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Some people have epic titles. I happen to be a fan of the title Bentham’s Bulldog, but it certainly doesn’t have the same awe inspiring title as William Lane Craig, who was called by Harris “the one Christian apologist who seems to have put the fear of God into many of my fellow atheists.”
William Lane Craig is a very good debater. He consistently runs circles around people like Hitchens and Harris. However, his arguments are unsuccessful and worth addressing. When he’s targeted on specific points by qualified thinkers, he often loses decisively. However, his debating prowess across broad topics makes him a difficult opponent. So consider this article an attempt to rid the fear of god from my fellow atheists, and defeat Craig’s arguments.
Craig consistently makes lots of arguments for theism. I’ll address them. Much of the inspiration for this post came from James Fodor and his book unreasonable faith, which I’d recommend you all read.
1 Good and evil
The first argument is the moral argument. He says
p1 If god does not exist objective moral values and duties do not exists.
P2 objective moral values and duties do exist.
Therefore, god exists.
Several issues with this.
First, Euthephro’s dilemma. The question arises: are things good because god decrees them or does God decree them because they’re good. If the former is true then God could decree that you should torture infants for no reason and it would be objectively moral to do so. If the latter is true then morality is independent of god.
Craig replies by saying morality is grounded in god’s character. However, this just raises the deeper question—is it good because it corresponds with God’s character or does it correspond to god’s character because it is good. If the former is true then God’s character could be pro infant torture and it would be objectively moral to torture infants and if the latter is true morality is outside of god.
Craig says that this is incoherent because God is necessary. A few worries with this.
1 This obviously requires further argument.
2 You can’t say that we can’t evaluate God being different and also hold that if God didn’t exist there would be no morality. If you think that God being different is incoherent, like asking about the properties about a square circle, then the same would apply to a world without God. Yet this entire argument is establishing what would be the case without god.
3 This raises the question of why God’s character is the way it is. This requires further explanation because his character grounding goodness means that goodness can’t ground his character. Thus, morality on this account is posited basically as a brute fact about God’s character.
A second objection is the following. Is objective morality metaphysically possible. If so, then it can exist without god. If not, God can’t cause it. They might say that it’s metaphysically possible only if God exists. However, metaphysical principles that are true in all possible worlds can’t be dependent on God, unless one thinks that logic requires God. Things like morality which are necessary can’t be grounded in some external cause.
Third, this seems to obviously misidentify what morality is. Morality has to have reason giving force. However, it’s not clear how theistic morality does. God’s character being anti child murder misidentifies why child murder is bad. If God disappeared the badness of child murder would not disappear. The theist has to say that the badness of brutally torturing children has nothing to do with harm to children and everything to do with God’s character being disapproving. This is not a plausible account of moral ontology.
Fourth, as the Kagan debate showed in his debate, atheists can have objective morality. Most philosophers are moral realists and atheists. Facts about the world can give us reasons. The fact that some act would cause brutal misery gives us a reason to not want it. Craig gives a few reasons this isn’t true.
First, he worries that on atheist we’re just animals and thus don’t matter. However, it’s not clear why animals don’t matter. On my view, animals do matter because they can suffer. We can suffer a lot so we matter a lot. Kagan exposed this brilliantly in the debate.
Second, he says that on atheism morality is produced by evolution, giving us no reason to think that it tracks truth. This same response can be given to theism to debunk believing in morality in the first place. However, there are plausible naturalistic reasons to identify moral truth. Much like reason allows us to know complex mathematical truths, it also allows us to know moral truth. Additionally, we have direct acquaintance with the badness of experience when we suffer. This allows us to generalize that principle and conclude that suffering is bad and happiness is good.
The project I’ve undertaken relating to utilitarianism allows us to have moral knowledge. Much like we can work out mathematical proofs, we can do the same thing for moral proofs. If all moral truths are consistent with a moral principle we can compare it based on its theoretical virtues to other theories. On atheism we can evolutionarily debunk certain moral theories, but keep other ones which withstand evolutionary scrutiny.
Third, he says that on atheism morality is a human convention. This is true only for anti realists. Moral realists like myself think that morality is objective and necessary, not just a convention.
Fourth, he says that other animals practice horrific practices like rape, so why think our morality is objective rather than just an evolutionary quirk. Well, we can reason and conclude that things are bad. Careful reflection leads to the conclusion that factory farms are bad and utilitarianism is true. Sharks don’t have morality, so we should not defer to their practices for our moral norms.
Second, Craig says atheism can’t account for moral duties. This is false, on atheism moral duties apply to us all. Holding people to moral duties makes things go best so we should do so.
Craig argues for this first by saying that on atheism we’re just animals and animals don’t have moral duties. However, the reason animals don’t have duties isn’t because they’re animals—it’s because they don’t have moral concepts. We similarly wouldn’t say that a small child or severely mentally disabled person has duties, because they can’t understand morality. If there was a non human that had the same moral concepts as humans we’d give them moral duties. Thus, what determines moral duties is whether an entity has moral concepts. Duties are instrumental, providing deterrence for bad things and encouraging good things. Animals don’t respond to these incentives so they don’t have duties. We, however, do.
Next Craig asks who the duties are owed to and where they come from. Duties exist like the principle of innocence until proven guilty. They’re useful heuristics that we decide upon as a society because they make things go best. Duties are owed to others who would potentially be harmed. They come ultimately from base moral concepts like the badness of pain and goodness of happiness.
Third, he says on atheism duties are just a social convention. This is false as long as we accept that we have objective reasons not to cause harm.
Fourth, Craig says that on atheism we have no free will which moots morality. He says that if we have no free will moral decisions are no different from a tree growing a branch. This is flawed in several ways.
First, lots of atheists believe in free will. It’s the majority view in philosophy, even among atheists.
Second, even without free will things can still matter. A tree growing a branch isn’t morally bad. However, a tree growing a branch through the heart of a child would be bad. It’s bad if it causes harm.
Though we don’t have moral responsibility in the ultimate sense, atheism can still account for the desirability of the notion of free will. Malaria is purely mechanistic, yet it is still bad. If passing laws and declaring malaria to be horrific could contain and deter malaria, as it can for humans, then we would pass laws and declare malaria horrific. The reason we don’t act like animals or malaria have moral responsibility is because they don’t respond to deterrence. If malaria could be deterred by a prison sentence, we would no doubt give it that prison sentence.
Whether we have free will just relates to the origins of our desires. We only do things if we desire to do them in the limited sense. The no free will view just says that cause of our desires relate to purely mechanistic processes. However, it’s not clear how the etymology of our thoughts undermines our free will.
Third, if God is omniscient he knows everything in advance and we thus have no free will.
Craig’s third contention is that atheism gives no account of moral accountability.
First, he says that if the universe will end in the heat death, nothing really matters. This is an obvious non sequitor, as Kagan pointed out. Suffering is bad even if time will eventually stop and the universe will one day die. It’s not clear why the end of the universe implicates morality any more than the beginning of the universe. You might think that Craig must have some intricate defense of this. However, as the Kagan debate showed, he does not.
Second, he asks why we should be moral on atheism. Well, we should be moral because we have a reason to be moral. Being moral just describes the things we should do. This question is like asking why should we do things we should do? It’s obvious nonsense.
The question of whether moral norms are weightier than practical norms is a tricky one, yet I think that Parfit in Reasons and Persons persuasively argues that they do. I don’t have time to lay out the argument here, but I think he’s right.
However, to the extent that your reason why people should act morally is because otherwise they’ll burn forever, that robs morality of its force. Any satisfactory reason to be moral has to explain why we should be moral even if it harms us, not just suppose that God tortures those who aren’t moral.
Overall, Craig’s moral arguments falls into two categories: claims that are obviously false and claims that undermine moral epistemology. The obviously false claims don’t matter because they are false. The claims that undermine moral epistemology are self defeating. If Craig argues that we can’t have moral knowledge on atheism, then that would mean that for one to hold that objective morality is real they’d already have to accept theism. If Craig thinks the atheist can’t have reliable moral beliefs, then that would undermine his claims that morality is objective, because the atheist could appeal to similar debunking considerations.
Craig just seems to ignore lots of plausible moral views. Those include
Constitutivism
Naturalist moral realism of the type espoused by Railton
Parfit style moral realism, relating to external normative reasons
Kantian moral realism, arguing that morality is about what we could will to be a universal law.
Ideal observer theory.
Moral Platonism.
Views that say morality is necessarily supervenient on mental states.
Rawlsian views about the veil of ignorance.
Kagan’s own view.
…
Absent surveying the entire moral landscape, one can’t confidently proclaim that all other moral views fail. Craig has not done that.
Two final points are worth making.
First, if Craig can’t give an account of why God’s character has certain features, then his accounts is moot. If he posits that it’s just a brute fact that God’s character is loving, then the atheist can just posit morality as a brute fact. Saying God did x is not a good account unless you have some reason to expect God to be particularly likely to do X. Yet he can’t give that because he thinks that X (morality in this case) is dependent on God.
Second, it seems like an atheist could give an account that Craig would be sympathetic to. They could ground morality in what God’s character would be like if he existed. This allows the atheist to account for morality, without believing that God actually exists. Indeed, this is basically ideal observer theory.
The moral argument is poor. Let’s move on to others.
2 A universe delicately balanced on the edge of oblivion
Craig’s next argument (there’s no clear order to these, it’s just the one I’m addressing second) is the following.
P1 The universe is finely tuned for life.
P2 Fine tuning is either explained by chance, design, or necessity
P3 It’s not explained by chance, design, or necessity
Therefore it’s explained by design
If it’s explained by design, God exists.
Therefore, God exists.
Let’s take these one by 1.
Premise 1 is suspect. It’s possible that with different physical constrains one would get very different life. Given that we have no idea the conditions under which life could exist, we have no reason to think that with different conditions there wouldn’t be very different forms of life.
Second, if the universe is infinitely large, as many models of physics suggest, the universe is not finely tuned for life. If the universe is infinitely large, anything that can happen under the laws of physics will. If you modified the cosmological constants a little bit, it’s not clear that this would fully rule out life. Perhaps our local universe is just a tiny blot in an infinite universe, the vast majority of which is bereft of life. It seems at least possible that some fantastic combination of particles could result in life, even given very different physical laws.
Both of these objections I think are decent, yet not decisive. Premise one still is decently plausible. However, the objection gain even more force conjunctively. An infinitely large universe would likely be able to generate very different forms of life, given that we have no idea the conditions under which life can arise.
Premise two is rather ambiguous. It’s unclear what falls under the category of chance or necessity. However, there are lots of ways to explain fine tuning apart from theism.
1 Perhaps there is a recurring universe with different laws over time. This would result in infinite universe runs, which would have an infinite number of life forms arise.
2 Perhaps there is a multi verse, as many of our best models of physics suggest. A multi verse would explain the appearance of fine tuning. Each universe may have a low chance of having life arise, but eventually life will necessarily arise.
3 Perhaps there’s some simpler physical law that necessitates the existence of complex structures. This can’t be ruled out a priori.
4 Maybe there’s some other explanation out there that is outside of our grasp but provides an adequate explanation. Much like at one point life was unexplainable, perhaps the explanation for fine tuning will turn out to be something simple and harmonious.
5 Perhaps there’s some evolutionary mechanism for universes. A few ways for this to be the case.
A Maybe there are some ways that beings can create universes, such that universes with more beings create more copies of the universe. This would work in much the way Darwinian evolution works.
B Maybe black holes create new universes, resulting in lots of universes. This also helpfully explains why the universe seems finely tuned for black holes, and why life is rare.
C Maybe something else that we can’t imagine.
6 Maybe there’s some deistic entity that finely tunes the universe and does nothing else.
7 Perhaps, as David Lewis suggests, modal realism is true, and everything that is true in some possible worlds actually exists. On this account, possible worlds are real, not just philosophical constructs. This would necessitate us existing. It also has a prior probability similar to God, given that it generates complexity from a simple process.
These hypothesis are better than the God hypothesis for a few reasons.
First, it’s far from clear that God needs to finely tune the universe. He could just make a universe that’s not finely tuned. Thus, these theories provide better explanations.
Second, these theories explain fine tuning better. If god exists the odds that the universe would be finely tuned in exactly the way that it is are very low. However, on modal realism, multiverse theories, and many others, the odds of this universe existing, given all its complex contours, are exactly 100%. Infinite universes make every universe that’s possible actually existent.
Third, these theories explain why the universe is not finely tuned enough. If one was designing a house, they wouldn’t make 99.999999999999% of the house lethal to the residents. They wouldn’t lease malaria on the residents either. They would probably have there be residents in most of the house, rather than in just a tiny segment of it.
Craig gives a few objections to this. In his post, he argues
“Moreover, while we have no evidence of the existence of multiple universes, we do have independent reasons for believing in the existence of an ultramundane designer of the universe, namely, the other arguments for the existence of God, which I have defended elsewhere.”
If, as I do, you’re inclined to think that we have better reasons for believing god does not exist than for believing that God does exist, then you would no doubt think that multiple universes, even without evidence, are more probable than God. Additionally, multiple worlds are often posited by physicists, for example in the Many Worlds Interpretation.
Additionally, it’s far from clear that we have no reason to think that the other theories are true. In a Bayesian sense, A is evidence for B if the Probability of A given B is higher than the probability of A given not B. Fine tuning is evidence for the multiverse because the probability of fine tuning is higher if there is a multi verse than if there is not.
Additionally, David Lewis argues that we have independent reasons to accept modal realism. While I’m not convinced, it’s inaccurate to say we have no evidence.
Craig next says
“He is unaware of the potentially lethal objections to the multiple universe hypothesis that have been lodged by physicists like Roger Penrose of Oxford University (The Road to Reality [New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005], pp. 762-5). Simply stated, if our universe is but one member of an infinite world ensemble of randomly varying universes, then it is overwhelmingly more probable that we should be observing a much different universe than that which we in fact observe.
Penrose calculates that the odds of our universe’s low entropy condition obtaining by chance alone are on the order of 1:1010(123), an inconceivable number. The odds of our solar system’s being formed instantly by random collisions of particles is, on the other hand, about 1:1010(60), a vast number, but inconceivably smaller than 1010(123). Penrose calls it “chicken feed” by comparison! So if our universe were but one member of a collection of randomly ordered worlds, then it is vastly more probable that we should be observing a much smaller universe. Observable universes like that are much more plenteous in the ensemble of universes than worlds like ours and, therefore, ought to be observed by us if the universe were but one random member of an ensemble of worlds.”
This runs into several issues.
1 Penrose is but one physicist. The view he espouses here is not the consensus view—Craig presents no evidence that it’s even a majority view. Many others like Caroll seem to disagree with this.
2 Penrose is an agnostic. He believes in a recurring universe to account for fine tuning. He has said "I'm not a believer myself. I don't believe in established religions of any kind." He has literally debated Craig about fine tuning. Using him to disprove fine tuning is quite disingenuous.
3 Anthropics is somewhat confusing but whatever way you configure it, Craig’s view runs afoul of it. If you think that we can include the universe as background information, then it’s not something that has to be accounted for. If we didn’t exist because there was no fine tuning, no one would be complaining. However, if it’s data to be explained, then regardless of what the probability is of each universe having fine tuning of the type of our universe, a multiverse is a better explanation. On modal realism or an expansive multiverse theory, the universe existing exactly as it does is certain, 100%. On theism, the odds are very low. If I won the lottery, we would have no reason to suspect foul play, even though the odds of me in particular winning the lottery are low. This is because the odds of someone winning the lottery are very high, and I am a reference class very similar to other people.
Additionally, if there are lots of different ways of generating a universe, each individual universe will have lots of very rare features. If one had infinite children, it would be no surprise for a person to find themselves as one of the infinite children.
4 If Craig is going to use the low portion of life supporting universes that are of our size as evidence against the multiverse, then one can raise similar (And in fact identical in some cases) objections to theism. Here are several.
A Why would God make the universe the size that it is. God could make universes of any sizes. The odds he’d choose this size in particular are incredibly low.
B Why would God make the particular laws of physics that he does. This seems unlikely.
C Why would God make the particular number of arrangements of particles be what he does. We have no reason a priori to expect there to be fundamental building blocks, made up of electrons, quarks, and neutrons. This seems improbable.
D Why would God make quantum mechanics the way that he does?
E Why would God make the number of elements that he does.
5 There are lots of models where this is not a problem. Caroll, argues against the improbability of the starting entropy being what it was. Penrose admits in his book that his view is not shared across the board. This is just Craig cherry-picking random physicists who agree with him on specific points.
Craig next says “Or again, if our universe is but one random member of a world ensemble, then we ought to be observing highly extraordinary events, like horses’ popping into and out of existence by random collisions, or perpetual motion machines, since these are vastly more probable than all of nature’s constants and quantities falling by chance into the virtually infinitesimal life-permitting range. Since we do not have such observations, that fact strongly disconfirms the multiple universe hypothesis. Penrose concludes that multiple universe explanations are so “impotent” that it is actually “misconceived” to appeal to them to explain the special features of the universe.”
The objections to the previous arguments apply. Why the hell would God ruin our fun and prohibit perpetual motion machines. On many multi verse models a world without perpetual motion machines is certain. On the God hypothesis it’s unlikely. Disorderly universes might be ruled out by the starting conditions that generate multiverses. They also might be less likely to support life.
One last point is that even if a designer finely tuned life, Craig’s God wouldn’t be the rational inference from that. An amorphous deistic entities, or even fairies are more probable. As James Fodor has pointed out, fairies seem much more likely given that they explain the chaos of the universe. Those are caused by the fairies playing tricks on us. They also explain inconsistent revelation, hiddenness, evil, fine tuning, the resurrection evidence (Fairies were playing tricks), contingency, cosmology, religions differing across geography, the universe being mostly hostile, mathematics being relevant, and lots of historical hoaxes.
3 Why the universe began to exist
Craig’s next argument is the Kalam cosmological argument. As he says
“1. Whatever begins to exist has a cause of its beginning.
2. The universe began to exist.
3. Therefore, the universe has a cause of its beginning.”
Craig infers go from this so we can add in a fourth implicit premise.
4 If the universe has a cause, God exists.
Therefore, God exists.
Let’s examine the premises.
Craig supports the first premise in three ways.
“1. Something cannot come from nothing. To claim that something can come into being from nothing is worse than magic. When a magician pulls a rabbit out of a hat, at least you’ve got the magician, not to mention the hat! But if you deny premise (1'), you’ve got to think that the whole universe just appeared at some point in the past for no reason whatsoever. But nobody sincerely believes that things, say, a horse or an Eskimo village, can just pop into being without a cause.”
This runs into lots of problems.
First, it’s just an assertion. There is no argument given for it here beyond it just seeming to be the case.
Second, Craig believes that some things don’t have a cause. He thinks God doesn’t have a cause. Thus, Craig can’t appeal to things not coming from nothing because he thinks some things do. If we agree that some things do, the question is merely whether the things that come from nothing have to be the types of things that don’t begin to exist. If you told me that something came from nothing, I don’t know why a priori we’d expect it to have never begun to exist. This is especially true if the thing that came into existence uncaused contained time within it. There was no time before time.
Craig might object that we all accept lots of things don’t have causes, like mathematics, morality, and modal truths. These things also never begun to exist. However, these things also have several other characteristics that we could use to generalize inductively. These things all are
A Causally inert.
B True in all possible worlds.
C Non omnipotent.
D Not beings.
Thus the absurdity is really a question of whether it’s more plausible that God just exists uncaused or that spacetime just exists uncaused. We both agree that something is uncaused, we just disagree on the details. One could make a similar skeptical claim about theism with the following parody argument.
“On Craig’s view, causally efficacious things can exist totally uncaused. However, this is implausible.
1 It’s a metaphysical first principle that from nothing nothing comes. Causally efficacious things can’t come from nothing.
2 It they could, why don’t Beethoven, Rootbear, and boats just exist uncaused. Moreover, why aren’t there lots of timeless things that just exist all around, like planets, and goats.
3 Inductively, everything we’ve seen that’s causally efficacious has a cause.”
Third, this is misleading. When Craig says “Comes from nothing,” this is badly misleading. A better way of phrasing it, as Clifton points out, is that it didn’t come from anything. It doesn’t seem absurd for spacetime not to come from anything, but just to be fundamental. It’s not like there was nothing for a while, and then out of the blue a universe just popped into being. There was just the universe which began to exist. Nothing is not a thing, it’s an absence of a thing.
Fourth, Craig’s view runs into problems based on theories of causality. Craig thinks that God is necessary, he can’t not exist. However, if God is necessary he can’t cause things on the most popular view of causality, the counterfactual view. On this view, A causes B if B happens if A happens, but B doesn’t happen if A doesn’t happen. This is just a rough sketch, modern versions are more complicated. However, if God is necessary then he can’t not exist. Causality relies on counterfactuals relating to things not existing. This is impossible for beings that are necessary.
Additionally, we might hold that causality is a relationship between spatiotemporal events. If we hold this, then God can’t cause things if he’s timeless, spaceless, and immaterial.
Craig’s second argument is that
“2. If something can come into being from nothing, then it becomes inexplicable why just anything or everything doesn’t come into being from nothing. Think about it: why don’t bicycles and Beethoven and root beer just pop into being from nothing? Why is it only universes that can come into being from nothing? What makes nothingness so discriminatory? There can’t be anything about nothingness that favors universes, for nothingness doesn’t have any properties. Nor can anything constrain nothingness, for there isn’t anything to be constrained!”
Several reasons.
1 The things wouldn’t pop into being from nothing. The universe isn’t nothing. It is something. All plausible theories hold that things can’t just pop into existence uncaused in the middle of something. However, this doesn’t require holding that the universe didn’t have a cause
2 Causality might be a relationship between spatiotemporal events. If true, this explains why things don’t just pop into being.
3 There are lots of previously explained inductive inferences parallel to the one Craig could make, that would rule out God. Here are several
A Everything which begins to exist is not caused by something omnipotent. This is supported by all of our experience, metaphysically, and induction.
B Everything which begins to exist has a physical cause. Same thing again.
C Everything which begins to exist is not caused by Omniscient beings.
D Everything that’s causally efficacious is contingent.
It’s not clear how Craig would privilege his explanation.
4 If modal realism is true then everything which begins to exist wouldn’t have a cause. Everything that could exist does in fact exist. Thus, the universe has to exist, as does everything else.
5 If we have free will or if there’s quantum randomness then some things begin to exist without causes. If determinism is false then our thoughts don’t have ultimate causes.
Craig’s third argument is “3. Common experience and scientific evidence confirm the truth of premise 1'. The science of cosmogeny is based on the assumption that there are causal conditions for the origin of the unuiverse. So it’s hard to understand how anyone committed to modern science could deny that (1') is more plausibly true than false.”
This just shows that events within spacetime have causes. It does not mean that spacetime itself has a cause. All humans have mothers but humanity itself does not have a mother. The objections to the previous arguments all still apply here.
So premise 1 is false. The others are too.
Moving on to premise 2 Craig says the universe began to exist. This is far from certain.
1 It’s not clear that the concept of beginning to exist makes sense when we’re talking about time itself. For something to begin to exist that means that there was a time when it didn’t and then it did. This makes no sense in the concept of time.
2 According to the B theory of time, time is a 4 dimensional block, with differences in time being like differences in space. If this is true, nothing begins to exist. I don’t begin to exist, rather I’m a 4 dimensional object that only exists at certain values for time. If the B theory of time is correct, Craig has admitted the Kalam fails. The B theory of time is the consensus view, supported by many, especially philosophers of time. Craig’s view thus rests on a very controversial philosophical premise that’s the minority view in physics—and this is just for one of his premises.
3 There could be an actual infinity of past events. I haven’t the time nor the desire to litigate all the infinity paradoxes, but lots of physicists think they’re possible. Craig has resorted to just saying that they seem very weird and counterintuitive, but he has admitted he can’t prove a contradiction. Additionally, Craig believes in an infinite future, so there’s no reason the past cannot also be infinite. This requires a controversial form of temporal asymmetry that can’t withstand scrutiny.
The third premise of Craig’s argument is that the universe had a cause. This follows from the previous premises. However, I argue those premises are false.
Premise 4 is that if the universe had a cause that cause is personal. He argues that the only thing that is timeless, spaceless, immaterial, and beginningless would have to be either an abstract object or mind. However, abstract objects are inert, so it must be an entity. This is false. Fodor gave a list of candidates, many of these come from Fodor.
A A metaphysical law that says that everything that can happen will (modal realism).
B A law that generates material things.
C Some vast space governed by certain laws, from which times emerges.
D Dao.
E Some basic informational structure.
F A sorting hat esque non agent that causes things.
G A timeless computer program that generates things including time.
H Some rather powerful but not omnipotent God.
Indeed, Craig’s proposal does uniquely poorly here because God’s thoughts are events that begin to exist, and thus must be temporal.
Thus, all of Craig’s premises fail.
4 Contingency
Craig defends this here.
This argument has five premises.
1. Everything that exists has an explanation of its existence, either in the necessity of its own nature or in an external cause.
2. If the universe has an explanation of its existence, that explanation is God.
3. The universe exists.
4. Therefore, the universe has an explanation of its existence (from 1, 3).
5. Therefore, the explanation of the universe’s existence is God (from 2, 4).
Premise one seems false. Something that is necessary couldn’t not be the case. The metaphysical grounding of everything probably isn’t that for a few reasons.
1 If something is necessary it would be possible to deduce its existence, at least in theory, from first principles. If the universe relies on something necessary, which would necessarily cause the universe, then it would be theoretically possible to deduce all of the laws of physics a priori. This is deeply implausible. A priori reasoning only takes one so far. It allows one to know things about math but not about which math is related to the laws of physics.
2 All the other necessary things are causally inert. The number two doesn’t cause anything. God, allegedly does. We have good reason to think that necessary things can’t be causally efficacious because of the previous analysis of causality. For something to cause something else it has to be possible for it not to exist.
3 Other necessary things are true in all possible worlds. However, it seems like we could imagine a world without God, where there is nothing, making God not existent in all possible worlds.
Craig provides a few supporting arguments. They all fail. First he says “This claim, when you reflect on it, seems very plausibly true. Imagine that you’re hiking through the woods and come across a translucent ball lying on the forest floor. You’d naturally wonder how it came to be there. If one of your hiking partners said to you, “Don’t worry about it! There isn’t any explanation of its existence!”, you’d either think he was crazy or figure that he just wanted you to keep moving. No one would take seriously the suggestion that the ball existed there with literally no explanation.”
This just shows that events in spacetime are caused. However, there are no events in spacetime that we see are necessary. The justified inference is all or nearly all events within spacetime are caused, not that everything is either caused or necessary.
Second, Craig says “It might be said that while premise 1 is true of everything in the universe, it is not true of the universe itself. Everything in the universe has an explanation, but the universe itself has no explanation. Such a response commits what has been aptly called “the taxicab fallacy.” For as the nineteenth-century atheist philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer quipped, premise 1 can’t be dismissed like a taxi once you’ve arrived at your desired destination! You can’t say that everything has an explanation of its existence and then suddenly exempt the universe. It would be arbitrary to claim that the universe is the exception to the rule. (God is not an exception to premise 1: see below at 1.4.) Our illustration of the ball in the woods shows that merely increasing the size of the object to be explained, even until it becomes the universe itself, does nothing to remove the need for some explanation of its existence.”
This is not the taxicab fallacy because we have principled reasons for expecting that the things that apply temporally don’t apply atemporally. Craig’s argument could equally be used to justify the claim that everything has a cause. This is, however, false.
Craig replies, saying, “One might try to justify making the universe an exception to premise 1. Some philosophers have claimed that it’s impossible for the universe to have an explanation of its existence. For the explanation of the universe would have to be some prior state of affairs in - 4 - which the universe did not yet exist. But that would be nothingness, and nothingness can’t be the explanation of anything. So the universe must just exist inexplicably. This line of reasoning is, however, obviously fallacious because it assumes that the universe is all there is, that if there were no universe there would be nothing. In other words, the objection assumes that atheism is true. The objector is thus begging the question in favor of atheism, arguing in a circle. The theist will agree that the explanation of the universe must be some (explanatorily) prior state of affairs in which the universe did not exist. But that state of affairs is God and his will, not nothingness.”
This is false. The objector just assumes that the things that apply within the universe don’t apply outside the universe. We have no reason to generalize from things within the universe to things outside the universe. The atheist can hold that there was something outside the universe that causes space and time, and that this thing was just a brute fact.
Thus, I would accept that some things are just brutely contingent. The initial things may have no greater explanation of their existence. They just happened to exist. They didn’t have to, it’s quite lucky that they did, but ultimately it’s contingent. If this is true then Craig’s first premise is a false dichotomy.
The second premise is “If the universe has an explanation of its existence, that explanation is God.”
This is defended in the following way. “What, then, about premise 2? Is it more plausibly true than false? Although premise 2 might appear at first to be controversial, what’s really awkward for the atheist is that premise 2 is logically equivalent to the typical atheist response to the contingency argument. (Two statements are logically equivalent if it’s impossible for one to be true and the other one false. They stand or fall together.) So what does the atheist almost always say in response to the contingency argument? He typically asserts the following: A. If atheism is true, the universe has no explanation of its existence. Since, on atheism, the universe is the ultimate reality, it just exists as a brute fact. But that is logically equivalent to saying this: B. If the universe has an explanation of its existence, then atheism is not true.”
Lots of atheists say that the universe has no cause. However, this is not an entailment of atheism. One could perfectly consistently hold the universe is necessary. Craig gives literally no argument for why the universe or the fundamental laws that cause all of space and time can’t be necessary other than that atheists usually say that’s true.
Craig continues, writing “Besides that, premise 2 is very plausible in its own right. For think of what the universe is: all of space-time reality, including all matter and energy. It follows that if the universe has a cause of its existence, that cause must be a non-physical, immaterial being beyond space and time. Now there are only two sorts of things that could fit that description: either an abstract object like a number or else an unembodied mind. But abstract objects can’t cause anything. That’s part of what it means to be abstract. The number seven, for example, can’t cause any effects. So if there is a cause of the universe, it must be a transcendent, unembodied Mind, which is what Christians understand God to be.”
Several problems.
1 We have no reason to think there can be immaterial minds or that they can be necessary.
2 The previous arguments in response to P4 of the kalam are also applicable here.
3 There could be basic metaphysical laws that cause it.
4 Minds can’t make choices sans time.
Mr. Bulldog.
You mention that morality would not shift if God’s character was shifted. However I would imagine that God’s character is fixed and would not “shift” in the manner you describe. Why is it inappropriate to use God’s character as the foundation for morality then?