Scott777ab wrote:Really what was sooooooooooooooooo unscientific about it, besides the stuff about God and religion.
Please look at my sig for an explanation of that sentence.
To begin with, Craig proceeds from the invalid premise that there must be, therefore there is, a creator. Further, he perpetrates the absurdity of assigning to time and the universe a "before" and a system of causality and consequence consistent with conditions observed now to pertain. Notable is his postulating - in his words - "The Supernaturalist Alternative", developing therefrom:
Quote:If we go the route of postulating some causal agency beyond space and time as being responsible for the origin of the universe, then conceptual analysis enables us to recover a number of striking properties which must be possessed by such an ultra-mundane being. For as the cause of space and time, this entity must transcend space and time and therefore exist atemporally and non-spatially, at least sans the universe. This transcendent cause must therefore be changeless and immaterial, since timelessness entails changelessness, and changelessness implies immateriality. Such a cause must be beginningless and uncaused, at least in the sense of lacking any antecedent causal conditions. Ockham's Razor will shave away further causes, since we should not multiply causes beyond necessity. This entity must be unimaginably powerful, since it created the universe without any material cause ...
From there, he goes in circles, arriving, at his conclusion, back where he began:
Quote:We can summarize our argument as follows:
1. Whatever exists has a reason for its existence, either in the necessity of its own nature or in an external ground.
2. Whatever begins to exist is not necessary in its existence.
3. If the universe has an external ground of its existence, then there exists a Personal Creator of the universe, who, sans the universe, is timeless, spaceless, beginningless, changeless, necessary, uncaused, and enormously powerful.
4. The universe began to exist.
From (2) and (4) it follows that
5. Therefore, the universe is not necessary in its existence.
From (1) and (5) it follows further that
6. Therefore, the universe has an external ground of its existence.
From (3) and (6) it we can conclude that
7. Therefore, there exists a Personal Creator of the universe, who, sans the universe, is timeless, spaceless, beginningless, changeless, necessary, uncaused, and enormously powerful.
And this, as Thomas Aquinas laconically remarked, is what everybody means by God.
There you have purely circular, argumentum ad incredulam reasoning: "The only thing that makes sense to me is that since there must be a god for there to be a universe, obviously there is a god." Particularly rich is that Craig invokes Aquinas as authority; Aquinas, though a far more reasoned and thoughtful writer than Craig - by orders of magnitude - proceeds from precisely the same invalid premise in
his "Proof" of the existence of
his God: "As plainly we may see it must be that God created the universe, therefore must we come to the understanding that the universe was created by God".
Aquinas' "Proof" is far more elegantly developed than Craig's laughable effort, btw - you really oughtta read the
Summa; written in the early 13th Century, its truly very high on the very short list of the most exquisite expressions of Western thought ever penned.
That essay of Craig's ain't dispassionately objective, logically reasoned science, its not even valid logical exposition; it is purely subjective, blatantly partisan, unambiguously sectarian agenda set forth through a vortex of pseudoscientific sophistry which disappears down the drain of
Russell's Paradox.
