Worldview. Explanation. Value Proposition. These are the themes of a recent essay and video by the apologist, SJ Thomason, titled: “What Does Atheism Have to Offer? The Atheist Value Proposition”.

https://christian-apologist.com/2023/02/10/what-does-atheism-have-to-offer-the-atheist-value-proposition/

Instead of countering her claims, examples, and arguments, all of which have already been done to exhaustion, I aim to look at the foundation of her approach, which rests on the notion of “worldview” – a seemingly innocuous word at first glance, but behind which stands the germ of the false arguments of Christian apologists. We will see how explanation and value-proposition naturally grow from this originating error. To do so I’ll take a close at the three areas where she cites me specifically: worldview, the nature of reality, and morality.

Worldview

Recently, a Christian called Ken Ammi debated Jeff Williams on my channel. https://www.youtube.com/live/l3N0GNO9FdE?feature=share Jeff was adamant that atheism is not a worldview. Unlike Christianity, which claims the common core in the belief in Jesus’ resurrection and our salvation based on His sacrifice, he said that “there simply isn’t” a common core. He also said we have no objective morality, yet, he said, we do have morality and a moral sense. Hmm.

This is SJ’s first reference of me in her essay and video, and here I’ll address the underlying issue of worldview. I’ll return to the question of morality at the very end.

If worldview were merely the fundamental misstep of Christian apologetics, I wouldn’t bother with it here. I long ago lost interest in the question of gods, including Christianity. But as Martin Heidegger demonstrated in “The History of Beying”, “Introduction to Metaphysics” and “The Age of the World Picture”, worldview is a constituent element of modern life – our prevalent fundamental grasp of the world. He perfectly encapsulates this in “The History of Beyng” as follows:

“Da-sein must find its way into Beyng and leave history to Beying.

Beyng, in its dignity does not require domination.

The First Commencement has become more inception and more primary, and for this very reason, Beyng no longer essences as φύσις. Above all, “metaphysics” is without soil or ground. Yet for this reason, its progeny dominates: Worldview.”

For those not familiar with Heidegger’s Ontology, let’s look closely at these few words.

Da-sein means “Being-there” in German, which Heidegger means as the essential nature of humanity – the part of Being that finds itself conscious of being in the world and, when authentically engaged, in thrall of the event of experience of Being in the world. But our history in the West is one of forgetfulness of Being and not enthrallment as we reduce our world to mere objects of manipulation and superficial measure. Being no longer essences as physis. The world becomes objectified as practical raw material.

That objective reduction is an attempt to dominate Being itself. This reduction is a falsification of the manifold nature of Being by projecting our rational constructions onto it. We insult the dignity of Being through our insolent attempt to instruct Being of its nature whereby we reduce reality to our preferred specifications. The opposite path would be to let Being instruct us and swell beyond our limited rational constructs.

The first commencement is Western Metaphysics, begun at the time of Socrates. It is the time when the full experience of Being as physis is removed from sensual experience and split in two: physics as the objective, rational, and reductive understanding of the material world; and metaphysics as the transcendent and immaterial realm of Being. By ripping Being from the ground of experience in the world, the world becomes desolate (and even sinful) and truth becomes groundless – a mere act of rational imagination. Our experience of physis reduces to physics just as Logos reduces to logic.

Being groundless, metaphysical worldviews can be anything at all. In their groundlessness they claim to explain the universe – it’s beginning and nature. There can be multiple contradictory emergent worldviews, each reductive (thus confining), and each internally coherent. Coherence is easy to achieve when we dispense with the requirement of grounding. But none achieve any real explanation, and all close off the most important questions. Christianity is a worldview. So are Islam and Hinduism. And so is scientific reductionism. Christianity, being a European metaphysical invention (Neoplatonic, later Aristotelian through Thomism, The ROMAN Catholic Church) and unrecognizable to the originators of the Near Eastern mythology it appropriates, is merely the flip side of the same coin as naturalism. For those entrapped in metaphysics, it is impossible to imagine Da-sein without a worldview.

We see this in SJ Thomason’s opening:

Over the past few hundred years, the move to “secular rational modernism” has supplanted “traditional religious” views in many parts of the West. Atheists sometimes think Christianity will one day be toppled and atheists of the past century such as Lenin, Stalin, Pol Pot, and Mao Tse Tung certainly gave that effort their best shot. Other atheists decry the morally atrocious actions of these dictators – whose actions led to the untimely deaths of over 100 million innocent lives. Many of these atheists favor the idea that science will one day topple theistic belief systems – and God. So let’s examine science and God.

To Thomason, everything is a worldview. If Christianity has a worldview, then so must atheism. While in reality there is no single atheist worldview, our current age ensures there will be worldviews among atheists. Certainly Marxism is a worldview inhabiting the reductionist metaphysics of Hegelian dialecticism. As such, it reduces the world to material and power. Much bloodshed ensued. Christianity is a worldview claiming to explain the creation of the universe, the nature of god and man, morality, and truth. It is also a reductive metaphysical construction that precludes the necessary fundamental questions by insisting it already has the answers. Much bloodshed ensued. If we are to ascribe atheism to Communism, we must then also take into account the atheism of Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek and ascribe Monetary Theory, Supply Side Economics, and Free Market Libertarianism to atheism also. Also not without bloodshed. And Naturalism is a worldview – or more broadly, scientific reductionism and the metaphysical insistence that the universe is orderly and rationally explicable. Far too many in the sciences also fail to perceive the fullness of Being.

But that would simply be furthering Thomason’s inability to see outside her confinement to the Christian Worldview, where the world is reduced to Christian/non-Christian.

All of these worldviews fail due to the lack of being grounded in what Being presents in the events of experience, and all offer equally false claims of universal explanation. This lack lies at the foundation of modern drift and sense of loss, or even anxiety. Desolation. We are ripped from the ground that nourishes us.

At the heart of metaphysics lies the myth of subject/object duality – Da-sein depicted as an individuated immaterial soul opposite an observed material world. The individuation is absolute: a rational end-in-itself. And not just that, but an end-in-itself with an all-explanatory worldview. The all-explanatory feature stifles questions, allowing the weeds of dogma to grow. And dogma fueled by Will-to-Power (the last stage of metaphysics) leads to bloodshed.

Explanation

So what makes atheism so attractive to some so-called rationalists, materialists, or naturalists? Does it explain our most important questions of life? Is it the truth? What is its value proposition? Or alternatively, does Christianity offer tremendous explanatory power for life? Is Christianity the truth? What is Christianity’s value proposition? Truth is that which conforms with reality. Let’s examine the two worldviews in the context of life’s biggest questions.

Notice the emphasis on practicality. The crude business jargon of “value proposition” is given first priority, followed by a vague notion of truth. This is the legacy of subject/object physics where the world exists for our domination, and the world view must first of all provide practical benefit. Truth thus comes about as that which supports the benefit. Thomason gives us the naive and superficial definition of “that which conforms to reality”, but is unaware she already constructs reality as that which is useful in her worldview.

The “value” of a worldview is its ability to provide answers to what in reality are uncanny and inexplicable mysteries, but always in accord with one’s preferences. The earmark of metaphysics is its lack of grounding, enabling a myriad of contradictory explanations, as evidenced by not only the Biblical creation myth, but also Enumu Elish, Gaia emerging from Chaos, and many others. All are groundless and explain nothing at all, unless we mean “explain” to mean no more than a coherent narrative. But none conforms to any reality outside the groundless suppositions of the worldview.

Worldviews are essentially incapable of describing ultimate reality, and that goes for scientific reductionism as well as religious myth.

Yet some atheists such as Jeff Williams will push back on even the most basic foundations upon which we’ve built our scientific theories by questioning the rationality of our universe:   We can only pray that he and others like him come to their senses.

As I said earlier, scientific reductionism and Christian worldview are two sides of the same metaphysical coin: a firm yet ungrounded assertion that the universe is fundamentally ordered and rationally understandable. To the Christian and the naive realist the very questioning of this tenet is nonsense. They must cling to this belief at all costs, or all is lost. If the world is fundamentally arational, then the mere coherence of a narrative becomes worthless – the proposition loses all explanatory value.

This is where it becomes interesting. Science itself in the last hundred years has crashed into the impenetrable wall of decoherence, and as in the particle crash of a supercollider, decomposed into mysteries literally inconceivable to our rational minds. Fundamental reality is known to us only negatively – as a lack of our very conditions of rational thought. It is without space and time. Without causality and number. Superposition violates the law of noncontradiction.

Einstein is often said to be the last physicist entitled to belief in a rational worldview, heavily influenced by Spinoza’s metaphysics of a mechanistic world created by a perfectly rational god or nature. Confined to this worldview, Einstein famously rejected the obvious implications of entanglement and indeterminacy as he insisted there must be hidden variables that, when discovered, would restore our faith in a rational universe. John Bell offered a theorem that promised to disprove hidden variables, and Anton Zeilinger, Alain Aspect, and John Clauser shared the 2023 Nobel in Physics for giving definitive experimental proof of Bell’s Theorem. Like it or not, fundamental reality is arational and all our systems of understanding are limited constructs.

Worldviews are not only ungrounded, but in opposition to fundamental reality. They explain nothing at all.

The question of God’s ontology so vexes the atheist that they try to shift the burden of proof for God’s existence to the theist by claiming the definition of atheism is a lack of belief in God. Thus, the theist must address the atheist’s lack of belief by demonstrating evidence for their own beliefs. Thankfully, we have answers. God has given us both generalized evidence for His existence in nature, the cosmos, our design, our rationality and our teleology (or purpose).

Worldviews collapse because they assume a rational universe, but also due to a lack of grounding. This is the obvious weakness of Christianity, but also all worldviews. Christianity cannot present its god, and necessarily resorts to sophistry and empty claims. Notice the degraded use of “Ontology” by Thomason. Non-metaphysically, ontology is philosophy in its fullest sense as a deep questioning within the experience of Being in its manifold nature. In the spirit of metaphysical reduction, however, she uses it merely as a pretentious way to ask if something exists. Unable to ground this existence in experience, she blatantly attempts to shift the burden of evidence.

Morality

He also said we have no objective morality, yet, he said, we do have morality and a moral sense. Hmm.

As the “Hmm” signals, within her worldview my statement about morality is incomprehensible. Within the imprisonment of subject/object metaphysics, there are only two alternatives: Either there is an immaterial objective moral law recognized by our immortal souls (Christian metaphysics); or there is no morality at all and everything is allowed in the sinful world of the senses. (Reductive physicality – nihilism).

Hume is probably the most famous of the moral sentimentalists, and he recognized something fundamental in human nature: we have an innate sense of morality that can be refined over time. That is, morality is subjectively determined, but not entirely arbitrary. It is guided by certain innate sensations and common, in the same way he share an innate ability to reason. When we make a moral judgment, it is immediate in the gut, not an effect of mediated syllogistic reasoning to a standard.

The history of Christian morality itself shows this refinement of moral sentiment, as once biblically approved genocide, stoning of heretics, and slavery are now morally repugnant to most believers. The change over time defies any claim of objective law, which must be immutable.

The universe is arational, and so is morality. But here arationality does not imply empty, but rather overfull. So much more than we can reason.

To follow the question of morality requires overcoming of worldview: to grasp its nature we need to abandon subject/object metaphysics. Fundamental reality is not atomic but entangled. All is connected and in mutual relationship. The key to finally grasping morality is through empathy and love – our primary modes of experiencing fundamental entanglement. The loss of individuation without annihilation. Complementary being in the world. Superposition.

The Second Commencement

For Heidegger, the Second Commencement follows a complete rejection of the past 2500 years of subject/object metaphysics. It rejects rational systems and reduction. It exchanges esthetic knowing for objective representation. He saw himself as no more than somebody clearing the way for this new beginning, but who were to be the brave new explorers of Being? Certainly not the academy and its mean pretense to philosophizing. Heidegger saw the role and capability of the academy as no more than transmitting the past – a past no longer vital. And philosophers lie.

So we turn to poetic thinkers, artists and musicians. A beginning that isn’t new at all, but a return to the pre-metaphysical approach of physis – a poetic non-reductive physicalism perhaps.

Heidegger wrote at the time of intellectual PTSD, full of anxiety and dread. The vertiginous moans of Nietzsche’s madman echoed with the deaths of god and the illusion of a predictable rational universe. This was the desolate time when we are too late for the gods and too early for Being. But it would be wrong to identify the Madman with Nietzsche, who knew better and commanded us to laugh and dance. And in perfect irony, collapsed in a surfeit of empathy embracing a beaten horse.

But this is the 21st Century, and we have had ample time to reorient. Empathy and love beckon us away from subject/object confinement, and its systematic dogmas. Systems are mechanized death. Life is a temporary dance to the tune of entropy. Make it a joyful sound. Embrace the weirdness, whose call beckons from the heart of Being. Surf the waves.

Empathy, love, and joy shared. Or at least so says this unreconstructed 60’s Hippy.

I recently commented on a Twitter thread on my concern over rising Christian Nationalism, and pointed out that the time that the Church ruled Europe was the darkest period of Western History. That thread is found here:

Is it acceptable to hold to a religious belief system based off of personal expierences?

— Lone Spartan (@L0neSpar1an) January 22, 2022

The thread’s originator pointed to the article linked below which he believed refuted the claim of Church oppression and terror:

“The Dark Ages” – Popery, Periodisation and Pejoratives

That took me to a unique blog by a person named Tim O’Neill, who seems to pass himself off on Twitter as a historian, although in the Q&A section of his blog he admits he is not. The title of the blog, “History for Atheists”, is curious as the target audience appears to be Christians looking for support in their online arguments. O’Neill’s brand appeal is as an atheist who is a bit embarrassed by other atheists and busies himself with correcting their historical ignorance. He often carries on about claims from atheists that he is really a theist posing as an atheist – probably more than he should. I want to be clear that for me the question of whether he is an atheist targeting a theist market or a theist in disguise makes no difference at all. I wish only to focus on the quality of his arguments and manner of presentation.

After reading the above article on that blog, I responded on the Twitter thread that O’Neill was not a credible source and made another reading suggestion, which I will comment on at the end. This brought Mr. O’Neill into the thread where he demonstrated remarkable bluster but little, if any substance – a characteristic I found to permeate the blog article. After a pointless exchange I said I would write a more considered explanation of why O’Neil is not a credible source. What follows is that explanation.

We can judge a great deal of Mr. O’Neill’s substance and intellectual honesty from just the opening paragraph:

The concept of “the Dark Ages” is central to several key elements in New Atheist Bad History.  One of the primary myths most beloved by many New Atheists is the one whereby Christianity violently suppressed ancient Greco-Roman learning, destroyed an ancient intellectual culture based on pure reason and retarded a nascent scientific and technological revolution, thus plunging Europe into a one thousand year “dark age” which was only relieved by the glorious dawn of “the Renaissance”.  Like most New Atheist Bad History, it’s a commonly held and popularly believed set of ideas that has its origin in polemicists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries but which has been rejected by more recent historians.  But its New Atheist adherents don’t like to hear that last part and get very agitated when they do.

This paragraphs portends the key defects we find throughout O’Neill’s presentation: Bluster, overstatement, strawmanning, and insult. To start, he insinuates that the idea of an oppressive Church rule during the medieval era is wrong by association with New Atheism and their “bad history”. Very few familiar with my thinking would ascribe the reductionism of New Atheism to me, but I would also hold that Church Rule was oppressive, corrupt, and retarded the growth of intellectual progress. In other words, he starts with poisoning the well and bluster.

O’Neill then claims the support of authority by appealing to “more recent historians”, which he opposes to “polemicists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries”. This is the worst sort of appeal to authority. He implies there is a consensus among recent historians where no such consensus exists. Nor were most eighteenth and nineteenth century historians polemicists. In fact, polemicists are more likely to found in the revisionist, often Roman Catholic, commentators, who work today to cleanse the reputation of the Church. The most that we can say is what he claims as consensus remains a matter of dispute among historians, but that more accurate depiction would deflect his thrust.

Even more telling is the way he framed the alleged atheist error.

The first element of his characterization of the atheist “myth” is the claim that Christianity violently suppressed ancient Greco-Roman learning. While there were things the Church violently suppressed, I know of no serious claim it was Greco-Roman learning. To the contrary, Christianity was constructed on the framework of Greek metaphysics, with the Neo-Platonism of Augustine and the Aristotelian metaphysics of Aquinas and the Scholastics. If anything, the early church took the narrative of a primitive Near East religion and created a uniquely European metaphysical structure. There is no biblical correlate to the elaborate cosmological constructions and deductive arguments – these are European features.

The second element is claiming the atheist position to be that Christianity destroyed an ancient intellectual culture based on “pure reason”. First, it would be interesting to know what O’Neill meant by “pure” reason. It sounds impressive, with echoes of Kant which the naive might credit with erudition, but it is a term with a specific meaning that in no way applies to this context. But that is a mere quibble next to the important matter of blurring a more nuanced issue. I know of no serious atheist who denies the use of deductive Aristotelian logic; especially among the hyper-rational Scholastics. O’Neill obscures, or perhaps is ignorant of, the real matter at hand – the metaphysical basis of such logic, where proofs are deduced from metaphysical ideas. This is in stark contrast to the later scientific method, which removed the metaphysical premises in favor of induction from empirical observations – a critical adjustment that apologists yet today bemoan.

The serious atheist claim is usually not that Christianity destroyed a culture of reason, but rather that it imposed certain metaphysical assumptions as starting premises to arrive at deductions that accord with Christian dogma. Any logical deductions that offended such dogma, no matter the validity, were quickly condemned. Even clerics found themselves on the wrong side of the auto de fe when logic defied obligatory beliefs.

The third element of O’Neil’ls framing is that atheists claim the Church retarded a nascent scientific and technological revolution. O’Neil relies on a somewhat revisionist account of the Middle Ages as the foundation for modern science encouraged by the Church. It wasn’t. There was a degree of scientific inquiry of a sort, but what was at the time called Natural Philosophy wasn’t quite what we would recognize as science. It was more metaphysically derived and included alchemy and magic, for example. Some early empirical attempts were indeed accepted by the Church if they could be interpreted as proclaiming the glory of god and his creation. Of course, any scientific inquiry that contradicted Church dogma was quickly condemned, and at times with grievous consequence.

O’Neill’s support for his demonstration that the Church nurtured science and formed the foundation for its further development was a book by James Hannam: God’s Philosophers: How the Medieval World Laid the Groundwork of Modern Science, and an approving comment by Edward Grant. My intention is not demean Hannam – he is a legitimate scholar who advocates well for his position, but his position has supporters and detractors among historians. Edward Grant was a historian of much greater renown whose main scholarly thesis was that the Middle Ages did lay the groundwork of modern science, so we would expect to see his approval. But again, that is one school of thought and not received truth. In fact there is no received truth in history, which is an endless series of re-interpretation of past events and facts, partly out of ideology; partly out of the need to introduce novelty.

I believe the preponderance of evidence demonstrates that, on the whole, the Church oppressed science as it did freedom of thought in general. Through oppressive threat and more than occasional torture and burnings at the stake, few dared to voice findings or opinions in contradiction to Church dogma. The Church jealously guarded its authority at all costs. Countless lesser-known scholars and clergy, as well as the less educated, experienced the terror of the Church, but the more respected were not immune. Galileo was accused of heresy in the Inquisition for advocating the Copernican idea of a sun-centered system and sentenced to life imprisonment.

Those like O’Neill can try to minimize the number of occurrences or try to tangle us into minutia such as no published boundaries for permissible scientific inquiry, but that misses the point as badly as the attempts of some to minimize the number of deaths in the Inquisitions. The point is the terror and oppression such occurrences spread regardless of frequency. The threat demonstrated by such occurrences worked contrary to the claim of Christianity nurturing scientific progress.

Science as we know it did not exist until the relaxing of the Church’s grip in the seventeenth century. It was not the sudden rebirth of reason, as O’Neill tries to have us say, but the removal of metaphysical speculation and ideas from science; i.e. the institution of empiricism and inductive reasoning – not possible under Church rule.

In the Twitter thread that initiated this response, I suggested to the originator that he read Johan Huizinga’s The Waning of the Middle Ages as an introduction to credible historical works, not because it presented the absolute truth about that time, but because it offered a much more nuanced and holistic rendering. Unlike those such as O’Neill, who can obscure the terror by reducing things to numbers and facts, Huizinga introduced an immersive approach into the culture itself though exploration of the art, philosophy, and other texts of that time. It supplanted the cold numbers and disembodied facts with the atmosphere. We could sense what it was like at that time. From that we can interpret as we see fit. I do not mean to imply that Huizinga was the last word on the subject. In fact I suggested to the originator that he read as much of the primary sources as he could as well as different perspectives of respected historians. There is no other way to come to grips with the past.

There are no easy or final historical answers, and most assuredly there is no internet site that can furnish the ultimate truth of the past.

I didn’t find it worth my time to belabor this response with a detailed critique of every point O’Neil attempts in the essay, but he is, of course, invited to expand or otherwise respond below in the comments; or discuss with me on my YouTube channel.

This is a follow up to my last video, which was a wide-ranging look at Bernardo Kastrup’s interview by Craig Reed. This time I focus tightly on Kastrup’s metaphysics as described in Kastrup’s interview on the Adrian Sinclair Show, titled How to Think About Consciousness, linked to below:

The picture that emerges is a flight of fancy springing from obsolete subject/object metaphysics.

I organized this into the following sections:

Consciousness

Metaphysics

Schopenhauer

Metaphysical Idealism

Epistemology

Meaning

Afterlife

Context

Consciousness

1:09

We see confusion in Kastrup’s very first sentence:

“Consciousness is the field in which everything happens.

Whatever happens outside the field of consciousness might as well not exist because it is never experienced.”

In that same sentence he first declares that everything that exists happens in the field of consciousness then refers to all the things that exist outside consciousness and dismisses them because they are never experienced. That would seem to negate the claim that consciousness is elemental if there are things outside it, even if they might as well not exist. It is also a curious suggestion that everything outside our experience is of no importance. One might be tempted to excuse this contradiction as an example of misspeaking off the cuff, but the confusion turns out to carry through his entire metaphysics.

Cut

This is Kastrup’s central assertion: that consciousness is not emergent from nature but rather it is the ontological primitive from which all else emerges. We will examine this assertion when we analyze his metaphysics, along with the difficulty in general of ever determining any ontological primitive and the history of prior attempts

Cut

Here he states that quantum fields are the elemental level of the universe. It would be safer to say that it is the most elemental level we yet know, as most physicists do. From that safe ground, however, he makes the metaphysical leap to the claim that these fields, when unified, are one conscious field.

Quantum field itself is a metaphor for something we cannot conceptualize. We think of it as waves across a field, but both are spatial and temporal concepts through which we try to grasp a reality prior to space, time and causality, and therefore outside our conceptual apparatus. Lacking all epistemological humility, however, he defines what cannot even be grasped. He repeats that error in his attempt to define consciousness, which nobody understands, not even Kastrup. Over the next sections we will look carefully at how he attempts to justify this leap.

II. Metaphysics

6:23

Kastrup never actually gives the definition of the Greek word “Meta”, but describes metaphysics as what precedes or underlies physics. This is a common but misleading definition among those who engage in Analytic Philosophy, and doesn’t quite get at the meaning. In Greek, meta means beyond, with the connotation of transcendence. Metaphysics was an invention of 6th century BCE Greek philosophy and marks the end of Greek Pre-Socratic thought. It is the invention of a transcendent immaterial realm of ideas imagined to explain the mysteries apparent in the physical world. Since the time of Francis Bacon, its importance steadily waned. With the scientific method, Bacon sought to exclude metaphysical explanation of the world, which had predominated throughout the Scholastic Medieval period, through empirical evaluation of observable phenomena. Up through the 19th Century, academic subjects were continuously moved from the purview of metaphysics to scientific empiricism.

By the 20th Century, metaphysics had been resoundingly denounced by the most important thinkers such as Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Quine, and Rorty, and seen as the single cause of 2500 years of error in Western thought. Heidegger demonstrated how metaphysics barred our relationship to Being by reducing the physical world to superficial representation and removing Being to an inaccessible immaterial realm, thereby uprooting us from the ground of authenticity.

Wittgenstein used the double meaning of “Unsinn” as nonsense and not available to the senses to dismiss metaphysics and declared the only role left to philosophy after millennia of metaphysical error was therapeutic: Philosophy had done nothing but create illusory problems, and our role is now to to untangle the knots of confusion.

Both of these thinkers saw mystery as the greatest part of existence and beyond our comprehension – at least rationally, embedded in the physical universe. This mystery, not being transcendent, is not characterized by inability to sense or at least detect, but by our inability to grasp it through our modes of understanding evolved for survival, not truth. These thinkers demanded silence before what we cannot know as the only honest intellectual position. In other words, Kastrup relapses into the error of metaphysical fancy where he should remain silent. He returns the essence of nature itself (or Being) back to the imaginary realm of metaphysics – the origin of our present uprootedness.

I also want to focus on his claim that “physics is the way that nature presents itself to us”. He conflates physics as a branch of study with the physical world existing more fully beyond our reductive representations to limit physicality in a way that allows him to redefine the world outside our objectification as immaterial, and later as consciousness. This sleight of hand is his central move, repeated throughout his presentations.

His comment that physics cannot tell us what our representations are in themselves, but only how objects are measured and related, is certainly true and a commonplace understanding. Heidegger gives the best demonstration of how technological thought is really an outgrowth of metaphysics, which removes essence from the knowable world. But Kastrup then goes directly to a claim that there are correct methods of metaphysics that can give us best guesses about essence. What he betrays here is that both physics and metaphysics are reductionist acts, which we will see him explicitly acknowledge later. But that reductionism is what forever closes off any knowledge of essence, or world-in-itself. What physics reduces to physical properties, metaphysics reduces to uprooted empty concepts, both forever inadequate to describe the indescribable. If elemental reality exists outside space, time, and causality, and our concepts cannot exist without being rooted in space, time, and causality, then anything we propose as the essence of world-in-itself, or ontological primitive, will necessarily be wrong. Reducing the unknowable world to consciousness is as foolish as reducing it to atoms.

III. Schopenhauer

13.21

This is a bad interpretation of Schopenhauer. Schopenhauer’s Will was a blind, mindless, and irrational force. It was the thing-in-itself which we could never know other than through immediate experience of our own consciousness. But Schopenhauer was careful to acknowledge the term Will as a misleading reduction, applicable only to the occasion of labeling the world-in-itself from the human perspective out of our nature as willing beings. A bird would experience it as flight. No word or concept we could devise would be able to exhaust the reality of the world-in-itself. We could just as easily call it the prime force which we experience as Will willing itself blindly, unconsciously, and without purpose. Conscious states such as desires and fears only appear in the phenomenal world, and Kastrup’s mistaken notion of these as innate elements of the world-in-itself is merely an anthropomorphic projection onto the non-reducible Will. A blind, mindless, and aimless force would indeed be a poor base upon which to build an idea of cosmic consciousness.

Cut

He repeats his mistaken notion of conscious states and gives an inadequate explanation of why Schopenhauer used the term Will. I have just give one reason, which Schopenhauer explicitly presented in The World as Will and Representation, but there is another deeper explanation.

Will, Der Wille in German and a deeply Germanic word and notion, is a central, or at times even the central concept, over the history of German philosophy. Schopenhauer can be seen mostly as an extension of Kant, but with one seminal alteration: the turning of Kant’s idea of Will on its head, and in doing so, taking a decisive step toward the elimination of Metaphysics in German thought, which was completed by Nietzsche.

Kant used Will as the thing-in-itself to describe the Idealist notion of Pure Reason. Kant’s project was to rescue objective knowledge from Hume’s skepticism while at the same time preserving a bit of Idealism in order to justify his belief in god and free will – a mediation between empiricism and Idealism. Kant’s Copernican Revolution was to demonstrate that we live in a world of representation conditioned by our subjective senses of space and time, and ordered through the categories of understanding into a coherent phenomenal world understood through the principle of sufficient reason. This was our phenomenal world but not the thing in itself, which existed outside space, time, and our categories of understanding – and therefore forever unknowable to us. He ultimately justifies empirical knowledge by equating Will with god, and retains the Rationalist notion that God inserts this Idea of Reason into our consciousness, and thereby validates our phenomenal understanding; but only as far as this reason operates on sense data. Reason applied beyond sense data led to metaphysical transcendental illusion.

As we have already seen, Schopenhauer’s revolution was to remove Will from the Idealist notion of reason and relocate it to physical reality – the irrational primal force of what we represent as nature. It is still unknowable in itself through objectification, but sensible through our own will. The noumenal is no longer pure immaterial mind of god, but brute physical force. Kastrup’s attempt to claim consciousness in Schopenhauer’s Will is therefore a misunderstanding of Schopenhauer’s thought.

Cut

Another example of the confusion of Kastrup’s metaphysics. Representation and what Kastrup calls “metacognition” only exist in the rational phenomenal world constructed through human subjectivity, of which Will knows nothing. This is man’s constructed world, which Schopenhauer goes on to see as the mechanism through which we can escape the brute horror of Will – a denial of the fundamental truth and instinct. Again, this could not possibly serve as the foundation of cosmic mind.

I’ll let Kastrup have the last word on this:

Cut

IV. Metaphysical Idealism

21:01

This is where the underlying metaphysical illusion of material/immaterial I described at the beginning will be revealed as a continuous thread through Kastrup’s metaphysics.

Having earlier stipulated the Kantian dichotomy of phenomenal representational world and noumenal world as it exists in itself outside our representations, Kastrup now elides into the claim that only our representational world is physical and assigns immateriality to the world-in-itself. We see this when he says it’s hard to use the word physical because it has nothing to do with what our intuition tells. This is a non-compelling assertion where the only thing we can truly say is that it lies outside our ability to conceptualize. From the Kantian/Schopenhauerian perspective, size, shape, position, and speed only exist as representations, and in a sense are less real than the world in itself. The only fitting dichotomy, therefore, is not ontological but epistemological: What we can conceive and what lies outside our ability to conceive. Any attempt to define the noumenal would only lead to what Kant terms transcendental illusion. Kastrup later tries to bolster his redefinition of reality outside conceptualization as nonphysical through a distortion of the Leggett Inequalities. Anthony Leggett demonstrated that non-locality and realism cannot coexist, which was pivotal because John Bell had earlier demonstrated beyond doubt that entanglement was real and thereby proved that the quantum realm was nonlocal. Leggett proved beyond that that realism was also precluded at the quantum level. Kastrup twists that to mean physicality was precluded, but we need to understand that Realism in physics has a special meaning which Leggett employed: “the notion that physical systems possess complete sets of definite values for various parameters prior to, and independent of, measurement”.

Quantum reality is physical as energy, but systems with sets of definite parameter values only emerge after entanglement with our observations. Kastrup once again tries to conflate quantum states with the non-physical.

Without any transition, he then jumps to a completely different frame of reference: quantum measurement. As opposed to objects as subjective representations, things are now physically actualized through observation. He never acknowledges the contradiction, or perhaps he never even realizes it, but as we will see later, this will prove a serious problem when he addresses Relationalism and asserts consciousness as the ontological primitive.

He also gives a false simplification of the measurement question. His limiting the trigger of wave collapse to conscious observation might actually just be our limited knowledge since any wave collapse we can know is necessarily an artifact of our conscious entanglement. We can know nothing outside that condition. Perhaps entanglement also occurs outside of consciousness, and our conscious observation is just one instance of entanglement. Quantum mind theory suggests a more intriguing possibility: the moment of entanglement creates our consciousness as the first step in a process of reduction. We first entangle with those potential events within quantum foam that are possible within our universe and not with those with no possibility of realization – the first reduction. Of those possible events in superposition, our consciousness further reduces our perception as wave collapse into what we conceive as eigenstate. Through our evolved categories of understanding and senses of time and space, we further reduce received sense data to our world of representation – the only world we can know objectively. This leaves us incapable of determining anything like ultimate reality, ontological primitive, or the nature of anything outside our representations. All attempts to do so are repetitions of the error of metaphysics. We can meaningfully explore the possibility of mind emerging from quantum events. We cannot meaningfully attribute mind to anything prior to our perceived physicality.

He proceeds to his central tenet:

Cut

Kastrup’s followers have well learned to repeat the mantra that while not everything is conscious, everything is within consciousness. Having declared the world in itself as not physical through mere redefinition of the physical, he offers the false choice of material/immaterial, or physical/non-physical. He furthers this metaphysical error by projecting the representational understanding of “consciousness” onto the unknowable elemental physical reality beyond definition.

If we were to stay within what we can actually perceive through experience, it would be far more sound to assert that consciousness emerges from life, and not that life is a representation of consciousness.

Finally, his assertion that everything exists within consciousness causes another problem: if consciousness causes the wave collapse, then quantum states could not possibly exist.

He then moves on to Relational Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics.

Cut

This stems from his misreading of Carlo Rovelli’s Relationalist interpretation of quantum reality, which is truly great work. Rovelli is not only a brilliant physicist but probably the closest thing we have to a philosopher of any importance today.

Rovelli starts with the waves of quantum fields as the most elementary level of the universe that we know, or perhaps can know. The universe at bottom is an unimaginably complex interplay of these fields from which emerges spinfoam as purely chaotic quantum events constantly creating and destroying particles. To understand Relationalism further, we need to introduce Rovelli’s notions of perspective, blurring, and ignorance.

It is possible to perceive order as minute subsystems within the chaotic foam as interplay between a small sample of events. This appears to us as a system with increasing entropy which gives rise to our experience of time. To do this, it is necessary to blur the great vastness of existence, or else the appearance of order is lost back to the sea of foam floating atop the quantum field waves. This is the blurring which closes off the vast rest of existence. From this, Rovelli announces time as ignorance – an extreme reduction of reality – literally, an ignoring of vast reality. With awareness of the greater universe, time and order disappear.

Now we come to the.critical part relative to Kastrup’s comment: perspective. Time and causation only emerge relative to a myopic perspective arbitrarily perceiving a system with increasing entropy. This is the creation of a world. He illustrates this with the example of a deck of cards in his discussion of Boltzmann. A brand new deck might be considered in a low entropy state as it is neatly organized into suits by number value. However, from the perspective of black and red it is at a higher level of entropy, from the perspective of number and face cards, even more so, and so on. The degree of increased entropy after shuffling will depend on the original arbitrary perspective, each implying different worlds with different times.

When Kastrup complains of a paradox because the events must be in relation to something else he misses Rovelli’s central point that we individually supply the missing ingredient through the perspective of our individual consciousness blurring the universe lying beyond the perceived subsystem. There is no role or need for a cosmic consciousness, only individual perspectives that create worlds.

In Rovelli’s words in “The Order of Time”:

“On closer inspection, in fact, even the things that are most “thinglike” are nothing more than long events. The hardest stone, in the light of what we have learned from chemistry, from physics, from mineralogy, from geology, from psychology, is in reality a complex vibration of quantum fields, a momentary interaction of forces, a process that for a brief moment manages to keep its shape, to hold itself in equilibrium before disintegrating again into dust, a brief chapter in the history of interactions between the elements of the planet, a trace of Neolithic humanity, a weapon used by a gang of kids, an example in a book about time, a metaphor for an ontology, a part of a segmentation of the world that depends more on how our bodies are structured to perceive than on the object of perception—and, gradually, an intricate knot in that cosmic game of mirrors that constitutes reality. The world is not so much made of stones as of fleeting sounds, or of waves moving through the sea.” (pp.98-99)

With that the entire of question of material/immaterial becomes nonsensical. Call the vibrations of the quantum fields whatever you want, but they display nothing of consciousness and from them emerges only the chaos of spinfoam. Rovelli simply calls them forces. Each of us from our own perspective supplies the rest.

Cut

This is really a clever analogy, although hardly original. Kastrup notes the similarity between superposition, with all possibilities yet to be decided, and conscious decisions where that same situation pertains, and concludes from analogy a universal mind. Of course, we could equally argue that consciousness is but one emergent instance of superposition, therefore: emergent quantum mind.

This analogy was done much better in the early 20th century by Alfred North Whitehead. Whitehead was a mathematician and philosopher and one of the founders of Anglo-American Analytic philosophy; and like all the founders other than Russell, went on to renounce that project. In Whitehead’s case it was his encounter with quantum mechanics that awakened him from the poverty of reductionism. In the elemental reality of waves he saw time as central to existence. In the wave a particle had a defined past and a present in superposition where the future is decided. He saw consciousness as this same wave where the body is the past analogous to the particle’s actualized trail, and the mind in superposition deciding among the possibilities toward the future. From this he developed a pantheism where consciousness pervaded the universe deciding at every point. Although limited by a naive notion of time at the quantum level, he transformed a mechanistic view of reality composed of discrete components into an eternal fluid process – a wave founded in universal consciousness – a major step forward from the reductionism and classification characteristic of analytic philosophy.

Cut

Here he’s referring to Alan Watts’ musing that the cosmic consciousness got bored and decided to forget the world was its invention in order to make it more interesting for itself. What I find interesting is that Kastrup didn’t outright ridicule the notion, but instead either is drawn to it himself or is playing to the sort of people who are drawn to it. He ultimately rejects it on the basis that there is no evidence for it and it appears to be just an anthropomorphic projection of an experiential state. Yet he doesn’t realize the exact same can be said of universal consciousness, which also can be seen as an experiential state and an act of anthropomorphism. In the same vein, do we have any reason to believe that the universe has an experiential state that has evolved within us?

Epistemology

40:41

In earlier instances Kastrup has talked about the arational and chaotic basis of existence, which our dashboard of perception had not evolved to understand. Here, however he uses the rational reductionist method within this dash board to attempt to explain this ultimate arational state anyway. This is the essence of metaphysics and the reason it was abandoned last century among serious thinkers. As he acknowledges, this is a reduction, and here he has reduced a chaotic, arational, and incomprehensible reality to the anthropomorphic projection of consciousness. He then tries to argue on the basis of parsimony that if consciousness is the ontological primitive then those who reject that reduction have the burden to show why there are so many individual instances of this primitive instead of just one .

This is both sloppy thinking and mere sophistry. Unless he gives a compelling case for consciousness as the primitive, which is impossible, we are under no obligation to explain in terms of the primitive, and instead could answer that consciousness is an adaptation found to varying degrees within living organism and no more in need of explanation than the individual instances of vertebrae.

But there is also the problem of parsimony as a basis for decisions in a world characterized by chaos and arationality. Parsimony in this case would be a sure indication of the error of reductionism in such a world. In fact, appeal to parsimony is merely an artifact of Scholastic Metaphysics that assumed a rational god created a rational world – a notion with no place in the modern world.

Cut

Contradicting his claim that consciousness is universal primitive and can’t be explained as many individuated instances, he now explains human consciousness as a product of evolutionary adaptation. As such, it needs no further metaphysical projection. He acknowledges the impossibility of knowing the ultimate truth, if there is any such thing, of the universe, which he will then go on to contradict once more to posit his metaphysical speculation of universal consciousness as that impossible explanation.

I want to emphasize the point on which he is correct: that our cognitive processes did not adapt to know cosmic truth and are ridiculously inadequate to do so. I talked earlier about the impossibility for us to imagine anything without time, space, and causality, yet we know these do not exist at the most elemental level of existence we know of, That means nothing other than we have nothing meaningful to say about this state of existence from a scientific standpoint, and any attempt to define this mystery is an error of reduction. Again, this the reason no meaningful interpretation beyond the Copenhagen interpretation has ever been offered, nor ever will. It is a world we literally cannot imagine or grasp.

Within the human scale of intelligence, there are a few individuals who perceive and conceptualize in ways beyond the abilities of the average person, and to the rest of humanity they appear to be formidable geniuses with preternatural understanding of reality. But on the cosmic scale there is scant difference between the exceptional and the ordinary. None of us can imagine the world of which quantum mechanics hints. Even worse, we can only detect existence within the electro-magnetic field and extrapolate from the gravitational field. We experience only 5% of what makes up the universe, and label the unknowable 95% dark energy and dark matter. Again, those labels tell us nothing because we wouldn’t know what to say about them.

Our ability to understand fundamental reality would be the same as trying to understand the workings of the human body through study limited to a toenail. We only fool ourselves, or perhaps more importantly, we fool others when we claim to know any ontological primitive. Kastrup is no exception and we should view his claim of cosmic consciousness with the skepticism appropriate to somebody trying to sell us something of questionable value..

Cut

Human intelligence evolved to make predictions through reduction. Similar to Rovelli’s concept of blurring, we ignore almost all reality to focus on what immediately concerns survival and we make predictions by imputing causality. This tells us little about the truth of what surrounds us, but has succeeded to enhance our survivability. It is a purely pragmatic sketch of the world, and technology is the outgrowth of this objective reduction. It is the font of the pragmatist definition of truth as “whatever works”. As Whitehead showed us, it is abandoning the present for the future. The deeper introspection of the world from which we attempt to know meaning, the nature of the world, and our place in it comes from a more primordial esthetic experience of the world in the present. As humans, we dwell in both worlds. Sadly, subject/object metaphysics has grown to an outsized domination, closing off authentic esthetic experience of the present and replacing it with reductive speculation – the 2500 year error of metaphysics. Kastrup continues that error.

Cut

He continues his confused contradiction of unknowable ultimate realty and the ability of reductionism to explain it. While we do understand closed systems from a mechanical standpoint, reductionism tells us nothing beyond the superficial appearance and pragmatic usefulness. As Wigner’s Epistemological Law of Empiricism and Rovelli’s Relationalism both demonstrate, all descriptions of a closed system are severely limited by time, space, and chosen events, and have no reason to accord with each other. The contradictions of relativity and quantum mechanics are examples of this, and there is no reason to believe there is any sort of underlying unity that will harmonize these two systems. It seems any grand unification theory would be a mere beckoning illusion of the mind.

The most important point here, however, is his repeated metaphysical leap equating quantum fields, which themselves are only metaphors, to consciousness – an over-defining of the undefinable. The repetition of metaphysical error.

Cut

Meaning

51:52

Meaning is the central troubling question for humanity in this age. Descartes’ dualism depicted a meaningless mechanistic physical universe and an immaterial metaphysical soul from which all meaning sprang. Kastrup’s central error stems from the continuation of this material/immaterial dualism. The Enlightenment began the path of destruction of metaphysics, moving an increasing number of issues from metaphysics to the natural sciences, and with that the annihilation of the notion of god. It did not, however, offer anything to replace our loss of meaning and connection to the universe. Instead we became isolated and ungrounded individuals lost in a world reduced to objects of scientific analysis. Our souls dried as husks under the relentless glare of reductionism. That was the horror of Nietzsche’s madman as he announced the death of god.

Since then, we have failed to find the more authentic grounding of our nature as humanity and its source and connection to the universe and are still sickened by the Madman’s continuing vertigo. Of course, this enabled all sorts of charlatans peddling simplistic and false answers to a desperate people.

I agree with much of what Kastrup has to say here. There is meaning grounded in what Schopenhauer called Will, and our relation to Will can show us that meaning. But it is a very difficult process, and we should avoid simplistic answers such as universal consciousness or god. Schopenhauer certainly did. For Schopenhauer, Will had no consciousness. It was blind and mindless volition, much as takes place in our cerebellum, where the volition to live unconsciously regulates our metabolism and organ functions. Humanity in this notion is a late manifestation of Will to experience itself, as the cerebral cortex is to the cerebellum. We are a late feature of Will and our meaning is to experience and know existence. I’ll return to this notion and expand it at the end of the video.

Afterlife

55:54

Another example of a simplistic fiction to sooth the anxiety of our mortality, but a hopelessly confused one. Kastrup has consistently described this universal consciousness as blind instinct with no ability to metacognize. That is what we would be rejoining, in effect going from a superior consciousness to blind instinct once again. It is yet to be explained how this blind instinct could then recognize us as conscious alters as we rejoin. In short, this is utter nonsense.

Context

5I 7:29

The movement in the West away from metaphysics, including religion, was the desire to part from the rule of ignorance. That requires an arduous struggle to reground ourselves, which we have so far failed to achieve. In the gap, religion and gurus have enriched themselves by preying on the vertigo and anxiety. Metaphysics persists in the academic philosophy industry as the output of mediocre minds dependent on unread journals to maintain their employment.

Rather than fraudulent palliatives, we need the courage to recapture the present. That means returning to esthetic thought held to tightly in the moment of experience. It is the only possible path to meaning, and our imperative. Our purpose is to experience Being and allow its poetry too speak through us; its music to sing and dance through us. In the process the world regains the wonderful – the fullness of Being at last returning from its metaphysical exile to this very physical world through esthetic knowledge.

There are those who will criticize the tone of my writing here as inappropriate to addressing a work of scholarship, to whom I point out I am not confronting a work of scholarship. Others may complain that I am not properly respecting an important work of philosophy, to whom I respond that I am not responding to a any sort of philosophy at all. Moreover, as a simple semi-literate biker I am unconstrained by the timid conventions of the academy.

In the guise of serious writing, Craig is rather addressing a naive audience whose credulity he exploits to sell Christianity. What he presents is no more than base apologetics, dressed up in guise of philosophy, and aimed at believers in search of reinforcement and those mediocrities traipsing the backwaters and swamps of Philosophy of Religion while searching for the ghosts of dead ideas amidst fever-inducing mosquitos.

Immanuel Kant’s First Antinomy in Book 2 of the Critique of Pure Reason has long been the bête noire of apologists, who have yet to honestly confront it. Typically, the apologist evades the topic entirely, distorts it beyond recognition, or attempts to facilely dismiss Kant himself.

In the Book: The Kalam Cosmological Argument, which he claims includes his serious academic response to the First Antinomy, Craig resorts to all three but never gets around to addressing the point of the Antinomies itself. We will examine where Craig purports to address the First Antinomy in the penultimate chapter: “First Premise: Everything that Begins to Exist has a Cause of its Existence”. Craig includes an entry in the Appendix that claims to address this Antinomy further, but for reasons explained below, we need not consider it.

Kant’s First Antinomy

Toward the end of the Enlightenment, Kant published The Critique of Pure Reason — one of the greatest events in Philosophy and the seminal epistemological work for modern philosophy. No matter one’s opinion of Kant’s argument, it is impossible to join in the discourse of philosophy without an honest confrontation of this great work, the purpose of which was to rescue objective knowledge of the world from Hume’s skepticism by finding a middle way between Skepticism and Rationalism. The result was what Kant called his “Copernican Revolution” in which we know the external world by creating representations from crude sense data through innate a priori categories of understanding under the direction of pure reason, which are drawn in the imagination via the innate and purely subjective sensations of space and time. While Reason is deduced transcendentally and ultimately linked to Will (his nod to Rationalism), its legitimate purpose is limited to creating a coherent understanding of the manifold of sense data impinging upon our consciousness. In keeping with Enlightenment Empiricism, true objective knowledge is only possible by applying reason to the sense data, but in his revolution, Kant demonstrates this knowledge to be subjective constructions from sense data that do give us reliable information about the objective world, but can never tell us anything of things-in-themselves as they exist outside our subjective conditions of thought as space, time, and the categories of understanding. As long as we remain within the the sensible world, our objective understanding is reliable. Once we transgress the boundary of sense data, however, we merely create transcendental illusion — a groundless metaphysical world of empty speculation where we have illegitimately imposed our conditions of objective thought on the unimaginable noumenal realm.

In the second half of the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant demonstrates the problems created by Transcendental Illusion which result from empty metaphysical speculation. In doing so, he presents four antinomies, which consist of contradictory thesis and antithesis to a metaphysical question, each of which is equally plausible – and each of which results from an error in reason itself and our subjective limitations. On the side of the thesis, we have reason relentlessly pushing thought to totality. Reason is pure will to unify and knows no bounds, but continues to push for order and resolution of conflict beyond what we can know through they senses. The competing error of the antithesis is to assume that objective knowledge necessarily extends beyond the objective world. For that reason it would be wrong to dogmatically support either side of the argument since both are illusions spun off by an empty metaphysical question.

The first of the four Antinomies concerns the question of whether the universe is finite or infinite, which goes directly to the premise in the Cosmological Argument that everything that exists has a cause of its existence. The thesis of the antinomy is that an infinite regress is impossible, therefore there must be an initial unconditioned cause that began the universe. This is a metaphysical illusion stemming from reason’s pure will toward totality, i.e. it must bring everything under one unifying perception, which requires a beginning. The antithesis is that since all we know is causation rather than initial creation, that can be all that exists. We cannot possibly experience anything but a chain of conditioned events because we are limited to objective knowledge. In Kant’s term, the continuous synthesis of conditioned objects, which would negate any beginning.

Our limited experience tells us that the universe is infinite without first cause. Our Cosmological Ideas from reason tell us that beyond experience there must be a first cause. Both are illusions, however; the former caused by the inviolable limitation of objective experience, and the latter from the error caused by the unconditioned nature of the ideas of reason themselves.

This error is compounded in both cases with the imposition of our purely subjective senses of space and time onto the noumenal realm, to which space and time do not apply, rendering the question itself nonsensical.

Craig’s approach is to largely ignore the underlying metaphysical problem at the core of the antinomies, and instead attempts to strengthen the thesis and undermine the antithesis rather than, as Kant cautioned, refrain from dogma on either side of an illusory problem. To the extent he does recognize the underlying metaphysical problem demonstrated in the First Antinomy, rather than confront it head on, Craig attempts to obliquely undermine it through appeal to the authority of two very obscure Christian academics. We will trace this attempt in his penultimate chapter:

First Premise: Everything that exists has a cause of its existence.

Craig begins with a suggestion that this premise can indeed be defended:

“Although we have declined an elaborate defense of the proposition that everything that exists has a cause of its existence, two possible lines of support might be elucidated.

The argument from empirical facts: The causal proposition could be defended as an empirical generalization from the widest sampling of experience. The empirical evidence in support of the proposition is absolutely overwhelming, so much so that Humean empiricists could demand no stronger evidence in any synthetic statement. To reject the causal proposition is therefore completely arbitrary. Although this argument from empirical facts is not apt to impress philosophers, it is nevertheless undoubtedly true that the reason we —and they—accept this principle in our everyday lives is precisely for this very reason, because it is repeatedly confirmed in our experience…” (p.145)

There are two serious flaws in this suggestion. The first is he gives no justification for attributing objective knowledge to a noumenal realm (the creation of the universe, the cause of which lies outside the observable universe). The second is that within the observable universe no first cause of creation has ever been observed, only the chained synthesis of conditioned objects.

Thus his empirical argument fails. Throwing Hume into the mix only obfuscates his failure to ground causation as anything outside our objective representations. No matter how many examples of synthesis in time, the conclusion of causality remains a matter of habit based on the assumption that nature never changes. So no, it would not convince Hume that causality is ontologically real.

The admission that his argument is not apt to impress philosophers reveals his real intended audience: naive believers looking for reinforcement of faith; and his method: appeal to naive common sense of the sort Kant showed to be illusory. This book is no serious piece of scholarship or philosophy, but mere pandering and salesmanship.

He then moves to his second possible line of support:

“The argument from the a priori category of causality: Hackett formulates a neo-Kantian epistemology and defends the validity of the causal principle as the expression of the operation of a mental a priori category of causality which the mind brings to experience. Kant had argued that knowledge is a synthesis of two factors: the sense data of experience and the a priori categorical structure of the mind. The categories are primitive forms of thought which the mind must possess in order to make logical judgements without which intelligible experience would be impossible. Kant attempted to compile a list of these categories by correlating a category with each of the types of logical judgement; the category associated with the hypothetical judgment type is the category of causality. Kant argued that these categories are not simply psychological dispositions in which we think, but that they are objectively valid mental structures which the mind brings a priori to experience. For without them no object of knowledge could be thought; if the mind does not come to experience with the a priori forms of thought, thought could never arise. Therefore, the categories must be objectively real. Kant made two crucial limitations on the operation of the categories: (1) the categories have no application beyond the realm of sense data, and (2) the categories furnish knowledge of appearances only, but not of the things in themselves.” (pp.145-146)

Here Craig introduces the first of two obscure Christian academics, Stewart C Hackett, whose conclusions he goes on to cite without argument. He takes these from Hackett’s The Resurrection of Theism: Prolegomena to Christian Apology, a book of apologetics, not philosophy; i.e. proselytizing, not dispassionate analysis. In relating Hackett, Craig presents his own distortion of Kant. His claim that the category of causality leads to objectively valid knowledge is literally true, but takes full advantage of the naïveté of his audience to create the impression that it is thus true in itself. Most of his readers would lack the sophistication to understand “objectively valid” within Kant’s limited meaning. Keep in mind that the categories are the very conditions of thought through which we create representations and order out of sense data. That creates the objective world, which we know as a coherent constructed representation of reality, although this reality in itself is manifold and beyond our objective determination. But for Kant, causality, like all categories, does not actually exist noumenally and can tell us nothing about the world in itself or anything prior to our observable universe. Therefore, causality is objectively true but with no real ontology outside our subjective ordering of sense data. His conclusion of “Therefore, the categories must be objectively real” really says nothing at all other than they are our conditions of thought objectively observed introspectively, with no reason to ground them in the physical reality of things-in-themselves.

Craig does end that paragraph by singling out Kant’s two issues that undermine Craig’s premise (no applicability beyond sense data, and knowledge of appearances only), but only to slide into a facile denial. He goes on to rely further on Hackett’s unargued but suspiciously convenient assertions:

“Hackett makes three critical alterations in Kant’s formulation of a categorical epistemology. First, the number of the categories must be reduced. It is universally recognized that Kant’s tables of categories and logical judgment types are highly artificial; accordingly, Hackett eliminates the categories totality and limitation and equates the category of existence to that of substance. The remaining categories he regards as validly derived.

Second, the remaining categories have application beyond the realm of sense data.” (P.146)

Merely on the assertion of an obscure apologist, Craig declares Kant’s inconvenient underlying arguments to simply be artificial and invalid — one more example of facilely dismissing Kant’s Antinomy instead of facing it head-on. There is no justification for the claim that categories must be reduced, just the desire to do so to maintain his premise. Second, there is no “universal” recognition that the categories are highly artificial. To the contrary, they were carefully derived from first enumerating the possible forms of judgment. He starts with Aristotles four categories of quantity, quality, relation, and modality, and derives three categories of judgement under each of these for 12 systematic categories of the understanding. Anybody who has studied Kant’s lengthy and methodical deduction of these categories in Book 1 of The Critique knows how ridiculous this statement is, and can see it as nothing more than a weak excuse to remove the obstacle Kant poses. Again, one can disagree with Kant’s schemata if one has a plausible counterargument, but never honestly dismiss it as arbitrary. Having claimed to remove the offending categories of totality and limitation (the very categories defining this particular antinomy), he goes on to proclaim that the remaining categories are not limited to sense data, therefore we can simply restore empty metaphysical claims.

Craig then resorts to the following tired canard of self-refutation, mindlessly repeated by apologists whenever scientific thought confounds their claims:

“Kant’s position is self-refuting: for if the categories are restricted in operation to the realm of sense data alone, then no knowledge of the categories themselves would be possible, since they are categorized by the very absence of sense data…” (p.146)

This is another outright distortion of Kant’s methodology. The whole point of critiquing Pure Reason is that, as our innate a priori conditions of thought itself, they are the only things that can be directly studied absent external information by objectifying our conditions of thought through introspection. That being said, it still is drawn out in the sensibilities of time and space in order to become intelligible to us. For example, we draw all synthetic propositions in time sequentially, and all analytic proposition in space, such as geometry. It is simply the objectification of our innate cognitive ability.

He follows with this:

“Third, the categories do furnish knowledge of things in themselves. For either things in themselves exist or they do not. If they do not, we are reduced to solipsism. Besides the obvious problems of solipsism, the crucial point is this: since the categories do apply to the phenomena and these are all that exist, it follows that the categories do give a knowledge of reality in itself. But suppose things in themselves do exist;…then it becomes impossible to deny that the categories provide knowledge of things in themselves. For at least the categories of reality and causality must apply to them (since they cause the phenomena which we apprehend), unless one is willing to relapse into solipsism. Thus, to assert ‘no knowledge of the noumena is possible’ is self-refuting since it itself purports be an an item of knowledge about the noumena, This means, concludes Hackett, that the categories are both forms of thought and forms of things — thought and reality are structured homogeneously.” (pp.146-147)

Once again Craig egregiously distorts Kant’s argument to claim a homogenous relation between thought and reality. Here he blurs the boundary between our reception of sense data and the thing-in-itself by insisting that since the thing-in-itself “causes” the sense data it must exist and include causation. First, to cite Kant from another occasion, existence is not a predicate. The point is we have no predicate for the thing-in itself, and assuming its existence therefore provides no information to us leading to knowledge. Second, that what we perceive as energy impinging our senses in no way indicates causality outside our innate categories. Craig is merely projecting our category of causality on something he knows nothing about. How our senses acquire data is only known form the workings on our side of the boundary. To say the things-in-themselves cause it is again a transcendental illusion intended to plug the gap of unobtainable knowledge.

He then summarizes Hackett’s argument and moves on to his other obscure Christian commentator, Bella Milmed:

“The argument, which is basically Kant’s, is not that without the categories we could not experience sensation much as an animal does, but that self-conscious thought could not arise unless the human mind were structured so that it could.

Since the categories are objective features of both thought and reality and since causality is one of these categories, causal relation must hold in the real world, and the causal principle would be a synthetic a priori proposition, It is a priori because it is universal and necessary, being a precondition of thought itself. But it is synthetic because the concept of an event does not entail the concept of being caused. Hackett’s attempt to thus found the causal principle on an a priori mental category merits further investigation outside the scope of this book; for as Bella Milmed observes, although much of Kant’s work is obsolete,

‘…surely most if not all of his categories are still recognizable as relevant to the interpretation of the empirical world; and the increased flexibility of logic means that it should be easier to find logical foundations for such categories, avoiding those of Kant’s derivation that appear strained. Moreover, some of the most important of his derivations, e.g., those of substance and causality, do not appear strained at all.’ (pp.147-148)

He begins with more sleight of hand through the inexact use of the term “reality”. Kant indeed claims that without the categories we could not construct a coherent representation of the world, and in fact we can conceive of the world in no other way. This constitutes objective reality. That does not imply that the world we represent has any knowable reality outside our objective representation, but merely that within that objective realm our thoughts can be seen as knowledge. There is no basis at all for Craig’s implication that it has any validity for things-in-themselves. Craig again resorts to obfuscation and distortion, and adds facile dismissal by claiming Kant obsolete — an odd objection from a man who makes a living peddling an obsolete primitive worldview and long abandoned Medieval metaphysics.

And now we move to Craig’s conclusion:

These two arguments suggest possible ways of defending the principle that everything that begins to exist has a cause of its existence. But probably most people do not really need convincing. In summary, we have concluded that (1) it is intuitively obvious that anything that begins to exist, especially the entire universe, must have a cause of its existence; (2) Hume’s attempt to show the universe could have sprung uncaused out of nothing fails to show this to be a real possibility, and (3) the causal principle could be more elaborately defended in two ways. Therefore, we conclude our first premises: everything that begins to exist has a cause of its existence.

It would be hard to imagine a weaker or less satisfying conclusion. His great and vaunted confrontation with Kant comes down to the meek suggestion that we may discover possible ways of defending his key premise that everything that exists has a cause to its existence, based on the non-arguments of two obscure theists, and that no proof is necessary since his premise is intuitively obvious. That apologists just might come up with a way to defend the claim does not quite make for a compelling premise, and non-compelling premises prove nothing. He utterly failed to address Kant’s demonstration that the “intuitively obvious” in this case is transcendental illusion. (P.148)

Craig does include an appendix: “The Kalam Cosmological Argument and the Thesis of Kant’s First Antinomy.” While on first glance it would seem relevant for critique here, it adds nothing further. You might remember that the thesis of that antinomy was that the world had a finite beginning. Once again, Craig fails to address Kant’s intent in presenting the antinomies, and dogmatically attempts to further argue for that thesis and undermine the antithesis, thereby continuing his habit of evading the real issue at play.

Modern Aspects

Philosophical

Since Francis Bacon, philosophy has traced a trajectory of reducing the metaphysical by gradually moving subjects of inquiry from the metaphysical to the empirical. Since Kant, a second prominent trajectory appeared limiting the validity of reason itself and elevating esthetic knowledge. In short, the Enlightenment announced an age in rejection of Medieval Scholastic Metaphysics, which proved a mortal wound to religion. Western Christianity is essentially a creation of Scholastic Metaphysics, and relies to this day on its arguments and constructed worldview. The ascending secular world, however, moved on.

The two great thinkers of the 20th Century, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Martin Heidegger, went on to reject their philosophical roots: Wittgenstein admitting the failure of propositional logic and Analytic Philosophy to explain reality, and Heidegger rejecting the inherent metaphysical residue of Phenomenology. Both declared philosophy to have reached an inglorious end and abandoned the 2500 year enterprise as a metaphysical and linguistic error. While certain mediocre denizens of publication-demanding academic departments yet ply this obsolete trade, serious thought has move onward. Wittgenstein claimed the only legitimate activity left to the thinker is to undo the tangled errors and illusions of our philosophical history by, as he put it, helping the flies back out of the bottles. Heidegger, on the other hand, urged an esthetic/poetic engagement with Being itself as we encounter it firmly with the discipline to refrain from flights of metaphysical fancy and hearkening faithfully to the mystery of Being itself.

Both great men used the term “das Mystische” to describe the lure of deeper reality, and most importantly, warned us not to speak what cannot be spoken. That means: know the limits of what reason can understand and be ever-vigilant against slipping into metaphysical fancy.

Science

The most astounding aspect of modern understanding of our world is that we still have no satisfying interpretation of quantum mechanics, and the likelihood of having one appears increasingly remote. The only fully honest interpretation is no interpretation at all: The Copenhagen Interpretation. Neils Bohr took Kant extremely seriously and refused to speculate on any description of the world that QM seemed to imply as mere empty metaphysical speculation of the noumenal realm. Since John Bell’s experiments in the early 60’s, it is confirmed that the subjective conditions of thought — time, space, and causality — do not pertain to the most fundamental level of reality and any attempt to interpret that realm inevitably leads to metaphysical fancy, such as Multiworld theory. Einstein’s theory of relativity showed the non-existence of anything resembling one universal time, and the equation of modern Loop Quantum Gravity does not even contain the variable “T”. As the preeminent physicist of Quantum Gravity and time, Carlo Rovelli, reminds us in The Order of Time: “The laws of elementary physics do not speak of “causes” but only of “regularities”…” (p169). He does speak of causality as a useful notion at higher emergent levels coupled with our consciousness, but not as an elemental property of nature in its own existence, and certainly not something we could posit at a quantum event such as the creation of a universe. And as for questions of eternity and infinite regression, he tells us that “time is ignorance”. It is only through remaining ignorant of the vast reality other than the focus on one small quantum system – a small eddy in a vast ocean – that our own perspective creates the impression of time.

Rovelli then encapsulates our latest understanding of the universe and our place in it:

“On closer inspection, in fact, even the things that are most “thinglike” are nothing more than long events. The hardest stone, in the light of what we have learned from chemistry, from physics, from mineralogy, from geology, from psychology, is in reality a complex vibration of quantum fields, a momentary interaction of forces, a process that for a brief moment manages to keep its shape, to hold itself in equilibrium before disintegrating again into dust, a brief chapter in the history of interactions between the elements of the planet, a trace of Neolithic humanity, a weapon used by a gang of kids, an example in a book about time, a metaphor for an ontology, a part of a segmentation of the world that depends more on how our bodies are structured to perceive than on the object of perception—and, gradually, an intricate knot in that cosmic game of mirrors that constitutes reality. The world is not so much made of stones as of fleeting sounds, or of waves moving through the sea.” (pp.98-99)

The most elemental reality of our universe is one of interacting quantum waves and spinfoam. Medieval notions of substance and accidents, things, material, causality, universal time are illusions no longer taken seriously by serious thinkers. As Kant glimpsed long ago, fundamental reality is not imaginable because we are bound by our categories and sensibilities of time and space. Modern physics has taken us to that very edge beyond which we can make no further representations. Any talk of finite/infinite, substance, uncaused cause, infinite regress, or presentism is empty prattle. Any system or order is fleeting and dependent on perspective. Any rational understanding is approximate, arbitrary, and severely limited in time, space, and chosen events. Talk of the beginning of existence is mere nonsense.

All that remains is our esthetic sense of mystery. Nietzsche’s Madman panicked as the realization of god’s death overwhelmed him and the world in vertigo. He knew full well that for hundreds of years there would be those dark souls attending the corpse of their god in caves; many more overcome with nausea as they succumb to their imbalance, and a few brave enough to reorient themselves toward an embrace of that mystery, free from the myths and dry monotonous dreams of empty men.

References

William Lane Craig, The Kalam Cosmological Argument, The MacMillan Press Limited, London, 1979

Carlo Rovelli, The Order of Time, Riverhead Books, 2018