Questions on Quantum Mechanics, Certainty, and Extreme Resistance

KEVIN HARRIS: Next question:

Hi, Dr. Craig. I wanted to ask a potential objection to the cosmological argument. Is it possible that the uncaused cause is an eternal state of quantum potential that led to the creation of the universe? If this state could exist, would that not solve the problem of creation without God as this state is uncaused and always existed. And this first state doesn’t necessarily have to be quantum potential so long as the state is something that is uncaused. Troy, United States.

DR. CRAIG: I think the problem with appealing to some sort of quantum mechanical state is that such a state is inherently unstable and therefore could not exist for eternity past and then just a finite number of years ago produce the universe. In my article with James Sinclair in The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology, we talk about a number of possible cosmological models that would try to have a quantum state that goes back eternally and all of these models in the end fail to be viable descriptions of the real physical universe.

KEVIN HARRIS:

Dear Dr. Craig, How could the universe be matter 13 billion years old if the edge of the universe from us is 46.5 billion light years away? There isn't enough time for matter which travels slower than light to have expanded that 46.5 billion light years away from our location in 13.8 billion years. Am I missing something? Michael, United States

DR. CRAIG: One of the things Michael is missing is the early inflationary era in the history of the universe. If there was this early brief period of inflationary expansion then the universe went from subatomic proportions to a size greater than the observable universe in less than the blink of an eye. So if you have this inflationary era you cannot simply estimate the size of the universe by the speed at which it is expanding times the number of years that it has existed.

KEVIN HARRIS: Next question,

Hello, Dr. Craig, I've enjoyed your ministry and it has helped strengthen my faith over the years but I have recently been having troubling thoughts in my mind. My trouble is that one of the things about Christianity is that it requires a lot of work to follow. In order to follow Christ you have to orient your entire life around him. Christianity is not just a set of propositions that one holds, but it's a faith-practice, a way of life. With that in mind, wouldn't the smart thing to do is require very high epistemic standards before one decides they will dedicate their life to Christ? If you're going to live for Christ then wouldn't it be smart to actually meet Jesus Christ in person or even talk to his mother Mary or an angel? I know you often mention the witness of the Holy Spirit as a way that one can have direct access to God but I have done meditative prayer and deep meditation for years upon years and nothing has come up in terms of God speaking to me directly where I know it wasn't just my own imagination. Many of my fellow Christians have had similar concerns on this also. This is perhaps my biggest struggle and I cannot seem to get it out of my head as it is causing me to abandon the Christian life because I cannot have high epistemic confidence that Christianity is true. Kyle, United States.

DR. CRAIG: When I first heard the message of the Gospel as a non-Christian high school student, that my sins could be forgiven by God, that God loved me, he loved Bill Craig, and that I could come to know him and experience eternal life with God, I thought to myself (and I'm not kidding) I thought if there is just one chance in a million that this is true it's worth believing. So my attitude toward this is just the opposite of Kyle's. Far from raising the bar or the epistemic standard that Christianity must meet to be believed, I lower it. I think that this is a message which is so wonderful, so fantastic, that if there's any evidence that it's true then it's worth believing in, especially when you compare it to the alternatives like naturalism or atheism or other forms of life. If Kyle really knows what it's like to experience the love of God and to have this hope in eternal life and forgiveness of sins then it seems to me that he will gravitate toward that alternative. It will be so attractive and that it would take really, really decisive disproofs to make him give up his Christian faith and abandon it. Now, when I talk about the witness of the Holy Spirit I don't mean God speaking to me directly in the way Kyle describes. God doesn't speak to me directly either in that sort of way as an inner voice. But I just mean a kind of fundamental assurance that one's faith is true. People often talk about this as the assurance of salvation, and I think that is the privilege of every born-again Christian. I hope that Kyle is more than just a nominal Christian, that he's really come to experience the regenerating power of the Holy Spirit and that he's indwelt and filled with the Holy Spirit because I think then that removes the huge epistemic bar that he thinks you need to get over in order to become a Christian.

KEVIN HARRIS: A question from James in the United States,

Dear Dr. Craig, My dad is an extremely resistant non-believer. Upon hearing the news of my brother becoming a Christian, he was sick to his stomach and couldn't even eat lunch. My brother and I tried to talk to him about how our faith is based on evidence. I talked to him about the kalam cosmological argument that you defend. I even bought him a book called I Don't Have Enough Faith to be an Atheist by Frank Turek and Norm Geisler. That book was thrown in the trash and not read. He told me not to send him any books, articles, videos, or anything on the topic of God's existence. He calls us both brainwashed. He says he's not willing to even look into the evidence. It has been months since this discussion took place and I really don't know what to do. I can talk to my dad about anything else, but I'm scared to even mention the words “church” or “God.” The death of my mom is basically the reason for his resistance. I feel like a lot of people are in this situation. How do I and others reintroduce the topic of God's existence and get to the point where it can simply be a friendly discussion, just like how I see you speak to people? James, U.S.

DR. CRAIG: I want to say to James that I understand his predicament because I, too, was raised in a non-Christian family, and my father also was resistant. He wasn't hostile in the way James’ dad is, but he was indifferent. He thought it was fine for me, but it wasn't anything for him. And I think it was clear to me that it was futile to try to convince him (or my mother for that matter) at that time. So I would say to James don't give your father any books or videos to look at. That's futile. It will only antagonize him. Don't even try to talk to him about God or Jesus Christ. That will only make him defensive. Rather, I would encourage James to simply live naturally his Christian life in front of this man. Let him see the joy that Christ inspires in your life, the purpose that he gives you in your life, the meaning that you have, the hope for beyond the grave. Let him see how you handle difficult situations of suffering and hardship in life. So live out the Christian life naturally in his presence. Now, that means don't be intimidated by him. Don't refuse to say things like “We attended church this morning and I had a wonderful time with our Christian friends.” Don't be unnaturally cowed into silence. But on the other hand don't be overt and aggressive in sharing your faith with this man. Instead pray for him. Pray constantly that God would break down the barriers and open his heart. In my own life, after praying for my parents literally for decades every day, one day we got a phone call out of the blue from my mother and she said, “Bill, your dad and I have been talking, and he's ready to become a Christian. What do we have to do?” You could have knocked me over with a feather. This came out of the blue. There was nothing to foreshadow it. I said, “Well, in my little book The Existence of God and the Beginning of the Universe [which I knew they had] there's a prayer in the back of the book. You can pray and give your lives to Christ. And if you really mean it, he will answer that prayer. So look at it and let us know if you do make that decision.” Sometime later she called back and said, “We did pray that prayer, Bill. In fact, we prayed it twice just to make sure it stuck.” Near the end of their lives both of my parents came to Christ, and it was really a convicting experience for me because I have to confess that during those decades of prayer seeing no movement whatsoever in their lives I think a kind of root of bitterness had sprung up in my own heart as to why God wasn't answering my prayers. Why was he so inactive? Why wasn't he doing anything to draw them to himself? What I didn't realize was that even though there weren't any visible signs, so to speak, the left hand of God's providence was at work secretly in their lives in ways that I couldn't even see. So I want to encourage James to be faithful in prayer and to trust God to be at work in this man's life as James and his brother live out naturally their Christian lives before him.

KEVIN HARRIS: Next question,

Hello Dr. Craig, I'm currently an undergrad student at Biola University. Many have tried to dodge the tough questions facing God's eternality by proposing that God is both in time and outside of time. You have said numerous times that God cannot be both timeless and temporal for this would be absurd. I undoubtedly agree that this is absurd for a single person. Since God is three persons, would this necessarily mean that each person has the same relation to time? Why can't we make a distinction between each person's relation to time? I propose that God the Father could be timeless while God the Son and God the Spirit exist in time. Your view is that God (referring to the Godhead) is timeless without creation and omnitemporal since the beginning of creation. From my understanding, it is almost certain that the Holy Spirit and the Son are in time. I believe they are both omnitemporal since creation for this is the only plausible explanation of the incarnation and the indwelling of the Holy Spirit amongst us. To be clear, the Holy Spirit does not dwell with us physically or spatially, rather we mean that the Spirit is with us presently. Just as the Son put on the veil of human flesh in the incarnation, I believe the Son and the Spirit put on the veil of temporal existence at the moment of creation, the beginning of space-time, while the Father remains timeless. In summary, why can't a trinitarian God have distinction regarding each of the three persons’ relation to time? In Christ’s love, Christian.

DR. CRAIG: I don't think that what Christian imagines is metaphysically possible. To say that one person of the Trinity is timeless and the other two are temporal is going to rip the Trinity in half or into thirds, which is impossible because God is indivisible. So to posit this kind of division between the persons, I think, is just simply untenable. Moreover, if the arguments that I give for thinking that God enters into time at the moment of creation are sound (as Christian seems to think) they would apply to the Father just as much as it would apply to the Son and the Spirit. Just as creation is attributed to the Son, creation is attributed to God the Father – In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. If I'm correct that in virtue of being related to a temporal world God is in time, that applies just as much to the Father as to the Son and Spirit. Moreover, if the arguments I give based on God's omniscience requires God to know tensed facts (like, “It is now three o'clock,” “It is now 3:01”) then God the Father, being omniscient, must be in time. So you cannot try to dissect the Trinity in the way that Christian would want to do. If the arguments are sound, God (all three persons) are in time. If they're not sound then none of them needs to be in time. I don't think you can pick and choose among the persons of the Trinity in the way that Christian proposes.

KEVIN HARRIS: Question from Australia,

Dear Dr. Craig, one of your major critiques of Islam is that it denies the crucifixion of Jesus which goes against the vast majority of historians’ opinions and is an extremely fringe position. But wouldn't that be what we would expect if Allah made it so it merely appeared that Jesus was crucified? Though this does make Allah responsible for indirectly creating the world's biggest religion, would this necessarily disprove Allah? What if Allah just doesn't care? Joshua in Australia.

DR. CRAIG: Yes. If Allah wanted to make it merely appear that Jesus was crucified then he could do so. But that doesn't mean that that hypothesis is therefore plausible. What it requires us to say is that all of the historical evidence for the crucifixion of Jesus is mere appearances – is illusion. And that is, I think, an ad hoc and very implausible hypothesis. You don't get around the implausibility of the hypothesis by saying that if it's true then that's what you would expect to see. It is ad hoc and implausible. Moreover, I think Joshua was right that this would make Allah responsible for creating Christianity by deceiving everyone into thinking that Jesus was who he claimed to be, making them believe he rose from the dead in particular. And Allah does care because according to the Qur’an God is all merciful and all compassionate and therefore he wants people to come to know him and not to go to hell, not to commit sin. And yet on this view God (or Allah) himself is responsible for these billions and billions of people being deceived not to believe in him and so to go to hell forever. And that's contradictory to the God of the Qur’an. To give an analogy. Suppose I were to hypothesize that the world was created five minutes ago with built-in appearances of age – food in our stomachs from the breakfast we never really ate, wrinkles and gray hair that made us appear older than five minutes, and so forth. Now, clearly if the world was created five minutes ago then that's exactly what we would expect to see. But does that make that hypothesis a credible and plausible hypothesis? Obviously not. You'd have to be crazy to think the world was created five minutes ago. It goes against all of the evidence to the contrary, and therefore is ad hoc and implausible. You should follow the evidence to what it appears to lead to and not adopt ad hoc and implausible hypotheses to try to explain it away. It's the same in the case of the crucifixion of Jesus.

KEVIN HARRIS: Question from South Africa.

Dr. Craig, Thank you so much for the important role that you've played in my faith journey. Not too long ago I realized that I had subconsciously been entertaining the idea that Jesus healed people through the Holy Spirit instead of through his own divinity. I assumed the idea was heretical and consciously tried to adjust my way of viewing Christ. Nevertheless, when I attended an apologetics conference last week, J. P. Moreland suggested that Jesus was indeed healing people through the Holy Spirit rather than his own divinity, and it is the more popular opinion of the two. I am now a little bit confused and not sure what to think. Would you please be so kind as to share your thoughts on this topic. Esma, South Africa.

DR. CRAIG: I have to confess that although I'm aware of these two positions I have never looked into them in any depth because it seems a matter of indifference to me. At Talbot School of Theology, J. P. Moreland and I had a colleague, Garry DeWeese, who held to the position you described – that Christ did his miracles through the power of the Holy Spirit who was resting upon him rather than through his own divine nature. I'm not aware that this is the more popular view though, as you claim J. P. asserts. I've never done a sort of survey. I would imagine that most Christians would think that Jesus did the divine miracles not through the power invested in his human nature but through the power invested in his divine nature, and I see no reason to exclude that. I'm not an adherent to what is called kenotic Christology which says that Jesus gave up his divine attributes or at least the exercise of those attributes during his earthly existence. I don't agree with kenotic Christology. So it seems to me to be perfectly acceptable to say that Jesus performed these miracles through the exercise of his own divine power. The other option – that he refrained from exercising these powers but relied upon the Holy Spirit to do so – is also an acceptable alternative so long as you insist that he did not relinquish or give up any of these powers but merely their exercise while here on Earth. So this is an open question, I think, and one that Christians are free to disagree on.

KEVIN HARRIS: Great questions today, Dr. Craig. I want to remind everyone to go to our Question of the Week feature at ReasonableFaith.org where you pick one of the questions each week to address it in writing. That's the Question of the Week feature at ReasonableFaith.org.^[1]