Q&A: The Cosmological Argument and Spontaneous Formation
The Cosmological Argument and Spontaneous Formation
Question
In your book The First Being, you present as a challenge to the cosmological argument a situation in which a particle is formed spontaneously. You reject that challenge by arguing that despite the spontaneous formation, the event still occurs within the framework of conservation laws.
The difficulty that occurred to me as a result is that the question has actually shifted from the philosophical plane to the scientific one. One can imagine a world in which a particle forms spontaneously and the conservation laws do not hold. In such a situation, would we have refuted the cosmological argument?
Answer
One can perhaps imagine such a world, but that is not our world. The question is whether our world came into being that way or not.
Discussion on Answer
Maybe. Though I doubt whether such a discovery will be made (in my opinion, it is almost impossible a priori to infer that this is the case).
It could be that such a discovery will be made in the future. In that case, would the argument be undermined?