Theistic Critiques of Atheism, part 12June 22, 2009 — Deacon Duncan
Ok, so that was a nice little 6-month diversion from the topic which we were originally considering, which was William Lane Craig’s article on “Theistic Critiques of Atheism. As you may recall, Craig posted a two-pronged argument: the arguments against atheism, and the arguments for theism. We’re up to the second argument of the second prong, the cosmological argument for God.
Cosmological Argument. A simple version of this argument might go:
1. Whatever begins to exist has a cause.
2. The universe began to exist.
3. Therefore, the universe has a cause.
Conceptual analysis of what it means to be a cause of the universe then helps to establish some of the theologically significant properties of this being.
As with his first argument for God, the Cosmological Argument suffers from a number of flaws, not the least of which is his naïve assumption that there was once a time when the universe (including time itself) did not exist.
Let’s look at Craig’s detailed analysis.
Premiss (1) seems obviously true—at the least, more so than its negation. It is rooted in the metaphysical intuition that something cannot come into being from nothing. If things could really come into being uncaused out of nothing, then it becomes inexplicable why just anything and everything do not come into existence uncaused from nothing. Moreover, the conviction that an origin of the universe requires a causal explanation seems quite reasonable, for on the atheistic view, if the universe began at the Big Bang, there was not even the potentiality of the universe’s existence prior to the Big Bang, since nothing is prior to the Big Bang. But then how could the universe become actual if there was not even the potentiality of its existence? It makes much more sense to say that the potentiality of the universe lay in the power of God to create it. Finally, the first premiss is constantly confirmed in our experience. Atheists who are scientific naturalists thus have the strongest of motivations to accept it.
His first premise “seems obviously true”—at least to our naïve experience. It’s certainly the most consistent observation we can make at the macroscopic level, even if it’s not necessarily true at the quantum level. Personally, I prefer to state this observation in terms of the truth being consistent with itself. We see certain factors in operation, and we see certain phenomena consistently produced as a result, and therefore we say that the observed factors are the causes of the observed phenomena. This does not guarantee that all phenomena will have observable prior factors in operation beforehand, but our observations (at the non-quantum level) definitely support this overwhelmingly.
Where Craig gets into trouble is when he starts trying apply this line of reasoning to the very atypical case of the entire cosmos, including time itself, coming into being. He assumes that the phrase “origin of the universe” refers to a temporal sequence in which, at time X, no universe exists, and then at time X+1, the universe does exist, because of some factor that was in operation at time X. Since time itself is a property of the material universe, however, the “origin” of the universe is not a reference to a chronological beginning, but more like a geographical term, like the “origin” of a Cartesian graph—a location in space-time, not a process of transformation.
Craig’s math is off by one. The origin of the universe, and of time itself, is X0, the original moment of time. There is no moment of time X0 – 1 prior to the beginning of time at X0. Thus, there has never been any point in time at which the universe did not exist, and therefore it is simply nonsense to argue about whether or not “potentiality” existed during the time prior to the existence of time. Such nonsense can only lead to credulously superstitious conclusions, like saying “it makes more sense that the potential lay in the power of God to create it.” Such thinking makes no sense at all, since it simultaneously asserts that time existed for God to create in, even though time did not exist, because God had not created it yet.
We’ll continue with points 2 and 3 tomorrow.