W.L. Craig Argues for the Existence
of God.
Why his approach
doesn't help.
Existence of God debate.
W.L. Craig, Christian apologist, tells
atheists who they are. He says--
@05:00 “Typically atheists say the
universe is eternal and uncaused.”
He doesn't ask them, he tells them. How
wonderful.
The deal is, the secular view teaches
a caused universe, not an uncaused one; part of the Big Bang model says the
known cosmos had a beginning and wasn't eternal.
W.L. Craig says, “But there are good
reasons scientifically to think that the universe began to exist.”
Did he figure that out all by
himself?
About infinite causes, he says @5:35
“Mathematicians recognized that the existence of an actual infinite number of
things leads to self-contradiction.”
But he can't say what exactly an
infinite number of things is.
Besides, infinity is a notation in
math, not a number.
He says “For example what is
infinity minus infinity? Well, mathematically you get self-contradictory
answers.”
He doesn't know what he's taking
about. Infinity isn't a number to begin with. Mathematicians use the notation
of infinity to denote an indeterminate numerical value.
Even W.L. Craig says, “This shows
that infinity is just an idea in your mind but not something that exists in
reality.”
Okay. But God is supposed to be infinite. So, by the same token, an infinite God doesn't exist in
reality; it's just an idea in your mind.
Pursuing this business of infinity a
little further, Craig says, @6:00 “David Hilbert ... wrote, ‘The infinity is
nowhere to be found in reality. It neither exists in nature nor provides a
legitimate basis for rational thought. The role that remains for the infinity
to play is solely that of an idea.’
"But that entails that since
past events aren’t just ideas but are real, the number of past events must be
finite.”
Well, the Big Bang theory already
says that the observable universe had a beginning. But what was responsible to
make it come, we don't know.
Empirical events are observed in terms
of General Relativity theory, which has a speculative limit (it's what's called
the Planck unit, a really tiny measurement.) General Relativity can't account for
empirical events beyond the Planck unit.
W.L. Craig intimates that a reality
can't exist prior to the Big Bang as it would be unknown to science.
He doesn't make sense there.
Craig says, @7:00 “What makes the Big
Bang so startling is that it represents the origin of the universe from
literally nothing.”
No it doesn't.
Science says that its origin is from
nothing we know about; physical laws, as we know them, break down before the advent
of the Big Bang. Scientists are trying to come up with new physics for it; quantum
physics, for example, postulates the existence of a force field prior the Big
Bang.
The Big Bang model doesn't say that there
was nothing.
He says, @7:00 that the late British
physicist Paul Davies stated that the Big Bang had no cause.
Well, in an interview, Paul Davies said
the cosmos came from literally nothing, sounding as if he meant nothing at all.
But Davies also said: "You push it further and further back until you
reach the point we call the Big Bang, and naturally enough you want to ask, ‘Well,
what made the big bang go bang? What caused it? What was there before it?’ And
the scientific answer is – nothing! And by ‘nothing’ I don’t mean empty space.
I mean, no matter, no energy, no space and no time. In other words ‘no thing’ in the
normal sense of the word ‘thing’. In
particular, there simply was no before for anything to happen in, because time
itself began with the big bang.
(source)
There was "no thing" in
the normal sense of the word thing. It's
what physicists have been saying all along.
But, W.L. Craig, out of ignorance,
or disingenuousness, misspeaks himself.
W.L. Craig quotes astrophysicists
John Barrow and Frank Tipler, both Christians. They say that the cosmos came
from nothing whatsoever.
Hitchens
vs Craig: The existence of God part 3
@00:00
Craig: "At this singularity, space and time came into existence; literally
nothing existed before the singularity, so, if the Universe originated at such
a singularity, we would truly have a creation ex nihilo. (John Barrow & Frank Tipler, The Anthropic Cosmological Principle, 1986,
page 442)."
Ex
nihilo translates to “out of nothing.” W.L. Craig claims this quote
represents “contemporary cosmology” while he quotes from a book that's about twenty-five
years old.
(Besides,
the authors speculate on "if the
universe orginated at such a singularity.")
Craig writes, “[T]he scientific
evidence supports the conclusion that the origin of the universe was absolute
in the sense that all matter and energy, even physical space and time
themselves, came into being a finite time ago. So we have really good grounds
for affirming the immateriality of the First Cause.”
Something immaterial (transcendent) causes
something material.
Um ...
I get this feeling that he simply makes
things up.
