Questions on Nothingness, Abstract Objects, and Doubts About Salvation

KEVIN HARRIS: We have some questions from all over the globe. They come to the website and also from Facebook. This one says,

Dear Dr. Craig, I've read you talk about the mistake of treating “nothing” as a thing instead of “not anything.” I've also read how you talk about Leibnez and how there's something rather than nothing. I looked up where Leibnez said this. He says what you say, but then right after he says “nothing is simpler and easier than something.” Is Leibniz making the same mistake of treating “nothing” as “something” rather than “not anything” which you say is a problem? If he does, does this count against his point? Thank you for your time. Toren

DR. CRAIG: I've puzzled myself about Leibniz’s statement, Toren. It does sound like the mistake of treating nothing as a thing and saying that it's simpler than something, and yet it's hard to believe that someone who is the logical genius that Leibniz is could be making such a fundamental mistake. So I wonder if we might interpret him in the following way. Perhaps he's saying the hypothesis that “nothing exists” is a simpler hypothesis than the hypothesis that “something exists.” And the reason for that is that the hypothesis that “something exists” comprises an infinity of other hypotheses – rabbits exist, mountains exist, planets exist, hay exists, and so on and so forth, whereas “nothing exists” is a simple hypothesis that has nothing to it. So perhaps in that sense Leibniz is saying that the hypothesis that “nothing exists” is simpler than the hypothesis that “something exists” because the latter is infinitely complex. That's a possibility.

KEVIN HARRIS: This next question is from Sweden:

Greetings, Dr. Craig. I have a really difficult time understanding the neutralist position on abstract objects. Could you perhaps help me with the confusion? When we say that properties and propositions do not exist, how can we say that God is just or God is all-powerful when those statements do not really refer to any abstract object or attribute? Would you say that the thing that makes God just is that God is the paradigm of justice and goodness? Or is it sufficient to say that God is good himself. So the thing that makes predications true regarding God is that there exists a concrete object, namely God himself, that makes the statements “God is all-powerful” and “God is all-knowing” true? Am I far off in my understanding? Thank you. Advan, Sweden

DR. CRAIG: The essence of the neutralist position, Advan, is that true sentences do not have to have singular terms that refer to actually existing objects in the world. The fact that a sentence is true does not mean that every referring term in the sentence corresponds to some actually existing entity in the world. To give an example, when I say that “Wednesday is between Tuesday and Thursday” that statement is true, but does that commit us to the existence of an object called Wednesday? Surely not. Wednesdays are just socially constructed entities, not mind-independent realities that actually exist. So the neutralist point is that true sentences may involve referring terms to which no object in the mind-independent world is correlated. So think about when you say that the dog is brown. Does that require that there be a thing – an abstract object – called “brownness” to which the dog is related? I don't think so. It seems to me if you ask, “Why is the dog brown?” it would be because he reflects certain parts of the spectrum of sunlight so that he takes on the color brown to us. But it does nothing to explain why the dog is brown. To say, “It's because he has the property of being brown”, how does being related to an abstract object like brownness beyond space and time do anything to make an otherwise-colorless object brown? I think this is a pseudo-explanation masquerading as a genuine explanation. To explain why the dog is brown, it does absolutely nothing to say it's because he has the property of being brown. Similarly, with regard to God. “God is just.” “God is all-powerful.” Those are true statements, but that doesn't require that there be objects – things – called “justice” or “all-powerfulness” that actually exist independently of God. And I would not even go so far as to say that it is God himself who makes those predications true. Here you are assuming a theory of truth that is called truth-maker theory – that in order to be true there must be things that make the sentence true. And, again, I see no reason to think that that is correct. For example, take the statement “Baal does not exist.” There's nothing that makes that statement true. Certainly not Baal. So negative existential statements like that don't have truth-makers, I think. And I would say this can be extended to a vast range of statements. So I think this whole approach of thinking there need to be truth-makers and that there need to be abstract objects like properties in order for sentences to be true is just misconceived. That's part of the neutralist perspective on these sorts of statements.

KEVIN HARRIS: Next question.

Dr. Craig, How could an eternal, unchanging God who exists outside of time (our time dimension) and who exists as spirit enter into our time dimension and into a physical state of being? If time is a function of change and God is unchanging, then by what process can God enter into our time? There's also the question of how can the unchanging God be subject to change, whether adding or deleting or emptying himself? Daryl, Canada

DR. CRAIG: Good question, Daryl! I think that something can be in time not by changing itself but by being related to other things that change. For example, imagine an asteroid in outer space frozen at absolute zero so that there is no internal change whatsoever in the asteroid. Would the asteroid therefore be timeless? Clearly, not. Because at one moment a meteor might whiz by and then later another meteor might whiz by and then a little later yet another meteor whiz by. Clearly there would be a temporal sequence of events going on. So the object itself doesn't need to be changing in order to be temporal. It just needs to be related to changing things. I would say that God, in creating the universe, comes into a causal relation with changing things and therefore is himself temporal in virtue of his real relation to the world. Now, much, much more could be said about this, and if you're interested in exploring it further take a look at my book, Time and Eternity, where I examine God's relationship to time.

KEVIN HARRIS: Next question,

Dr. Craig, I accepted Christ as Savior at a young age. I grew up under the preaching of J. Vernon McGee, went to Biola College, and completed two years of a Masters at Dallas Theological Seminary, a masters of theology. I also served in church teaching, directing programs, and missionary work. While at Dallas Theological Seminary, in my second year I was working on an exegetical study in Ephesians and presented it to my second-year Greek class. Another student had the same passage in Ephesians, but came up with a different premise. As I thought afterwards, how could this happen? And this started a downward cycle of rejecting the Bible. The next 20 years I denied all I had learned in my first 30 years and lived in apostasy. But in 2003, the Lord brought me back. With tears in my eyes, I cried out to Jesus Christ. I repented and, though I still sin (I know Romans 7), I continue to trust him knowing without faith it is impossible to please him. Question: I question at times whether my life now is true, or am I not able to repent because of my apostasy, and am I destined for hell?

That's James in the United States.

DR. CRAIG: Well, now, before I address James’ question, I want to comment on this extraordinary experience. It's hard for me to understand a faith so fragile that because somebody else has a different interpretation of a Bible verse that that somehow undermines your confidence in the truth of the Bible. Why not just say, “The other fellow's interpretation is wrong; I have exegeted the Greek better than he has?” Or, alternatively, why not say, ”Oh my goodness! He did a better job in his exegesis than I did. He'll probably get a better grade than me.” I don't see how this leads to any sort of relativism about truth. It just means that sometimes it can be difficult to find the truth and to interpret literature. This is true of all literature, not just the Bible. So James’ apostasy was so unfortunate, so unnecessary, that something so trivial as this would cause him to lose confidence in the truth of Scripture. Now, James, I want to say to you directly – you do not need to worry that you have lost your salvation and are destined to hell. The very fact that you are worried about it is indicative of the presence of the Spirit of God in your life because a genuine apostate would not care and would not be bothered by this question. So the very fact that you're troubled by it shows the tenderness of your conscience toward God and the presence of the Holy Spirit in your life. So I would encourage you to just shed these unnecessary doubts, put them behind you, rejoice in your acceptance by the Lord, and go forward in living for him.

KEVIN HARRIS: I'm a little concerned also that he said in 2003 the Lord brought him back, but yet he's having trouble with his salvation and knowing if it's secure. Well, if the Lord brought you back, you're good!

DR. CRAIG: You’re absolutely right. That's inconsistent, isn't it? I mean, he could have said, “In 2003, I came back to Christian faith, but now I'm troubled that maybe that wasn't real.” But if he really believes in 2003 the Lord brought him back then these questions are just inappropriate and inconsistent.

KEVIN HARRIS: Next question,

Hello, Dr. Craig. My question is in regards to the teleological argument for God. The point is often made that fine-tuning is either due to chance, necessity, or design. An atheist I saw claimed that the probability it is due to design is actually less than that of chance. This is because there are far more possible options. Why design a life-permitting universe rather than one in which there are just unembodied conscious agents? Why design anything at all? These seemingly infinite possibilities of design they claim make the probability of design far less than that of chance. How would you respond to such an objection? Carter

DR. CRAIG: I think the fine-tuning argument as Carter has formulated it is flawed, and I would highly recommend that he look at Robin Collins’ formulation of the argument in the Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology. What Collins discusses there are two probabilities and the ratio between them. One probability is: What is the probability of the fine-tuning given the existence of God and our background information about the laws of nature? The other probability is the probability of the fine-tuning given atheism and our background information about the laws of nature. And the fine-tuning of the universe is incomparably more probable on the design hypothesis even though if God exists he could have created, say, unembodied conscious agents rather than embodied ones. He didn't have to create a fine-tuned universe, but nevertheless I think you can say that the probability of a fine-tuned universe given theism and the background information of the laws of nature cannot be said to be very low, whereas the probability of fine-tuning on naturalism and the laws of nature is infinitesimally low. There's just no comparison between the two. So I think when you rightly formulate the argument, it's incorrect to say there are infinite possibilities on design. Now, certainly, God could have created an infinite number of different sorts of creatures. That's true. But that's not the formulation of the argument. The argument is: What is the probability of fine-tuning given the existence of God and the laws of nature compared to the probability of the fine-tuning given naturalism and the laws of nature? And there the probability of fine-tuning given an intelligence is obviously much, much higher than on naturalism according to which there is no intelligence.

KEVIN HARRIS: This next question is from the UK:

Dr. Craig, you have said that we can show Christianity is true by appealing to evidence and arguments, but we can know it is true because of the internal witness or assurance of the Holy Spirit. If this is so, can someone who is a genuine Christian who possesses the Holy Spirit ever have doubts and questions? Or, to turn it the other way around, can someone who has doubts and questions be a genuine Christian? David from the UK

DR. CRAIG: I would say to David that quite definitely the person who is indwelt by the Holy Spirit can have certainly doubts and questions. Paul teaches this in his epistles. He writes to his churches, “Do not grieve the Holy Spirit in whom you've been sealed until the day of redemption.” We can grieve the Holy Spirit through sin in our lives, and this might occasion spiritual doubts because we alienate ourselves from God rather than drawing close to him in confession and fellowship. Similarly, Paul says, “Do not quench the Holy Spirit of God,” and I take it there he's talking about refusing to follow the leading of the Holy Spirit in your life; to repress the leading of the Holy Spirit in the same way that you might quench a fire. And that could lead to doubts in your life. So Scripture teaches that we are to be careful about having no unconfessed sin in our lives, about walking daily in the fullness of the Holy Spirit so that we can meet spiritual challenges and obstacles when they arise. Now, certainly, even a Spirit-filled Christian is going to have unanswered questions. Every one of us has what I call a “question bag” in which we have all these unanswered questions. And we put it on the shelf because we don't have time in this earthly life to deal with all of them. But occasionally it is a wonderful experience to take that bag off the shelf, pull out one of those unanswered questions, and pursue it into the ground until you come to intellectual satisfaction on that. And I have found this to be one of the most intellectually gratifying experiences of the Christian life. To take a hard question that you've been unable to solve and to pursue it until you come to intellectual peace with it. That is a wonderful, spiritual experience that I fear too few Christians know.

KEVIN HARRIS: I’ve heard of a bucket list. It sounds like you have a bag list, too!

DR. CRAIG: Yeah, right!^[1]