Greetings, Craig --
Ham,
The ball's in your court. Can you find any logic book that uses
the phrase "fallacious premise"? Any good logic book will talk
about ARGUMENTS as "fallacious"/not "fallacious", depending
on the connection between the premises & the conclusion.
PREMISES are evaluated as true/false, supported/unsupported,
etc. But I don't think you'll find a logic book which evaluates
"something comes from nothing". Or if you do, it will evaluate it
the same as "something doesn't come from nothing".
My search for the 'ex nihilo' principle in logic books has so far proved
disappointing, so you are technically correct when you say that "fallacious"
applies to the "argument" rather than the premise itself. My own college
text, "Logic and Scientific Methods" (Searles), uses "nothing" in a humorous
syllogism to illustrate the fallacy of double meanings:
"Nothing is better than a good lesson
A poor lesson is better than nothing.
Hence, a poor lesson is better than a good lesson."
In the same vein, there is the old quip about the man who, believing he had
placed a dollar in his pocket in the morning, checks his pocket later in the
day and finds that it contains nothing. Of course "nothing" used
ambiguously or fallaciously in this way does not prove my point. I think
the problem is that logicians use 'P' as a symbol for a given proposition,
and nothingness is never a given.
Mathematicians tend to classify "nothingness" as an "empty set", and their
'P' is that the empty set exists, not the nothingness it contains. In plain
fact, "nothing" does not exist, but existence is the perception of reality
reduced or delimited by nothing. There are several mini-lectures on YouTube
dealing with this topic, one of them by John Clayton, which may amuse you.
But I defer to the astro-physicists on this matter, since they explore the
limits of reality. For example, here's what David Darling says about the
universe starting from nothing:
"Don't let the cosmologists try to kid you on this one. They have not got a
clue either--despite the fact that they are doing a pretty good job of
convincing themselves and others that this is really not a problem. 'In the
beginning,' they will say, 'there was nothing--no time, space, matter or
energy. Then there was a quantum fluctuation from which .' Whoa! Stop right
there. You see what I mean? First there is nothing, then there is
something. And the cosmologists try to bridge the two with a quantum
flutter, a tremor of uncertainty that sparks it all off. Then they are away
and before you know it, they have pulled a hundred billion galaxies out of
their quantum hats." -- David Darling, Astronomer
Nothing is what does not exist. I maintain that there is not now, nor has
there ever been, pure Nothing. The Big Bang did not erupt from nothing.
Beingness did not come from nothing. But, like the guy who found nothing in
his pocket, "relative nothingness" is a contingency of being-aware, and it
is what accounts for our experience of reality as a relational system.
Another astrophysicist, John Archibald Wheeler, in a radio interview on "The
anthropic universe" voiced his support of this concept:
"We are participators in bringing into being not only the near and here but
the far away and long ago. We are in this sense, participators in bringing
about something of the universe in the distant past and if we have one
explanation for what's happening in the distant past why should we need
more?"
So, while I may not have the support of the logic textbooks, my ontogeny is
at least consistent with the views of modern cosmologists.
Thanks for a provocative challenge, Craig.
Best regards,
Ham
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