For the Sake of Science

I’ve been following a comment thread over at The A-Unicornist that has mostly revolved around the First Cause argument. In it was this gem from family-harasser Jack Hudson:

…causation isn’t logically dependent on time.

This made me literally laugh out loud. It demonstrates what is one of the most incoherent view of reality I think most Christians hold. I’ve explained how it all works on FTSOS as well as in the comment thread, but I think it bears repeating one more time what, exactly, causality is.

Newton’s third law says that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Another way of saying this is, for every cause there is an equal effect. Or, to use exactly equal language again, for every force there is an equal opposing force. With that under our belts, let’s look at what force is.

Simply put, force is mass multiplied by acceleration, or f=ma. Let’s break it down further. What is acceleration? It is the change in velocity of an object over time. In other words, find the change in velocity in an object and divide that change by the amount of time it took for said change to occur and you’ve got acceleration.

I think if I left things at this point many people would be able to figure out the implications of what I’m saying. However, since I know Jack (who is obsessed with FTSOS) and other Christians will be reading this, I will spell it out. In order for something to have a force, it must have mass and acceleration. And in order for something to have acceleration, it must have velocity. And in order for something to have velocity, it must go through time. Tie it all together and we see that time is of the essence. At least to introductory physics. Without time, there is no causality. And what did we have ‘prior’ to the Big Bang? Certainly not time as we understand it. Therefore, it is logically incoherent to use the idea of causality in order to argue about how the Universe began.

If more Christians understood science, we wouldn’t have these sort of problems.

Filed under: Astronomy/Cosmology/Physics, Philosophy | Tagged: Causality, First cause argument, Jack Hudson, Newton, The A-Unicornist |