The philosophical debate over whether it is logically impossible for the universe to have existed for an infinite period of time is inconclusive and ongoing:
I hereby dispute that it commits a fallacy.
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In defense of premise 2, Craig develops both a priori and a posteriori arguments. His primary a priori argument is
- An actual infinite cannot exist.
- A beginningless temporal series of events is an actual infinite.
- Therefore, a beginningless temporal series of events cannot exist.
A question: isnāt Godās eternal continued purported existence likewise āa beginningless temporal series of eventsā?
There seems to be a Special Pleading fallacy here.
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Craig writes:
What properties must this cause of the universe possess? This cause must be itself uncaused because weāve seen that an infinite series of causes is impossible. It is therefore the Uncaused First Cause. It must transcend space and time, since it created space and time. Therefore, it must be immaterial and non-physical. It must be unimaginably powerful, since it created all matter and energy.
Finally, Ghazali argued that this Uncaused First Cause must also be a personal being. Itās the only way to explain how an eternal cause can produce an effect with a beginning like the universe.
Hereās the problem: If a cause is sufficient to produce its effect, then if the cause is there, the effect must be there, too. For example, the cause of waterās freezing is the temperatureās being below 0 degrees Celsius. If the temperature has been below 0 degrees from eternity, then any water around would be frozen from eternity. It would be impossible for the water to begin to freeze just a finite time ago. Now the cause of the universe is permanently there, since it is timeless. So why isnāt the universe permanently there as well? Why did the universe come into being only 14 billion years ago? Why isnāt it as permanent as its cause?
Ghazali maintained that the answer to this problem is that the First Cause must be a personal being endowed with freedom of the will. His creating the universe is a free act which is independent of any prior determining conditions. So his act of creating can be something spontaneous and new. Freedom of the will enables one to get an effect with a beginning from a permanent, timeless cause. Thus, we are brought not merely to a transcendent cause of the universe but to its Personal Creator.
This is admittedly hard for us to imagine. But one way to think about it is to envision God existing alone without the universe as changeless and timeless. His free act of creation is a temporal event simultaneous with the universeās coming into being. Therefore, God enters into time when He creates the universe. God is thus timeless without the universe and in time with the universe.
Ghazaliās cosmological argument thus gives us powerful grounds for believing in the existence of a beginningless, uncaused, timeless, spaceless, changeless, immaterial, enormously powerful, Personal Creator of the universe.
Which, IMHO, is just special pleading of a different sort. All that really entails is that something existed in a timeless state before the first moment of time. Why does that have to be a god?
The Kalam Cosmological Argument | Popular Writings | Reasonable Faith
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Respectfully, you did not present a scientific proposition for discussion. What you presented was an apologetic argument for the existence of God which is little different from other apologetic arguments along the same lines, notwithstanding a dollop of AI on top. When someone presents a non-scientific argument to scientists and asks for criticism, it shouldnāt be a big surprise when they receive it.
As I noted above, this particular philosophical argument has a long history of not being resolved, or even resolvable. You are not the first to attempt such an argument, nor will you be the last. It is definitely not an uncommon topic here. You can blame me for some of the criticism, because when I saw the topic I thought, āOh, not this againā, and moved it to an āopen commentsā category. Without that you would at least have been criticized a little less (or at least more slowly).
Some specific criticisms:
- There was no definition of the God whose existence you intend intend to prove, and no possible evidence which could falsify this hypothesis.
- The claim doesnāt appear to meet even a weak threshold of some āfar outā Cosmological theories which might someday be testable.
- You didnāt do your homework, either scientific or philosophical, on previous attempts to prove the existence of God. If you had, then none of these criticisms should be any surprise. Thereās an old saying, āA few hours in the library will save you a few months in the laboratory.ā
If instead of asking AI to support your hypothesis, you had used it as a research tool to investigate all the possible flaws in the hypothesis, that would put you on the right track to doing scientific research. You would still have run afoul of #1 and #2, but you would at least be taking a scientific approach.
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If you are interested in a real scientific discussion re the Big Bang, Sean Carroll just dropped a great podcast with Phil Halper and Niayesh Afshordi discussing their new book Battle of the Big Bang: New Tales of Our Cosmic Origins.
Special pleading on steroids. IMO, this is classic WLC gibberish. I love how he capitalizes Personal Creator as if that act alone establishes a āpersonal God.ā As WC Fields once said, if you canāt dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with b-llsh-tā¦
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That does not appear to solve the contradiction so much as ignore it.
We are left with an infinite number of events of God deciding āI will not create the universe nowā followed by one of āI will create the universe nowā.
The claim that āHis creating the universe is a free act which is independent of any prior determining conditions.ā is incoherent for two reasons:
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because Libertarian Free Will is itself incoherent; and
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because the prior decisions not to create the universe play an obvious causal role in that they cause the universe to be as-yet uncreated, otherwise the consequent decisions would be moot.
We are thus left with the same ābeginningless temporal series of eventsā that Craig was arguing against.
No, because until the universe comes into existence time itself does not exist, just as space, matter, energy, Pop Tarts, etc. do not exist. So, the very concept of a series of temporal events is incoherent.
I do think it resolves the apparent contradiction. However, it fails to achieve the argumentās main objective, which is to demonstrate that God is the most likely explanation for why the space, time, matter, energy, Pop Tarts, etc. began to exist. The idea of a timeless state preceding the first moment of time, which is then followed shortly thereafter by the Big Bang, is completely compatible with naturalism, and the idea that only a personal being possessed of free will can have brought this about is very unpersuasive.
Discussions like this make me think that we have erred in employing the term āartificial intelligenceā to chatbots and their ilk. While there are well-defined problems for which the output of artificial intelligence can be useful, and large text-scanning problems for which a program capable of parsing a huge amount of text can be useful, the term āartificial intelligenceā seems better applied to those than to chatbots.
āArtificialā has at least two very different senses. One is simply to indicate that something is made by human work. Chatbots certainly are that. But the other, more applicable to chatbots, is something closer to āfake,ā āersatz,ā and that sort of thing.
Perhaps people need to start referring to these things as āsimulated intelligenceā or some other such term which is less neutral: something which better captures the fact that thereās less going on than people are liable to think.
I always thought the āTuring testā was an interesting notion: could you get a computer to respond to a human in a way that the human wouldnāt know if he was corresponding with a computer or a human? What I did not remotely imagine was that we would come into a period where the human could know, with certainty, that he was corresponding with a computer, but then so badly misjudge the situation as to place an unreasonable level of trust upon the computer with which heās corresponding. Evidently we regard linguistic ability, even of a simulated type, as such an indicator of intelligence that we just fly straight to the idea that we are speaking with something worthwhile, even in such realms as abstract reasoning. It does make one despair for humanity.
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Iād say unpersuasive is an understatement. But as I addressed supra it is absolutely necessary for Christianity to work. Also, Iām sure that Pop Tarts have a sufficient shelf life to survive all this cosmic fence-sittingā¦
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Exactly. I couldnāt have said it any better myself. (And as the regulars here already know, Iām a theist.)
And this theory of time topic is one of my major areas of disagreement with William Lane Craig.
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Agreed. However, I donāt see āartificialā as the problem. The real problem is with āintelligenceā. We do not have a clear definition of āintelligenceā. And we really donāt have a clear meaning for āthinkingā.
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In an early and little known draft of the KJB the verse read, āIn the beginning, God ate a Pop-Tart, and then created the heavens and the earth.ā
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If I hadnāt grown up in the 1960ās, I would be prone to thinking a Pop-Tart was a skimpily clad, twerking backup-dancer in a typical music video.
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I agree except that I find the idea of something preceding time itself to be incoherent. How can there be a before time? It seems to me that there can not.
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Taking that viewpoint, does it make any more sense to talk about anything ābeforeā that point in time? That there could not have been an āeternityā before it, and thus not an eternal entity existing before it? Did everything that we might have conceived of as happening before that point in time happen at that point of time, in a single messy moment of cause and effect?
Taken to its logical conclusion, this viewpoint would appear to favor pantheism over theism. However, in spite of having pantheistic leanings, Iām not sure Iām altogether comfortable with it. But that may be simply due to the fact that the viewpoint looks at something far outside my common sensual experience.
I actually thought I was agreeing with Craig there. 
Yes, I am inclined to agree. But I canāt think of an alternative vocabulary that better applies to that situation.
Maybe the end result looks similar, but I think it is less about being the repository of truth and more of a strong skepticism towards anything that doesnāt come from conservative Christian circles.
For example, when I skimmed through this updated Grok conversation, I was struck by Ronaldās repeated mentions of the idea that Grok was programmed to default to philosophical naturalism.
Setting aside whether thereās any reason to think that LLMs can accurately report on biases implicit in their trillions of parameters, there is a clear expectation here that because the origin of these tools is not explicitly the conservative Christian community, it must be biased against Christianity. This feels similar to the mindset which leads people to tell me that acceptance of evolutionary science must be because I have been comprised or corrupted by the secular world, no matter how hard that is to square with my actual educational experiences.
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This article does not state that it āproves that any universe expanding on averageālike oursāmust have a beginning.ā
On the contrary, it explicitly states that a ābeginningā is only one of āseveral possibilitiesā:
What can lie beyond this boundary? Several possibilities have been discussed, one being that the boundary of the inļ¬ating region corresponds to the beginning of the Universe in a quantum nucleation event [12].
I am amused that you would reject Vilenkinās explanation as ānot scientificā in order to make room for your own even less scientific explanation of āGoddiditā. Such double standards cannot help but lower both your own credibility and the credibility of your argument.
Your presentation to Grok does not appear to contain any more detailed argumentation supporting your claims than your OP. It appears to be mainly what legal jargon describes as āconclusory assertionsā: statements that present a conclusion without providing supporting facts, evidence, or reasoning.
The tiny number of relevant citations you have since provided do little to ameliorate this problem ā as there tend to be large gaps between the citationsā conclusions and the implications you draw from them.
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