William Lane Craig

‘What place, then, for a creator?': Hawking on God and Creation

Hawking ne fait pas la distinction necessaire entre creation originaire et creation continue, et identifie le temps imaginaire avec le temps physique. Son argument anti-creationniste est donc serieusement compromis

God, time, and eternity

God is the ‘high and lofty One who inhabits eternity’, declared the prophet Isaiah, but exactly how we are to understand the notion of eternity is not clear. Traditionally, the Christian church has taken it to mean ‘timeless’. But in his classic work on this subject, Oscar Cullmann has contended that the New Testament ‘does not make a philosophical, qualitative distinction between time and eternity. It knows linear time only…’ He maintains, ‘Primitive Christianity knows nothing of a timeless God. The “eternal” God is he who was in the beginning, is now, and will be in all the future, “who is, who was, and who will be” (Rev. 1:4).’ As a result, Gods eternity, says Cullmann, must be expressed in terms of endless time.

The Ultimate Question of Origins: God and the Beginning of the Universe

Both cosmology and philosophy trace their roots to the wonder felt by the ancient Greeks as they contemplated the universe. The ultimate question remains why the universe exists rather than nothing. This question led Leibniz to postulate the existence of a metaphysically necessary being, which he identified as God. Leibnizs critics, however, disputed this identification, claiming that the space-time universe itself may be the metaphysically necessary being. The discovery during this century that the universe began to exist, however, calls into question the universes status as metaphysically necessary, since any necessary being must be eternal in its existence. Although various cosmogonic models claiming to avert the beginning of the universe predicted by the standard model have been and continue to be offered, no model involving an eternal universe has proved as plausible as the standard model. Unless we are to assert that the universe simply sprang into being uncaused out of nothing, we are thus led to Leibnizs conclusion. Several objections to inferring a supernatural cause of the origin of the universe are considered and found to be unsound.

Creation and conservation once more

God is conceived in the Western theistic tradition to be both the Creator and Conservor of the universe. These two roles were typically classed as different aspects of creation, originating creation and continuing creation. On pain of incoherence, however, conservation needs to be distinguished from creation. Contrary to current analyses (such as Philip Quinns), creation should be explicated in terms of Gods bringing something into being, while conservation should be understood in terms of Gods preservation of something over an interval of time. The crucial difference is that while conservation presupposes an object of the divine action, creation does not. Such a construal has significant implications for a tensed theory of time.

Talbott's Universalism

In a pair of recently published articles, Thomas Talbott has presented a carefully constructed case for universalism. He contends that from the principle (P 3 ) Necessarily, God loves a person S (with a perfect form of love) at a time t only if Gods intention at t and every moment subsequent to t is to do everything within his power to promote supremely worthwhile happiness in S , provided that the actions taken are consistent with his promoting the same kind of happiness in all others whom he also loves and the propositions 1. God exists 2. God is both omniscient and omnipotent 3. God loves every created person 4. God will irrevocably reject some persons and subject those persons to ever-lasting punishment a contradiction may be deduced. For given (P 3 ), (3) entails 5. For any created person S and time t subsequent to the creation of S , Gods intention at t is to do all that he properly can to promote supremely worthwhile happiness in S .

God, Creation and Mr Davies

P. C. W. Davies in his recent, popular God and the New Physics ([19831, p. ix). This is a bold claim in a day in which the conventional wisdom dictates that theology and science are two mutually irrelevant disciplines, whose respective findings have no implications for those of the other. As one who has tried to cross the line from the other direction, I can only agree with Davies, though perhaps for different reasons, that no serious religious thinker can ignore the tenets of the so-called new physics. The philosopher of religion who is a theist ought to adhere to a synoptic world view which embraces the universe as the object of empirical study, and he should not be surprised if theological doctrines like creatio ex nihilo come to be confirmed by the empirical sciences. By the same token, the scientist, at least insofar as he chooses to reflect philosophically, ought to be open to the metaphysical implications of his theories and not to wear the blinders of a narrow scientism which disdains such considerations. The risk of engaging in such interdisciplinary synthesis is, of course, making blunders in the field with which one is less familiar. Davies often seeks to correct the theologians concept of God and the universe on the basis of current physical theory. Such admonitions are welcome; but parity requires that when Davies himself enters upon the province of the philosopher of religion then he, too, must be patient of correction. Now whatever other merits Daviess book may have, it seems to me that correction is in order with regard, at least, to his discussion of the cosmological argument for a temporal first cause of the universe. For Daviess critique of that argument seems to be based at several points on misunderstandings which appear to vitiate his objections.

THEISM AND THE ORIGIN OF THE UNIVERSE

In our book «Theism, atheism and big bang cosmology» (1993), Q. Smith and I debated the implications of contemporary cosmology for the existence of a creator of the universe. In this paper I hope to extend this debate by picking up where we left off and pressing certain points further, concerning quantum cosmology and the beginning of the universe, the creation and the nature of time

God and the Beginning of Time

Creatio ex nihilo is a biblical doctrine affirmed by the Church and confirmed by modern cosmology. But if the universe began to exist, what shall we say of God’s temporal status sans the world? The Christian doctrine of creation requires that the actual world includes a state of affairs which consists of God existing alone without any created realm, a doctrine remarkably consonant with the worldview of contemporary cosmology, which posits an absolute beginning of physical space and time. Is God sans the universe timeless or temporal?

Creatio Ex Nihilo

If God exists in time, then God, since He can neither begin nor cease to exist, exists omnitemporally, that is to say, He exists at every time which ever exists. But is God’s duration infinite? Has He arrived at the present moment only after enduring through an infinite succession of prior moments? If the universe is sempiternal, that is, infinite in its past as well as future duration, then the answer must be in the affirmative. But suppose that the universe began to exist. Would time in that case also have a beginning? Or would there be an infinite duration prior to the inception of the world? To set the stage for a consideration of these questions, we turn to a discussion of the traditional doctrine of creatio ex nihilo.

On Non-Singular Space-times and the Beginning of the Universe

The most widely discussed argument for the existence of God is the so-called kalam cosmological argument, which originated in attempts on the part of certain ancient philosophers to rebut Aristotle’s doctrine of the past eternity of the universe.1 The argument assumed major importance in medieval Islamic theology, from which its name derives. In his Kitab al-Iqtisad the medieval Muslim theologian al-Ghazali presented the following simple syllogism in support of the existence of a Creator: ‘Every being which begins has a cause for its beginning; now the world is a being which begins; therefore, it possesses a cause for its beginning’ (1962, pp. 15–16). In defence of the second premise, Ghazali offered various philosophical arguments to show the impossibility of an infinite regress of temporal phenomena and, hence, of an infinite past. The limit at which the finite past terminates Ghazali calls ‘the Eternal’ (1963, p. 32), which he evidently takes to be a state of timelessness. Given the truth of the first premise, the finite past must, therefore, ‘stop at an eternal being from which the first temporal being should have originated’ (1963, p. 33).