I am always looking up what WLC thinks about these objections etc and this is what he says about validity of a premise:
"What makes for a sound deductive argument? The answer is: true premisses and valid logic. An argument is sound if the premisses of the argument are true and the conclusion follows from the premisses by the logical rules of inference. If these two conditions are met, then the conclusion of the argument is guaranteed to be true.
However, to be a good argument, an argument must be more than just sound. If the premisses of an argument are true, but we have no evidence for the truth of those premisses, then the argument will not be a good one. It may (unbeknownst to us) be sound, but in the absence of any evidence for its premisses it won’t, or at least shouldn’t, convince anyone. The premisses have to have some sort of epistemic warrant for us in order for a sound argument to be a good one."
On another question it is revealed that WLC doesn’t keep it a secret that he uses or has “metaphysical intuition” that something cannot come into being from nothing”
i think this is what you are reffering to when you say it is not good to make a premise on intuition?
This was the objection the person made:
“But is that really it – he intuits it? Because human intuitions about the nature of reality have a less than impressive track record. This is why I’m guessing Dr. Craig fortifies his admission with a bit of intellectual intimidation by warning that anyone who disagrees with him has “quit doing serious metaphysics and resorted to magic” [quoting you there, Bill]. Of course this leaves us wondering why Craig would cite philosophers such as Quentin Smith, Graham Oppy, and Adolf Grünbaum as having lodged substantive critiques of kalam’s first premise when according to him these men have quit doing serious metaphysics and resorted to magic.”
This sounds alot like what you are saying right?
He gives a couple of reasons why he thinks the universe has a cause or why his intuition may be right.
WLC:
“The first one is, that it is a kind of first principle of metaphysics that something cannot come from nothing; out of nothing nothing comes. Aristotle put it that being only arises from being, it doesn’t come from non-being. And I think that this is a metaphysical truth that we do intuit rationally when we think about it.”
Now he gives his reasons for his intuition:
Now I think that the questioner doesn’t understand, perhaps, what philosophers mean when they talk about intuition. It’s not like women’s intuition, some sort of mysterious feeling or something; rather this would be a way of knowing some sort of a truth that is so basic, it’s so primitive, that it is grasped as evidently true without needing to provide some deeper proof of it. Examples would include, for example, the truths of logic: p implies q; p; therefore q. Now how do you know that that logical truth is in fact true? There’s no way to prove it because any proof would have to appeal to logic. So the truths of logic are something that one simply knows by a rational intuition when you look at them; it’s just clear that they are true. Or modal truths, for example, that I could not have been an alligator. When you think about that I think it’s obvious that being a person is something that someone has essentially, so that I could not have been a non-person like an alligator or a chair; that would be a different being than me. How do I know that? Well, you can’t prove that but it just seems evident when you think about it, that I could not have been an alligator, for example. Or other sorts of intuitive truths. This table could not have been made of ice. When you think about it that seems intuitively true; it’s not that you can prove it but it just seems evident.
And I would say in the same way when you think about the metaphysical principle that something cannot come from nothing, that seems to me to just be evidently true. And I don’t think that this is idiosyncratic to me; on the contrary this is one of the oldest principles of metaphysics, Kevin, that has been recognized since the time of ancient Greek philosophy right up through the present day, so that I stand well within the mainstream of philosophical thought in saying this.[1] To quote from Plato himself in his Timaeus sections 27 and 28, he said,
We must in my opinion begin by distinguishing between that which
always is and never becomes from that which is always becoming but
never is. . . . everything that becomes or changes must do so owing to some cause; for nothing can come to be without a cause.
As for the world – call it that or ‘cosmos’ or any other name acceptable to
it – we must ask about it the question one is bound to ask to begin with
about anything: whether it has always existed and had no beginning, or
whether it has come into existence and started from some beginning.
The answer is that it has come into being . . . And what comes into being or changes must do so, we said, owing to some cause
This fundamental metaphysical principle has been recognized down through history. Even David Hume, the great Scottish skeptic, wrote to John Stuart in 1723 I believe it was, “I have never asserted so absurd a proposition as that something might come into being without a cause. I only maintained that our certainty of the falsehood of that principle stems neither from intuition nor experience but from some other cause.” So even Hume recognized the truth of the principle even though he disputed the typical basis upon which we know it. So I think that this is a fundamental metaphysical first principle that anyone who thinks about it ought to see is true.
Now that does not mean that this is known infallibly. I noticed that later in his question he equates intuition with an infallible certainty that whatever begins to exist has a cause. Well, I’m not claiming that, and the argument doesn’t depend on that. All it depends on is your seeing that this principle is more plausibly true than not, and that’s enough for the argument to go through. Ask yourself, if you were on a sort of serious game show where you can win five hundred million dollars and the question to you was “Can something come into existence uncaused out of nothing?” how would you answer? Well, I think you ought to answer, “No, it can’t; whatever begins to exist has a cause.”
Sorry for the huge amount of texts and sorry for not making those pretty quoting windows, i have no clue how!
But i think this does answer your objection a little @T_aquaticus
