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Reasonable Faith Book (part 3)

September 30, 2007     Time: 00:22:35
Reasonable Faith Book (part 3)

Summary

Conversation with William Lane Craig

Transcript Reasonable Faith Book (Part 3)

Kevin Harris: Dr. Craig, this is one of my favorite chapters in the book Reasonable Faith – the existence of God. You have a chapter where you examine various evidences and arguments for the existence of God. And in the new revision, you’ve actually added a few.

Dr. Craig: Yes, that’s right. In the original book, I basically only did a personal assessment of the so-called kalam cosmological argument. But I felt that in light of the so-called New Atheism and the aggressive stance that many atheists are taking, this deserved to be expanded. So I’ve expanded the chapter on the existence of God into two chapters and I discuss and defend, I think, five arguments for God’s existence in the revised version of the book.

Kevin Harris: What are those five arguments that you talk about?

Dr. Craig: The first one is the contingency version of the cosmological argument that you find, for example, in Leibniz, the great 18th century German philosopher. Then there is the kalam cosmological argument. Then there is a version of the design argument based on the fine-tuning of the universe for intelligent life. And then there is the moral argument for God’s existence. Then finally the ontological argument for God’s existence. All of these in the first edition of the book were surveyed in the historical background section but I only defended one of them. What I have done now in the third edition is to present defensible versions of all five.

Kevin Harris: All five of these are just fascinating.

Dr. Craig: Oh, they are! I find these to be just an endless source of fascination and interest to reflect upon them and to read about them. I never tire of this.

Kevin Harris: Let’s talk about the contingency argument first. Contingent – what does that word mean? If something is contingent, what are we saying of it?

Dr. Craig: What we are saying is that it is not necessary – it doesn’t have to be that way. So, for example, we use this in everyday speech by saying, “Are you going to be going to the store today?” And you say, “Well, that is contingent upon whether or not I’m going to have the car.” Maybe you don’t say that [laughter] but you could say that. You make decisions contingent upon something else and that means it depends on that. So this argument is basically saying that . . .

Kevin Harris: Whether the ballgame is going to be played is contingent upon the weather.

Dr. Craig: Exactly. This argument is an argument from the fact that we see things in the world that are contingent. In fact the world itself seems to be contingent – it doesn’t have to exist. So we wonder: why does anything at all exist rather than just nothing? That is the germ of the argument. That is what motivates this argument, this deep question of the mystery of existence. Why anything at all exists?

Kevin Harris: It seems, though, there are two options in a contingent universe. One would be an infinite regress of just this thing exists because this thing did, and this thing exists because of this thing and this thing, and you’ve got this eternity of contingencies stretching all the way back. The other option is that all of these contingent things ultimately lead to something that is not contingent or non-contingent or independent. Are those the only two options we have there?

Dr. Craig: Right, I think it is basically that. Either everything that exists is contingent and there just is no explanation for why the universe exists or else you have to say there is some kind of a necessary being whose non-existence is impossible – a being that is not contingent but necessary in its reality; it must exist. I would argue – and Leibniz argued – that merely showing that there is an infinite series of contingent beings going back into the past doesn’t do anything to explain why there are any beings at all. It just puts prior states of those beings in order. But it doesn’t say why there is anything at all. You can still ask the question, “Gosh, why is there this infinite series of contingent beings? That doesn’t have to exist. Why is there such a thing as that?” So that really doesn’t answer the question. The atheist, I think, ultimately . . . frankly what the atheist is basically going to have to do is just bite the bullet and say the universe is just a brute contingent. That is to say, it doesn’t have to exist, it is just there, and there is no explanation for it. [1] 

Kevin Harris: If the universe is made up of a bunch of contingent things and the universe were eternal, you would still have that problem of all those contingencies wouldn’t you?

Dr. Craig: Exactly.

Kevin Harris: An eternal universe?

Dr. Craig: Sure, merely extending it back into the past doesn’t explain why there is a universe at all. You could still ask, “Why is there an eternal universe?” There could have been a finite universe or there could have been no universe. Why is there any universe at all, even an eternal one? Merely projecting it back into the past doesn’t get rid of this question of the contingency of the universe.

Kevin Harris: It doesn’t make sense to my brain that matter can just be put together from all eternity. Matter is composed of things and is complex. It is like saying it is something that is put together but it was never put together.

Dr. Craig: Right, I talk about this in the book. Scientists think that matter at its most fundamental level is made up of quarks which are these little point like particles. Quarks aren’t made of anything else. Now, the atheist is going to have to either say all of these little quarks exist necessarily – that each one of them is a necessary being that exists – or else he is going to have to say that we have all of these quarks that just exist contingently for no reason whatsoever. They are just there.

Kevin Harris: They get into metaphysics trying to avoid metaphysics. Start giving it metaphysical properties.

Dr. Craig: Oh yeah, it’s deeply metaphysical.

Kevin Harris: You are starting to move towards theism at that point.

Dr. Craig: Well, if you try to start saying that the universe exists necessarily then I think you are moving in that direction because that is what the theist wants to say. That is, God isn’t something that just happens to exist, that his existence is contingent. The theist typically wants to say that God’s existence is necessary – he is a self-existent being. His non-existence is impossible. This is the explanation for why anything exists rather than nothing.

Kevin Harris: When we start talking about eternity, we start talking about the kalam cosmological argument, another argument for the existence of God you deal with in Reasonable Faith. Talk to us about it.

Dr. Craig: This is a different argument. This one argues that this series of events going back into the past in fact cannot be infinite. That the idea of an infinite past is either false or it is impossible and that therefore the universe is finite in the past. It had a beginning. This coupled with the idea that something can’t come out of nothing implies that there must be a transcendent cause beyond the universe which brought the universe into being. So this is different than the contingency argument. This one argues against the possibility or the existence of this infinite past and gets back to a first, uncaused cause.

Kevin Harris: Because the Big Bang seems to be the point at which everything comes into existence. That seems to be an empirical evidence that the universe is not eternal.

Dr. Craig: I think you are absolutely right, Kevin. Originally this argument was developed by early Christian and then later Jewish and Muslim philosophers on purely philosophical grounds. They argued on purely philosophical reasons – the idea that an infinite past is impossible. But what happened during the 20th century is that astronomy began to discover scientific evidence that the universe is not eternal in the past but had an absolute beginning a finite number of years ago before which literally time and space did not exist. Time and space came into being at the moment of the Big Bang. One of the remarkable features of this argument, unlike many other arguments for God’s existence, is that it is no longer just a philosophical argument. This is a scientific argument now and is discussed in physical journals – in journals of physics and astrophysics.

Kevin Harris: So are there two aspects to the kalam cosmological argument – one is a physical, scientific argument and the other is philosophical?

Dr. Craig: Yes, that is right and these are independent of each other so that even if you are not persuaded by one you might be persuaded by the other. So the person who doesn’t like the argument is going to have to refute all of the evidence for the key premise that the universe began to exist, whether it is philosophical or scientific. [2] If I might just share one of the exciting revisions that was necessitated in doing this third revision. In 2003, three very prominent cosmologists – Arvind Borde, Alan Guth, and Alexander Vilenkin – were able to formulate a theorem which proved that any universe, any model, any theory, any universe that has been expanding on average over the course of its history cannot be infinite in the past but must have an absolute beginning. So at one fell swoop, they have demonstrated that no matter what kind of theory you adopt, as long as the universe is expanding on average over the course of its history it has to have a beginning point, an absolute beginning in the past. And moreover this proof that they developed is independent of any physical description of the universe in the very early phases of its existence. In the very, very early universe our theories break down and we don’t know how to describe it physically because our theories break down at that point when the universe is so dense. But the Borde-Guth-Vilenkin theorem is independent of that so it doesn’t require a physical description of the early universe in order to prove that the universe had a beginning. So Vilenkin is very strong about this. In his recent book called Many Worlds In One, he says that,

It is said that an argument is what convinces a reasonable man and a proof is what it takes to convince even an unreasonable man. With the proof now in place, cosmologists can no longer hide behind the possibility of a past-eternal universe. . . . They have to face the problem of a cosmic beginning. [3] 

That is a virtual quotation right out of that book.

Kevin Harris: When I was a little boy, I remember asking my mom what the highest number was. What is the last number? And she goes, “There is no last number because you can always add one more.” And that kept me up all night.

Dr. Craig: Wow! Your mom was very astute.

Kevin Harris: She was at that point. Now, how does this weigh on the kalam? Is there an infinite amount of numbers and therefore an actual infinite.

Dr. Craig: Well, this does weigh in on the kalam in the following sense. If you believe that the past is infinite and never had a beginning, then you would have to believe that somebody could count down all of the negative numbers from minus infinity ending today at zero. -3, -2, -1, 0, phew! I’m glad that’s over. And that seems intuitively to be absurd as you say. There is no highest number. They just go on to infinity. So how could anybody count down all the negative numbers ending today?

Kevin Harris: It is like today would never arrive.

Dr. Craig: Exactly. Because before you could count 0, you’d have to count -1. But before you could count that you’d have to count -2. But before you could count that you’d have to count -3. And you just get driven back and back and back into the past. You never count any number because there is always another number before it that has to be counted.

Kevin Harris: That makes a lot of sense to me.

Dr. Craig: It does to me, too. Here’s a further thought. Suppose we say, all right, well suppose you could count down all the negative numbers ending at today. Suppose that is possible. Then the question arises, “Gee, why didn’t he finish yesterday?” By then an infinite amount of time had elapsed. If he could finish by today, why didn’t he finish yesterday? In fact, why didn’t he finish the day before yesterday? Or the day before that, or the year before that? At any point in the infinite past an infinite amount of time has already transpired. So why wouldn’t he be done counting down all the negative numbers by then? But what that means is no matter how far you regress into the past you would never find the man finishing his countdown – he would always be done already. And of course that contradicts the hypothesis that he’s been counting from eternity past.

Kevin Harris: Bill, are you saying that I can have an infinite amount of numbers, perhaps, but I can’t have an infinite amount of marbles?

Dr. Craig: No, no, I’m not saying that. I don’t think there are any numbers myself, much less an infinite number of them. Now, you might say that is absurd, of course there is the number 3 or the number 1. But when we say, “Are there numbers?” what we mean is “Are there objects which are independent of our minds that exist?” So for example if there were no universe, there were no people, would there be things like the number 1 or the number 3 and so forth? Well, I don’t think there would be. I think in a sense numbers are just useful fictions. They are ways that we use to talk about saying, for example, there are 3 apples on the table. [4]Well, there 3 is just an adjective. It is a way of quantifying how many apple there are. What exists are the apples and there are three of them. There are three apples on the table. But we can also express that same truth by saying “The number of the apples on the table is three” or “Three is the number of apples on the table.” There we seem to be committed to something called “three” – that there aren’t only these apples there are also this number “three.” I think that is just being fooled by language. As Wittgenstein said, it is when language goes on a holiday that we begin to postulate the existence of these entities. They really don’t exist. We are being fooled by the way we talk. What there really are is apples – there are three of them. There are three apples. But there isn’t in addition to the apples a thing – an object – the number 3 itself. So I don’t think that there are any numbers much less an infinite number of them. It is just a kind of fictional world or make believe world.

Kevin Harris: The bottom line then is that an actual infinite just doesn’t exist in reality.

Dr. Craig: That is my position; that is right. I think that there are no actual infinites. There is no collections that have an actually infinite number of things in them.

Kevin Harris: When I’ve read some on this trying to get my brain around it, Bill, some people who believe that numbers exist (that they somehow exist as abstract objects or whatever) even some mathematicians don’t think that there are an infinite amount of numbers because even though they are abstract, you still never get there.

Dr. Craig: That’s right, that’s a good point, Kevin. Even if you do believe in the existence of numbers, to say there is an infinite number of them is still a further commitment. There is a school of mathematical thought called intuitionism which believes that all that exists are potential infinites. That is to say, we construct the numbers by counting. And people obviously haven’t counted to infinity so there aren’t any infinite numbers. There are just the natural numbers that we produce by counting, and there really are no actual infinites. Now that is one school of mathematical thinking about this. I want to go even further than that as I just explained and say I don’t think there are any numbers at all. But if I were persuaded that there are numbers then I would probably fall back to that sort of intuitionist position that infinity is just potential and that numbers, if they do exist, there is not an infinite number of them.

Kevin Harris: Bill, I can just here people jumping up and down right now who are listening to this saying, “What about God? What about God? I thought God was supposed to be infinite and aren’t you guys Christians?” Are you saying that God is not infinite?

Dr. Craig: Of course we believe that God is infinite. But we have to distinguish between a mathematical infinite – or a quantitative infinite – and what we might call a qualitative infinite. When we talk about God’s infinity, this is not a quantitative notion. We are not saying that God is a collection of an infinite number of definite and discrete parts. Rather, when we say God is infinite, this is a qualitative notion. It means things like this: God is self-existence, he is perfectly Holy, he is omnipotent, he is omniscience, he is omnipresent, he is eternal. Those superlative attributes go to make up the infinity of God. In fact, I would say, Kevin, that infinity is just a sort of umbrella term for all of those superlative attributes. If you took all of those away, there wouldn’t be some other attribute left over called “infinity.” Infinity just is God’s omnipotence, omniscience, omnipresence, self-existence, and so forth. And none of those are quantitative concepts. God isn’t a number of things. He is not a collection, is another way of thinking of it. God isn’t a set the way, for example, the set of living U.S. Presidents would be composed of a number of people. Or the set of all beetles that have crawled upon the face of the earth would be composed of a certain number – finite number – of beetles. God isn’t a set. He is not a collection. So to talk about God’s infinity is just not a quantitative notion. And here I think everybody would agree with this, not just people who are plumping for the kalam cosmological argument. I mean, this is a neutral point. Nobody thinks that God’s infinity is this mathematical quantitative idea; that is just a misunderstanding.

Kevin Harris: The fact that the universe is not eternal, the evidence seems to show that, the philosophical evidence, the empirical evidence, we are led to something eternal. From there, do we add some more steps to get to the God of the Christian faith? [5]

Dr. Craig: Well, this argument won’t get you to the God of the Christian faith. In fact, this argument has a broad intersectarian appeal – it has been propounded by not only Christians (both Catholic and Protestant) but also by Jewish theologians and philosophers and by Muslim theologians and philosophers. So this is an argument for a personal creator of the universe who transcends space and time, who is changeless and immaterial, and enormously powerful because he brought the universe into existence without any material cause. That is the concept of God that this argument gets you to.

Kevin Harris: Dr. Craig, our question of the day – what about all the evil done in the name of God? People cite the Crusades, and the Inquisition, and crimes committed by religious people.

Dr. Craig: I guess I would say, Kevin, that that is simply testimony to the fallenness of man. It is testimony to how wicked and perverse we are that we could take the most beautiful and wonderful things in the world and use them as instruments of violence and torture and cruelty the way Christianity has sometimes been used in the hands of wicked men. So it does nothing to disconfirm Christianity. On the contrary, if anything it confirms the Christian doctrine of sin, that we really are depraved and fallen and alienated from God.

Kevin Harris: I guess every philosophy or every system could be abused. Or perverted.

Dr. Craig: That’s right. Bertrand Russell once remarked that you cannot prove a system of thought is true by looking at the lives of its adherents. What he meant was just because the adherents lived good and righteous lives doesn’t mean their system is true. But it also applies to when those adherents fail to live up to their system of beliefs and are wicked and hypocritical and deceitful. In the same way that doesn’t mean that their system of beliefs is false. [6]