Imagine inviting some neighbors over to play Monopoly. Three players are white, one is black. This is the 1960’s, so the white players create unfair rules: the black player can only buy property on the first row, gets randomly thrown into jail and collects 1/2 when passing go. We don’t know who would win the game, but we know who would lose: the black player. As far as analogies goes, this is fairly generous towards U.S. history as it ignores slavery altogether, but I think just considering Monopoly with Jim Crow-like laws is sufficient to make my point. Now, imagine the next morning the kids of those same players show up and decide to play Monopoly as well. The white kids know that racism is wrong and say “we aren’t going to do that anymore, from now on the rules are completely equal.” The black kid then reaches to the bank to start the game over but the others exclaim, “wait, no, we start where our parents left off.” This is American capitalism. It is relatively uncontested that parental

education influences future child Quality of Life. We also know that wealth in general influences scores on cognitive skill tests in early childhood, behavioral problems in schools, high school completion, teen pregnancy, and most importantly, future wealth.  I am 38 years old. My parents went to segregated schools in the south. That means that many if not most of my Black peers were born into a system rigged against them, just like the Black Monopoly player described in my analogy. This is because the largest, unequal value transfer in capitalist economies is the transfer of wealth and knowledge from parents to their children. Capitalism claims that it is a moral distribution of wealth insofar as people succeed based on how much value they add to the economy. However, we know this is false. Money and knowledge are transferred both annually in the form of expenditures on children (~$12,800 per US family) and then…

At the heart of the Kalam Cosmological argument is the question of a past infinite universe is coherent or actual. Over the last 20-30 years, most of the development of the argument has centered on the growing body of evidence that our universe had a beginning approximately 13.7 billion years ago. While the research is promising and fruitful, it faces a notoriously petty objection of "we just don't know". Science primarily practices inductive reason, making certain knowledge, especially about the distant past, difficult to erect a case on. To be fair, this objection has been used on both sides - atheists writing IOUs for some future model that will extend the Universe into the past eternally and Young Earth Creationists writing IOUs that further examination will yield a young Earth. Thus, while this may be fertile grounds for exploration, it will never provide the certainty that math and logic can provide. Causal Finitism Causal Finitism is the principle that causal chains

cannot be past infinite. It has always had a certain intuitive appeal, but it has been difficult to draw out the exact logical incoherence. Drs. Pruss and Koons may have effectively exposed this incoherence once and for all.  Some Historical Objections First, let's talk about the objections to causal finitism through the years. The original formulations against causal finitism have aimed at the idiosyncrasies of the thought experiments that accompanied the argument. Perhaps the most famous of these arguments is the grim reaper experiment.  A grim reaper is assigned to kill Jack at 12:30 AM. However, another is assigned to kill Jack at 12:15. Yet another at 12:07:50 and so on and so forth, each time halving the time between Midnight and the last reaper. The paradox is this: there is no way for Jack to live past midnight, but there is also no grim reaper who can kill Jack, as there are always an infinite number of reapers between any…