God's Omniscience and the Kalam Argument

Transcript God's Omniscience and the Kalam Argument

KEVIN HARRIS: Questions that people ask – and they ask them at ReasonableFaith.org. Dr. Craig, we want to address these questions. These are representative of many questions that we get that we are compiling here. We have a lot of material on these questions. So it is our pleasure to reiterate and expound on what we have as far as resources at ReasonableFaith.org – through your work, through your books and writings, and your lectures. On the kalam cosmological argument, this gets asked a lot and it is how you reconcile God’s omniscience (that he knows all truths, he knows all true propositions, that he knows all) and infinity. “The kalam cosmological argument,” he says, Dr. Craig, “says you cannot actually traverse an actually infinite number of moments or things or marbles or coins. Yet, if God knows all and if there are an infinite amount of moments from here on out then how can God know all that infinity of moments?” Do you see where he is going here?

DR. CRAIG: Yes. And the question then is: in virtue of God’s omniscience, does an infinite number of things exist? Now I don’t think that divine omniscience and God’s foreknowledge of an endless future implies that an actually infinite number of things exist. First, the events themselves don’t actually exist. On a tensed theory of time, or a dynamic theory of time, according to which temporal becoming is real, future events in no sense exist. The future is a realm of pure potentiality and these events will exist but they do not exist. The future is potentially infinite in the sense that infinity is a limit which the series of events endlessly approaches but never reaches. The number of events from any point in time forward, that is to say later than that moment, will always be finite but growing with each successive moment. So the future is potentially infinite; there is never an actually infinite number of events in an endless future.

What about God’s knowledge of what will happen however? Are there an infinite number of items of God’s knowledge? Well, again, that is not obvious to me. This seems to assume that God’s knowledge is propositional in nature. That is to say, that what God knows is an actually infinite number of future tenses propositions. But the difficulty there is that it assumes that God’s knowledge is propositional in nature. I don’t think that is incumbent upon the theist. In fact the classical theist has typically denied that God’s knowledge is fragmented into propositions, into individual bits of information. Rather, God’s knowledge is a seamless whole, an intuition of all reality and all truth and is therefore not propositional in nature. We finite knowers fragment God’s infinite propositional knowledge into an infinite number, or a potentially infinite number, of finite bits or propositions. But that represents simply our finite expression of what God knows, not the medium by which God himself knows them. Therefore, the number of propositions that exist – if propositions exist at all – would simply be potentially infinite as human cognizers come to formulate and know more and more propositions. But there is no reason to think that God’s knowledge has to be propositional in its structure. If it is not, then I don’t see that there is any collection of things that is infinite in number – neither the events themselves are actually infinite in number nor are the items of God’s knowledge actually infinite in number. So there just isn’t any case here of an actually infinite number of things and therefore it is not a counter example to the argument.

KEVIN HARRIS: This seems to answer objections to God based on his future knowledge throughout future events, and also prior to creation, prior to the Big Bang, causally prior to the Big Bang. What God was doing throughout all eternity. If you can’t traverse an actually infinite number of things then God was thinking thoughts all this time prior to creation and he was thinking an infinite number. But are you saying that God doesn’t think thoughts successively one after another like we do?

DR. CRAIG: That would be entailed in what I am saying. [1] The series of past events which could include mental events in God’s mind must be finite and have a beginning. It will get you back to an absolutely changeless state in which there is no succession of before and after. That would include in the mental life of God himself. God would exist changelessly sans the universe – without the universe.

KEVIN HARRIS: This also brings up a good definition of what we mean by omniscience and omnipotence. It doesn’t entail the impossible. We always say square circles. God cannot make square circles because it is nonsense. It is an impossibility and God doesn’t do what is logically impossible. So a lot of people have the idea that omnipotence or omniscience means that God’s knowledge and power even extends to the logically impossible. That is not necessarily true.

DR. CRAIG: No, of course not. What I would say with respect to omniscience is that when we define omniscience in terms of God’s believing only and all true propositions, what we are expressing there is not the medium or the mode of God’s knowledge but simply the extent or the breadth of God’s knowledge. There is no proposition that we could enunciate that would be true that would be outside of the purview of God’s knowledge. He would know it. But that doesn’t mean that this is the mode of his knowledge. The mode of his knowledge, I think, is non-propositional even though we express it in terms of its extent by saying he knows all and only true propositions.

KEVIN HARRIS: Here is another question:

What is all this about a block universe?

DR. CRAIG: That is basically the tenseless theory of time, Kevin, or the B-Theory of time. You can think of B and Block as related. It means that all events in time are equally real, that the universe is a four-dimensional space-time block. The difference between past present and future is just an illusion of human consciousness. So when this professor said that the past and the future are illusions, he didn’t mean that they are unreal. Quite the contrary, on his view what we count as past, present, and future are all equally real. There is a block – a four-dimensional block – that is the space-time reality. It is the perception of some event’s past and others as present and others as future that is merely an illusion of human consciousness.

KEVIN HARRIS: As we move along the time line?

DR. CRAIG: That movement is itself an illusion. You see we don’t really move. It is just that there are different stages of yourself at different coordinates or locations in this space-time block. And so there is the illusion of movement.

KEVIN HARRIS: Again, this is on the B-Theory?

DR. CRAIG: This is the B-Theory or block theory of time and the universe. That’s right.

KEVIN HARRIS: And the B-Theory is not right? [laughter]

DR. CRAIG: Let’s put it this way. For the purposes of this question, it is certainly not implied by relativity theory as this professor would have this student believe. That is simply naïve and mistaken. The relativity of simultaneity that the professor talks about is a feature of the Special Theory of Relativity only. Einstein's theory that he developed in 1905. But that theory is superseded by the General Theory of Relativity – Einstein’s gravitational theory. In the General Theory of Relativity, there is a time parameter which is not simply one of the dimensions of this four-dimensional block but is independent of the spatial coordinates and which measures the duration of the universe as a whole back to the Big Bang. So when we say that it has been 13.7 billion years since the beginning of the universe, we are not expressing a merely relative time from our frame of reference. This is expressing the absolute duration of the universe in what is called Cosmic Time. [2] So the professor has simply ignored the General Theory of Relativity and focused only on the Special Theory.

Worse, even in the Special Theory, it is not true that the Special Theory entails a block universe. In my work Time and Eternity, the book published by Crossway Press, I go into this in some detail and show that on a non-Einsteinian, or Lorentzian, interpretation, you can say that there is a preferred frame of reference which measures absolute time. That is to say time that is not relative to the reference frames of different hypothetical observers in relative motion to one another. In this preferred reference frame, you can have absolute becoming, you can have real present with genuine pastness, genuine futurity, and genuine temporal becoming. There is no problem whatsoever. What is admitted on all sides is that a Lorentzian interpretation of relativity theory is empirically equivalent to an Einsteinian interpretation. That is to say, they make all the same empirical predictions, they are indistinguishable even though they have vastly different ontologies, that is to say, structures of the nature of space and time. In fact, if anything, the most recent experimental evidence tends to favor a Lorentzian interpretation of relativity because we do seem to have some good evidence for an absolute frame of reference.

KEVIN HARRIS: His final question seems to follow from everything that you said up to this point. We have other resources on the A-Theory and B-Theory of time. Once you start getting this down, it is not difficult. My 14-year old son, who is a genius by the way [laughter], is so fascinated with time and is getting a lot out of your work on time. I got him Time and Eternity. So he is just eating it up. But the writer here asks a final question: “Can free will be consistent with a block universe?” I’d like to know that, too. If the B-Theory of time were somehow true, would free will exist?

DR. CRAIG: I think it definitely could exist. Here, again, I think this professor is simply mistaken in thinking that a block theory of the universe implies fatalism. Freedom of the will, or libertarian freedom, means freedom from causal constraints. The events that exist in a B-Theory could be completely causally indeterminate. They could be quantum events that are completely undetermined by antecedent states of affairs. The fact that they exist in the future doesn’t mean that if we were to take different decisions now that those events would not exist. So it is this same fatalistic fallacy that is committed by people who think that divine foreknowledge implies that there is no freedom of the will. They think that because God foreknows something, and that it will exist, that therefore it necessarily will exist – that it is unpreventable and unavoidable. That simply doesn’t follow. What is true is that if we were to do differently, then God would have foreknown differently and the future would be different. Similarly in this case, from the fact that the event will exist in the future doesn’t imply that it will exist necessarily or that it is unpreventable or unavoidable. Were we to choose differently, then that event would not be future and so it would not be out there in the B-Theory, in the block. So once you understand these counterfactuals, I think you can see that the B-Theory no more than divine foreknowledge implies some sort of fatalistic denial of free will. We have the freedom to determine the future, whether that future really exists as on the B-Theory or whether it is pure potentiality as on the A-Theory.

KEVIN HARRIS: Final question on this topic, Dr. Craig, is about quantum tunneling, which I think is something akin to tennis elbow, I’m not really sure. [laughter] He says,

DR. CRAIG: I think he has reference here to Alex Vilenkin’s model of the origin of the universe through quantum tunneling into being. If you look at Vilenkin’s book Many Worlds in One, he has a nice diagram where he describes how the universe could tunnel from a point of zero volume into a universe having some positive volume. [3] The mistake here, I think, that is made by Vilenkin is that he equates this point of zero volume with nothingness. That is incorrect. A state of affairs in which the universe has a radius, even if that radius is zero, is not the same as nothingness. With this quantum tunneling, the function is a two-valued function. That is, it is always from something to something. So it is not from nothing. There is always a prior state to a later state. So these quantum tunneling models do not provide in fact a model of the universe coming into being from nothing properly construed. It is always from something.

KEVIN HARRIS: You hear this a lot: quantum mechanics shows that something can come from nothing uncaused. Because what? Particles pop into existence and then go out of existence spontaneously? We’ve addressed that a lot but that is the most popular objection.

DR. CRAIG: Yes, it is a surprising objection because I think it is really quite a misuse of science, frankly. The theory here is that because of Heisenberg’s indeterminacy principle, because of the uncertainty, a brief period of time is available for material particles to materialize out of the vacuum energy and then to go back into the vacuum and disappear again during that brief interval of time. It is permitted by this indeterminacy. But this is not an example of something coming from nothing. The quantum vacuum is a sea of fluctuating energy – a roiling sea of violent activity having a rich physical structure and governed by physical laws. It is not what the layman understands by a vacuum, namely, nothingness. It is definitely a physical reality and is a precondition for these virtual particles materializing and then de-materializing again. So even if these virtual particle-pair production is a matter of spontaneous coming into being, it is spontaneous but it is not uncaused in the sense that it comes into being out of nothing. There are definitely causal conditions – preconditions, antecedent conditions – that must be there in order for this to occur.

KEVIN HARRIS: Can you expound just briefly as we conclude today, Dr. Craig, on Heisenberg’s principle? We hear that a lot. Often it is a conversation stopper. You say a universe couldn’t have come from nothing uncaused and out of nothing uncaused, and they go, “Oh, Heisenberg’s principle! They don’t know what they are talking about! It's a bunch of layman talking about stuff they don't know what they are talking about.”

DR. CRAIG: The principle of indeterminacy simply means that for certain correlated states of these quantum realities we cannot determine both of them with specificity simultaneously. So if you know, for example, the position of a particle, you cannot determine with accuracy its momentum. If you determine its momentum with specificity, then its position becomes uncertain. So there is a sort of trade off between these quantum properties and people have argued about whether this is merely a result of our epistemic limitations or is this ontic? Does this reflect the indeterminate nature of reality itself? But with respect to this question of things coming into being uncaused out of nothing, as I say, the indeterminacy that the principle allows permits – so long as its in this tiny window of time – that the energy in the vacuum can fluctuate in such a way as to produce material particles, and then those particles have to vanish back into the vacuum again within this time interval that is permitted by indeterminacy. Otherwise you would have a violation of the laws of quantum mechanics. But, again, in this case it is not a matter of events occurring without causes because the quantum vacuum is itself the physical cause of particle-pair production as a result of fluctuations of the energy in the vacuum.

KEVIN HARRIS: I want to encourage people to get your booklet God, Are you There? for a good perspective on these very difficult concepts that you’ve been discussing. That is available at ReasonableFaith.org. [4]