From Necessary Being to God? | Dr. Graham Oppy & Dr. Rob Koons
Вставка
- Опубліковано 16 чер 2020
- Cosmological arguments aim to arrive at some uncaused cause or necessary being. But why think this necessary being is God? In this episode, we explore some potential paths. Buckle up for some philosophy.
Here's the Pruss-Koons paper we referenced: link.springer.com/epdf/10.100...
Book: www.amazon.com/Majesty-Reason...
Website: www.majestyofreason.wordpress...
I loved the interactions from the Majesty of Reason. Epic moment: t=26:23, "Joe, can you help?" What follows is history-making clarity, which helped them get back on track.
Thank you, Josh! I seriously couldn't help myself from laughing (not *at* anyone, but a sort of giddiness + what I found to be a very comical situation) at some of those points in the discussion lolol.
I'm glad you enjoy the interaction -- I've learned from *you*!
Hey Josh Rasmussen, how’s your book on philosophy of mind coming along?
@CJ Baierl 😂
Oppy: "That might sound like question begging" Koons: "Well worse, it sounds like foot stomping" . I laughed out loud at that moment. These guys are are definitely top thinkers in their fields, really enjoyed listening to this
The way Graham went on to ponder the 'hmm... footstomping...' was so funny too lol. These guys are brilliant.
"these guys are top thinkers in their field" would be extremely disappointing if true..
Koons is just a theist. not a logist.
Oh my goodness! Can’t wait to listen!
I've watched a lot of theists that I really respected, but Koons really just seems to be on another level, both in depth and clarity to the layman.
yeah he is one of the better ones I watched but not sure I buy his thomistic views
If you are a layman then what am I? I didn't even understand what they were talking about. And I watched the entire thing.
@@benrex7775 oh man , you have a long way to go. So do I. It’s a never ended learning philosophical talk where it’s language and definitions play a big role. Metaphysics, Types of thought, epistemology, Reason... Philosphy is just a realm of thought about a lot a lot of things.
@@JoshuaMSOG7 I like the feeling of not understanding anything. Sadly the more I learn the rarer this feeling gets.
@@benrex7775 if you really want to hear something that you probably wouldn’t understand at all. Hear David Albert and Sean carrol dialog about Quantum physics
Some personal time stamps for me:
10:30 Koons establishes common ground
13:03 Joe’s Question for Koons: If complex things require an explanation for their unity, how does the trinity play into this?
16:58 Oppy argues that necessity is the stopping point for explanation, there is not explaining why things are necessary.
19:18 Koons argues that necessary truths can have explanations
26:53 Joe clarifies
35:44 Topic changes to arbitrary limits
49:28 Skepticism Problem
55:31 Joe’s first objection: PSR restricted to contingent facts + knowing a priori that our experiences are contingent. Fleetingness of thoughts and experiences seems to imply that they are contingent.
58:18 Joe’s second objection: If I can’t know that my solipsistic experiences right now aren’t contingent, can I really know if they’re natural? Maybe I’m a supernatural unbounded infinite necessary being which has the power (omnipotent) to make it seem to itself that it has finite/changing experiences.
1:01:58 Oppy responds kinda
1:05:00 Joe raises alternative methods for avoiding skeptical scenarios such as accepting phenomenal conservatism a priori (which don’t require PSR)
1:11:02 Oppy objects to self-explanation
That's really helpful!
God is a simple being. It sees Graham Oppy, it clicks.
Haha nice one :D
Underrated comment
This was a funny comment
Legit, this has got to be one of the best and most underrated UA-cam comments in the history of UA-cam comments!
Blasphemous, but superbly funny.
☺️
39:22 "The mind rebels at arbitrary necessities." That was quite nice haha
More Rob Koons please
This is low key one of best debates on subject and I come back to it wish we got a round 2
Great conversation! And good contributions Joe! Lots of food for thought.
Yes dude. Absolute power move getting these two together.
A common problem I have noticed in discussions/debates is that the introduction takes way too long, and the first installments of the argument are too long. I love what you did; in the beginning, you laid out the views and had them briefly clarify their stances and move onto the more probably theory emphasizing, explanatory power, simplicity, and uniformity. Thanks for providing high quality thinkers! :)
Very nice conversation and one of the most interesting ones I have seen as of late on youtube. Also, this video make me think so hard that my head hurt. Lol.
Thanks for another fantastic discussion!
Amazing video ! Thank you so much to all of you ! Need to be watched several times to be vaguely understood though : a dumbed-down version for ordinary people would be valuable ;-)
Anyways, i think that's the best philosophy video i've watched so far. And the host - whom i didn't know - is very impressive too !
Joe, wow dude! Great job.
Can't wait to watch
Great discussion! Thanks Joe! :)
Interesting talk. The paper looks interesting too.
Great discussion!
56:54 My memory is an intuitive impression of the current moment. It's unreasonable to exclude it from any reasoning.
I’m just at the 32:00 mark and I feel that a good in-depth video about the different philosophical thoughts about the metaphysical and epistemic schools of Causation and why it’s so important if not up front and central to a lot of these debates. Late great David Lewis! Galen Strawson, I mean come on?!? Lol 😂 cheers to all my fellow philosophy peeps 🍻
Graham oppy has the best accent ever
I'm starting to think that you're a genius. If God exists I would have to say that He blessed you with wisdom.
Whoah! I took a course from Koonz in college. I miss his proto-fro
It's cool to hear Koons say that simplicity is a necessary condition for a proper Trinity, because that's what I think too! I'd definitely like to read his paper on that if i can find it. I essentially explain it through the distinction between Subject-Act-Object, which explains the "threeness," so since God is without composition He is what he has, so would be all three, but subject, act, and object are still distinguishable. Father is subject Holy Spirit is Act and Son is object, and it makes sense to me since the act is something that proceeds from the subject in a sense which is how the relationship between the Father and Holy Spirit is described.
EWW THEISM
I think it would make a huge difference for Oppy and his position if it were clear that you can't just hand any old thing "necessity" and thus make it not require explanation by brute force (pun very much intended). Consider that clearly some things don't qualify for "necessary" status, and so there are at least some criteria, which means there is at least partial explanation for why X is "necessary". The full analysis will have to do with what are usually called "necessary and sufficient conditions". A modally necessary thing just doesn't have any required conditions, and therefore any state of affairs is sufficient. Reflect on the differences between, for example, abstract objects (if there are any) and concrete ones, which seem to be precisely the type that permit something to be modally necessary vs. contingent.
This is very random but I’m a fan of your channel and also an opera singer and just wanted to let you know that you have a very close name to one of the greatest Austrian tenors of the 1930’s, Joseph Schmidt.
I think arguing that a lack of limits entails having divine features is a better route for going from a necessary being to a divine being rather than also arguing that a necessary being must be free from constraints and thereby free in its initiation of the universe. Though, I do think the latter argument is compelling.
That's a good point. I've always struggled with the latter form of argument, since it seems plausible to me that there could be an indeterministic but non-free initiation or cause of the universe (setting aside other reasons in Stage Two) :)
@@MajestyofReason it's an odd use of "limits" that seems only ever applied in this kind of God question which automatically makes my Wittgenstein antenna go up that we've entered into some dark corner of language and afe using words in ways that deeply offend them. If we remove all limits, we've removed all definition. An infinite plane is limited in exactly the ways described by it's definition. Limits define the essence. Meaning is use in accordance with the agreed upon rules of our language. But rules are a limit. I just don't see how "unlimited" that gets you anything useful.
If it has no definition, no limits , no rules or laws it follows , we're then talking about nothing...or at least the most nothing that can obtain. But that's not God. It is , however, exactly the kind of thing that would necessarily generate a multi-verse. If nothing restricted or defined how this initial state evolves then anything could and eventually would happen.
Oppy looking fresh today
In the end Infinite regress gets us all . It can’t be comprehended .
I think the necessary foundation having some sort of free will/agent causation is a great way to get from necessity to contingent things without positing a necessary but arbitrary limit like probability. I wish Graham had responded more to that point at 44:40
Free will sounds exactly like a bounded probability.
Are you a theist if not a christian? I hope you dont mine me asking
44:00 I'm highly suspicious of the idea that the necessary causal origin can't be a spaceotemporal boundary because boundaries are mereologically complex but that the causal origin could be an infinite mind. Minds seem to be mereologically complex to me and an infinite mind would be infinitely mereologically complex. I'm open to the idea of a mereologically simple mind if one can explain what they are, what they do, and how they are a mind though.
Can you explain me, please, why Dr. Oppy said that from a solely physical universe you can get indeterminacy and, hence, contingency? I think that in that universe the things will be determine by previous things.
Conversation:
The main takeaway from this, for me, is that Oppy hasn't fully nailed down his account of modality. And this becomes ESPECIALLY clear with his conversation with Loke later on. Here are some things to point out about Oppy's "initial state" which I think might be helpful for him in future discussions.
1. At t=0, no causal history has happened yet. Some time has to pass before there can be a "history" of anything.
2. If possible worlds share a causal history with the actual world, and there is no causal history, then possible worlds are indistinguishable from actual worlds.
3. This means that Oppy's initial state is a collection of all possible futures, some of which will emerge as actual when time starts.
4. By S5, if possibly X, then necessarily (possibly X).
5. Insofar as Oppy's initial state is just a collection of possible future states, since those possible states are necessary (by S5), Oppy's initial state is necessary.
6. So what that means is that, not only does Oppy have Leibnizian grounds to assert his initial state is necessary, it turns out that it's necessary by construction, given his account of modality.
Now from these points, Oppy is well positioned to deal with Koons' objection. Given any physical apprehension held by Oppy, Oppy can interact with that apprehension to make it otherwise. This means that his apprehension isn't a mere possibility (like his initial state) and so it's not necessary in the sense his initial state is necessary. Now, reality could still be an illusion, blah blah blah. But the point now is that there's nothing unique about Oppy's model that opens him up more than anything else.
This also immediately helps him in his discussion with Loke. Since Oppy's initial state is a collection of merely possible futures, it makes no sense for them to "pop into being uncaused". First, mere possibilities aren't actual. Second, possibilities ARE uncaused by definition. So they wouldn't have to pop into being. This reduces Loke's entire argument down to a category error immediately.
Man I'd love to chat with Oppy and pick his brain about some of this, because I think this clarification on his model is a powerful pre-emptive defeater for so many objections.
You probably can he goes on a lot UA-cam channels
You should Email Oppy he is nice he accept Request alot for UA-cam discussion
Did u E mail him
What's you're background in the academic world 🌎?
@@jbunstoppable5074 Master's in Math, Master's in Econ, a year off from a Master's in Stats. Philosophy wise, I just study it as a hobby.
“Diagonalize out of the totality of natural things” is that just as an vague analogy to cantors argument or is there some version of actual diagonalization? That would be cool!
Watching this again (and loving it! Thank you MoR!), and three things occur to me, for someone who takes Oppy's view that necessary truths have no explanation of their necessity, and they are just brute "costs" to your overall theory of the world:
1) If necessity is a cost, then wouldn't a thing with multiple necessary properties, each necessarily set to to some specific amount or limit or degree, incur a much *larger cost* than something with very few or perhaps no such properties? You could think of each time you have to say "it's just necessarily like that" as 1 unit of "theoretical cost". You have to do that many more times (and therefore, "spend" many more "theoretical cost units") for a complexly delimited thing.
2) It would mean that there can't be explanations of why X is impossible (since impossibility = necessarily-not). That seems crazy to me! A married bachelor is impossible because the union of those properties is incoherent. Likewise, the necessity of 2+2=4 is explained by the incoherence of denying it.
3) It would mean that there could never be such a thing as evidence of contingency. So, even though there are some things which seem clearly contingent, and others that don't... and even though our justifiably believing/knowing that there are at least some contingent truths undergirds the whole project of alethic modality and the PSR... we actually could never have justification or evidence to think X is contingent. Because whatever we would point to (e.g. having a beginning, being finite or limited in various ways, it being easy to conceive of slight differences in X's properties...) would have opposites that would count as criteria of X's necessity. If a fact makes it more or less likely that another fact is contingent, then it simultaneously makes it more or less likely that thing is necessary. And so we'd have a limited pool of things that even qualify to potentially be regarded as necessary, and satisfying the criteria to belong to that pool would count as explanatory!
I completely agree. Oppy is brilliant, but his view has real problems, like the ones that you laid out. I especially find that fact that he opens a door to skepticism that he does not have to do is a very powerful point against his theory. God Bless.
@@maximilianstein7326 Do you think there is a way around this for an atheist? Seeems to me they would have take a few similar to Oppy's one.
@@anglozombie2485 Hey there, I hope you are doing well. My guess would be that they would respond in a similar way to how Oppy responded. My guess would be that the naturalist would say that he can agree with Koons that the necessary thing could not be different as it is necessary, but this doesn't mean that it can't have arbitrary limits as those limits would just be unchangeable by virtue of the fact that the thing is necessary. I don't think this response would work as it seems to be begging the question as the whole point of the discussion is to find out what it takes for a thing to be necessary so just saying that the limited entity is necessary without any reason other than the fact that it is your view would be question-begging. The reason would be that the Pruss-Koons PSR would, in that case, just entail that you couldn't rationally hold to the necessary thing being limited because of the skepticism that comes from positing this entity. I think if you can't rationally hold to a position that position is probably false. God Bless.
@@maximilianstein7326 could you dumb that down a little more for me and what would this mean in taking the position of belief in a God over naturalism, would the suggestibility of one be more than the other?
point 1 correct, but point two has a problem.The kind o necessity Oppy is claiming to have no further explanation is metaphysical necessity, note that he always says "there's no explaining why a THING is necessary", a married bachelor is not a thing, precisely because there are no contradictions (assuming the falsity of dialetheism).
the point 3 i'm not really sure i understood.
Haven’t watched the whole thing yet, but it seems like the confusion around 26:05 is a conflation of the word “explanation”, where Oppy uses it to mean a cause, or the reason why, as opposed to “explanation” as Koons is using it, as a way of understanding something. We can use one necessary truth to better understand another one. For example, you can “explain” 3x3=9 as “3+3+3=9”, & that helps make multiplication more intelligible to me, BUT one does not cause the other. One expression is not more fundamental than the other. One does not come about as a result of the other. I sort of agree with Oppy that all necessary truths seem to come as a “package” all together.
As a theist I tend to think that mathematical & logical truths are necessary because God made them so. But I realise that that makes their necessity contingent on God’s design, & that seems contradictory.
well it isn't contradictory if you define contingent to only mean : a thing that could have not existed, which does not imply dependence. "Contingent" in modern analytical philosophy means only this possibility, not to be confused with the daily usage of the word meaning , "contingent = dependent". Now, you are certainly on a good track of thought here. Because based on this, you can classify beings as Ibn Sina or Aristotelian philosophers do; *impossible beings, possible beings, and necessary beings.* There are two types of necessary beings/things: *necessary due to itself* (this can be called pure necessity or whatever you want to call it) or *necessary due to some other necessary thing* (this could be called a determined being; i.e. determinism). Here the word "necessary" means could have not failed to exist, which again does not provoke dependency notions, it can be dependent or independent. (another layer of classification overlapping with the previous 3 main categories).. Dependent beings can be possible beings or necessary beings of the second type, i.e. determined or not pure necessities. Independent beings are always pure necessities, because they don't depend on any other beings to exist or be what they are.
One thought for the idea about an omnipotent being deceiving itself about the finitude and contingency of its appearances: Did you not directly appeal to your omnipotence as an explanation for the appearances? That just is to give an explanation in terms of power, which is the very thing you're trying to avoid in that strange scenario, no? Maybe I'm missing something....
Yeah seems odd lmao.
I think you are right. Joe's move, while clever and interesting, doesn't seem to be a problem for the theist *given the dialectical context* , for at that point it's the naturalist who is committing himself to the existence of some natural state of affairs which is necessary, has no external explanation at all *and* is not relevantly different from other natural stuff which is contingent and has an explanation ("being the initial state" or "being the fundamental thing" per se is not a relevant difference with respect to the possibility of having an external explanation, given the nature of the things involved: natural things, in this case, as defined by Koons). By contrast, the theist is not by any means committing himself to any sort of theism which has as one of its "essential" tenets the view that God has a disposition to create the weird solipsistic scenario that Joe described. I mean, you can still say its epistemically possible, just as any other typical skeptical scenario (brain in a vat, Matrix, etc.) is, but as Koons mentioned, that's totally irrelevant given the dialectical context.
I think the best route for the naturalist here is to flesh out in his theory a non-arbitrary distinction between the uncaused/necessary natural things and the caused/contigent natural things that at the same time mantains or makes a safe home for the rationality of the claims to empirical knowledge that we hold.
50:20 I don't think that taking seriously the idea that my sense experiences and other faculties could have appeared without a cause necessarily defeats my knowledge. Just because it's epistemically live and serious that those things could be true doesn't defeat any of my necessary criteria for knowledge like justification, truth, belief, and there being no undefeated factual defeaters. For example it could be that I take that idea seriously and also be the case that I have at least one hand, believe I have at least one hand, be justified in that belief, and be in a situation where there are no factual undefeated defeaters such as about failings in my eyes or mind making me think I have hands.
Maybe what he said earlier was really that taking that sort of idea seriously makes my claim to knowledge more vulnerable like he seems to clarify at 1:07:10 . I'll have to look more into skepticism and responses to it to see if he's right
Since Nov 2nd 1986, I've been a necessary being on naturalism and theism.. 😁
Ill try to give a go at what they're arguing about by way of an example: 25:45
Theory A - Multiplication
2 * 4 = 8
holds true when / because
Theory B - Addition
2 + 2 + 2 + 2 = 8
holds true when / because
Axioms of Addition
Which of these theories are explanatory / logically superior?
Theory A has a longer logic tree but has a more comprehensive antecedent cause
Theory B which has a less comprehensive antecedent cause but is the basis on which theory A holds true
Koons : B betta tho
Oppy : Min theological commitment Max Explanatory powahhhh (rule).
It answers Koons Question in a way but also doesnt in a way
my 2 cents
45:00 some moment of silence...😄
“The agreement’s important right?” - the first time Oppy’s been wrong
Came here to make a "Is that Cameron Bertuzzi's little brother?" Joke... sticking around for the solid content. No offense, but I literally just discovered your channel and that was my first thought.
hahaha much love
I'd be curious to hear how Koons argues that this necessary being has an infinite mind, free will and ultimate/maximal power and all of this being ultimately simple...given that the one example we have of an actual mind with free will, e.g. our human minds, exist as a product of random mutation + natural selection and seems to be an emergent process of a properly functioning brain. A brain which is anything but simple, our limited, tiny (compared to the mass or volume of the universe) is nonetheless the most complex object which we have ever encountered. From what I remember, it's estimated to have a gobsmackingly high specified complexity on the order of 10^155. An infinite mind? Seems by definition it is infinitely complex if only to be capable of processing anything interesting at all. And then to require atemporal processing? And then to say it has libertarian free will which suffers serious problems by decoupling will from reason...or a causal history...or anything at all, doesn't seem different than "random" but "random" isn't anyone's idea of free will. A mind that doesn't process in a sequential/temporal order. A simplicity that is infinite complexity. All sounds essentially *not* any of those things. Either not a mind, not atemporal and/or not simple.
Given he describes the Trinity and the various internal and reflective relationship therein as ultimately simple we may just be using very different meanings of the word.
Also, I love the "I might be God" defeater. It's the only idea I've ever come up with that provides a coherent theodicy.
Loved the discussion and your moderation was excellent! Very bright, earnest, authentic and even humble ;-) cheers!
Why couldn’t the ground of being be “a” mind that tenselessly grasps all truths (and tenselessly wills to create) “in a single, changeless intuition?”
WLC has a section on timeless personhood in his Time and Eternity, although he’s not a classical theist like Koons. Still does a nice job arguing for the coherence of timeless peraonhood.
But, classical theists have already given specific arguments for thinking that the terminus of explanation is (a) simple and (b) conscious(ness). So you’d have to address those specific arguments head on to give a more robust critique.
Koons takes some unexpected turns sometimes, but I think that he’d probably agree with me that it is (or at least seems to be) completely impossible for a rational mind to be developed by chance, or to be entirely material.
If we could say that we know, with complete certainty, that, say, 2+4=6, or whatever, then we can be certain that that knowledge did not come there by random chance. It’s possible to come up with that information by merely natural processes (I.e. a calculator), but not the principles by which it is known, and certainly known; plus, even if the random chance were non natural, it would still have to be based on necessary principles to be certain knowledge, which couldn’t be random- they’d have to be the RIGHT principles, or else ENTIRELY uncertain.
If we have a non natural (in the modern sense) origin, then there’s nothing wrong with God’s having one (in buttering an entirely necessary Being) as well.
As for free will, that follow necessarily from having an independent mind, that it’s also natural. That would mean that the individual makes up its own mind on its various subjects, rather then being a bunch of abstract principles necessarily entailing one another.
Hope that clears things up- or at least gives you something to chew on! Great comment, btw!
@@TheBookgeek7 there's so much in your response to dig into :-) thanks for taking the time. Dr. Koons was my professor at UT Austin for Contemporary Christian Philosophy. I wish I had known he was so well known in the field I would've gone to after hours lol. What I remember is a big binder of poor quality copies of Plantinga and C.S. Lewis and such. I'm on a mobile device so responding is hard as I'm going from memory so please bear with me.
1. I worry that the first conclusion is driven by incredulity (though perhaps you may say that your incredulity, as Im labeling it, is simply the cognitive inability to believe 1+1=3?) and a possibly circular reasoning path enables you to make such a strong conclusion "is (or seems to be) completely impossible for a rational mind to be developed by chance, or to be entirely material."
I haven't mapped out the circularity, it's just an intuition but I'll clarify when I get half a moment... hopefully!
I could talk for hours on just that quote!
a) it sounds like you're arguing against the claim, "Rational minds develop via randomness & must be entirely material." I'm not quite making that argument. I'm not aware of anyone who thinks any modern creature, sentient or not, arose via randomness. Perhaps it's a fine tuning argument that relies on the assumption that the initial Conditions of the universe are manifested at random, in which case, rational minds emerging from such a random process does seem to approach a probability of aleph zero.
b) by "the principles by which (that certainty about arithmetic sums) it is known..." (is not random). By this are you saying the laws of logic would be one of those non-random things about our/any universe? Certain mathematical axioms as well? 2+4=6 is something I feel very strongly that I know with certainty. Not as certain as "I'm in pain." but maybe the difference isn't worth the distinction. But maybe it is since your arithmetic example is supposed to be an example of certain knowledge because of necessary principles. Me being absolutely certain I'm in pain is not grounded in some necessary principle of existence, it's the perception of pain that *is* pain. Maybe that would be grounded in identity? But even keeping it in simple arithmetic and not in any math built out of addition and subtraction, 172884774782921974+528384758292948=173413159541214922
Is something I'm not at all certain about.
However, I have no issue with the statement necessary things exist necessarily (and so are not random) regardless of my ability to grok them or not. I like to think of our universe and start removing everything possible and whatever remains is necessary. It's the maximal nothing. All that remains is that which is necessary. Logic seems to be there :-)
c) I'm thinking some of this was a typo on your part because I don't know what "if we have a non natural (in the modern sense) origin, then there's nothing wrong with God having one (in *buttering* an entirely necessary being) as well.
i. Can you clarify what you mean by "non-natural (in the modern sense) origin"? By "we" you mean the universe? Or do you mean life or human kind?
ii. I wasn't expecting you to claim that God has an origin of any type. Did I misunderstand?
As I/you said, lots to dig into :-). I'll leave it there for now before jumping into free will.
@@TheProdigalMeowMeowMeowReturns I think because without the property of tenses, the concept of mind becomes incoherent. WLC can write "tenslessly grasps all truths (and tenselessly wills to create) "in a single, changeless intuition?" But the entire argument is ad hoc to get around the evident essential nature of mind which operates by distinguishing causes from effects and to do so must temporally flow from one to the other and distinguish the difference. All things present at once is just white noise and the static on your television. The functions crucial for mental, knowledge-generating activity are spatio-temporal processing of, and application of concepts to, sensory inputs. Cognition requires concepts as well as percepts.
Josh, please don’t interpret this as cop out, but Craig has a chapter on atemporal personhood and Feser gives arguments for why the purely actual actualizer has intellect/will/and yes concepts in his books.
I recommend them👍
Joe Will you request Dr Alexander pruss for a written discussion for this channel ?
Jesus said unto her, I am the resurrection, and the life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live: and whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die. Believest thou this?
John 11:25-26 KJV
"you're a wizard Harry" - see, we can quote from fiction too...
14:28 Koons article
19:30 bookmark
If everything we have contact with and all the world around us is natural, why i have to think that the "being" who cause this is supernatural?
do we really know if everything we have contact with and the world around us is natural? that said, one asnwer would be because the being who cause this would be outside/different from everything else.
Excellent video. Please consider inviting Hamza Tsortiz
I am not a philosopher but I don't see how Graham saying there are two sets of explanations causal and necessary requires him to therefore think that all apparent physical/natural phenomena being necessary is a real tenable possibility. Am I missing something? Maybe something about what his version of the PSR can't assume? I personally didn't see the logic.
Thanks!
So, Graham thinks that the initial segment of natural reality is necessary, but that non-initial segments are contingent (due to the outworkings of chance, i.e. indeterministic causal powers had by the initial segment
Thanks you are producing some great content!
There is no need of Bill Gate for using Windows, because Windows has its self-structured code, therefore, why should we think Bill exists?... we just skip that part and believe that code is all.. and we do not need more..
I'm a philosophy moron but I watched two of your videos and somehow made it all the way through. This one was a little light on getting to how god comes out of a necessary being. Koons asserted some things that left my jaw on the floor: I totally missed how he got there (the bit about the immaterial mind and the bit about the trinity and love, etc). Suggestion for a future topic that just sticks with naturalistic explanations. Assuming naturalism is true and no gods are needed or if they're there they're deistic type gods or long since dead gods, so we're on our own. I guess you could call this the "problem of consciousness" but that doesn't seem like a problem to me. Clearly it's a continuum. Different animals is one bit of evidence that consciousness isn't all or nothing but another is just cutting out bits of the human brain... and voila! Consciousness it altered (almost always a downgrade). That seems entirely consistent with naturalism. However, the one question I have is why do I have subjective experiences? Say you copied all the important information from my brain into a book and then you updated the state of this copy by calculating how it would change from one sample time to the next, and that book was essentially me, or a copy of me. You could feed it inputs and get the same outputs I'd give if given those inputs. Clearly that copy must also have a subjective experience. If it's the flow of information that's important, how do we know what sorts of information flows have subjective experiences, and what are their boundaries (i.e. what separates one entity having a subjective experience from another)? That seems like a really interesting philosophical question. But it pre-supposes naturalism I think. One idea I had is that the consciousness continuum continues further than we might think. Maybe all sorts of things have a subjective experience and they run at wildly different time scales. Everything from groups of humans to trees & rocks to mountains, forests, planets and galaxies. I'm not saying those things have a consciousness that is similar to ours, but perhaps there's an information flow going on that gives them a subjective experience in some sense. What do you think?
what do u mean by god
Got a new sub out of me :)
God bless
Much love
Wow great work here! Are you studying at Perdue?
Yep! #BoilerUp
@@MajestyofReason Awesome! I almost went there for my PhD in the fall. Fortunately I was also accepted somewhere closer to home. Although, given how great you are, I'm sure I would have enjoyed studying at Purdue as well. I hope everything is alright with the pandemic down there for you.
Another great video, thanks for these discussions!
I have a question about this, I don't get the difference:
1:00:17 Joe: 'if I'm truly omnipotent then I could make it appear to me that these appearances are finite...how can I rule it out'
1:01:04 Rob: 'it still appears to be finite and that fact is gonna be bounded and calls for a causal explanation'
1:07:39 Rob: 'you think in reality there is a natural fact that is necessary and is uncaused...someone asking, what about your present state? That's a natural fact. What is it that enables you to think that that's not in the same boat as the initial state?
1:08:18 Oppy: 'because it's not the initial state'
1:08:41 Rob: 'that's just foot stomping'
Why is seeming allowed to be used in Rob's case but it's 'footstomping' in Oppy's case?
Becoouse oppy agreed he footstomped he shoud ponder to become a christian now .
Oppys argument seems interesting, but i think he got a little flustered and forgot it in the heat of the moment.
I had to re-watch this one after a conversation with Ben Watkins about God's ability to choose from a range of possible worlds and whether or not God's choice is necessary or contingent and if contingent then whether or not it is a brute contingency. Unfortunately they only got into that very briefly during this discussion. Any suggestions for other resources where I might dive deeper into that area?
Alexander Pruss, in his book “The principle of sufficient reason: a reassessment”, has a very nice discussion of libertarian freedom and whether it implies brute contingency.🙂
how did you arrange this?!
Magic ;)
Let me explain: a lot, and I mean *a lot*, of Facebook debate threads, lots of emails, and some flattery sprinkled on top 😉
@@MajestyofReason btw, i vaguely remember reading somewhere that you said "in principle agnosticism," as opposed to epistemic agnosticism, was silly. why do you think so?
@@tanner955 The reason is because there is no obstacle in principle for coming to knowledge about the foundational nature of reality -- that's exactly what the business of philosophy is, after all.
@@guardedacumen I basically just slid into Rob's DM's and he agreed, then sent one email to Graham and he said it sounds cool...
Hmmm... foot stomping....
I'm a bit confused by Koons' argument here.
My understanding is that he's saying that on Graham's view, we couldn't be sure that there's a causal history to what we think is our knowledge and therefore we couldn't call it knowledge.
So is his point that this means that it can't be true? I don't see how that follows...
i wish we got a part 2
At *that* point in the discussion, it doesn’t mean that Oppy’s view can’t be true (at least prima facie). But it does mean that, at that point in the discussion, his view faces huge epistemological (and in some sense, metaphysical) problems (because of the nature of the objects he has to invoke) which can be easily avoided by some intuitive or a priori PSR for basic natural facts (or something similar to that), as Koons argues. And the interesting thing is that from *that* sort of PSR, it’s possible to build further chains of reasoning that eventually can lead you out of Oppy’s view (a naturalistic worldview) into the theistic worldview.
Rob wants to solve the problem by positing a restrictive PSR that says "all natural facts are contingent" but it seems to me that a naturalist could accept another a priori principle - all mental states are contingent. That's already what most naturalists believe anyway. The initial segment of reality is natural but non mental. While it is true that my current sensory experience and impression of the world is natural it cannot be the initial uncaused necessary fact since it is a natural mental fact. The necessary uncaused first state is a natural non mental state.
Thoughts?
Or I could say all natural mental facts are contingent. That seems to avoid the implications of his knowlegde argument.
@@phiosopher8712 I need to think further about this. Tentatively, I agree with you. I think this is something I was trying to gesture towards in the video but which you have articulated more precisely here!
@@MajestyofReason I think I agreed with Rob's basic premise: in order to adequately deal with his argument you'd need to have an a priori reason for excluding the possibility that your current qualitative conscious experience is the uncaused necessary natural fact. Rob thinks there needs to be an important difference between the necessary thing and contingent things. If the necessary thing is natural and finite, then it's going to be hard to rule out my immediate impressions as being the necessary thing since they just are natural and finite.
I believe Rob is projecting his theism a little bit here. A naturalist could simply say the difference is that base reality is non mental. The necessary thing lacks mental properties, it has no conscious experience. Therefore I know I am not in the initial state. If Rob thinks "all natural facts are contingent" is a legitimate a priori principle one can accept, then it's going to be extremely difficult for me to see why "all natural mental facts are contingent" is not a plausible a priori principle one can accept.
Happy new years bro!
@@phiosopher8712 Thank you!!! Happy new years! I enjoyed your comments here :)
Isn't it arbitrary, when considering the initial state, to allow for the possibility of necessary being, only in the instance of physical/natural things?...and also somewhat counterintuitive as the most commonly considered candidates for necessary being are not physical/natural?
What do you guys think about this argument?
1) It is possibly necessary that all minds have physical bodies (that is, in at least one possible world, all minds necessarily have physical bodies)
2) Therefore, it is necessary that all minds have physical bodies (♦️🟥p ->🟥p)
3) Necessarily, god does not have a physical body.
4) So, necessarily, god doesn't have a mind.
Pathetic argument.
This discussion was long on imagination but short on demonstration.
It would be great if you had a podcast.. I don't have time to watch UA-cam for this long.
I love your feedback my dude
How do we even get to this conversation with almost nothing to establish there is any being responsible for anything regarding creation? Seems like an empty armchair pointless debate.
YEAR 2200 ......
science shown UNIVERSE is a steady state system again ......
This was such a fun conversation! I'm sad it took me so long to see this. I read the paper and listened to the discussion and I had some thoughts, first, on the paper.
1. I notice that natural and supernatural aren't exhaustive even in the "things that don't explain themselves" category. Natural is a thing with a composition of measurable parts, supernatural is an unbounded thing with one part.
But what about composite things with unbounded parts?
What about things, singular or composite, which are simply unmeasurable, i.e. measuring them would be a category error?
For the first example, we can think of a vector space in some crude sense as a composition of its dimensions. And if the vector space is a direct sum of infinite fields, then it would be a composition of unbounded parts. The question is whether that object would explain itself or not. Now if one wants to say that, despite being infinite, the dimensions are "bounded" then such a vague definition of "unbounded" is being used here that it opens you up to the Igtheist gambit.
For the second example, consider Koons' own example in this video: "2+2=4". Putting off to the side that this statement isn't necessarily true as written (what are 2, +, and 4?), let's suppose he included all the minutia which does make the statement necessarily true. Koons wants to say that, maybe, these facts don't explain themselves, and a single sentence like this surely would be unmeasurable. How many units would "2+2=4" be? And what would we even use for units?
So there is a real worry here that because natural and supernatural aren't exhaustive within their category, it could be that the plurality of natural facts is explained by one of the "rogue categories" of facts, rather than a supernatural fact.
2. It's not clear why it couldn't be the case that an extraordinary fact explains the plurality of natural facts. Indeed, even Koons and Pruss MUST believe this. Since Koons admits in this video that there are an infinite number of possible worlds that God could have created, God can't be the explanation for any particular one of them.
This is so because God exists whether or not any of them are or aren't the case. Instead, it's God's decision that's actually doing the work here, not God. And what do we know of God's decision? According to Pruss, it's self explanatory, which immediately makes it extraordinary. But just in case, we note for completeness that it's not measurable, and thus wouldn't be natural or supernatural.
3. Putting these two thoughts off to the side, I can't help but feel that there's something I like to call an "Elenchus Fallacy" going on here. The best way I can describe this, is that it assumes a category of things (not their collection) is reducible in some sense to the collection of which it is a representative when this might not be the case.
The example I give for this is "wetness". Wetness is not reducible to the plurality of all wet things. Indeed, if someone were to ask you what wetness is, you wouldn't just start showing them a bunch of wet things, but you'd try to abstract them to what they have in common. It turns out that what's common is a qualia, a "feeling" associated with being wet that's common to all of them, and that's why the category of things are wet.
Note, this is distinct from a fallacy of composition because in this case, it's obviously true that if you grab a bunch of wet things and make a collection out of them, that collection will be wet.
Now where this comes up in the argument is when we discuss the plurality of all the natural things there are. This collection is being referred to as a "single thing" let's call it Nature. The idea is that since Nature has exhausted all the things there are, then if Nature has an explanation, it won't be explained in terms of some natural thing. But the two questions that immediately pop up are:
i. Is it right to think about this plurality as a single "thing" that may or may not need an explanation?
ii. Supposing we can, does Nature reduce nicely to the properties of the members of which it is a representative?
I argue "no". The move isn't justified, and there's an intuitive reason for why one might think you can't make this move. Intuitively, thinking about i, any defined collection of natural things is concrete and definable. You can think of it as a system in some sense. But once you describe ALL natural things, that changes. What you've done at that point is filled up the entire boundary of all facts pertaining to this world as some possible world. Thinking about what an explanation for all that might look like, what you're left with is asking something like "why is this world like X, instead of like other possible world Y instead?" Once you're asking questions at that level, there's equivocation going on about what an "explanation" looks like, especially if we're using a grounded idea of explanation which justifies science and knowledge of empirical reality. Because this explanation is different from something like "why does gravity work?" we know there's intuitively, something "greater than the sum of its parts" about i.
Now i seems more to discuss the fallacy of composition aspect, i.e. can we talk about the wall in the same way we talk about all its bricks. But ii focuses more on my issue. Let's take the modal intuition above but let's also flip it a bit. Let's use the author's own definitions to discuss this. Is nature a composition of things? That's an interesting question. It's been defined to be a "collection", but are collections necessarily compositions? I don't think so. But supposing for the sake of argument that Nature is a composition. Its parts are certainly measurable, but is IT measurable? I mean what measure would you pick to measure it, in principle, and what would its units be?
Now we could note that the authors omitted that the natural thing itself be measurable or bounded, only its parts have these qualities. But if we're trying to justify empirical reality with the PSR, why would we do that? Suppose it seems apparent to me that some object, in totality, is bounded. But I don't know, epistemically, for certain that the object isn't composed of some parts which may be individually unbounded and yet "cancel out" in composition to result in the bounded object before me. Will that uncertainty cripple my empirical knowledge? I don't think so, because apprehension of the thing seems more important, or basic, than apprehension of its parts. In that vein, since "Nature" isn't "bounded" in the same way this or that object, or specified collection, is bounded, we have a problem. I think something about that needs to be baked into the definition so this game can't be played.
The other thing to note here is that we don't know that "all the natural things there are" when we go deep into quantum boogity woogity, are bounded. All kinds of crazy stuff could happen which we may not even be mentally prepared for, but more importantly, it seems like bolting this implicit assumption on opens one up to a quasi Hempel's Dilemma. Since science has made no claim to explain nature in terms of bounded quantities at the present time, so it can't be appealed to for this intuition. On the other hand, if you want to be sure that this intuition is future proof, you'd have to define science as something that explains all the natural things in terms of bounded things. So if some unbounded part of a system is found, it must be declared immediately unscientific.
Are you a theist or a atheist?
@@omaribnalahmed5967 Depends on one's definition of either term.
I've had atheists refer to me as either
I've had theists refer to me as either
I don't really care what I am, I just like discussing the arguments.
@@logos8312 cool what do you think is the strongest argument for atheism and strongest for theism?
@@omaribnalahmed5967 That's a tough question. Since there are so many interesting arguments on both sides, but best way I can put this in terms of the best "meta argument" for either.
For Theism, the best meta-argument I can think of is that so many aspects of our models are underdetermined by physical facts. So for example my friend Shousa and I have a soft spot for Tychism, the idea that randomness is a fundamental aspect of reality. But this leads to an interesting question.
Suppose random facts determine the way in which certain aspects of the world are the way they are. Then suppose we exhaust all the explanations to figure out what happened to make the world the way it is. We still have to appeal to something outside the physical facts to close the system because insofar as everything is random, it's part of a statistical distribution, and this distribution contains broader categories of facts over and above the particular ones we see now.
To simplify, it's like we exhaust all our physical understanding to figure out that we're the world in which a dice rolls 5. But while our facts are great at telling us what the dice rolls, we can't appeal to them to explain that the dice has a uniform distribution from 1-6, because those other rolls "didn't happen" and so can't be physically observed by us.
The Tychism question is just one of many that have this underdetermination problem. Does this get you to a particular God, a particular religion or anything like that? No. But it points at a necessary immaterial mode of being (Rasmussen calls it a "foundation" which I think is apt) that seems to reliably insert itself into discussions once you hit the boundary.
The best meta-argument for atheism is that you have classes of arguments against theism which do several things.
1. Note that a model that appeals to immaterial necessary stuff that is designed to exclude other "God stuff" from tagging along (such as agency, goodness, etc.) also ends up being simpler in many other regards than Theist models that leave the possibility of this open. Oppy brings this up regularly.
2. There's some arguments I find compelling which force discussions of God's agency into a dilemma where if it's too strongly accounted for, you get modal collapse, but if it's too weakly accounted for you end up undercutting the intuition at the core of your argument. So there are Leibnizian examples of this, Majesty of Reason recently had someone on discussing a dilemma bout the Kalam and the first moment of time.
These dilemmas happen quite often, in a lot of arguments, with enough commonalities I think this could be generalized into a second-order meta dilemma if people really work at it.
I could say more but this comment is going to get pretty long already so hopefully that gives you an idea of where my head is at. It's not "this or that" argument I find compelling in favor of atheism or theism but rather the patterns in arguments which keep turning up in these discussions that make me take some pause.
He let the cat out of the bag when he said that the argument takes us closer to where we want to go. So you keep on making arguments and if they fail then you back track and try something else that takes you where you want to go. One of the places the arguments cncerning God is that you can give god any abilities that satisfy gods existence. god cant live within time because time would exist without being caused. The same with space. God cant be in space as space wouid not have a cause. So what does it mean to be outside of time and space. Can you have an eternal being without time. Can god have infinite power in a dimentionless world. More important what can we say about such an entity. Nothing. Just my opinion.
1:03:25
How does the possibly that I'm wrong entail that I don't know? Infallibalism?
why do you want logical explanation or simplification only for the trinity? there are so many religions in the world! If God is there then any one can be the truth! so why not discuss things more neutrally, at least bring the major religions or their concepts of God Almighty too beside the trinity.....specially Islam! cause why not?
17:10
Since you didn't answer my previous comments I won't just keep on waiting and I will just continue on with watching your videos.
Is it normal that I didn't understand a thing what you were talking about? Here is everything I understood:
- The title says: "From Necessary Being to God?"
- It looked like it was interesting.
- The two people were not the same opinion.
- One of the two people wrote a paper on the topic that was discussed here.
- The one in the bottom right seems to be Christian.
- You talked something about a necessary beings. But I didn't understand what exactly.
- That the point where something just is without an explanation is for everyone different. (0=0 for example)
That's about all I understood.
But I didn't even notice when you started talking about god. Or if the title and the topic of the video matched. But I guess that is to be expected.
Thanks for the comment! I'm drowning in work lately. If you would like to tag me in your previous comments, I could potentially take a look :)
@@MajestyofReason The only important thing is that I don't have an understanding of what philosophers mean with the different worlds.
In one of your first videos, someone said, closeby worlds are similar and distant worlds are different. Or something like that. And I don't understand why that should be the case.
1. If Christianity is true, then there is the natural world, the spiritual world and god. And those three are closely interlinked even though they are completely different.
2. If a simulation (or a computer game or a written story) is a world, then that world can have every characteristics imaginable. And in case of a computer game for example, it is interactable. And if they don't count as worlds, then what if Elon Musk is true and our entire world is a simulation? Would we then not live in a world?
I would love to have a video on that topic, if it was possible. Like the one you made on what is an argument. If you talk enough around that topic even someone who wouldn't even consider himself a laymen might pick up one or two things.
But obviously you don't have to create videos after my wishes. Especially since you are so busy. It is just something I would be thankful for.
@@benrex7775 Good questions and points! I appreciate your feedback--truly. 'World' is a technical concept for philosophers. In short, a world is a complete or total or global way that reality could be. So, if God exists, then one possible world will be God existing alone, without any creation whatsoever (assuming God has free will, of course). This is a complete way that reality could have been (but clearly this is not the actual world!). Here's Ryan Mullins explaining what a possible world is:
"a possible
world is a maximally consistent proposition that is best captured by modal
logic. Such propositions express the entire way things could be. A maximally
consistent proposition will contain an ontological inventory of all things that
exist within a world, and the relations that obtain between those objects. This
maximal proposition will also include the entire history of a world’s timeline,
if that particular world contains a timeline. The actual world is a maximally
consistent proposition that expresses the entire way things are. Worlds are
distinct from universes. A universe is a smaller domain within a world. A
universe is a collection of contingently existent beings who are spatiotemporally related to one another. This is why one finds theists talking about a
possible world where God exists without any universe of any sort, or a possible world in which God exists with a universe."
Hopefully this helps!
The Lamb with blemish died for the souls many so repent and believe in the gospel of Jesus Christ
Does Oppy reject the weak PSR?
"It is possible that every contingent being has a cause"
He would have to hold that it is IMPOSSIBLE for at least one contingent being to have a cause.
He would have a huge burden of proof...
Oppy accepts (a version of) the PSR
@@MajestyofReason which one?
@@MajestyofReason the only forms I know are the Leibniz and Gale Pruss version...
@@matthieulavagna Oppy accepts that all contingent objects have an explanation
@@MajestyofReason then how can he hold that the universe is necessary??
The univers is clearly a contingent object since it is material and limited in space and time...
If one accepts both PSR and the contingency of the univers he becomes a theist...
Does Prof. Oppy believe it's a brute fact that necessary truths exist? If I know what "brute fact" means, a brute fact is something that can't have any explanation even in principle. If a brute fact can't have one even in principle, there's no way to tell that something is a brute fact. If there were a way to discover that something is a brute fact, that would imply that there's an explanation. But then the supposed brute fact wouldn't be a brute one after all.
Thanks for the comment!
I don't think it's impossible to discover or reason that there's a brute fact.[Fn] This seems to me to confuse epistemology with ontology. The mere fact that we reason that P has to be true does not require that there be an (ontological) explanation for P's being true. There might be an *epistemic* explanation (i.e. a kind of justification), but that doesn't require there being an *ontological* explanation (i.e. a dependence relation like causation or grounding).
[Fn] In fact, theism is committed to the existence of at least one brute fact, viz. God himself. God cannot be further explained even in principle. God is radically independent and hence not dependent on anything for an explanation for his existence.
@@MajestyofReason Joe, maybe you're right to say that I confused ontology and epistemology. But it seems to me that there may still be an ontological explanation for necessity. Maybe you remember that I believe the law of noncontradiction is a metaphysical principle instead of a merely semantic one. I suggest that Aristotle is right when he tells us that nothing can both be and not be in the same respect at the same time. Either a boulder ways 1,000 pounds or it doesn't weigh that much. Weigh it. In outer space, a boulder can't be both weightless and not weightless and not weightless in the same respect at the same time. Even when we account for what causes weight and for what causes weightlessness, Aristotle's LNC still seems fully general. In fact, I'm making an ontological point when I say that the LNC is a metaphysical principle built into reality. If it is built into it, that would help explain necessity.
@@williammcenaney1331 What Graham could say in response is that not *all* necessities are brute, and hence there might still be some explanations for some necessities. [ Whether he himself would say this is something that would have to be asked directly to him! :) ]
@@MajestyofReason God knows you're much smarter than me. So you'll understand when I admit, with a face reddened enough to look third-degree burned :), that I still don't know of a way find out that something is a brute fact. If you ask St. Thomas Aquinas what grounds necessity, he probably would say that God does. Still, feel free to take this note with a pillar of sodium chloride. :)
Just a friendly tip, my friend. Please resist the urge to spray paint sodium hypochlorite, i.e., swimming pool chlorine, because it'll blow up. When I was a boy, someone discovered that in garage where the firey explosion broke the windows and melted a snowmobile's windshield. The fireman needed medical oxygen, too. Yes, Joe, you now know that Kaboom is much more than a breakfast cereal. ;)
@@williammcenaney1331 lol! Thank you for the tip. Noted ;)
Even for Aquinas, though, God is wholly ungrounded. So, Aquinas (takes himself to have) reasoned to a brute fact, namely God's existence (since God's existence cannot in principle be further explained).
I ant ruly omnipotent? No Wonder philosophy gets a bad name.
It's amazing how many hoops theists have to jump through to validate their beliefs.
Wwyd if God revealed himself to you?
Yes?…theists?…or atheists?…
What a arrogant intellectual people. They should read Isaiah 55: 8-9. Self explanatory.
(1) Why do you have a pack of Nestle snacking ARSENIC on your bookshelf? (2) Is it true Rob's phD is in smugness and Graham's is in wretchedness? (3) Long and vain talk they of 'God', who have not walked on her mountain, or warmed their knees at fires kindled from Hiroshima embers. Philosophers are structurally identical in function to comedians, with very much an emphasis on the SLOW burn joke. Engineers and whiskey distillers rank higher. Bus drivers rank higher. An acoustic guitar dropped down stairs plays more true notes. The world is a cube. Attention seeking OVER.
I think it's in philosophy.