Post 5 of 6
Again a fallacy. Tzortzis is creating a straw man while simultaneously suggesting atheists have no real arguments. He cites two 'clichés', the first being that atheists change the meaning of words to confuse the audience, and the second that atheists reject causality, which would be absurd.
The first one deals with the concept of nothing. As scientists found out, empty space is an object in the sense that it has weight, energy and is home to a 'quantum haze'. In other words, stuff keeps happening in the quantum level. But that's not what scientists call nothing – that's empty space. It is not that science is mixing up the concepts, it is only that Tzortzis wants you to think so.
It is true, however, that scientific concepts may change over time as more evidence accumulates. Scientists learn from nature, while religious apologists wants to impose their beliefs on nature.
The next sophism is his 'Kantian argument' that our brain is hardwired to understand causal links, without which perception itself would be impossible. We are hardwired to understand cause and effect indeed, but that doesn't mean at all that the universe has to abide by our mental capabilities. Our deductive logic cannot offer insight on the origin of the cosmos, as science can. It sounds really strange to have a universe without a cause, but if that's what science tells us, it is as close to the truth as we can get.
The same problem appears on Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species. He writes:
“To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree.”
Creationists love that quotes from Darwin, but they never include what follows up in the same paragraph:
“When it was first said that the sun stood still and the world turned round, the common sense of mankind declared the doctrine false; but the old saying of Vox populi, vox Dei, as every philosopher knows, cannot be trusted in science. Reason tells me, that if numerous gradations from a simple and imperfect eye to one complex and perfect can be shown to exist, each grade being useful to its possessor, as is certainly the case; if further, the eye ever varies and the variations be inherited, as is likewise certainly the case; and if such variations should be useful to any animal under changing conditions of life, then the difficulty of believing that a perfect and complex eye could be formed by natural selection, though insuperable by our imagination, should not be considered as subversive of the theory.”
The universe is bigger than our imagination.
Causality is a dogma
Great link. And an interesting choice of words: I wouldn't call it a dogma... it may be an illusion.
Of course, our brains being hardwired to understand causality in no way means causality actually exists in the material world. It only means we've had so far an evolutionary benefit from understanding the world that way. Depending on how you define causality, though, we're pretty damn sure it exists on the classical world (ie, excluding the quantum level).
Causality is a concept related to our experience as humans. We notice we can affect things around us. Our actions are causes in the sense that they make things happen. We attribute to all other things that happen other causes, so that we understand that changing such causes we can influence these things also. Our brains look for causes because they are useful to us. Nature does not give a damn to our brains or to our causes.