If you ask me about my thoughts on the origin of the universe, I'll have little to tell you. I do not know the initial conditions of the universe. We can speculate (and I can talk about some ideas later). Did the universe have a beginning or did it come to exist at some point in the past? I don’t know. And I really have little intuition on this matter. But apparently you do! And you think that the fact the universe exists (or that the universe began to exist) is reason to believe in God. You have these beliefs. That’s fine. What you need to do is tell me why you believe this. Why do you think this is reason to believe in God? And more importantly, you need to explain why I should believe this as well. You have failed in this task. Therefore, I did this for you. In my last post, I presented William Lane Craig’s kalam argument: Whatever begins to exist has a cause. The universe began to exist. Therefore, the universe has a cause. Craig gave two arguments in support of his second premise that the universe began to exist. I then presented Morriston’s case for the failure of these arguments in favor of this premise. We then questioned the first premise. Then finally, I accepted Craig’s conclusion for the sake of argument to show that even if Craig is correct, he fails to establish God as a creator. This was a long post and I’m sorry for that. But I felt that this was necessary since this was a very detailed argument. In the future, I will try to have shorter postings.
In any case, this is how you replied: “I have told you this before in emails, in conversations, on Facebook, etc., that as a Christian, I do not necessarily agree with everything that another Christian says.”
So you don’t accept Craig’s argument? I was not asking if you agree with all of Craig’s arguments. I only gave you one-- the kalam argument. I did send you Craig’s argument before I posted to see if you agreed with him. You said yes. If you don’t agree with Craig, fine. Give me a different argument.
I will dismiss the rest of your last post. Not only did you completely ignore Morriston’s critique of Craig, but you misunderstood Quentin Smith’s reply as well. He never said it was nonsensical to talk about causes. He made a statement about abstract objects. What he said was that abstract objects cannot have causal relations with other objects. And therefore, it is nonsensical to talk about abstract objects having causal relations with other objects. Also, you also asked, “If there is no t=0, then why did you describe time as having a first instant?” I never said that time had a first instant. Smith argued the opposite. If the universe did begin to exist then there is no point in time t=0 and therefore there is no first instant. But don't worry about any of this if you don't accept Craig's argument. These are criticisms of Craig.
