Elliot Lesson 4 - The J-Bone Argument

The formal argument:

P1: Something cannot come from PURE Nothingness

P2: Space and time cannot be eternal in the past

P3: Material things require space and time to exist.

T: The universe was created by a spaceless, timeless, immaterial creator.

Elliott; this one is just nonsense – it’s not even a proper argument, just a series of disconnected statements. Essentially, what you here is of the form:

A, B, C, therefore D.

None of the premises are connected to each other and they in no way support the conclusion. There’s no logical structure or progression here; it’s a definite fail as an argument form.

What you need to do here is set up a series of sub-arguments that support the premises you have and thus lead to the conclusion; you will need to create at least one sub-argument for each premise in this case, possibly more than one. A bald statement like “something cannot come from pure nothingness” is not a premise in the context above unless you can create a scaffold that supports it, or make it part of a sub-argument that leads to the ultimate conclusion. You should also reconsider the use of words like “something” and “pure nothingness”; “something” is far too woolly and “pure nothingness” can easily be challenged in terms of the definition of “pure” just for starters. For example (this is just off the top of my head here) P1 could read “X (defined here as the condition of being) cannot arise from ~X (a state of non-being)” or more formally ~X ⊅ X. You would then need to establish the Universe as having the condition of “being”; U (the Universe) has the condition X or more formally, U ⊆ X. You would then have to establish that the state of “being” is a necessary condition for the Universe’s existence, or U ≡ X. You could then conclude that U ⊅ ~X. This would then read: -

P1. ~X ⊅X

P2. U ⊆ X

P3. U≡ X

∴ ~X ⊅ U

This conclusion would become P1 in your argument above; in regular speech it would read as “the Universe cannot arise from a state of non-being”.

This site is pretty good (http://philosophy.lander.edu/logic/index.html); it starts with the basics, so you might want to skip ahead at some point. With relation to the “argument” above I suggest you look at this page: http://philosophy.lander.edu/logic/diagram.html. It deals with diagramming arguments; I found this technique useful in my undergraduate years when I knew very little about logical argument.

You should also familiarise yourself with formal logical symbolism as used in my example above; the Lander site is good for this as well, and Wikipedia has a brief list of the most commonly used symbols.