DOCSLIB.ORG

GOD, TIME, and ETERNITY GOD, TIME, and ETERNITY the Coherence of Theism 11: Eternity

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
GOD, TIME, and ETERNITY GOD, TIME, and ETERNITY the Coherence of Theism 11: Eternity GOD, TIME, AND ETERNITY GOD, TIME, AND ETERNITY The Coherence of Theism 11: Eternity by William Lane Craig Talbot School ofTheology, La Mirada, CA, U.S.A. SPRINGER-SCIENCE+BUSINESS MEDIA, B.V. A C.I.P. Catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN 978-90-481-5823-2 ISBN 978-94-017-1715-1 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-94-017-1715-1 Printed on acid{ree paper Cover: Salvador Dali (1904-1989), The Crucifixion. Oil on canvas. Photo graph © 1987 The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of The Chester Dale Collection, 1955. (55.5) All Rights Reserved © 2001 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht Originally published by Kluwer Academic Publishers in 2001 Softcover reprint ofthe hardcover 1st edition 2001 No part of the material protected by this copyright notice may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written pennission from the copyright owner. To ALVIN PLANTINGA who by his work and his life has pointed the way TABLE OF CONTENTS Preface ix PART I. TIIE NATURE OF DIVINE ETERNITY Section 1: Arguments for Divine Timelessness Chapter 1 The Case for Divine Timelessness 3 Section 2: Arguments for Divine Temporality Chapter 2 Timelessness and Personhood 43 Chapter 3 Timelessness and Divine Action 56 Chapter 4 Timelessness and Divine Knowledge 112 Conclusion l34 PARTII. GODANDTIME Seetion 1: God, Time, and its Measures Chapter 5 The Classical Concept ofTime 143 Chapter 6 God's Time and Relativistic Time 163 Chapter 7 God, Time, and Relativity 197 Seetion 2: God, Time, and Creation Chapter 8 Creatio ex nihilo 247 Chapter 9 God and the Beginning of Time 256 Conclusion 281 Bibliography 285 Subject Index 311 Proper Name Index 315 vii PREFACE hose who think about time are thinking deeply. Those who think about God T are thinking even more deeply still. Those who try to think about God and time are pressing the very limits of human understanding. Undaunted, this is precisely the project which we have set for ourselves in this study: to try to grasp the nature of divine eternity, to understand what is meant by the amnnation that God is etemal, to fonnulate a coherent doctrine ofGod's relationship with time. This study, the second installment of a long-range research pro gram devoted to a philosophical analysis of the principal attributes of God, flows naturally out of my previous exploration of divine omniscience.! For the most contentious issue with respect to God's being omniscient concerns divine foreknowledge of future contingents, such as free acts of human agents. The very concept of foreknowledge presupposes that God is temporal, and a good many thinkers, from Boethius to certain contemporary philosophers, have thought to avoid the alleged incompatibility of divine foreknowledge and human freedom by afflnning the timelessness of God. Thus, in examining the complex of issues surrounding the foreknowledge question, we found ourselves already immersed in the question of divine eternity. In this study, I shall not return to the discussion of the bearing which God's temporal status has on His knowledge of future contingents; rather we wish to press on to consider other arguments aimed at showing that God's eternity is best construed as either temporal or atemporal and to explore how one's answer to this question affects in turn one's understanding of God's relationship to time. Although the biblical data are underdeterminative with respect to the nature of God's eternity, historically the conception of divine eternity as timelessness has, through the influence of Platonie thought-the Church Father Origen and the Neo­ Platonist Plotinus were both pupils of Ammonius Saccus in Alexandria-, dominated Christian theology until lohn Duns Scotus, who offered an incisive critique of Thomas Aquinas's own defense of divine timelessness. As I have elsewhere briefly surveyed the thinking of several key Christian theologians from Augustine to Suarez on the nature of divine eternity/ the present study shall forego a historical exposition of the doctrine and focus immediatelyon a critical discussion of the arguments. Unfortunately, the works of contemporary theologians will be of little help here, for the lack of analytical tools or the theological anti-realism which has in recent years blighted systematic theology foil or prevent a significant grappling with the William Lane Craig. The Problem ofDilline Foreknowledge and Future Contingents from Aristotle (0 Suarez, Brill's Studies in Intellectual History 7 (Leiden: E. 1. Brill, 1988); idem, Dilline Foreknowledge and Human Freedom: The Coherence of Theism I: Omniscience, Brill's Studies in Intellectual History 19 (Leiden: E. 1. Brill, 1990). 2 Craig, Problem of Dilline Foreknowledge and Future Contingents. See also Alan G. Padgett, God, Eternity and the Nature ofTime (New Vork: St. Martin's, 1992), chap. 3. ix x issues on their part. 3 Fortunately, there has been during the last two decades a burst of interest in the doctrine of divine eternity, no doubt due in large part to the stimulus of the foreknowledge-freedom debate, among analytic philosophers of religion. The construal of divine eternity in terms of infinite omnitemporality has been greatly advanced during the twentieth century through the influence of Whitehead and Hartshome's process theology and its critique of the c1assic conception of God as pure actuality, simple, impassible, immutable, and timeless. For many years, Nelson Pike's God and Timelessness (1970), in which he argued that the doctrine of divine timeless eternity is incoherent, remained the only monograph on the subject. The dearth of material on divine eternity is evidenced by the fact that no entries on this subject were inc1uded in Wainwright's Philosophy 0/ Religion: an Annotated Bibliography 0/ Twentieth Century Writings in English (1978). Then in 1981 Eleonore Stump and Norman KretZInann published in the Journal 0/ Philosophy an artic1e entitled simply "Eternity," in which they defended a conception of divine eternity as atemporal and sought to speil out how a timeless being could be related to temporal entities. Their artic1e sparked a revival of interest in the nature of God's eternity and His relation to time. Since 1987, when I first began this study, a steady stream of monographs (not to speak of journal articles or book chapters) on the problem have issued from the presses: Paul Helm, Eternal God (1988), William Hasker, God, Time, and Knowledge (1989), lohn Yates, The Timelessness o/God (1990), Brian Leftow, Time and Eternity (1991), Alan Padgett, God, Eternity and the Nature 0/ Time (1992), Robert Neville, Eternity and Time 's Flow (1993), Lawrence Fagg, The Becoming o/Time (1995), all conspiring to rob me of anything to say! I hope to show that much original work, especially of an integrative nature, One can only agree, for example, with Jantzen when she concludes that the writing of Karl Barth on the subject of God's etemity (Church Dogmatics [Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1936] vol. 2, pt. I, pp. 608- 677) amounts to little more than "edifying nonsense" (Grace M. Jantzen, God's Warld, God's Body [London: Darton, Longman, & Todd, 1984], p. 59). Even so level-headed a theologian as Pannenberg is of little help, for he seems to reject the mere timelessness of God in favor of timelessness with a relation to time; but he never explains how this is possible (Wolfhart Pannenberg, Systematic Theology, vol. I, trans. Geoffery Bromiley [Grand Rapids, Mich.: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1991], pp. 402-409). At least Pannen berg does not repeat his earlier obscure doctrine that God somehow exists in the future, which is unfortunately adopted by Ted Peters, God-the Wor/d's Future (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1992). Although Peters says, "God creates from the future, not the past" (lbid., p. 134), what he really describes is God' s bestowing on us a future, i. e., continued existence, hope, etc. EIsewhere he interprets the dictum "God creates from the future" in terms of God's transcending the whole spacetime manifold, such that creation is "a single event incorporating the whole history of the cosmos" (Idem, "Cosmos as Creation," in Cosmos as Creation, ed. T. Peters [Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1989], pp. 88-89), a comprehensible doctrine, but insufficiently supported by argument on Peters' spart. By contrast I do not even understand what Robert Neville is talking about when he says, "Etemity ... is the togethemess of the modes of time­ past, present, and future-so that each can be its temporal self' (Robert C. Neville, Eternity and Time 's F/ow, [Albany, N. Y.: SUNY Press, 1993], p. 60). One might think this a garbled affirmation of a tenseless theory of time, except that Neville also says that "Without etemity, time can be conceived only as a static dimension like space ... "; etemity is the "non-temporal togethemess of past, present, and future" (Ibid., pp. 12, 28}-which is just unintelligible. Perhaps the most comprehensible theologian writing on divine etemity today is the process thinker Keith Ward with whose views I shall interact. For arecent survey of theological thought on etemity, focusing on Heim, Barth, and Tillich, see Karl Hinrich Manzke, Ewigkeit und Zeitlichkeit, Forschungen zur systematischen und ökumenischen Theologie 63 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1992). xi bringing together discussions of the philosophy of time and space, philosophy of language, phenomenology, philosophy of science, Special and General Relativity, classical cosmology, quantum mechanics, and so forth, with the concems of philosophy ofreligion and theology, remains to be done. I initially attempted to carry out such an integrative study in a single work. The book grew to two large volumes, which, though having philosophical theology as their central concem, tumed out to be very much like an introduction to the problems of time and space.
Load more

Recommended publications
  • Russell, Infinity, and the Tristram Shandy Paradox
    RUSSELL, INFINITY, AND THE TRISTRAM SHANDY PARADOX by Shandon Guthrie INTRODUCTION Mathematicians have puzzled for centuries what precisely we mean when we refer to the concept of infinity . Some have suggested that infinity is merely something that exists in the mind. Yet others maintain that infinity possesses some ontological status in the real world. In an attempt to demonstrate the difference between the reality of an infinite and the idea of an infinite, Aristotle had suggested the terms actual infinite (the completed whole value of infinity) and potential infinite (susceptible to infinite addition). (1) Analytic philosopher Bertrand Russell believed that an actual infinite could be achieved as long as the counter possessed an actually infinite number of years to do it. In the example given in Sterne's novel, we have the example of Tristram Shandy. (2) Sterne writes about Tristram Shandy as an individual committed to writing an autobiography. However, he is so slow that it takes him one year in order to complete only one day. This means that the most recent event that could be recorded is the day that occurred one year ago. As Shandy writes an additional day, it takes him an additional year to complete the events of that day. Russell uses this example and believes that an actual infinite can be achieved through successive addition only if Shandy has an infinite number of days to complete it. RUSSELL'S ASSESSMENT OF THE TRISTRAM SHANDY PARADOX Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) suspects that the Tristram Shandy paradox can be solved. For Russell, it is the individual who possesses an infinite number of days.
    [Show full text]
  • On God's Existence
    Scholars Crossing SOR Faculty Publications and Presentations Summer 2001 On God's Existence W. David Beck Liberty University, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.liberty.edu/sor_fac_pubs Part of the Biblical Studies Commons, Comparative Methodologies and Theories Commons, Epistemology Commons, Esthetics Commons, Ethics in Religion Commons, History of Philosophy Commons, History of Religions of Eastern Origins Commons, History of Religions of Western Origin Commons, Other Philosophy Commons, Other Religion Commons, and the Religious Thought, Theology and Philosophy of Religion Commons Recommended Citation Beck, W. David, "On God's Existence" (2001). SOR Faculty Publications and Presentations. 167. https://digitalcommons.liberty.edu/sor_fac_pubs/167 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by Scholars Crossing. It has been accepted for inclusion in SOR Faculty Publications and Presentations by an authorized administrator of Scholars Crossing. For more information, please contact [email protected]. W. DAVID BECK 49 compared to the energy involved in the entire act of, say, raising one's hand to vote. When an engineer throws a switch to release the water behind Hoover Dam, the vast amount of potential energy unleashed by the moving water is overwhelmingly greater than that involved in the engineer throwing the switch. It may be the same with libeliarian acts. Perhaps the energy released in the exercise of active power is miniscule compared to the poten­ tial energy released in the body as part of the relevant causal pathway. I just don't lmow. Second, even if one opts for this second option (the release of energy is virtually undetectable), it doesn't follow that the resulting gap would not be detectable, since the effects of a libertarian act could still be quite different in a "gappy" way from what would have followed in the absence of that act.
    [Show full text]
  • Thomas Aquinas' Argument from Motion & the Kalām Cosmological
    University of Central Florida STARS Honors Undergraduate Theses UCF Theses and Dissertations 2020 Rethinking Causality: Thomas Aquinas' Argument From Motion & the Kalām Cosmological Argument Derwin Sánchez Jr. University of Central Florida Part of the Philosophy Commons Find similar works at: https://stars.library.ucf.edu/honorstheses University of Central Florida Libraries http://library.ucf.edu This Open Access is brought to you for free and open access by the UCF Theses and Dissertations at STARS. It has been accepted for inclusion in Honors Undergraduate Theses by an authorized administrator of STARS. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Recommended Citation Sánchez, Derwin Jr., "Rethinking Causality: Thomas Aquinas' Argument From Motion & the Kalām Cosmological Argument" (2020). Honors Undergraduate Theses. 858. https://stars.library.ucf.edu/honorstheses/858 RETHINKING CAUSALITY: THOMAS AQUINAS’ ARGUMENT FROM MOTION & THE KALĀM COSMOLOGICAL ARGUMENT by DERWIN SANCHEZ, JR. A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Honors in the Major Program in Philosophy in the College of Arts and Humanities and in the Burnett Honors College at the University of Central Florida Orlando, Florida Fall Term 2020 Thesis Chair: Dr. Cyrus Zargar i ABSTRACT Ever since they were formulated in the Middle Ages, St. Thomas Aquinas’ famous Five Ways to demonstrate the existence of God have been frequently debated. During this process there have been several misconceptions of what Aquinas actually meant, especially when discussing his cosmological arguments. While previous researchers have managed to tease out why Aquinas accepts some infinite regresses and rejects others, I attempt to add on to this by demonstrating the centrality of his metaphysics in his argument from motion.
    [Show full text]
  • The Absurdity of Life Without God (Craig)
    The Absurdity of Life Without God (Craig) 1. Life Without God is Meaningless: William Lane Craig argues that, if there is no God, then life itself lacks meaning, value, and purpose. The primary motive of this conclusion is the idea that, without God, there is no immortality. And, without immortality, then each and every one of us is doomed to die. Life is, as Craig notes, merely a brief transition out of oblivion and back into oblivion. Not only that, but the human race—indeed, the entire universe—is doomed to die. In 5 billion years, the Sun will engulf the Earth in a fiery death. Billions of years after that, the entire universe, as it expands and cools, will one day be nothing but a litter of dead, cold stars, forever getting further and further from one another, travelling forever into the dark recesses of dead, cold, lifeless space. (1) Life is Meaningless: If we are all doomed to die, then nothing really matters. No one’s life has any ULTIMATE significance. Our advancements to expand human knowledge, to alleviate human suffering, to learn to live in peace will all eventually be meaningless. Craig claims that, because human beings are doomed to be here for only a short time, astronomically speaking, we are no more significant than a “swarm of mosquitos”; and man, “because he ends in nothing, he IS nothing”. But, he says, even if we could live forever, life would still be meaningless. It is not MERE eternity that gives life meaning. There must be something that GIVES it meaning.
    [Show full text]
  • God? a Debate Between a Christian and an Atheist
    God? A Debate Between A Christian and An Atheist William Lane Craig Walter Sinnott-Armstrong OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS GOD? POINT/COUNTERPOINT SERIES Series Editor James P. Sterba, University of Notre Dame AFFIRMATIVE ACTION AND RACIAL PREFERENCE Carl Cohen and James P. Sterba GOD? A DEBATE BETWEEN A CHRISTIAN AND AN ATHEIST William Lane Craig and Walter Sinnott-Armstrong GOD? A DEBATE BETWEEN A CHRISTIAN AND AN ATHEIST William Lane Craig Walter Sinnott-Armstrong Point/Counterpoint Series James P. Sterba, Series Editor 1 2004 1 Oxford New York Auckland Bangkok Buenos Aires Cape Town Chennai Dar es Salaam Delhi Hong Kong Istanbul Karachi Kolkata Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Mumbai Nairobi São Paulo Shanghai Taipei Tokyo Toronto Copyright © 2004 by Oxford University Press, Inc. Published by Oxford University Press, Inc. 198 Madison Avenue, New York, New York, 10016 http://www.oup-usa.org Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Craig, William Lane. God? : a debate between a Christian and an atheist / William Lane Craig, Walter Sinnott-Armstrong. p. cm.—(Point/counterpoint series) ISBN 0-19-516599-3 (alk. paper)—ISBN 0-19-516600-0 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. God—Proof. 2. Atheism. I. Sinnott-Armstrong, Walter,
    [Show full text]
  • Theistic Arguments: the Craig Program
    Theistic Arguments: The Craig Program Edwin K. P. Chong Version: March 12, 2005 1 Introduction Reference: • William Lane Craig, God, Are You There? Five Reasons God Exists and Three Reasons It Makes a Difference, Ravi Zacharias International Ministries, 1999. Motivation: • World’s greatest thinkers have wrestled with the question of God. • Is there a personal, transcendent being who created the universe and is the source of moral goodness? • Today’s university student is not trained to deal with this issue. • Instead of reflecting rationally on the issue, many students absorb uncritically the easy an- swers and secular prejudices of their teachers. • People who think that it doesn’t make a difference what you believe about God simply reveal that they haven’t thought very deeply about the question. • Even atheist philosophers, e.g., Jean Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, recognized that the ques- tion makes a tremendous difference. Three reasons it makes a difference: 1. If God does not exist, then life is ultimately meaningless. 2. If God does not exist, then we must ultimately live without hope. 3. If God does exist, then not only does life have meaning and hope, but there is also the possibility of coming to know God and his love personally. None of this shows that God exists. But it does show that it makes a tremendous difference whether God exists. • Blaise Pascal: even if the evidence for and against the existence of God were absolutely equal, the rational thing to do would be to believe that God exists. • Presumption of theism: presume that God exists unless we have some good reason to think that atheism is true.
    [Show full text]
  • Craig, William Lane. "Religious Epistemology"
    verified, positivistic philosophers held them to be literally meaningless, as if one had asserted, “’t was brillig, and the slythey toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe.” Under criticism, the Verification Principle underwent a number of changes, including its permutation into the Falsification Principle, which held that a meaningful sentence must be capable in principle Religious epistemology of being empirically falsified. The fate of religious William Lane Craig language was thought to be no brighter under falsificationism than under verificationism, as became evident at a famous Oxford University symposium on “Theology and Falsification” held in 1948. "Enlightenment critiques of the reasonableness of religious belief point to defects not so much in At the symposium Antony Flew borrowed a story religious belief as in the conceptions of told several years earlier by John Wisdom knowledge uncritically adopted as the basis of concerning two explorers who came upon a patch these critiques. Maybe religious knowledge looks of flowers in a jungle clearing. One explorer was dubious because we have the wrong idea about convinced that the flowers were tended by a what it is to know something and how we know gardener. In the ensuing days, however, despite what we know." --C. Stephen Evans and Merold the explorers’ every effort to find him, no gardener Westphal, Christian Perspectives on Religious was ever detected. To save his hypothesis, the Knowledge. one explorer was progressively forced to qualify his original hypothesis to the point that the Introduction hypothesized gardener must be invisible, intangible, and undetectable. To which the other In Religious Epistemology we encounter the finally replied, “Just how does what you call an intersection of traditional epistemology with the invisible, intangible, eternally elusive gardener newly burgeoning field of Philosophy of Religion.
    [Show full text]
  • The Ultimate Question of Origins: God and the Beginning of the Universe
    The Ultimate Question of Origins: God and the Beginning of the Universe William Lane Craig William Lane Craig is Research Professor of Philosophy at Talbot School of Theology in La Mirada, California. He lives in Atlanta, Georgia, with his wife Jan and their two teenage children Charity and John. At the age of sixteen as a junior in high school, he first heard the message of the Christian gospel and yielded his life to Christ. Dr. Craig pursued his undergraduate studies at Wheaton College (B.A. 1971) and graduate studies at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School (M.A. 1974; M.A. 1975), the University of Birmingham (England) (Ph.D. 1977), and the University of Munich (Germany) (D.Theol. 1984). From 1980-86 he taught Philosophy of Religion at Trinity, during which time he and Jan started their family. In 1987 they moved to Brussels, Belgium, where Dr. Craig pursued research at the University of Louvain until 1994. The absolute origin of the universe, of all matter and energy, even of physical space and time themselves, in the Big Bang singularity contradicts the perennial naturalistic assumption that the universe has always existed. One after another, models designed to avert the initial cosmological singularity--the Steady State model, the Oscillating model, Vacuum Fluctuation models--have come and gone. Current quantum gravity models, such as the Hartle-Hawking model and the Vilenkin model, must appeal to the physically unintelligible and metaphysically dubious device of "imaginary time" to avoid the universe's beginning. The contingency implied by an absolute beginning ex nihilo points to a transcendent cause of the universe beyond space and time.
    [Show full text]
  • 218 JB Stump and Alan B. Padgett
    218 Book Reviews J.B. Stump and Alan B. Padgett (eds), The Blackwell Companion to Science and Christianity, Wiley-Blackwell, Chichester, 2012. 644 pages. isbn 978-1-4443-3571-2. The Blackwell Companions are a well-known and prestigious series that always form an up-to-date and high-quality entry to a certain academic domain. That is also the case for this Companion that focuses on the relations between sci- ence and Christian belief. It contains 54 essays that were written especially for this Companion. No existing material was used, which means that the book contains new texts only. One of the other attractive qualities of this publica- tion is that we find many of the most prolific authors represented in it. Readers of Philosophia Reformata will no doubt appreciate to see, for instance, Alvin Plantinga, Richard Swinburne, Denis Alexander, William Lane Craig, J.P. Moreland and John Polkinghorne mentioned as authors in the table of con- tents. Other names are missing, such as Alister McGrath and John Lennox, but that of course is unavoidable. Some of such names are there, but in a chapter title rather than as authors (in Part ix). Not all chapters are written by Christian authors and thus the editors have ensured that we do not get a biased perspec- tive on the topic. The book consists of eleven major parts. Together they form a broad and multifaceted treatment of the complex science – Christianity relations. I use the word “relations” in plural quite consciously because the book shows that it would be naïve to think that the relation between science and Christianity is the same for all areas in which this theme features in academic and public dis- cussions.
    [Show full text]
  • Resurrection Argument
    Theistic Arguments: The Craig Program, 5 Edwin Chong March 20, 2005 Resurrection Argument God makes sense of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. March 2005 2 1 The Argument 1. There are four established facts concerning the fate of Jesus of Nazereth: his honorable burial by Joseph of Arimathea, the discovery of his empty tomb, his post-mortem appearances, and the origin of his disciples' belief in the resurrection. 2. The hypothesis "God raised Jesus from the dead" is the best explanation of these facts. 3. The hypothesis "God raised Jesus from the dead" entails that God exists. 4. Therefore God exists. (A deductive argument.) Steps 3 and 4 are obvious. It remains only to examine steps 1 and 2. March 2005 3 Jesus' Death: Four Facts In defending this premise of Jesus' death, Craig does not treat the New Testament as inspired and therefore inerrant, but simply as a collection of Greek documents coming down to us out of the first century. March 2005 4 2 Fact 1 Fact 1: After his crucifixion, Jesus was buried by Joseph of Arimathea in a tomb. Highly significant because it means that the location of Jesus's tomb was known to Jew and Christian alike in Jerusalem. Evidence supporting this fact: 1. Jesus' burial is attested in the very old information handed on by Paul in his first letter to the church in Corinth, Greece. 2. The burial account is part of very old source material used by Mark in his gospel. 3. As a member of the Jewish high court that condemned Jesus, Joseph of Arimathea is unlikely to be a Christian invention.
    [Show full text]
  • On Kalam Argument
    An Argument for God Software Engineering Last updated Wednesday, December 02, 1998 THE KALAM COSMOLOGICAL ARGUMENT (Written not by Curtis Hrischuk but by some other fellow) What follows is a short presentation of the Kalam Cosmological Argument for the existence of God. The sources used in this presentation are documented according to current Modern Language Association standards. Consult the cited works of Craig for a more thorough statement and defense of the argument. The KCA has its roots in medieval Arabic philosophy and theology. The Arabic word "kalam" means "speech," but more broadly it means "natural theology" or "philosophical theism" (Craig, KALAM, 4). The distinctive feature of kalam-style cosmology is its stress on the impossibility of the actual infinite. Put simply, kalam arguments try to demonstrate (1) that the existence of an actual infinite (a concept from modern set theory to be discussed shortly) is impossible and (2) that even if it were possible, the universe itself is not actually infinite and hence must have had a beginning. The KCA has also been defended by Christian and Jewish philosophers. It is currently being defended by professional philosophers William Lane Craig and J. P. Moreland. The majority of what follows comes from Craig's defense of the argument, though I will use my own words and sometimes my own examples and comments. Here is an outline of the argument-- [1] The universe either had: [A] a beginning [B] or no beginning [2] If it had a beginning, the beginning was either: [A] caused [B] or uncaused [3] If it had a cause, the cause was either: [A] personal [B] or not personal The KCA works by supporting the [A] option of each premise and then using it in the following premise.
    [Show full text]
  • Evidence for the Resurrection of Jesus Notes from Discourse by Dr William Lane Craig Most Critics Regard As Historical the Basic Facts of Jesus Resurrection
    Evidence for the Resurrection of Jesus Notes from discourse by Dr William Lane Craig Most critics regard as historical the basic facts of Jesus resurrection 1. Jesus honorably buried in the tomb owned by Joseph of Arimethea a. Burial of Jesus attested to by various independent sources i. Independent sources mean much more probable to be historical than made up ii. Mentioned in old tradition quoted by Paul in 1 Cor 15.2-3 1. Sylized formula, non-Pauline. 2. Probably goes back to AD 36 when he spent two weeks with Peter and James in Jerusalem mentioned in Galatians 2. This would have been just 5 years removed from resurrection 3. Paul uses a source material used by Gospels. a. Although Gospels are not in sync with chronology of Jesus life events, they are very much n sync in describing The Passion week events. b. Burial events part of pre-Markan passion story that the gospels relied on to write their own narratives. iii. Joseph of Arimethea is unlikely to be a Christian invention 1. The jewish leaders had engineered a judicial murder of Jesus 2. So, unlikely that Christians would invent a member of the court that condemned Jesus who then. Honors Jesus by then giving him a proper burial instead of dispatching him like a common criminal. 3. No other competing burial story exists. If the burial by Joseph of Arimethea were false there would have been either competing stories or myths. 4. The burial of Jesus is one of the earliest attested facts about Jesus. 2.
    [Show full text]