May I respectfully point out that the whole argument is nonsense?

The old saw about causality not applying 'beyond the universe', whatever that means, originates from Kant. The Prussian philosopher however had a reason for holding this position however, namely that the 'universe' understood as the totality of spatial, temporal and casual entities resulted from the projection of Transcendental Categories and A Priori Forms on the raw chaos of phenomenal experience. Unless one is willing to adopt Kant's Transcendental Idealism (and even here it's arguable that one can justify a phenomenal unmoved mover) such claims are worthless.

To give a more specific response to your schematisation of Morison's argument (for which thanks) the first two premise are both vague and wrong. What are the 'Laws of Nature' in question? Human regularities? If so then all the objection really amounts to is Hume's animadversion against causation and that applies - if it applies at all - within the 'universe' as much as without. Classical Theists not to mention a sizeable proportion of realist atheists won't but this though. They would hold that talk of the 'Laws of Nature' is shorthand for talk of an entity's nature, that is its essential properties both manifest abs dispositional, in which case talk of them not holding beyond the universe is nonsense (because an entity without a nature is an entity without identity).

I think there's another confusion at work too, one originating from an ambiguity re the term 'universe'. When metaphysicians of the older school use that term or the older 'cosmos' they intend to refer to the totality of contingent beings*, both material and immaterial. This must no be confused with the way the term is used in modern cosmology.

*Indeed once we specific that said beings are contingent we really give the game away. If Morison and his ilk want to deny the validity of Cosmological Arguments in such cases they are forced to dig deeper than the Causal Principle and attack the PSR (and a weak form of the PSR to boot) itself. This of course just ends up as another 'appeal' to brute facts.

Edit: Another way of interpreting Morison's remarks about 'the origin of physical reality as a whole' might be along the lines of Hume's quantifer shift allegation or Paul Edward's 'Eskimo Village' parody. Regardless of whether this objections are any good (they are not) they are irrelevant to most cosmological arguments which certainly don't require appeal to 'physical reality as a whole' - instead they claim that the existence of one contingent being implies the existence of a necessary being.

Last edited by DanielCC (1/19/2016 10:10 am)

I agree in a sense with this objection. I do not think the universe even came into being. That is not to say I think that the universe has always existed, but it never "popped" into existence. The reason I hold this view is that I think all times exist in a tense-less kind of way. This position is known as "eternalism" and it has powerful arguments in its favor. But if this is the case, then no time ever comes into being, including, if there was a first moment, that moment. 

Now, this isn't exactly the objection presented but I see a relevance here. We cannot really speak of temporal becoming since no such thing is literally true. Therefore, any alleged instance of temporal becoming should be understood as just a difference between to adjacent moments in time. But if this is the case, perhaps the tiger needs a cause because there needs to be an explanation for the difference between two adjacent moments in time. But no such explanation could be given for the first moment in time given that there is no adjacent moment in the earlier direction. 


 

Paulo Juarez wrote:

I think another (possibly helpful) point to make is that our grasp of causality doesn’t begin with any kind of empirical analysis; rather, it is grasped by the intellect in a universal sense – and hence divorced from sensible being – such that what we have cognition of is of causes *as causes*, or what is composite *as such*, or what is contingent *as contingent*. This, I take it, is the Scholastic view over against that of the empiricist.

This is also true, but just from a phenomenological or even Kuhnian standpoint 1 is also over-determined. One wants to talk of "natural laws" because these are thick entities that already presuppose well-defined domains of operation and one thinks one has thereby demonstrated limits. But of course, the knowledge of natural laws as limits of knowing would itself be a kind of knowing that demonstrates that they aren't the limits of knowledge at all.

Thus, you are either in the position of admitting that you don't in fact know that the laws and their domain is all there is to know, in which case 1 is unfounded (which is, I think, in fact obvious when you attend to scientific knowing, wherein the domain of investigation is in a certain way stipulated not synthetic a priori), or else you make a claim to know the laws and their domain as limit to knowing, in which case you are engaged in a performative contradiction.

Last edited by iwpoe (1/21/2016 6:01 am)

Contra Morriston: could we also not ask, in somewhat retorsive fashion: ‘if the order of nature is exempt from causal inquiry, why should its constituents not be equally exempt?’

Paulo Juarez wrote:

"One wants to talk of "natural laws" because these are thick entities that already presuppose well-defined domains of operation"

This means that natural laws are defined very strictly in terms of where they apply. At bare minimum physical laws will define their application in terms of a physical domain: it would be insane to apply them to number theory or ethics or aesthetics without some form of reductionism/eliminativism.

They are attractive to talk about as limits of knowledge because the space of knowledge is strictly defined. If you say natural laws are the limits of knowledge what you are saying is that all we know is the domain of those laws: all we know is nature as defined in the articulation of natural laws. This precludes both other existing conceptions of nature as well as any possible future conceptions of nature. Why is that attractive? Well, it permits you to say "God (immaterial minds, the good, etc.)? That's not covered by natural laws, so we can't in principle know about it."

Paulo Juarez wrote:

"and one thinks one has thereby demonstrated limits. But of course, the knowledge of natural laws as limits of knowing would itself be a kind of knowing that demonstrates that they aren't the limits of knowledge at all."

The glaring problem, and this is Kant's problem too, but there are at least better defenses for his version (see Allison's interpretation), is that you need to know that all you can know is the natural domain. How would you know this? Either you know it because you've somehow taken an exhaustive inventory of everything to know and found nothing but nature as defined by natural laws, but this is both impossible and manifestly not so (plus it would render arguments for eliminativism/reductionism superfluous), or you know it by way of reasons outside nature (as one knows what's inside a circle because you can see the boundary and exterior of the circle), but if you claim to know that natural laws and their domain are all you can know because you know things outside natural laws and their domain that justify your knowledge, then you are manifestly contradicting yourself.

Last edited by iwpoe (1/21/2016 8:00 pm)