William Lane Craig: More of My Thoughts and Comments Regarding the First Cause Argument.

Theist William Lane Craig argues that you can't have a temporally infinite Universe since there is no way one can get to today (i.e. - now; the present) starting from an infinite time ago since that would also require taking an infinite amount of time to get from there to here. Therefore, Craig argues that there must have been a First Cause, and no cigar for guessing what that First Cause was caused by - you got it - God did it! Unfortunately for Craig, this is nonsense since the exact same argument would have to apply to God as it does to the Universe. It would have to take God an infinite amount of time to get around to His causing the First Cause. Which also brings up the question was there an earlier First, First Cause that caused God and so on causing an infinite regress. As Craig himself acknowledges, you can't create an absolute something from an absolute nothing so therefore God would have had to have worked with pre-existing, pre-Universe stuff in creating the stuff of the Universe. Since the immaterial has no sway over the material, God too is material (which Biblical passages make quite clear). So if Craig's First Cause argument is valid, he must also apply it to God which of course he won't do. God to him is eternal, infinite, uncaused, etc.

Further, if God exists solely outside of space and time, eternally in an a-spatial and a-temporal manner, as many theists claim (thus explaining the lack of any substantial physical evidence for God's actual existence), then anything God creates also exists outside of space and time which makes absolutely no logical sense at all.

Those that say that this or that sequence cannot go on (backwards in time) forever and therefore there must have been a start to any sequence - a First Cause in other words - can somehow never quite seem to be able to pin down a date, or even a very broad time frame in the most general sense for when this alleged First Cause was required. That's paramount to saying that a sequence in fact can go back forever since no date can ever be arrived at or established. No matter how far back you go without a First Cause having been established, you can always go back even farther. How far back in your causality chain do you need to go back before you HAVE to come across the First Cause? Philosophers and especially theists who insist there must have been a First Cause cannot answer that question - probably because there is no answer because there was no First Cause!

In any event, we often deal with finite blocks bookended by infinite ends, so the idea that there can both be a present, a now, a today as well as an infinite temporal Universe is to my way of thinking logically consistent. For example...

*The Earth is unbounded (i.e. - infinite go-round surface) yet you can finite travel from L.A. to N.Y.

*A Mobius Strip is unbounded (i.e. - infinite go-round surface) yet you can find the distance between two dots on the surface.

*The Universe might be spatially infinite from 'side' to 'side' yet Earth exists somewhere in the 'middle' or at least in-between.

*A sequence of numbers goes from minus infinity to plus infinity, yet you can still wrap your head around the finite sequence -1, -2, 0, +1, +2.

*Start counting, say ... -5, -4, -3, -2, -1, 0, +1, +2, +3, +4, +5, +6, +7, ... and so on and so on and so on. The last 'digit' on either side is minus infinity and plus infinity but every number you count off is counted off in the 'now'. So 'now' and infinity have to coexist.

*So the Universe might be temporally infinite yet you still have the 21st Century existing an infinite amount of time after the infinite 'beginning' as you well know.

*If you are going to apply a 'First Cause' principle or argument to the creation of the Universe then logically you have got to apply that 'First Cause' principle or argument to that which caused the 'First Cause'. Just saying that God is uncaused rolls off of the tongue very easily - now prove it! If I ask you to prove to me that the Moon goes around the Earth; that salt water is a mixture; that beheading results in death; that cows eat grass; that Paris (France) is an actual geographical place; that Cleopatra was the Queen of the Nile; and that George Washington was the first president of the USA, you wouldn't be overly challenged. But you can't prove the existence of God (or any other deity).