's assertion is the misleading twaddle of one who never critically regarded the problem of existence apart from his metaphysical biases. There's nothing uniquely Islamic about the universally objective, first principles of ontology or the theology that informs the Argument, and Judeo-Christianity predates Islam. In fact, the Christian theologian and early empiricist philosopher John Philoponus of the 5th Century was actually the first to formally argue from the impossibility of an infinite regress in time.
The first premise is whatever begins to exist has a cause of its existence.
It's to be understood within the context of the thesis ex nihilo nihil fit ("out of nothing, nothing becomes"). As something does exist, it necessarily follows that something has always existed.
Second, our inability to determine the immediate causes of these events or predict when or where they will occur doesn't mean they occur in the absence of causal conditions. We know what the causal conditions are: the instability of high-energy states, coupled with, in the case of nuclear decay, the disruption of the binding energies of the strong nuclear force. And the weak nuclear force effectuates the changes of nuclear decay. Ultimately, the principles of quantum physics are deterministic in the nomological sense. The inability to predict discrete quantum events, then, is merely epistemic. Stenger concedes this. He acknowledges that while the quantum world isn't entirely deterministic in the epistemic sense, quantum physics successfully describes the expected set of outcomes in a mathematically precise fashion. In other words, take any given particle and let it interact (or not interact) with any other given thing in the universe: we can determine the probability distribution of all possible outcomes. Thus, we know that the principles that underlie quantum physics are universal.
In any event, Stenger is confounding the ontological distinction between events and substances, and between being and becoming. Quantum events are not substances. Quantum events are occurrences sans immediate causes within a milieu of known causal conditions and possible outcomes. Also, there are no substances coming into existence (being) from nothingness per the indeterminant events of quantum physics. Quantum events entail changes (becoming) in preexisting substances. In other words, substances are not spontaneously coming into existence from nothingness or spontaneously fading out of existence into nothingness. Nothingness (or nothing ) is simply a term of universal negation. Nothingness is not a referent for somethingness. Nothingness has no substance or properties. To nominalize or reify nothing as if it were something is to confound the meaning of these terms. "Nothingness" simply means "not anything." The first premise is duly justified by the law of non-contradiction! Stenger never directly addresses the first premise. The only direct counterargument to it would be absurd: the assertion that substances of nothingness are becoming the substances of somethingness via quantum events. Contradiction! Behold: the hocus pocus of Stenger's convoluted gibberish is now manifest. He doesn't falsify the first premise at all, he obscures it.
To suggest that something can come into being from nothingness is to suggest that either something can cause itself to exist before it existed (contradiction) or to suggest that something that doesn't exist can cause something to exist (contradiction). Things don't just pop into existence from nothing! Why does this have to be explained?
The fact of the matter is that while everything must have a reason, there is no logical or scientific principle that everything must have a direct cause—as long as the prerequisite set of causal conditions prevail. Nothingness has no causal conditions. Nothingness does not and cannot exist. And the material realm of being cannot account for its own existence. It would seem that Stenger confounds an erroneous understanding of the principle of sufficient reason and the law of non-contradiction.
Stenger continues:
Huh?
Neither Craig nor any other learned theist admits any such stupid thing relative to the indeterminate nature of quantum events, as if the first principles of ontology depicted a spatially or temporally bound entity of origin. Accordingly, God existentially precedes and has primacy over the material realm of being. He is neither contingently part of the material world nor contingently compelled by any property of the material world. The only sense in which an event caused by God would be spontaneous would be epistemic, i.e., in appearance only from the perspective of an outside observer. It would necessarily be a preordained event. It would not be arbitrarily compelled by any external factor, but solely caused by God as effectuated by his libertarian free will. Moreover, probabilistic causality is not a Craigian notion of causation. It's a composite theoretical approach by which we may posit the probability of an effect relative to the frequency of its corresponding causal conditions, particularly, in systems of an indeterministic nature like that of quantum physics. And Craig never retorted to the insinuation that the first premise is false because quantum events do not have immediately evident mechanical causes, as if showing that quantum events are probabilistically caused in some sense redemes the first premise. Once again, as shown in the above, the first premise doesn't pertain to the continuously existing and continuously changing substances of the material world at the quantum level of physics or, for that matter, to those at the classical level of physics. The first premise is not everything has a cause in the first place!
________________
In terms of causation, the first premise goes to the imperative that existents that begin to exist do not arise from non-existents, but are necessarily preceded by ontological substances of direct or indirect causation. From here the youtuber of What do you meme? brilliantly takes over and takes Drools' gibberish down.
Atoms emit photons when they transition from an excited state to a low-energy state, and radioactive decay is the process through which an unstable atomic nucleus decreases in mass to a stable one.
In the case of emission, atoms reach the excited state when their electrons gain energy from external photons, which causes the atoms' electrons to jump to higher levels of energy (or to higher orbits). But the wont of electrons is to orbit toward the lower limits near the nucleus, so the electrons will not stay in the higher orbits for long. When the electrons transition to lower orbits, they give off photons equal to the amount of energy that raised them. Electromagnetic emission (or electromagnetic radiation) is spontaneous.
Relative to the electrostatic repulsion between positively charged protons, the combined gravitational attraction between protons and neutrons in atomic nuclei is insignificant because their masses are so infinitesimal. So what holds atomic nuclei together? The repulsive force between the protons in atomic nuclei is offset by the accumulative strong nuclear force between the protons and the neutrons in atomic nuclei, which include the discrete packets of binding energy associated with the strong force between the quarks that comprise the nucleons. But the more protons and neutrons (nucleons) nuclei have, the bigger the nuclei are; i.e., the distance separating the nucleons in nuclei is fixed. Thus, the strong nuclear force is both repulsive at a very small range and attractive over a slightly larger distance. While it's the strong nuclear force that holds the nucleons in the nucleus together, it's the total amount of this force in the nucleus relative to the proton-to-neutron ratio in the nucleus that determines whether the nucleus is stable or unstable. In the simplest terms, an excess number of either protons or neutrons—basically, an excessive amount of energy—in the nucleus disrupts the binding energies of the strong nuclear force in the nucleus making the nucleus unstable. Unstable nuclei try to achieve a balanced state by giving off matter and energy via radioactive decay. Radioactive decay, like electromagnetic emission, is said to be spontaneous because it occurs on its own; i.e., it's not caused by external factors like pressure or temperature. It's said to be random because its rate is indeterminable. Only the probability of decay can be given.
Hence, no immediate causes of these quantum events are observed.
In recent years, some atheists have got it into their heads that these and other spontaneous and/or random events at the quantum level somehow constitute a falsification of the first premise of the Kalam Cosmological Argument. The popularized source of this nonsense is Victor Stenger's God: The Failed Hypothesis: How Science Shows That God Does Not Exist. Unwittingly exposing his philosophical naiveté, Stenger commits a number of significant category errors.
Stenger writes:
In his writings, [William Lane] Craig takes the first premise to be self-evident, with no justification other than common, everyday experience. In fact, physical events at the atomic and subatomic level are observed to have no evident cause. For example, when an atom in an excited energy level drops to a lower level and emits a photon, a particle of light, we find no cause of that event. Similarly, no cause is evident in the decay of a radioactive nucleus. (pp. 123 - 124)
First of all, the first premise is not everything has a cause, much less everything has a material cause. This "straw horse," which is incessantly trotted out by atheists, is tiresome. There is absolutely nothing profound about certain categories of things within or without the universe not having immediate or discernable material causes! Atheists in general are notoriously bad thinkers, and atheist scientists are notoriously bad philosophers. The likes of Stenger, Dawkins and Krauss are especially obtuse, mostly because they are ignorant of the pertinent history of ideas. For example, Stenger thinks the Kalam Cosmological Argument is derived from Islamic theology. False! Rather, the late Stenger's assertion is the misleading twaddle of one who never critically regarded the problem of existence apart from his metaphysical biases. There's nothing uniquely Islamic about the universally objective, first principles of ontology or the theology that informs the Argument, and Judeo-Christianity predates Islam. In fact, the Christian theologian and early empiricist philosopher John Philoponus of the 5th Century was actually the first to formally argue from the impossibility of an infinite regress in time.
The first premise is whatever begins to exist has a cause of its existence.
It's to be understood within the context of the thesis ex nihilo nihil fit ("out of nothing, nothing becomes"). As something does exist, it necessarily follows that something has always existed.
Second, our inability to determine the immediate causes of these events or predict when or where they will occur doesn't mean they occur in the absence of causal conditions. We know what the causal conditions are: the instability of high-energy states, coupled with, in the case of nuclear decay, the disruption of the binding energies of the strong nuclear force. And the weak nuclear force effectuates the changes of nuclear decay. Ultimately, the principles of quantum physics are deterministic in the nomological sense. The inability to predict discrete quantum events, then, is merely epistemic. Stenger concedes this. He acknowledges that while the quantum world isn't entirely deterministic in the epistemic sense, quantum physics successfully describes the expected set of outcomes in a mathematically precise fashion. In other words, take any given particle and let it interact (or not interact) with any other given thing in the universe: we can determine the probability distribution of all possible outcomes. Thus, we know that the principles that underlie quantum physics are universal.
In any event, Stenger is confounding the ontological distinction between events and substances, and between being and becoming. Quantum events are not substances. Quantum events are occurrences sans immediate causes within a milieu of known causal conditions and possible outcomes. Also, there are no substances coming into existence (being) from nothingness per the indeterminant events of quantum physics. Quantum events entail changes (becoming) in preexisting substances. In other words, substances are not spontaneously coming into existence from nothingness or spontaneously fading out of existence into nothingness. Nothingness (or nothing ) is simply a term of universal negation. Nothingness is not a referent for somethingness. Nothingness has no substance or properties. To nominalize or reify nothing as if it were something is to confound the meaning of these terms. "Nothingness" simply means "not anything." The first premise is duly justified by the law of non-contradiction! Stenger never directly addresses the first premise. The only direct counterargument to it would be absurd: the assertion that substances of nothingness are becoming the substances of somethingness via quantum events. Contradiction! Behold: the hocus pocus of Stenger's convoluted gibberish is now manifest. He doesn't falsify the first premise at all, he obscures it.
To suggest that something can come into being from nothingness is to suggest that either something can cause itself to exist before it existed (contradiction) or to suggest that something that doesn't exist can cause something to exist (contradiction). Things don't just pop into existence from nothing! Why does this have to be explained?
The fact of the matter is that while everything must have a reason, there is no logical or scientific principle that everything must have a direct cause—as long as the prerequisite set of causal conditions prevail. Nothingness has no causal conditions. Nothingness does not and cannot exist. And the material realm of being cannot account for its own existence. It would seem that Stenger confounds an erroneous understanding of the principle of sufficient reason and the law of non-contradiction.
Stenger continues:
Craig has retorted that quantum events are still 'caused,' just caused in a non-predetermined manner—what he calls 'probabilistic causality.' Craig is thereby admitting that the 'cause' in his first premise could be an accidental one, something spontaneous—something not preordained. By allowing probabilistic cause, he destroys his own case for a predetermined creation. (p. 124)
Huh?
Neither Craig nor any other learned theist admits any such stupid thing relative to the indeterminate nature of quantum events, as if the first principles of ontology depicted a spatially or temporally bound entity of origin. Accordingly, God existentially precedes and has primacy over the material realm of being. He is neither contingently part of the material world nor contingently compelled by any property of the material world. The only sense in which an event caused by God would be spontaneous would be epistemic, i.e., in appearance only from the perspective of an outside observer. It would necessarily be a preordained event. It would not be arbitrarily compelled by any external factor, but solely caused by God as effectuated by his libertarian free will. Moreover, probabilistic causality is not a Craigian notion of causation. It's a composite theoretical approach by which we may posit the probability of an effect relative to the frequency of its corresponding causal conditions, particularly, in systems of an indeterministic nature like that of quantum physics. And Craig never retorted to the insinuation that the first premise is false because quantum events do not have immediately evident mechanical causes, as if showing that quantum events are probabilistically caused in some sense redemes the first premise. Once again, as shown in the above, the first premise doesn't pertain to the continuously existing and continuously changing substances of the material world at the quantum level of physics or, for that matter, to those at the classical level of physics. The first premise is not everything has a cause in the first place!
________________
In terms of causation, the first premise goes to the imperative that existents that begin to exist do not arise from non-existents, but are necessarily preceded by ontological substances of direct or indirect causation. From here the youtuber of What do you meme? brilliantly takes over and takes Drools' gibberish down.
