#946 Earnest Questions from the Tien Shan Mountains
June 29, 2025Dear Professor Craig,
My name is Abdulla [surname redacted]. I am a student from Kyrgyzstan whose nights have been consumed for the past three years by your works — from The Tensed Theory of Time to your debate with Oppy in god and time. Today, I write to you not as an academic, but as someone for whom your analysis of time in Time and Eternity became the key to an existential trap: how to reconcile the rational rigor of the Kalam Cosmological Argument (KCA) with the existential leap of faith that (in your words) “must risk itself in the darkness”?
My questions arise not from a desire to dispute the KCA, but from an attempt to locate within your system the point where metaphysics ceases to be abstraction and becomes breath — what you termed in Philosophical Foundations for a Christian Worldview as “the drama of creation.”
1. Time as an Attribute of Dependency: Why Does the KCA Require, Not a Beginning, but Necessary Dependence?
In The Kalam Cosmological Argument (1979), you define “beginning to exist” as “acquiring being through a cause.” Yet if we accept your model of God’s temporal eternity (from God and Time), where His existence “without the world” lacks a temporal axis, then:
- The Paradox: If there was no time prior to t=0, the universe’s “acquisition of being” cannot be a temporal act. Thus, the KCA proves not a beginning, but ontological dependence — closer to Thomism than classical Kalam.
- Question: Does this not render the emphasis on “beginning” a concession to scientific mainstream (Big Bang) at the expense of metaphysical rigor? How does this align with your rejection of the metaphysical Principle of Sufficient Reason in your debate with Pruss?
2. Aseity and the Violence of Logic: Can God Be a Hostage to His Own Nature?
In God Over All, you reject Platonism to preserve divine aseity: God “constitutes” abstract objects through His mind. But then:
- If logical laws are products of divine thought (as argued in Divine Conceptualism), how do we avoid arbitrariness? For if 2+2=4 only because God thinks it so, He could alter it (which is absurd).
- Your response: “Logic reflects God’s necessary nature.” Yet His aseity is then bound by internal necessity — not external Platonism, but His own essence.
- Question: How does this fundamentally differ from Platonism? Are you not reducing God to a “Prisoner of His Essence” — an idea you yourself criticized in Leibniz?
3. Hiddenness as Ontological, Not Epistemic: Why Is God’s Silence Deeper Than It Seems?
In Divine Hiddenness and Human Reason, you frame hiddenness as a “test of faith.” Yet if God is the ground of morality (per your moral argument), then:
- His silence in moments of existential despair (e.g., Ivan Karamazov’s experience) is not merely an epistemic problem but an ontological threat: if God remains silent when evil screams, does the moral argument not become a tool for His moral discreditation?
- You respond by invoking the Cross — but this shifts the issue: why does God allow the necessity of His incarnation-suffering as the sole “answer” to evil? This does not resolve the paradox; it deepens it: a Deus ex machina that requires the drama to legitimize itself.
4. A Personal Struggle: How to Believe After Metaphysics?
Forgive my candor, but your Reasonable Faith is to me like a lighthouse in a storm. Yet the deeper I delve into your arguments, the more acutely I feel the chasm between the logical inference “God exists” and the existential leap into “God is Love.” While translating Al-Ghazali’s The Incoherence of the Philosophers, I stumbled upon the thought: “The heart does not believe in God — it suffocated without Him.” Your works give the mind oxygen, but how does one make the heart breathe when temporal arguments fall silent before the face of death?
Summary of Questions:
1. Does the KCA reduce God to a “First Clockmaker” rather than a Creator ex nihilo?
2. Is divine aseity a form of self-deception if God is subjugated to His essence?
3. Can the moral argument survive the confrontation with ontological silence?
I would be grateful for even a brief response. If time does not permit — simply know this: somewhere in the Tien Shan mountains, a student reading your books is learning not to fear questions for which he has no answers yet.
With deepest respect,
Abdulla
Kyrgyzstan
Dr. craig’s response
A
Please forgive me, Abdulla, if I do not give each of your many questions the space that it deserves. I’ll give brief but hopefully adequate responses to them. One misgiving that I have is that I do not recognize in many cases the quotations you attribute to me; I do not know the reason for that.
1. Does the KCA Require, Not a Beginning, but Necessary Dependence?
While I think that Leibniz’s argument from contingency requires a necessary being on which the universe depends, the KCA does require a cause of the universe’s beginning to exist. The false assumption of your question is that in order for X to begin to exist, there must be a time at which X did not exist. That would make it impossible for time to begin to exist! But the definition that I defend of “begins to exist” is that X begins to exist at a time t if and only if X comes into being at t. X comes into being at t if and only if X exists at t, t is the first time at which X exists, and X’s existing at t is a tensed fact. Given a tensed view of time, X does not merely exist at t, but comes into being at t and therefore requires a cause of its beginning to exist.
2. Can God Be a Hostage to His Own Nature?
It is inaccurate to say that I believe that “God ‘constitutes’ abstract objects through His mind.” Rather my view is that abstract objects do not exist at all, period. Logical truths are grounded in God’s perfect rationality. This no more makes him a “Prisoner of His Essence” than does his being perfectly good or his being eternal. Those are just metaphysically necessary truths about the maximally great being that God is.
3. Why Is God’s Silence Deeper Than It Seems?
Again, I think your summary of my views is not accurate. I don’t think that divine hiddenness is merely an epistemic problem. Rather it is a severe challenge to the existence of God. My response to divine hiddenness is twofold: (1) God is not as hidden as the proponents of this objection assume. Those who press this objection inevitably assume that there are no good arguments for the existence of God. But as you know, I think that is false. I think that God is the best explanation for the existence of the universe, for the beginning of the universe at a point in the finite past, for the applicability of mathematics to physical phenomena, for the fine-tuning of the universe for embodied, conscious observers, for the objectivity of moral values and duties, and is implied by the very possibility of a maximally great being. (2) Given divine middle knowledge, God knows what amount of evidence will be the most effective in bringing the optimal number of people freely to salvation. He is not interested simply in getting more people to add another item to their ontological inventory of things; rather he wants to draw people into a saving love relationship with himself. The horrible suffering and evil in the world fit into that providential plan. If more evidence of his existence would have been conducive to this end, then God would have provided it. But he is under no obligation to provide additional evidence that he knew wouldn’t do any good.
My appeal to the cross of Christ is not part of my answer to the intellectual problem of evil, but rather to the emotional problem of evil. It helps to dissolve people’s dislike of a God who would permit them or others to suffer terribly. It vividly displays how God in the person of Christ took upon himself undeserved, incomprehensible suffering for the sake of our salvation. That can help us to have courage to bear emotionally the suffering that God asks us to endure.
4. How to Believe After Metaphysics?
Metaphysics can help us to believe! It has been said that the heart cannot rejoice in what the mind rejects as false. Metaphysics will not save us, but it can certainly help to make our concept of God more profound and credible. The gap between a purely intellectual knowledge of God and a heart knowledge of God is made through the gospel of Jesus Christ. By placing our faith in Jesus as our Savior and Lord, we are spiritually born anew to a relationship with God, a relationship that will be a lifelong journey until we go to be with him. May you make that step of commitment, Abdulla!
So in summary:
1. Does the KCA reduce God to a “First Clockmaker” rather than a Creator ex nihilo? No, something has to explain why the universe came into being a finite time ago.
2. Is divine aseity a form of self-deception if God is subjugated to His essence? No, for God’s having necessarily certain attributes, including self-existence, is in no way a matter of being subjugated or imprisoned, but is entailed by his maximal greatness.
3. Can the moral argument survive the confrontation with ontological silence? Sure! There are very good reasons to believe that God exists, including the need for an ontological foundation of the moral values and duties that we apprehend in moral experience. Moreover, given divine middle knowledge, we should not expect God to make himself more evident, since he knows what amount of evidence would be most conducive to bringing the optimal number of people freely to salvation.
- William Lane Craig