Person

Adolf Grunbaum

German-born American philosopher of science (1923-2018), Andrew Mellon Professor of Philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh, and one of the twentieth century's most rigorous philosophical atheists. He fled Nazi Germany with his family in 1938 and built a career spanning three fields in which he remains cited: the philosophy of space and time, the epistemology of psychoanalysis, and the philosophy of cosmology.

He appears in this codex from two directions, and they pull in opposite directions apologetically, which is part of what makes him worth a page.

Against the cosmological argument

Grunbaum was the most technically serious critic of the inference from Big Bang cosmology to a creator, principally in "The Pseudo-Problem of Creation in Physical Cosmology" (1989) and a series of subsequent papers.

His central objection is a point about temporal structure. If time itself begins at the initial singularity, then there is no moment at which the universe did not exist, and therefore no state of affairs of non-existence for a cause to remedy and no time at which a cause could have operated. Causation, he argued, requires the cause to be temporally prior to the effect, and at the first moment there is no prior. On his view the demand for a cause of the beginning is not answered incorrectly by theism; it is a pseudo-problem generated by importing an everyday causal picture into a situation where it has no application.

He also pressed that the question "why is there something rather than nothing" presupposes that nothingness is the natural or expected state requiring no explanation, a presupposition he argued has no warrant, calling it a legacy of theological habit rather than a neutral starting point.

The standard replies are that simultaneous and non-temporal causation are coherent, with the classical tradition already committed to a cause that is not temporally prior but ontologically prior, and that the argument concerns dependence rather than temporal antecedence. That reply is developed at Causal Principle, and the temporal-priority issue is treated at Kalam Cosmological Argument. His objection is one of the strongest in the literature and should not be dismissed as a wordplay.

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Against psychoanalysis

Grunbaum's The Foundations of Psychoanalysis: A Philosophical Critique (1984) is the most rigorous critique of Freud's theoretical apparatus ever produced, and it cuts in the opposite direction.

He argued against Karl Popper that psychoanalysis is not unfalsifiable but rather falsifiable and poorly supported, which is a considerably more damaging verdict. His central charge is that Freud's clinical method cannot establish the causal claims it makes, because the analytic setting contaminates the evidence through suggestion, so the data cannot bear the weight placed on them.

This matters here because Freud's projection thesis about religion is an extension of exactly the apparatus Grunbaum dismantled. An atheist philosopher of science demolishing the evidential basis of psychoanalysis is a useful citation against the wish-fulfilment objection, and one the objector cannot dismiss as motivated. See Religion Is a Crutch Objection Defeater and Sigmund Freud.

How to use him

• Cite him honestly on Freud and note his atheism when doing so. The citation's value comes entirely from its source being hostile.
• Do not treat his cosmological objection as trivially answered. The temporal-priority problem is real, and the reply requires committing to a non-temporal notion of causal dependence rather than waving at it.
• His work illustrates a useful general point, that a serious philosophical atheist can be a better ally on one question than a careless apologist, and that the codex's positions should be able to survive his level of scrutiny.

See also

• Kalam Cosmological Argument, the argument he principally criticised
• Causal Principle, where the temporal-priority objection is engaged
• Cosmological Arguments, the family hub
• Sigmund Freud, whose framework he dismantled
• Religion Is a Crutch Objection Defeater, where that critique is deployed
• Sean Carroll, the contemporary successor in cosmological criticism
• Philosophy, the discipline hub