[LINK] Sean Carrol's reflections on his debate with WL Craig on "God and Cosmology"
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For context, here are three of my posts from years ago about William Lane Craig's debates with atheists. I haven't looked at them for a long time so I don't know if I agree with everything in them, but I probably still agree with their general tone:
I watched part of this, and I came away with a very favorable impression of Carroll's performance. That said, I have no real idea how to score these things as wins or losses, especially when I have such a heavy prior bias. I will say, though, that Jeffery Jay Lowder, an atheist who follows these debates closely and is usually very critical of Craig's oppponents, said that Carroll dominated the debate and did as well as anybody who has ever debated Craig.
Or not even false, as I put it, because the notion of a “cause” isn’t part of an appropriate vocabulary to use for discussing fundamental physics.
Really? I don't know fundamental physics (I take this to mean quantum mechanics and general relativity) well enough to directly say anything about it. However, as far as I know, all of the mesoscopic stuff (electromagnetism, elasticity, thermodynamics, chemical processes, etc. on the scale of everyday objects) obeys causal differential equations, by which I mean the subject matter of this book. The same is true, to the extent that I know anything of the matter, of quantum mechanical descriptions of the time evolution of a system. Some of these also have non-causal formulations (e.g. principles of least action), but there is always a causal description: one that does not require any future boundary conditions in order to calculate future trajectories.
If physicists don't explicitly talk about causes, it's because the concept is too basic and agreed-on to need talking about. They don't talk much about "truth" either. Or "arithmetic".
Classical physics, excluding thermodynamics, is invariant under time reversal. I certainly wouldn't call that causal, but maybe I'm missing something.
Also quantum physics, in no-collapse interpretations. (Except for a few processes like kaon decays, that arguably are time invariant "in spirit" because they are CPT invariant).
A couple of points:
Some of these also have non-causal formulations (e.g. principles of least action), but there is always a causal description
Sort of true, although to make a "causal description" of GR one has to do unspeakable violence to the Einstein equation, which simply states that curvature = energy-momentum density. It also excludes many of the popular solutions with closed timelike curves and other anomalies. In any case, if you don't need a causal formulation, or if you can derive it from a non-causal one, then asserting that causality is essential in physics would be reaching.
If physicists don't explicitly talk about causes, it's because the concept is too basic and agreed-on to need talking about.
That's not true. Physicists do explicitly talk about causality, as in, how much of the future can be influenced by the past. Scott Aaronson recently wrote a paper about it.
All that said, however, I believe that what SC and especially WLC meant by causes in their debate was "external causes", more in a sense of a creator, or at least fire in the equations, not the mundane idea of equations of physics being castable in a hyperbolic form. And that vague notion of external causes is what SC objected too.
You are quoting out of context. The issue is the cause of the big bang and the cause of the particular values of fundamental constants. That physical laws say that the past causes the future is relevant to neither of these points.
(Shminux said the same thing, but buried it by pursuing your tangent.)
And the debate videos are now online. http://www.preposterousuniverse.com/blog/2014/02/27/godcosmology-debate-videos/
I find myself put off by Craig's use of disagreements and thought experiments in academic disciplines (which are the sign of a healthy field!) as a weapon against them. For example he uses speciesism to attack against non-theistic moral philosophy, instead of using it as a means of talking about what properties are relevant for moral consideration - which was its original purpose. And he uses Hilbert's Hotel to assert that infinities are "paradoxical" - even though they are perfectly logically consistent, and much of modern mathematics is based off of them.
I understand that he is trying to win, he doesn't care about honesty, but that doesn't make it any less off-putting.
Debates can be somewhat useful for finding out the truth when the debaters are matched in debating skills. But when one of the parties is more skilled than the other, this advantage usually determines which side people perceive to have won (excluding those already strongly committed to either position). William Lane Craig's debating skills are remarkable, and superior to those of nearly everyone he has engaged in debates with. (For an exception, check his debate with Arif Ahmed.)
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