William Lane Craig's pet argument for the existence of God is the Kalam Cosmological Argument which is outlined like this:
1) Everything that begins to exist has a cause.
2) The universe began to exist.
3) Therefore, the universe has a cause.
Craig, in his book "Reasonable Faith" and in various debates, defends premise 1 philosophically by attempting to point out some "absurdities" which would arise as a result of an actualized infinity, particularly that of an actual infinite past.
Now here's something interesting to note. If Craig's contention about the impossibility of "actualized" infinities is true, this literally kills his God.
My argument goes like this:
1) If Craig's philosophical argument against actual infinities is true, then God cannot actualize an infinite number of states.
2) But a decision is an actualized mental state.
3) Therefore, if Craig's philosophical argument against actual infinities is true, then God cannot make an infinite number of decisions.
4) Thus, (if Craig is correct) God can only make a finite number of decisions, if any.
5) In an eternity, the finitude of decisions leads to a God which either 1) ceases to exist, or 2) stops making decisions, as an ordered finite set (ordered however we so choose) necessarily has a last element.
Therefore, if Craig is correct, Craig's God MUST 'inescapably' either perish or become a metaphysical zombie.
Any thoughts?
1) Everything that begins to exist has a cause.
2) The universe began to exist.
3) Therefore, the universe has a cause.
Craig, in his book "Reasonable Faith" and in various debates, defends premise 1 philosophically by attempting to point out some "absurdities" which would arise as a result of an actualized infinity, particularly that of an actual infinite past.
Now here's something interesting to note. If Craig's contention about the impossibility of "actualized" infinities is true, this literally kills his God.
My argument goes like this:
1) If Craig's philosophical argument against actual infinities is true, then God cannot actualize an infinite number of states.
2) But a decision is an actualized mental state.
3) Therefore, if Craig's philosophical argument against actual infinities is true, then God cannot make an infinite number of decisions.
4) Thus, (if Craig is correct) God can only make a finite number of decisions, if any.
5) In an eternity, the finitude of decisions leads to a God which either 1) ceases to exist, or 2) stops making decisions, as an ordered finite set (ordered however we so choose) necessarily has a last element.
Therefore, if Craig is correct, Craig's God MUST 'inescapably' either perish or become a metaphysical zombie.
Any thoughts?
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2 comments:
I submitted this to a few people at Debunking Christianity and they provided some very valuable feedback concerning what might be said as an objection to this argument (that it might conflate between an actual and possible infinity, in addition to other things). I am working through the revisions as we speak to see if this argument holds through.
After much thought on this issue, I think that the argument as-formulated is incorrect. Some very helpful recourse from the men at Debunking Christianity helped me realize that the way that this argument could be debunked is that it conflates the distinction between an actual and a potential infinity in that though God cannot make an actual infinite number of thoughts/actions, he can make a finite (but indefinite) number of them by doing them one after the other. The set of completed actions is always incomplete.
However, this realization does not completely avoid the problem, as if the set of past, completed actions is finite (indefinite or not), then there must have been a first action. This may or may not be in a temporal sense, but in general, one can consider removing elements of this set one-by-one until there are none left. Because this set is finite, there must have (if action is consecutively additive as WLC would seem to agree), then there must have been a point at which God had a first action.
But then, what moved God to take his first action? There was nothing moving except God himself. But surely God cannot cause himself to be moved from inaction to action as that would presuppose that he was already in action to move himself. So then either God was always moving or God has never moved. But God, as we understood above, cannot have always been moving if his set of past, completed actions is finite (indefinite or not), as that would make his set of past events actual (definite) and infinite.
Another way, perhaps less rigorously, is taking the idea that ideas exist in the world, as WLC presumably agrees. That is, ideas are abstract objects. (Materialists disagree here, but I'm not concerned at the moment.) If ideas exist, then any idea that God has exists and has an existence in the world. But everything that begins to exist has a cause for its existence (from WLC). The cause of the first idea, if it indeed has a cause, must have been God as there was nothing else to be causing anything. But then God's beginning to think and have ideas would have had to been somehow sprung out of the nature of God. But the nature of something is abstract. It cannot cause anything to exist. Therefore, the first idea could not have been caused by the nature of God.
But, if the first idea wasn't created by the nature of God, then it surely wasn't caused by anything else as there would have been nothing else to do any causing. Thus, if everything that begins to exist has a cause, the first idea never began to exist. Thus there was no first idea of God. But if there is no first idea of God, then God's sequence of past actions must either be empty or an actual infinity. But, according to WLC, actual infinities do not exist in the real world. Thus a God with a sequence of an actual infinite number of past actions does not exist in reality. Thus, if God exists, God must have an empty set of past actions. Thus, making the theistic God rather useless.
(These ideas obviously need to be made more precise, but commentary would be useful.)
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