I have to analyse your first part further, especially as in how this is related to the modal ontological argument. I have my doubts that your objection about treating existence as a property is accurate, after all the nature of existence is not assumed and assuming the Fregean deflationary won´t help in avoiding the conclusion.
Also I don´t think that your first version on which your case is built is an accurate describtion on the syllogism.
My point was that if the objection of question-begging were accurate, due to its being fatal, the discussion of ontological arguments from the atheistic side would have stopped a long time ago. However especially Maydole published his version in secular Logic-themed journals and is regarded with the highest respect. So there is an a priori-reason to think that there are ways to formulate the ontological argument in a non-question begging way.
“It happens because it is random” is not an explanation, but a describtion, since “randomness” has no causal power of its own. I´m okay with explaining the randomness or probabilistic nature with refering to the nature of the particles, since that preserves the existence of an explanation. Something you haven´t provided.
And I also don´t see how I made ex nihilo nihil fit meaningless.
This doesn´t follow at all. One could even argue that the state of nothing is selfexplained due to absolute nothingness, but this is tautological.
You and I both reject the physicalistic picture of the universe. So I don´t understand why you would argue from that to absurdities. I could argue (without necessarily endorsing it) that the particle from the virtual field came into existence in an analogically similar way we came into existence; I can´t make sense out of the idea that we came from nothing, rather we were ideas in the divine mind with potential and now actual existence. Just because there is no energy involved (I will just trust you on this one , I have no knowledge of QFT and still not finished Cundy´s book on the topic), it doesn´t mean it comes from literal nothing, since that would involve that if we removed the Quantum Field, the particles would still appaer. Also, I know that you described God or consciousness as some kind of energy in the past, but, to make sense of it, I take it as a given that the describtion was made in an analogical and not univocal way.
The facts itself not. But I argue that the interpretation applied to the facts is wrongheaded since it leads to absurdities.
Do you have something in mind like electrons having both wave- and particle-attributes? I´d rather recommend to search for the mistakes in our classification. After all who said that the classification must be a duality between the two? I don´t think the classification must be absolute.
Also the astonishment is genuine, but what I claim is that the correct metaphysics can shed some light. Maybe not for the scientific work, but certainly for the philosophical understanding.
I´ve got no problem with that, since I affirm libertarian free will, as well as essentialism.
Whatever gets acutalized can only be actualized by something already actual
The existence of some X (= cup of coffee) requires the actualization of a potential at every moment at which it exists by some A (=Particles)
But the particles also need an actualizer for their existence.
This chain of actualizers can´t be infinitely long.
The chain terminates in something purely actual, what we call God.
This is a version purely for explanation, it can certainly be modified with clearer terminology. It is also based on aristotelian philosophy of nature, which I affirm. Now for a quick explanation of the points:
Undeniable
An answer by Aristotle to account for change. It by itself is mainly terminology and needn´t be a controversial premise.
The principle of causality, if A causes B, the cause must be present in A. There are some counterarguments, mainly based on Quantum Physics, which I´m confident, are wrong-headed. Alexander Pruss treated that objection in his book on the Principle of Sufficient Reason and Edward Feser in his work on the Aristotlelian argument/First way. The links I provided above give a brief sketch of the answer.
Controversial, since it follows from Aristotlelian philosophy. For me its advantage is, that it keeps the process of conception and dying intelligible, something I suspect is not present in the Fregean notion of existence or materialistic philosophy, since it leads to eliminativism. However there are also other Aristotelians who deny this premise because of something called “Existential Inertia”. That means that objects tend to stay in existence until something acts upon it. I don´t think that alternative is viable. Edit: Matthew, if you are a member of reaearchgate, you could read this paper, if you´re interested to understand the issue of Existential Inertia and Divine Conversation: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/272879474_Existential_Inertia_and_the_Five_Ways
Same as 4)
The most important premise. We have to make an important distinction; The accidental and the essential ordered causal series. Or horizontal and vertical causality. The accidental ordered series speaks of a causal series in time. Take for example a billard ball. A, after being pushed, causes the movement of B. Now, I have my doubts that actual infinities are possible at all, Koons´ and Pruss´ Grim Reaper Paradox is formidable and the latter recently publsihed a book about infinities and paradoxes. But for the sake of the argument we can assume that the universe is eternal.
Where the infinite causal series is impossible is in the essential ordered series, or the vertical causality. In order to keep the existence of the cup of coffee intelligible, its existence must be explained from the particles making it up. The coffee is caused by the particles, is caused by the atoms, is caused by the protons and neutrons (and electrons), is caused by the quarks, is caused by whatever physics will discover. However none of those deeper particles are necessary existent, they could all fail to exist, because they are contingent. In order to keep the existence intelligible, we have to terminate at some point.
Maybe that fact becomes clearer, when we are talking about consciousness. If we affirm that we are genuinely intelligent beings and thereby reject the identity of mind and brain, as I suspect we both do, the origin of intelligence is only intelligible by a ground of being that is in turn intelligent in some form.
Consciousness or intelligence as an example has the advantage that it avoids the objection that there maybe a causal loop. But I also think that it is a bad objection if we only talk about existence, since causal loops have some strange consequences and it fails to explain what it means for something to exist.
This is a shortcut, since it already assumes that we did the hard work of working out the implications of something being purely actual. However I take my explanation in 6) to be sufficient to understand why the purely actual being has to be intelligent in some form. But it suffices for now to swap out “God” with “necessary being”.
Very much beg to differ. The same argument can be made for creationism and flat earth. The reality is that this argument does not convince nonbelievers and even a lot of believers like myself do not consider it a sound argument either.
Oh I have little doubt that you can transform one logical fallacy into a different logical fallacy. Don’t see how that proves anything.
Not sure about that. I am a physicalist with regards to the mind-body problem so I certainly reject dualism. Sure I believe there is a spiritual aspect to reality but I am not sure this alters the physicalistic picture of the universe. On top of that you have me somewhat puzzled because what I gave you was just science with nothing whatsoever to do with philosophical positions like physicalism.
Whereas I can make sense out the idea just fine even though that isn’t what I think happened. Perhaps this is because God-belief isn’t as deeply rooted in my thinking and the formation of my understanding of reality as it is in your case.
What quantum field would that be? (QFT does not propose the existence of a generic "quantum field, but rather shows how electrons, protons, etc can be described as quantum fields). Virtual particles come from the energy-time uncertainty principle and not any kind of field.
But even though I don’t agree… I think I can improve your argument to say instead that space-time is pre-requisite and thus in that sense virtual particles do not come from nothing. The same goes for the spontaneous symmetry breaking supposedly produced all the matter energy of the universe from the decay of vacuum. Thus you can argue that space-time is not nothing – in fact many like myself who see the laws of nature reducing to the geometry of space-time would say that space-time is everything (everything physical that is).
But I still think there is an emptiness of meaning in this kind of argument. Which is basically saying there is no such thing as nothing.
Well I certainly don’t agree with some of the interpretations and conclusions of post-modernism. But just because something leads to absurdities in your worldview with the premises you have accepted doesn’t mean that it leads to absurdities in a different worldview with a different set of premises.
What I had in mind was pretty much right at the core of our discussion. Physicists sets out to explain the causes of physical phenomenon with mathematical equations and then along comes quantum physics and tells these physicists that some of the phenomenon they observe do have causes within the worldview they have accepted. I am talking about Bell’s inequality and the conclusion that there are no hidden variables to determine the results of these measurements. It is very hard for the physicists to swallow something that contradicts the premise of the science itself.
I am libertarian but essentialism sounds to me like a confusion of language with reality.
This is where I disagree, since you assume that once the question-begging is avoided, there necessarily has to be another logical fallacy.
Your quote was “But in the case of virtual particles there is no energy so it is out of nothing at all” and that was what I was objecting to, since that reads like an assumption like Armstrong´s “The whole of reality is exhausted by the space-time system and its contents”. Someone who affirms the latter would affirm your quote, too. My objection was that this is too restrictive and “no energy=nothing” misguided, at least in the way energy is used by contemporary physics.
We had this discussion before. You think that mind as an emergent phenomenon is compatible, I take it as an obvious oxymoron.
Depends. Ontological physicalism positively excludes the spiritual realm. See Armstrong´s quote above.
Your quote assumed the coming into existence of particles from literal nothing. This certainly is a philosophical statement and as such also must be refered to that way. On top of that the only alternative to nothing you gave was energy. This, as I already said, sounds like a statement from an Armstrongian naturalist.
Science has several premises, but I don´t think that this is necessarily a threat to the Law of non-contradiction. Just because something is indetermined, that doesn´t mean that a statement about the object or fact is therefor true and false at the same time. However, once again this seems to be contingent on the interpretation of Quantum Mechanics applied.
Thanks for the correction.
This seems like you affirm causal power to space-time itself. I would have to unpack what you else assume space-time to possess, but for now it suffices for me, that you are not talking about the literal nothing.
My point. I don´t think genuine nothingness is possible.
I formed my believe through a-posteriori reasoning, I begin with the common sense experience and reason from there to God. Hence my affirmation of divine simplicity and molinism. And my sympathy to negative theology.
Also I have my doubts about you having the ability to make sense of things coming from nothing. This is essentially a claim Hume made. But following Anscombe, I doubt that that is even really possible, to imagine a thing coming from nothing. And I doubt even more that such events, entailing an uncaused appearance, would be accepted as an explanation.
No, I accept the main premises based on human experience. We are conscious, we have intentionality, we have reason and rationality, living beings get born and die, nothing comes from nothing, things have explanations etc… The physicalistic picture of mind for example isn´t able to account for the first three things on that list and proceeds with explaining them away. The Aristotelian philosophy of nature is superior to the other systems in including such premises in a coherent worldview. And if I say, that somethings lead to absurdities, then I mean, that they threaten or require a denial of one or more of the most basics premises I mentioned above.
You affirm emergence, that suffices. If you affirm irreducibility, you have substances. The issue gets more obvious if you affirm that such substances, like e.g. a human being have causal power other than the mechanistic. You do that since you are a libertarian. The powers of the substance are found in the form; formal causality.
Further more essentialism is the affirmation that some entities have necessary properties. Human beings necessarily have the potential to be rational animals, wouldn´t you agree. Don`t all living beings necessarily possess the potential for procreation? Aren´t minds necessarily irreducible to the physical structure? Thats simple essentialism, I don´t see how that could merely be a confusion of language, it seems to be a rather straight forward statement.
Anyone who claims that physics is misguided is clearly misguided. By comparison your philosophical rhetoric might be considered nothing but empty words.
What I assume is that it is the same basic idea. If it is as different as you suggest then it shouldn’t even be called the ontological argument. No I don’t think a lot of rhetoric can make the basic flaw of the argument disappear.
I don’t even understand what you are claiming me to think. What I think is that the mind is a physical living organism.
Sounds to me like the difference between the physicalist view of the universe and the physicalist view of reality, which are two different things as far as I am concerned.
Incorrect. It is a statement of physics which you are reading as philosophy. Indeed this may be a big part of the problem. The scientist and philosopher talking past each other because each is really only interested in their own subject matter. This made more difficult because they use some of same words which may not have exactly the same definitions. So you can object the physics statement that these virtual particles come from nothing doesn’t mean that they philosophically come from nothing and the scientist is likely to reply that he isn’t really interested in your philosophical somethings which from their perspective is just a bunch of empty words.
As for me… I am interested in philosophy only in so far as it can be grounded in science. To be sure I extrapolate from the science to something more. But I don’t see a history of philosophical claims as validating those claims. And I will certainly renounce any that are contradicted by scientific findings.
Definitely! That is the conclusion of General Relativity that gravitational phenomenon are explained by the geometry of space-time. This is also where string theory was heading in the direction that takes this even further to suggest that instead of space-time simply being a container in which things exist that the geometry of space-time includes all the things previously thought to be inside of it.
And I think it is evident that you are not even aware of all the premises you accept. I find that a much more likely explanation of fact that other people disagree with your conclusions than the idea that you are simply correct and everybody else is wrong.
As much as I like Aristotle and think he was way ahead of his time, I would never say anything like that. Modern science is superior and I very much think that Aristotle would agree with that conclusion if you could ask him.
I don’t think that is correct – or at least I don’t see any value in that terminology. I am a substance monist. I think there is only one substance and differences have explanations. You have emergence because of self-organization – new rules that derive neither from component parts or previous external causes but from internal patterns which possibly have arisen at least partly by chance. Yeah… I think you can associate that with Aristotle’s formal causality and I have done so on several occasions.
I think by “substance” you are referring to the Aristotelian concept of ousia which presents many difficulties. It is equated with a number of different ideas: essence and being in addition to substance, and all these seem very very different things to me. The description of ousia by Aristotle looks strongly connected to language and Plato’s idea of universals – something which I reject completely. To me the English word “substance” seems closer to Aristotle’s word “hyle” which usually gets translated as matter, another word whose meaning has been greatly changed by the findings of science.
I didn´t say physics was misguided, I said you are misguided. “No energy=nothing” is hardly an empirical statement, but a metaphysical one and as such needs to be attacked that way.
But yes it is clear that physics the way it is practiced is now is at least very incomplete. That we are conscoius, thinking minds can´t be accounted for on physics. And quantum indeterminancy by itself doesn´t preserve you free will, you need an account for the personal agency. To quote Jack Smart: “I wouldn´t feel any freeer if a random brain state forced me to run in the garden and eat a slog. Quite the opposite.”
Also, isn´t it certain that QM is wrong, but that it is usefully wrong?
That´s Sabine Hossenfelder, physicist in Frankfurt, by the way.
We have this type of discussion every once in a while. I was recapping the position you gave back then. You denied that, although the mind is physical, that it can be reduced to the physical constituents.
I can only come up with panentheism, but you are pretty hostile to it, so that can´t be right. I need an explanantion.
I think I get your point. The physicists nothing is different. Still I´d blame them for not making that clear enough. I´m reminded of David Alberts answer to Krauss´book “A universe from nothing”. You don´t solve a philosophical problem by just using the same term in another context.
As you should. The problem is, that there is a certain degree contingent upon the perspective from which you look at the scientific finding. There is a strong argument to be made from physics alone that genuine free will is impossible. But that is only from a certain standpoint.
Oh sure, that is possible. Since we display different abilities when thinking (e.g. intentionality) that are not to be found in the physical alone, I conclude that mind and brain are different. Could be that I´m wrong. It could indeed be the case that free will is impossible or physicalistic-mechanistic philosophy was right all along. But I have little reason to think that, since the most pressing phenomenon aren´t explained, but explained away. Irreducibility is seemingly a genuine part of the universe. Sounds like an aristotelian form, doesn´t it? The data from the biological science, the way I see it, can best be accounted for by a basic account of teleology (e.g. the function).
I don´t think of course that I or anyone else have it all right, but I think the basics are. On the other hand, most modern philosophers are materialists and the way I see it, this is mainly based in a modern naturalistic presupposition.
Categorical error. Of course Aristotelian cosmology was wrong and the modern is better. But the work of distinguishing the aristotelian science from his metaphysics has been done a long time ago. And in this category the aristotelian school is clearly superior.
Are you an idealist?
I´d qualm with the formulation. If a new property arises, then self-organization is only the mechanism by which it is expressed. That tells us little about the ontological status of the property, but it is clear that it has to differ in at least one way from the constituents. Just refering to the internal patterns only pushes the question back instead of answering it.
Now I´m not a platonic universalist, but at least some kind of realism I affirm. Usually the weaker version, that universals exist, but only in minds. But identifying ousia with the universals isn´t accurate. Of course Aristotle is concerned with the nature of things, but denying these completely leads to problems. After all, is there nothing which makes someone a human? In general human beings get classified as rational animals, so that seems to be a common denominator. Aristotle doesn´t affirm the platonic realm, but that the human form is a universal. Everyone participating in it has at least one common attribute, and that here would be rationality.
Further more the examples I gave above for essentialism apply.
Now there can be further classification, especially in terms of accidens which is supposed to account for individuality, but that is a different topic.
Substances however are irreducible objects, physically or mentally, which are on a different ontological level than other things. For example the property “wetness” and the protons, neutrons and electrons making the molecules up. It was virtually present in the essence/nature of water, but this property is part of the formal and not the material cause. This solves a wholelot of problems, but is incompatible with physicalism, though you may disagree (your definition of physicalism is so broad, that is meaningless, at least for the metaphysical discussion).
Yes and no. The greatest change was the affirmation of the cartesian distinction, which I reject completely. Nature is not exhaustively quantifiable, since there are obviously qualitative aspects, like qualia. It is no real surprise that quantum physics has been seen as validating much of Aristotelianism. But since the distinction is a given in the scientific practice, it only follows that the scientific picture is inexhaustive. It has little to say about the nature of existence or causality, other than possibly refuting one picture if the facts on their face value aren´t compatible with it. But that conclusion must come through philosophy.
The biggest problem I see is that only very few people in the science departments have the holistic picture in mind. Biology for example, due to it being concerned with functions of organisms, is constantly confronted with a broad version of teleology/physical intentionality. Now, many have the conviction that ultimately those can be reduced to non-intentional physics (which is obviously false, since genuine intentionality can´t arise from non-intentional processes), but this is only a further example that physics, although providing us with true objective knowledge, is inexhaustive.
The modern picture of matter can´t be just read back into Aristotle.
Quantum indeterminacy is how free will must appear in a worldview which restricts itself to time-ordered causality.
QM is neither wrong nor incomplete. That hypothesis has been disproven.
There have been a long list of physicists who have rebelled against QM, one of its founder Einstein included. But their efforts to disprove it have repeatedly failed. QM is not wrong. Only evolution comes close to the shear quantity of corroborating evidence and doesn’t even get close the to precision of that supporting evidence. The most that Hossenfelder can say is that QM doesn’t explain everything any more than evolution or General Relativity does. But frankly QM explains more things than any other theory. Frankly, I think Hossenfelder’s article was mostly tongue in cheek reflection that the instincts of many physicists rebel against it and would very much LIKE to say it is wrong. But no, it is not wrong – NOT. AT. ALL!
That’s Mitchell McKain, physicist in Salt Lake City and the vast majority of other physicists, by the way.
No you were recapping the bin you decided to put me in according to your own peculiar binning. I have just repeated what I have said every time. The mind is a physical living organism using linguistic encoding of information much the way biological life uses DNA – meme life rather than gene life.
That’s because of emergence. A topic I will now skip to next…
Let’s try an example. Consider the game of chess. Everything from the board to the players consist of atoms. Does this mean that the rules of chess come from the physics governing atoms? Clearly not. So where did those rules come from? Well… people just made them up. That is emergence, right there! Everything doesn’t reduce to their component parts because the things composed of those parts can make up their own rules having absolutely nothing to do with the laws which govern those parts. And NO this doesn’t mean that the things made of those parts have to have either life or intelligence. They just need enough complexity to exhibit the phenomenon of self-organization which can be observed everywhere in the universe.
So… continuing on from where we left off before…
This was a very strange leap to me… panentheism is about God and God was nowhere mentioned so that must be some kind of hidden subtext to your use of the words… does physicalist mean “without God” in your personal dictionary? It doesn’t mean that anywhere I have looked.
How about this… Take the physicalist view of the universe and simply add something else which is not the universe and then use the phrase “physical universe” for the original, “non-physical” for the addition and reality for the sum of the two.
In case you are still stumbling over God in this… God would be part of the non-physical addition.
I also conclude that the mind and brain are different. I just don’t think the mind is non-physical.
Or it could be that both are wrong and both are so busy dismissing and discounting anything that doesn’t agree with their worldview that they fail to take into account how the new discoveries in science alter the big picture.
According to what definition of idealism?
Do I “assert that reality, or reality as humans can know it, is fundamentally mental, mentally constructed, or otherwise immaterial?”
I do not.
When I say that I am a substance monist that means I think that monism is the superior approach to understanding reality because it explains more – explaining both the separate phenomenon (such as mind and body) AND how they are related and differ from each other. This takes after what we see in physics and extrapolates beyond – how everything seems to be different forms of energy, and thus suggests that there is one stuff and different forms of that same stuff are all the things which exist both physical and non-physical.
And I typically say that I am a nominalist and that the universals in minds are themselves particulars of a different degree of generality.
And I think this restriction of rationality to human beings is spurious. The one thing we really know is unique to human being is language (not merely communication but with symbolization ability to rival that of DNA). What makes us human is the mind (living organism using language as its information coding) which often makes use of rationality but is not defined by rationality – not even close. I continue to assert that computers have demonstrated superb abilities in rationality without a shred of either consciousness or life.
But to use the word “substance” for the fact that we can make a distinction between man and the animals seems very strange to me. In the end these are just lines we draw in the sand as an aid to communication and we shouldn’t project such made up lines upon the nature of reality itself.
On the contrary, it is extremely specific. It is simply one answer to the mind-body problem, that both the mind and body are physical entities and thus interact by all the forces of nature as discovered by the physical sciences.
To be sure I have acknowledge in our discussion there is another use of the word for a broader metaphysical position, but it is not one I am accustomed to using.
I was refering to changes in the meaning of the word “matter.” And thus I doubt if the translation of Aristotle’s word “hyle” as “matter” is really a good fit anymore.
I do not acknowledge the existence of “qualia” any more than I accept the existence of Plato’s ideal forms. I don’t see the merit of using an atomist or reductionist way of thinking on human experience.
Ah yes! In this, your praise of Aristotle is very appropriate. I have often thought of him as the first organic philosopher taking so much of his thinking from the study of living organisms as he did.
I guess you might ask for a scale on which to put these numerical ratings because it might look like this is out of a maximum of 10. No! It is more like out of a maximum of 100 representing undeniable objective proof and evidence.
So for example we might give something like the following ratings to some scientific theories and ideas:
90 The theory of evolution (with all its modern modifications and not just Darwin’s book).
88 Special Relativity
85 Quantum Mechanics
80 Standard Model
78 General Relativity
77 Big Bang cosmology
50 Inflation
40 Dark Matter
25 Dark Energy
15 String Theory
9 Personal experience of God
8 Multiverse
6 Beginning of the universe as evidence for God
4 Fine Tuning argument for God
…
I should add however that this is largely a scientist.s perspective and intentionally giving a much higher weight to objective evidence because of the expectation it provides for others to agree (practically the definition of proof). For most people personal experience has the greatest impact (most convincing) and the technicality of science is too far out of personal experience to take as seriously. For some the success of science is enough to overcome this. But frankly this doesn’t add to the objectivity of scientific findings.
Thanks for explaining though I still can’t quite get the gist of this argument. I don’t think the principle of causality makes a lot of sense, despite works like Pruss or Feser. For me it seems like semantics for what to do with the quantum world and causality so I am not particularly impressed either way someone argues. For point 4 I think that this would require an understanding of the laws of nature in a deeper way than we presently understand them and I also would remain agnostic on this point. I would have no idea whether or not existential intertia is a valid concept as it seems to require knowledge we don’t presently have nor can we as we can’t test supernatural beings and how they relate to the existence of something in physics. I also don’t know about number 6 nor what logically can end a sequence in a scientific sense.
It’s clear you know way more about this than I do and appreciate your post. These are just some brief thoughts I’ve had on this.
As the song goes. Define what God. If it’s not the one in the Scriptures, then it does not matter to argue. If it is the God in Scripture, then Scripture has much to say about him.
If what a book says is sufficient then we also have books about ghosts, fairies, vampires, unicorns, and Santa Claus. But then this gives the answer to question what? These would all be characters and elements of stories. If you are satisfied that this is what God is, then “because the Bible says so” is sufficient proof indeed.
On the contrary we manage with what we have already and the proof is in the fact that we can predict changes before they happen. But this argument is not believable.
If we take the example of the coffee then we know it becomes hot not because of any potential in the coffee but because heat is transferred to the coffee by radiation and or conduction. OK, there are examples of where heat comes from a potential like in a burning wood or fuel where heat comes from the chemical potential. But I don’t see what this has to do with coffee. An example which comes to my mind is a rock slide or an avalanche where the changes to a mountain does indeed come from gravitational potential.
1 Change occurs.
2 Change is the actualization of a potential
3 Whatever gets acutalized can only be actualized by something already actual
4 The existence of some X (= cup of coffee) requires the actualization of a potential at every moment at which it exists by some A (=Particles)
5 But the particles also need an actualizer for their existence.
6 This chain of actualizers can´t be infinitely long.
7 The chain terminates in something purely actual, what we call God.
But in any case, that only gets us to the second part of the argument. The third part sounds like complete nonsense. If there is anything which enables the “actualization” of a potential it is laws of nature or the mathematical space-time structure of the universe which governs the way things change in physical relationships. It is certainly not the case that the activation of a chemical potential like in burning fuel requires fuel which already been actualized. Any heat from any source will do. It true that a good fuel will produce enough heat to make a chain reaction and then you can say that much of it burns because some of the fuel has already burned. But this is not always the case because something doesn’t have to be a good fuel in order to burn and then it burns only because heat is added from another source which need not be from a chemical potential or any other kind of potential.
I certainly don’t see any reason for accepting the claim in the fourth and fifth parts of the argument. It sounds to me like a premise which someone has concocted in order to devise a proof for the existence of God.
Then there is the sixth part of the argument which is clearly false by everything we know of logic and mathematics. This tells us that a chain of causation and change certainly can be infinitely long.
Back to the topic of change itself. The definition of change is worth some consideration because if we simply refer to the change of properties over time then we can say that a lot of changes happen simply because of what something is – most accurately described by a mathematical expression or equation with time as one of its parameters. For example electromagnetic waves propagate by alternating electric and magnetic fields and the wave spreads out in space. For this reason we might consider changes where the state remains the same as no change at all, with the idea that real change is when there is a change of state. But in that case the cause is generally an interaction with another entity rather than the action of any potential in the thing itself.
I think I get you here. I was trying to flesh out the nuance between the fact that the laws of physics are reliable and a potentially deeper reason as to why they are reliable.