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WL Craig, PS Williams vs. A Copson, A Ahmed - Cambridge Union Society God Debate, Oct 2011
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- Опубликовано: 13 янв 2012
- The motion for this debate was "This House Believes that God is not a Delusion". It took place before a packed house at the Cambridge Union Society on 20th October 2011, as a part of William Lane Craig's Reasonable Faith Tour 2011.
Proposing the motion were William Lane Craig and Peter S.Williams.
Opposing the motion were Arif Ahmed and Andrew Copson.
For more information on the Reasonable Faith Tour see www.bethinking....
Don't even waste your time going into the comment section. It's like they all are - simple dismissals of theistic arguments, very powerful ad hominem attacks directly almost universally at WLC - as if he's the only person in this debate, taking arguments out of context, etc.
This type of comment ought to be at the start of every comment section on videos about the God debate.
+ClusiveC I think Ahmed is a strong debater but I was very disappointed with how he tackled the moral argument. Copson was very poor too. Having said that, I think the moral argument is very unsound and should not be respected.
Very unsound and should not to be respected...Should your comment be respected in light of the fact you don't give a reason why its unsound?
I don't expect respect for my comment , no!! :P But I can explain to you why the moral argument is unsound if you like. The main problem is that he (WLC) is not able to demonstrate that the intuitions that he appeals to to affirm objective morality cannot exist on naturalism and he isn't even able to make a probabilistic case for how the intuitions of right and wrong are less likely to exist on naturalism as they are on theism. That's a summary of my critique but I can go into more detail if you like! :) Thanks for your nice reply anyway :)
Yeah sure id like to hear more
From Pakistan, Craig always very logical with his arguments. God bless.
I was listening to WLC speak about how this was one of his favorite moments of his career as an apologist. He spoke very respectably about Cambridge and it's history of debate and was honored to be invited. Like an excited child in his reflection of it, he loved all the pomp and style of the set up of this British style of debate.
He respected his colleague and noted how the room was already on the side of atheistic beliefs as this was during Richard Dawkins fever, but got up and did his WLC thing.
And was pleased with the outcome.
It’s also quite easy to think you don’t need any of this “God crap” when many in that room are in their early 20s, relying on a false idea of that you’re invincible, can party all night without having any health consequences. Nothing is taken seriously with life so you can just laugh at the theists for being stupid people when most at that time haven’t gone through any severe drama in life.
@@joachim595 They don't even need severe drama, they just need to go out of their dorms that isn't a gap-year in Thailand to see real events in the world and understand them. I was like them (earlier on), but I accepted theism after studying philosophy (in a great department) and I honestly couldn't resist changing my mind in the end.
Is there an atheist-theist debate where the atheist doesn't bring up the "god of the gaps" and the genetic fallacy in their opening statement?
Oners82 At least they aren't textbook fallacies or blatant strawmen... you could say the cosmological argument commits the composition fallacy, but that would itself be a strawman.
***** Well, they try to, although obviously you don't agree with the arguments they provide. They can't be faulted because you simply disagree with what they are saying. I could run with your reasoning and ask whether atheists ever provide "actual responses" to theistic arguments.
***** That's a bit of a semantics game there... the arguments theists commonly offer have premises which they try to support evidentially (again you can disagree, but that is no fault of them), and as the conclusion of a valid argument follows necessarily from the premises, the warrant for the premises is also a warrant for the conclusion.
***** If you disagree with the arguments that's fine, but that doesn't mean you can argue from there to say the arguments don't work.
+Christopher Johnson Do you think the moral argument is a good argument for God because I don't think it works.
Fun fact: the audience got too vote on who won the debate and they chose WLC.
@Psicólogo Miguel Cisneros I completely agree.
@Psicólogo Miguel Cisneros It's the British parliamentary style mate. It's supposed to get rowdy and expressive! Hahahaha (I am a Dr. Craig fan and he just gave an interview on this with on WiseDisciple channel)
@@itachigrain4651which video was that?
This crowd behaved like little kids from 6th grade, Dr Craig is a true christian and a very wise man, that´s why everything wound up being on God favor and always is going to be like that. God bless you all.
The opposition brought a butter knife to a gun fight.
This is WLC in God Mode. So socially aware of his audience and completely disassembling his opponents arguments as he always does. There is a reason that the majority of students walked out of that "non-delusion" door despite them being obviously overwhelmingly skeptical about theism.
... what happens when you are endowed with the holy spirit. Good job WLC.
GOD bless you.
Servant of God mode
No, that's what happens when you are endowed with guidance from Allah. Checkmate.
Just because it is not possible to prove god's non existence doesn't mean god exists. Unfortunately, religions still have enough hold on societies that the norm is a belief in a god.
Many of those walking through the non delusion door did not believe in a god, according to WLC's instructions.
@Psicólogo Miguel Cisneros I don't have sufficient reason to believe there is a god; particularly the god of the bible.
I wouldn't stand that high while wearing a kilt.
Wear underwear
May God have mercy on our wealthy nations. It is hard for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God, but with God, all things are possible.
William Lane Craig suffers from a a neuromuscular disorder called Charcot-Marie-Tooth disease, which is why his hand shakes. This is a hereditary disorder that involves the slow disintegration of the myelin sheaths around the nerves, resulting in progressive muscular atrophy.
so what has that got to do with his ability to mop the floor with others?
in God we trust, gacha tuber 🙏🏽😂😂😂😂
@@ingodwetrustgachatuber2747 this is Peter Williams he’s in the video!! I think he’s just letting us know because some people may think his hand is shaking because he’s nervous.
That is a cruel statement. You should be ashamed of yourself.
I haven't gone any further, but where I am at in the debate right now, Ahmed has slyly taken the moral argument out of context by making it a situation where you have to believe in order to have moral values, which is *not* the argument at all. He has a habit of doing this. He did it several times in his 1 on 1 debate with WLC, even into the questioning period where he repeated questions asked slightly out of context. Sneaky version of setting up straw men if you ask me.
+ClusiveC Certainly, a lot of athiests make this mistake in debates but I actually believe that I think theists love it when they do because it means that the athiests are NOT spotting the actual fallacies in the moral argument which are pretty plain to see.
@@amugsgame9936 The argument that "moral subjectivism" is an objective assertion undoes any supposed fallacy. There IS a singular standard necessary to conceive morality and alternative systems and deviations. As for "torturing innocent children," we observe that cruelty by torturers of diverse kinds, not just psychoanalytical bad childhood types, but ideological greed-superpower types, fascisto-cultural types, and so on. A stronger argument is that evolution by natural selection by physical laws relates to the material explanation of human capacities to act kindly and fairly, say, in mother-child bonding, and marriage, and it is from that biological standard that deviations occur. Theistic standards prioritizing lovingkindness led to its derived morality of Human Rights, including allowance for varying moral systems. Islam, for example, has about forty nations that have formed an alternative Islamic Cairo agreement, while the US has failed to sign the Econ,Soc, and Cultural half of the UN UDHR Covenants. The USSR failed to sign the Civil and Political half when it existed.
"In any case, Spencer, how much effort have you really made to understand these laws in the cultural context of the ancient Near East?"
- William Lane Craig
Arif Ahmed trying use undetermined, undiscovered, future physics to disprove premise two of the ontological argument was essentially a bad joke. "We could find out that maybe the quantum vacuum is truly random" - and therefore things don't need causes. That's ridiculous. Further the principle of cause and effect is essential for physics, if not all science. If you somehow discovered some physics that violated the cause and effect principle, you would disprove the logical basis for doing science in the first place, which would immediately delegitimize your discovery. He's offered argument that 1) is self-refuting and 2) assuming future discovery... and that's the best atheism has against the ontological argument. Wow.
+orbdustFilms Why do you insist on reading William Lane Craig who is a religious scholar for accurate modern physics? It also confuses me why so many atheists read physicists for the best religious philosophy/history.
We did find something that violated traditional notions of cause and effect. It's called Quantum Mechanics and we found it in the 1920s/30s (so you are only just century out of date, not bad for a theist). Since then we've been confirming and finding reinforcing evidence for QM ever since.
Daniel Carter my gosh ... Qm is utter crap ... It almost all unsubstantiated guess work ...
Daniel Carter takes more faith to trust in QM with our almost hundred years of experience of it.
56:41 WLC gets up and the smackdown begins
A triple X throw down
Interesting place for a debate. Dr. Craig's last speech was pretty impressive! God Bless!
He is the Protestant St. Thomas Aquinas of 21st century.
WLC debated the entire room and still won
Once again WIlliam Lane Craig dominates a discussion with logical arguments-- And at a college no less--
😂
Belief in God is not a delusion.
@SHIBBYiPANDA Craig and Williams won. No surprise there, considering they did amazing.
As a former Atheist myself, the final speaker, whilst intelligent is a perfect example of why the atheistic argument is so very dull....not for lack of complexity or genius, but because his obvious scrabbling to a "can we just get on with reality please" tone and scattered reasoning (constant interruptions of evident cognitive dissociation) belies a mind already made up with intuitive animus driving his internal supermarket sweep for arguments. Without realising it himself, he seems far more certain of what he is not certain about, than what he is certain about (something the atheist believes is THE ultimate defence of their intellect and proof of their dedication to facing up to Hard facts). Whilst I respect his position very much, especially given his background, his true convictions (i intuit from his conduct) lie at a much lower level of resolution than his arguments (in this case motivations matter). I think a better question for this debate might be, "is it possible, that a delusion, can also be true/a reality?" because if it is possible that someone who is presently deluded about a fact can still be holding to what is factual, if so then the motion is defunct and also "is love a delusion?" (especially since christianity for example claims that God IS love - in which case does it follow that love IS God or a god and so on and so forth in their world view). This was a good debate but I do think that WLCraig made a good point about the underhanded strategy of the opposition. Its also (again as a former atheist) very telling to see laughter where serious points are being made, perhaps if WL Craig had been waving a loaded gun at he audience simultaneously, they would not be so quick to ignorance, though sadly it would have the same effect in terms of their being unable to see what they have never truly taken the time to envisage....I wonder how many of them will later in life realise, as i did, how shallow their position really is.
Dream on
@@Resenbrink no you!
Praise God for you
hahahahhahahah everytime i need a good laugh. I listen to Copson and Ahmed getting spanked
Abc
Bullshit!
Theists are all deluded people..who get everything wrong logically and historically...God is just a man made assertion and expression not a fact or explanation!
@@rationalsceptic7634 yes we are all deluded. Nevermind those pioneers of science and Philosophy..
@@joshuaphilip7601
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@@rationalsceptic7634 sigh
@Jonathan Billings when I say "pioneer" I'm referring to those part of the scientific Revolution. I also never claimed that people who disagreed with them _were_ deluded..
I don't care what the atheist argument for moral values without God is, when push comes to shove and when people's patience and tolerance is pushed beyond their individual human limits, those ideas, devoid of the saving power and grace of God, will fail in action. And that often marks the very difference between those of Faith and those without.
LOL can't believe people still use the same BS arguments for Jesus being a "Myth", even-though they've been corrected many times.
it's not an intellectual isssue, rather a heart's.
Corrected by whom, and with what evidence?
Osmosis
lol you have to resort to evasion, i do have a choice idiot.your not capable of shutting me up
mike jones
No just sick of you polluting my thread with your bottom-of-the-barrel bullshit.
Osmosis
so you say
This man is supposed to be the Head kf the humanist society and yet he brings up the 'god of the gaps' fallacy
In any case, I'll be fair and simply say that the "who designed the designer" argument is extremely weak (for the reasons I've given). I apologize for using more pejorative terms.
If the unfathomable complexity of God does not require a designer, how could something less complex than God require a designer? Correct me if I’m wrong, but is there any facet of the Big Bang or the universe itself that requires an explanation that does not also apply to God? Can you or anyone else explain what it means for an eternal mind outside of time and space to create time and space by simply thinking it or saying it somehow? Why couldn’t I skip all that extra baggage of theism and just say the universe has always existed in some form just as God has always existed?
In both worldviews, the universe exists, but in your worldview you have the extra burden of explaining why an infinitely complex being is required in order to have a universe. Yet you believe you do not have the burden of explaining why and how this being exists while demanding an explanation for the existence of the universe from the unbeliever. So based on ontological economy and parsimony alone, theism is strongly disconfirmed.
01:29:45 WLC mentioned the results from the bar on an episode of Unbelievable and mentioned the ringing bell too
Enjoyable format and arguementation. Thanks for posting.
great format. well done!
Good watch. Tough crowd though.
Craig does not miss… If his arguments are not strawmanned he’s unbeatable.
It was funny watching the girl in the background laughing in the last 20 minutes of the debate lol
She's cute tho...
This debate was good but it would have been so much better if the question was phrased in a better way.
I couldn't follow Arif AT ALL just distracted by the laughting girl behind him :)))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))
What a relief to hear such intelligent people speaking in terms complex and sophisticated...about a subject that is so often over simplified....makes me wish I could go to university....if I had any faith that i wouldnt be wasting my money in a politically biased institution hell bent on ramming its political worldview down my throat instead of teaching the subject id pay thousands to learn....am i wrong to worry about that? Sorry to say though...from what i've seen online...oxfords union hall (if thats what its called) is far cooler lol soz guys. Great arguments all round.
God is NOT, and can NEVER be shown to be a delusion. Period!
"They're not idiots in there"
Well, having heard some of their questions, I'm not sure I'd agree. One female student asked Craig how he can prove the Christian God exists, when that clearly wasn't the debate topic!
I was shocked to hear what are supposedly Britain's brightest and best students trotting out old fallacies like "if God created us, who created God?" and a (badly-articulated) version of Russell's Teapot.
I think Craig expected better. Pity he didn't get to rebut Ahmed's points.
All I got from this is people need to eat more veggies! All I hear is constant f@cking coughing!!!
Did everybody in this building have covid? Cant go 3 seconds without someone coughing up a lung
The first debater has been watching WLC debates on You Tube.
Craig was right. Pretty sly tactic on the atheist's part to put their response to
the moral and KCA arguments at the end and protected from rebuttal.
1:20:34 She is gone.:)
Dr. Craig is absolutely right in saying that this a simply terrible, terrible, etiquette/sportsmanship on the atheist side in their waiting until the final round to attack the arguments so that Craig wouldn’t have a chance to respond and answer. That was a cheeky, slimy, little tactic; like the kind you would find on wallstreet. It’s like beating a man who’s in a wheelchair-sure you “won the fight”, but you didn’t “win the fight”.
Vilenkin deals with the quantum gravity models that have been proposed. A model doesn't need to be successful already to have a flaw pointed out in it. Moreover, lots of other cosmologists have worked on these.
Vilenkin (and Krauss and Stenger, etc) make use of quantum mechanics to explain the beginning of Inflation and then GR takes over. But there is still a beginning. No proposed model gets around the beginning successfully.
@karmaran
You haven't watched the video in full then, have you? Craig explicitly explains how Andrew's argument - about Gods being similar to us - works with polytheism but not monotheism, because the nature of the necessary, timeless, space, immaterial, transcendent being is UNlike us!
The quantum gravity models can be broken down into four categories: Background Flucuation, String, Loop, and Semi-Classical. The first one involves vacuum fluctuations, and didn't outlive the 1980's for good reason. It is a hopeless model. The String options are all subject to the BGV theorem and/or cannot be extended into the infinite past. Trying to extend the Loop Quantum Gravity models into the infinite past causes problems with the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics, as the accumulating dark...
People are hating on the god of the gaps argument, but all the theist arguments boils down to god of the gaps argument
[If by nothing you mean what does not exist, then the answer to the question for why there's something rather than nothing is that nothing does not exist.]
So Krauss hasn't demonstrated that something can come from nothing, since nothing does not exist, he doesn't have a starting point.
1:21:21- why is she laughing???? Is Arif's argument really that bad?
Yes. Arif is a total pillock.
They don't take him seriously because if they wrestle with his logic they lose.
The theorem does show that the inflation cannot be infinite in the past. And he doesn't say that future findings will be unable to escape the absolute beginning; he says that all attempts thus far have failed.
You can tell this was 11 yrs ago bc the audience looked like the population.
You're probably joking, but I take delight in answering that Craig and Williams won. Skip to 1:30:38
For the record, neither Craig nor Williams defended Anselm's form of the argument. They were using something like Plantinga's Modal version of the argument.
(continued)... You argued that Craig's quote of Vilenkin is out-of-context, and not consistent with Vilenkin's own view. You were incorrect. Guth may feel otherwise.
Irrational based on what? Last speaker just denies premise two, the moral argument, by using our human rational (which are immaterial laws of logic) instead of morals and still concedes it would have to be fine if someone didn’t come to the same conclusion as he.
"Delusion" is a medical term used in psychiatry to refer to a psychotic state. As someone who has suffered from transient psychotic episodes, it is overly simplistic and narrow to categorize a delusion as "a false impression or opinion".
If by looking at the Sun I had an impression that it was 12:00 PM, but in reality it was 12:20 PM, I would have had a false impression that wouldn't make me delusional.
The description provided by the DSM is more accurate.
It is not fallacious to argue that, since the denial of a premise, P, leads to radical skepticism and cognitive dissonance, we should not deny that premise on pain of undercutting all of rational thought. This particular consequence is very nearly a reductio ad absurdum, and is perfectly valid.
... Here, I'll illustrate it for you. Let's say that delusional statements, when written, had a particular form to them (a certain ordering of the predicates, verbs, nouns, or whatever). Let's say that all theistic statements also had that same form. That would not prove that the CONTENT of the sentence was incorrect. Indeed, ANY statement (including true, non-delusory ones) can be made with ANY word ordering you like (even the one that is characteristic of delusional statements).
Actually Craig almost always mentions the attempts that have been made to get around the absolute beginning (you should see the chapter that he and Sinclair wrote about all these attempts in the Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology!), he just finds them unsatisfactory for reasons that he explicates.
Well, I was speaking a bit tongue-in-cheek, I admit, but I think many theists are open to the idea that invisible creatures carried Jesus and Peter at that time. Angels perhaps.
Craig isn't just appealing to "some physicists disagree"; in his written work, he actually explicates the specific reasons why many physicists are moving toward deterministic models. Chris Hooley gives a really good lecture on one such motivation here on RUclips.
In the post that I was responding to, you directly said that there was no problem with infinite inflation. The BGV theorem shows that there are HUGE problems with infinite inflation, such that absolutely did not happen. Now, whether there was some pre-inflationary period or not is sheer speculation, and there is no motivation for thinking there was.
I feel the same way about WLC that some people feel about Baryshnikov.
Craig asserts that their theorem shows an absolute beginning of inflation. Both men agree, and the paper does indeed conclude to that. However, Guth and Vilenkin are much more modest when it comes to talk of "pre-inflationary" possibilities or what it is that caused inflation. And they have every right to be modest about this.
They both state the issue of what came before inflation "doesn't have a satisfactory answer", "is very much up for grabs", and "we don't really know". And they're being honest. Whereas, Craig asserts their theorem has already shown there's an *absolute* beginning to the universe. Both men, in their paper, say otherwise. New, other physics and more work is required. An unknown in no way, shape, or form, consistutes a proof for an absolute beginning. And I think you know that too.
"The constants can emerge at random"
But, as atheist physicist Steven Weinberg explained, its possible for one constant to be extraordinarily fine-tuned "at random", but to get all 30 simultaneously fine-tuned for life "at random" is completely implausible.
He says either there's an unknown physical law which makes them that way, or there must be a designer
I don't deny that Craig appealed to them on an emotional level as far as their vote was concerned, but he was not appealing emotionally for them to say "God exists"; merely for them not to go the next step and call people "deluded". He wasn't using the definition offered by the atheist side, he used a definition from the highest authority on mental disorders.
And my response to that central position is:
1) P2 is based primarily on the philosophical arguments for the finitude of the past, and so would be valid regardless of current science.
2) Vilenkin has concluded that the Universe did have an absolute beginning (even if he's uncomfortable with the term), and he has been one of many cosmologists who have come to this conclusion, and have defeated all attempts thus far of averting that beginning.
Well, I shouldn't have made such a big deal about the philosophical points, when you were clearly more interested in Craig's use of BGV. It's just that I wanted to clarify that P2 isn't primarily based on the BGV, but on philosophical argument.
That being said, the BGV theorem does show that the inflationary period cannot be infinite in the past. It is a big step toward showing that the whole past is finite, since all we have on some "pre-Inflation" period is highly speculative.
I'm so glad someone is actually clarifying this point. It was Antony Flew who first started this nonsense about "negative atheism" vs. "positive atheism". Now, it's to the point that people call themselves "agnostic atheists", and don't realize the ramifications (e.g. "agnostic theism" would have to be somehow coherent).
To Craig's followers who are claiming that any atheist who disagrees with the arguments he and Williams made are 'sore losers' I think it reveals an lot about how and why you've come to this video. A debate isn't a football match; you don't come to cheer on a team you've picked before the debate even began. You're supposed to decide who made the better argument after listening to what they have to say, not just blindly cheer on someone because they're telling you something you want to hear.
That Inflation isn't eternal in the past is precisely what the BGV theorem DOES prove!
And no, I wasn't. My overarching point on Craig's quote from Vilenkin is that he cherry-picked a quote - out of a popular-level book - to back up the conclusion of what was a scholarly paper (that made no such actual conclusion). Popular literature uses language that isn't specific all the time, and that's why Guth and Vilenkin have elsewhere clarified their position and the implications of their find: inflation isn't eternal in the past, but an "absolute beginning" REMAINS inconclusive.
GET THIS MAN IN THE CROWD SOME WATER PLEASE 🙏
I'm pretty sure Copson had everybody else beat on "appeals to emotion". His entire speech (which failed to address two out of three of the arguments Williams gave, and made no positive case at all for thinking God is a delusion) was entirely based on comparing theistic morality with "what we'd prefer to see". (Typical example 31:48 - 32:04).
1. That problem exists when we're talking about causality with regard to the *concrete realm*. Again, Craig himself states that abstract objects can't cause anything. He feels the only option left is an unembodied mind (which has 0 evidence) that affected nothing.
2. That doesn't mean the issue of beginning to exist (on "did I always exist"?) isn't contingent on material stuff. Craig can be a dualist, but even in doing so, there's still the *material* process involved in "bringing into being."
[If a horse instantly popping into being right in front of you is coming from non-being (as Craig asserts), then so are virtual particles.]
Craig never asserted that. He only asked for a reason why only universes should pop into being uncaused out of non-being. On the other hand, we KNOW virtual particles come from the quantum vacuum, not from non-being, so who is being inconsistent here ?
This dude PS Williams definitely is reading Craig`s work when he formulated his arguments.Because the way he postulate his arguments is similar to WLC would postulate his arguments.
Badly misplaced because of the specific points I mentioned about each available model. If you're only response is "I have more confidence in Carroll than in Craig", then there is nothing more to say. Time will tell, and I'm open to whatever.
Copson was practically useless in this debate. It was pretty much 2 vs. 1
He wasn't particularly persuasive because the speaker who preceded him (Andrew Copson) was so atrocious, that after Craig had swiftly demolished his points, he didn't have much to respond to!
Copson's first argument was guilty of the genetic fallacy, his second argument didnt even address monotheism, and neither of his arguments responded to Peter Williams's opening points.
Craig would have been better, as I said earlier, if he had the chance to respond to Arif Ahmed.
"Creatio ex nihilo has been observed in ... The Universe itself."
I don't know what to say to this. It's clear that this statement is ridiculous.
Glad you agree. The issue then is, why bother appealing to it all, if more work needs to be done? And not just that, but Guth also states that the issue is inconclusive. You seem to want to insert a conclusion where Guth makes none, but remains open. And this was Craig's problem. And on Premise 1, Craig equivocates on "begins to exist", as he appeals to intuition (citing examples at the macrolevel) that have pre-existing material causes to them... whereas the universe, according to him, doesn't.
And Carroll's quote is something that Borde-Guth-Vilenkin's 2003 paper agree with, stating "inflation alone is not sufficient to provide a complete description of the Universe, and some new physics is necessary in order to determine the correct conditions at the boundary. This is the chief result of our paper."
Their theorem proves the moment of expansion had a beginning, not the universe/reality itself. Vilenkin thinks quantum tunneling from "nothing" brought about inflation, but it's speculation.
Geez, Craig and Williams are AWESOME at banal presuppositional straw man argumentation. Kudos to them for their deeply thorough ideas, regardless of the fact that their whole argument hinges on the presupposed "fact" that God exists. When you back up and look at things from a neutral position, their ideas fall apart. Still, cheers to them for challenging my non-belief with enough big words for me to have to think about it for a second.
Somehow your question about the "tie" (between "it is possible that God doesn't exist, and therefore He doesn't" vs. "it is possible that God does exist, and therefore He does") got deleted. If you still want an answer, the simplest answer is "possibility is the default position". In any questions of whether something is possible, the default rational position is "yes, until some impossibility is shown".
Are you serious? It's how Craig addresses the issue of an infinite regress, with respect to causality. And once again, Vilenkin argues the contrary, from a scientific standpoint.
Time "begins" there because we can't measure any further back in classical physics. But as cosmologist Sean Carroll points out: the theorem "starts with a classical spacetime - “classical” in the sense that it is a definite four-dimensional Lorentzian manifold, not necessarily one that obeys Einstein’s equation of general relativity... Most importantly, I don’t think that any result dealing with classical spacetimes can teach us anything definitive about the beginning of the universe."
"Coming into being" is hardly a univocal term. While I agree and pointed out to you, that it is literally synonymous with creatio, there are two forms of creatio that you are attempting to equivocate. creatio ex materia has been observed to occur all the time, following all the laws of causality.
I quoted Vilenkin from May of 2012, in an email response to a theist physics student asking him what the theorem proved. His words are clear: "The BGV theorem, together with some more recent work (e.g., arXiv:1204.4658) suggests that the universe did have some sort of a beginning, but we certainly cannot say that this represents the beginning of space and time."
Vilenkin on Craig's use of BGV: "I would say this is basically correct, except the words 'absolute beginning' do raise some red flags."
Carroll explains why later on: "The moment of the Big Bang is, if anything is, a place where quantum gravity is supremely important. The Borde-Guth-Vilenkin results are simply not about quantum gravity. It’s extremely easy to imagine eternal cosmologies based on quantum mechanics that do not correspond to simple classical spacetimes throughout their history. It’s an interesting result to keep in mind, but nowhere near the end of our investigations into possible histories of the universe."
Yeah, and this is what constantly shocks me about this "lack of belief" definition. Many of these people who claim that they simply lack belief in God's existence but don't actively believe that he doesn't exist feel they are warranted in calling belief in God "stupid". This creates a situation where a belief is apparently so silly, trivial, frivolous, and contrary to common sense that it warrants being called "stupid", but not so much that it actually warrants disbelief. To me, THAT is stupid.
No, you are saying that causality is defined as a causer acting on something else to produce an effect. That is wrong. Causality does not require the "something else", it only requires two events related in such a way that one is the consequence of the other.
1) That's like saying that scientists might one day prove that there is nothing physically impossible about drawing a round square. If the concept leads to a self-contradiction, then it is metaphysically impossible, and no amount of work in physics to clear up physical impossibilities is going to change that.
2) Vilenkin is wise to leave things open. However, it is very telling in his book that the only reason "absolute beginning" raises red flags is because he sees theism lurking at the door.
I couldn't stop laughing at 1:24:33 when I believe Ahmed compared the necessity for a piece of music existing (or lack thereof) being in no way related to its greatness vs. God being a necessary being in order to create the entire universe as a sign of His greatness, that was such a bad comparison I almost laughed myself into an aneurism. Was he drunk? Do you have any idea the level of complexity and care that would have to go into creating an entire universe that is not only capable of producing complex life such as our own, but is morally sufficient enough to provide each and every individual within that universe with the ability to believe whatever they choose to believe and to go wherever they choose to go (heaven or hell) without ever impeding their freewill or allowing others to do so either? Of course not. God's necessity as the "most high" and transcendent Creator of the universe, the heavens, the earth, the sea, and all that in them is, is most certainly entirely attributable to greatness beyond comprehension.
But of course no one will ever prove or disprove God's existence, because that would defy the very purpose of existence itself, which is to know God (i.e. True Love, 1st John 4:8), and to enjoy Him forever, because if either side ever forced the other side to believe what they believe, that would be forced intimacy in relation to personal identity, something that a God of love would never allow. Though we can attempt to persuade each other, we cannot ever prove our case, which is why God only reveals himself to those who are truly seeking Him, rather than those who are only claiming to seek Him while internally they are running from Him, Revelation 2:23 - "I am he which searcheth the reins and hearts: and I will give unto every one of you according to your works." Each and every person gets to choose what they believe, about God, about themselves, and about each other, and that will always be the case, until the end of this world, when the judgment comes, and the Truth is made known to all: i.e. What we have done, vs. what God has done. The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom, but perfect love casts out fear, and perfect love is only found in Christ, and once his identity, his life, his death, as well as his burial and resurrection from the dead by the will of his Father (True Love itself) has finally been accepted, that infinite and eternal love is finally accessible to the person who accepts it. Without Christ, and without the glory of God being seen by the things that are made, so that we are without excuse, all of existence would be completely and utterly worthless. I cannot imagine how an existence which is made worth while by love could ever come into existence without love itself being the creative causal force that brought that existence into being, which to me is like saying I cannot imagine how 1 + 1 could equal anything other than 2. And yet over a third of the people in that room decided that I must be delusional in order to believe in God. That is frighteningly disappointing, especially considering the reputation and the caliber of the people purported to belong to such an establishment. But, there is still hope, a hope not found in doubt, but in faith, a faith that destroys the kind of doubt and unreasonable skepticism that eventually leads to intolerance and hatred, the kind of hope that moves mountains, that frees the captives, and that saves the children from living their lives without love, and his name is Jesus Christ.
Craig did NOT say that any quantum theory that will come will fail to address this. He said that all attempts have only moved the question back a step, and that it is "unlikely" that any future attempt will succeed.
Not quite. As Guth pointed out: "While inflation does not go so far as to actually describe the ultimate origin of the universe, it does attempt to provide a theory of the [big] bang." He said this in the same article where he called the big bang "the beginning", but then expounded on why it's not really *the* beginning. And again, this issue of ultimate origins remains inconclusive, and more work in physics has to be done.
But who has jumped to an "unfounded assumption" in this discussion? Craig and Williams don't jump to any such assumptions or claims in this video.
On what grounds was it mistaken? That's the whole point. What makes one answer morally right and the other wrong? And how do we even know there IS right answer or a wrong one? It is moral intuition. Plain and simple.
(continued)... Plantinga is very clear in saying "just because you can make the statement 'God might not exist', doesn't mean that's a coherent concept". For example, I could say "I am a married bachelor", but that doesn't mean it's a logical possibility.
3) In the modal argument for the soul, Plantinga is saying that the conceivability that A exists when B doesn't makes it PLAUSIBLE that this is a logical possibility, *in the absence of some defeater*.