So we are in, um, and we're beginning now, we are in, uh, apologetics part three. So just like when we made that transition from one to two, it's good for me to review, go over some of the things that we've studied, um, kind of bring everything together. Um, and, uh, and they kind of look forward to the, uh, the next couple of months of the third tier of apologetics. In apologetics one, we just started with a test for truth, and I called it incontrovertibleism, this idea that if you come across an incontrovertible truth, meaning that it's undeniable from an analytical or transcendental or existential standpoint from any perspective, then you've secured the truth of the worldview. And if a worldview is self-defeating or insufficient, then it has to be false. Well, in that first tier of apologetics, we realize that theism, Abrahamic theism, is incontrovertibly true, and we use the transcendental argument to demonstrate the truth of theism. The transcendental argument being an argument that suggests that God is the preconditions for knowing anything whatsoever, that without God you can't prove anything. Why? Because all the other worldviews are self-defeating, either because their core beliefs are fundamentally contradictory. or because their core beliefs fail to give us the preconditions for rationality. Atheism, for example, says that our cognitive faculties are fundamentally unreliable. In fact, there are atheists who explicitly say that. Because if your mind is the product of space, time, and chance, then you can't really trust it. If you can't trust it, you can't trust the deliverances of reasoning, which means that you can't trust atheism, because atheism is the deliverance of reason. So atheism itself becomes self-defeating. Theism is the only one that's not self-defeating, and it is undeniable from a transcendental perspective. Well, that sets up an exploration into which version of theism is true, and you can look at that in one or two ways. You can either say which version of theism is true from a religious standpoint. In other words, is it Islam? Is it Judaism? Is it Christianity? Or you can ask what version of theism is true from a philosophical perspective. And there are basically three versions of theism. Open theism, neoclassical theism, and classical theism. So what we decided to do is instead of rush into the religious question, we're gonna hang out and see a full theistic philosophy developed before we even get into whether Christianity is true. And so that's what we're doing now in Apologetics Part Two, or what we did. We developed a, we began to develop a natural theology. What is natural theology? Natural theology is the art and science of learning what you can about God through nature. Theology is the knowledge of God. Natural theology is the knowledge of God that comes to you through creation. And so what we did is we developed a theology of natural theology, that was chapter one. And then we began looking at a priori arguments for God's existence. What are a priori arguments for God's existence? They are arguments that in no way depend upon reasoning from outside of your mind to the existence of God. In other words, it is reasoning to God from premises that are established prior to experience. It's from the prior, a priori. And we looked at a lot of those. We looked at something like five of those. Various versions of the ontological argument. Various versions of the argument from abstract ideas and so forth. So even before you begin to explore the outside world, we can know that God exists simply from thinking about certain ideas. And so I introduce you to a character named Thomas who's in a cave, he's chained, he's blindfolded, he can't access the outside world through his senses. What could Thomas know about God in that situation? And there's a lot you can know about God. You can know that God is, you can know that God is true. You know that God is the greatest conceivable being, that God is all powerful, all knowing, and all good. There's a lot you can know about God even if you had no access to the outside world. Then we began to transition into what we call cosmological arguments. And there are three of those. And I'm kind of tired of hearing myself talk, so you guys tell me. What are the three versions of the cosmological argument out there? The Thomistic. Thomistic. The Leibnizian. Leibnizian, yes. Just Leibniz, so Leibnizian and Thomistic and the Kalam. So we have three versions of the cosmological argument. The cosmological argument is an argument that reasons from finite effects to an infinite cause. From the cosmos to God. So cosmology, the study of the cosmos. And the point is that our cosmos is such that It needs an explanation for its existence. Now, I'm rethinking my own view of the Leibnizian argument. I've argued here and even on a video that I did with Reasons to Believe, I've argued that the Leibnizian argument is unsound. So I don't even think it's a good argument. I'm rethinking that because Ed Fazer wrote this excellent book a year ago called Five Proofs of God, where he defends it, and he's given the best defense of it that I've seen. Now, my case for theism is only enhanced by the Leibnizian argument, right? So I'm not upset about the fact that I have to rethink this argument in light of his his defense of it. But what I did, more than anything, is I defended the Thomistic argument. We did, I think, seven lectures on the Thomistic argument, which cashes out to about 14 hours of talking about that argument. And I believe that Thomas Aquinas, 800 years ago, proved QED, that God exists. And so what we did is we looked at the argument itself, and then we looked at all the objections to the argument that I'm aware of. And so that's what chapter four and five are, an expiration of that argument. And then finally, we had about four lectures, which cashes out to about seven or eight hours, on the Kalam argument, which is the argument that I'm looking at here. Sorry? There was five lectures, I think. Oh, really? Five lectures? Wow. I think it was an A and B, so we did two parts here. One was 3A and 3B, but there was five on here. OK. 3A, 3B, four, and five. All right, so that's about 10 hours. So 14 hours on Thomistic and about 10 hours on Kalam. Yeah. OK, there we go. I did more than I thought I did. And so we explored the Kalam argument. Now, what is the Kalam argument? The Kalam argument is different. than the Thomistic and Leibnizian. The Thomistic argument and the Leibnizian argument presuppose, for the sake of discussion, that the universe has always been here. The universe is eternal. If we were to take a time machine in the past, we would never arrive at a first moment. That doesn't mean that Leibniz and Thomas believe that. It's just that their arguments don't assume or try to prove a beginning to the universe. And so what those arguments prove, if they prove anything at all, is that there is a God who is the sustainer of the universe. God is the one who keeps the universe from going into nothingness. He keeps the universe from perishing. But that would make him technically the creator of the universe. Now, the Thomistic cosmological argument establishes the existential undeniability of God's existence. And the ontological argument and the other a priori arguments establish the analytical undeniability of God's existence. And so what you have for those three arguments, the transcendental that we did in the first tier of our apologetic series, the ontological argument that we did as a first foray into natural theology, and then finally the Thomistic argument, those arguments give us the transcendental, analytical, and existential undeniability of God's existence. In other words, our test for truth in controvertibleism is fully fulfilled by the case for theism. Theism alone is transcendentally, analytically, and existentially undeniable. So it's a three-fold cord that can't be broken. And I think that that is a powerful point to be made in favor of theism. Even if any one of the other worldviews could offer a similar kind of argument for their conclusions, for their core beliefs. Even if they could, you would have to give me a worldview that could give me all three in order for me to take it as seriously as I take theism. And this is why we're arguing that the quantity and quality of evidence for theism far outweighs all the other worldviews. So you can make the point in different ways. You can say, all of these worldviews are self-defeating and insufficient except for theism, which is transcendentally undeniable. Or you could just start with the Thomistic argument and say it's existentially undeniable. Or you could just start with the ontological argument and say it's analytically undeniable. Or you could just stack up the evidence for all the worldviews that have ever been offered. all the evidence for pantheism, all the arguments for atheism, all the arguments for theism, and so forth. And you would see that even if you could get strong arguments for atheism and pantheism, the evidence for theism is just greater in terms of quantity. So no matter how you analyze it, quantitatively, qualitatively, and so forth, theism always comes out a little bit better. or even a lot better, or even undeniable. Questions about that? You want to explore that for just a minute? Which one of those is related to what you believe, like your orientation, your faith? Is it the transcendental? I'm going to try not to ask a bunch of questions at work. Yeah, I'm not sure if I understand. Even scientists, they believe in evolution. Sure. Okay. Well, they are in several ways. One, the conclusion that God exists is a core belief that Christians, for example, have. And it's not just God. We demonstrate that there's a certain kind of God exists through these arguments. Now, if you're asking me the question whether- I was actually thinking of the people that you said the evidence heavily supports theism, but it could be that the person's belief, like a person that believes in materialism or evolution, they might disregard a lot of that evidence. Oh, they will. So there is no doubt that the presuppositions you take to an argument will affect the way you read the argument. And one of the reasons why we're doing the series in the way we're doing them, and they're not just one series, we're on our third one now, but the reason we're presenting the evidence in the way we're presenting it is because I'm very sensitive to that fact. So what's the first thing that, if you want to do this in a strictly logical way, what's the first inroad to this? You basically talk to them about their own perspective. and you demonstrate that their perspective is actually self-defeating. And the way you do that is you just allow them to give enough rope to hang themselves. So just let them talk. What do you think about God? Well, I don't think God exists at all. Okay, so how do you think the universe got here? Well, who says that it had to get here? It's always been here. OK, OK. So what caused the first life form to come into existence? Well, I'll quote Richard Dawkins. He says it's luck, which is another word for chance. And he says that chance or luck spans the gulf at certain points in evolutionary history. So natural selection explains everything, except some of these big moments. where you had, once there was no life at all, and then life comes into existence. And then you go through evolution and natural selection explains everything up to a point, and then we span the gulf from plant life to animated life. And then from animated life to consciousness. And those big gulfs are spanned by chance. Well, after a while, you have to ask yourself, why do you trust your cognitive faculties? And I'll quote Richard Carrier. He says, well, our cognitive faculties are extremely unreliable. Well, then how does he get out of this problem? Well, that's why we have science. Now, you tell me, why is that a problem? The math is not in their favor. Well, their math is not in their favor. Those chances to occur are expansive. That's true, but notice what I just said, though. Richard Carrier says our cognitive faculties are unreliable. So how do you get around that problem? Well, he says the way we make up for it, the way we correct our cognitive faculties is science. Well, what does science? Your cognitive faculties are what does science. I saw that this morning in this handout you gave us somewhere. Yeah. So I'm not giving a design argument. In fact, this Saturday, today, is the day we begin looking at design arguments, where we look at some of the fantastical probabilities or improbabilities of something happening. So my point is not, however, that these things are so fantastically improbable as to it's irrational for you to be an atheist. That is a good point to make. It's an extremely good point to make. But I've yet to make that point in this series. I don't know if y'all remember, if you think about the way I've been arguing, I have never advocated the design argument in this entire apologetic series. I've done it elsewhere. I did it last week at the conference. But I'm not doing it here because we're doing this in a very strictly logical way. Throw the design argument out. In fact, throw all of our arguments out. The atheist is still left with one very serious problem. By his own admission, and it's not just Richard Carrier, I've heard several. P. Z. Myers in his debate with Fajrana said the very thing that Richard Carrier says. Our cognitive faculties are unreliable. They're terribly unreliable. In fact, they'll even overstate the case sometimes from their perspective. But I guess you can't overstate it if you are an atheist. But if your cognitive faculties are unreliable, then why do you trust them? Why do you trust the deliverances of reason? Well, science is a deliverance of reason. Why do you trust science? You're trusting something that is the product of faculties that you yourself say are unreliable. It's painting yourself into a corner. It's a circular, it's a vicious circle that you can't get out of. Because what happens is, mind comes about by chance, therefore it's unreliable. Mind produces the idea that atheism is true. Therefore, I must distrust or doubt atheism. And now we're in this horrible circle. Yeah. If your foundation is fundamentally unreliable, then there's no reason to accept the product of that unreliable process. And so I guess you're saying, well, I think you need to drive that point home so that the atheist really begins to sincerely doubt his atheism. Well, here's a question. Has this worked? I mean, are there atheists out there that have become theists because of this argument? Yes. I had a student who is a math major now, but he calls me up. He contacts me and he says, hey, look, I think I can improve your argument and make it better. Why? Because when he was my student, he was an atheist. He was that kid that sat in his Sunday school class and made fun of his teacher. And he told his parents, I'm an atheist now. I don't want to go to church. I don't want to have anything to do with it. Well, he took my class, and for nine weeks, we just very slowly went through these worldviews. And if you've gone through the process, it hurts. Well, the title of my class is Comparative Religion that I teach at the high school. And I don't have an agenda here in the sense that I'm trying to make converts. My agenda is to give them all the information that I know about these worldviews. But I've done this enough to see how it goes. And at one point, I do tell them where I stand in this. But for a while, I don't tell them. Now, some know because they get on YouTube or whatever, and I can now be seen a little bit easier than I could 12 years ago. 12 years ago, I could be totally incognito, you know, in the sense that you just don't know where I stand. But when I tell them, and then I walk them through why I think atheism is irrational, I have agnostics and atheists all the time who say, oh my goodness, God must exist. This particular person argued against the transcendental argument for another six weeks. But when the course was over, by the time the course was over, the Klum argument really impressed him. So that was one of the arguments that he converted because of, but he also was impressed by this transcendental argument. I think you, in your own struggles, That was a big argument for me to wrap my head around. I had never heard it before. In fact, you got a little upset with me last week when I was heading to the conference. He goes, what arguments are you going to give? And I said, well, I'm going to give the argument from truth. And I started rattling off all the arguments. And he goes, where's the transcendental argument? And I said, well, I just don't have time to give all of them. And the great thing about being a theist if you've mastered a lot of these arguments you have this Your quiver has a lot of arrows and you can just sort of you're like Hawkeye in the in the Avengers I mean you you're not always going to use the same arrow all the time You're gonna look at the person you're talking to and say I think this person is more Rationalistic and so they may be more open to the ontological argument or this person is more empirical, well, these design arguments we're about to get into are probably going to be far more effective for them. And so your apologetic needs to meet the person where he or she is. If you're talking to an atheist, you've got to start at creation. Yeah. If you're talking to an atheist, you've got to start at creation. Or you might say, well, this person is very philosophically erudite. Let's go transcendental on them. The transcendental argument is really our nuclear option. Because it literally destroys all the worldviews and leaves theism standing. That's true, and that's why you always have to be wary of where they're going. We're now we're looking at chapter 6. We're kind of finishing that up Well, this argument says the following whatever begins to exist has to have a cause The universe began to exist and therefore it has a cause and this this argument. I don't think is as Powerful as the other arguments that we've looked at like the transcendental the ontological and the Thomistic and because you're not proving absolutely that God exists. Travis, do you think you can prove absolutely? Yes, I do. I think that these other arguments do prove. They don't necessarily persuade because we meet people that have certain assumptions that you have to actually deal with when you're talking to them about these arguments. So they don't persuade immediately. It's not like all of my students, upon hearing the transcendental argument, every single one of them immediately just converts, some do. But some of my agnostics give me a lot of pushback. And I'm not telling you that every single atheist that I've ever taught has converted to theism in light of these arguments. I shared some of this information with a pastor who was losing his faith years ago. And he had actually stopped being a pastor. And he was leaning towards heavily atheism. Well, I was not able to convince him. I just wasn't. But they have to come to a place where they have to. That is true. They have to say, you know, there are all kinds of things that they're willing to say. And so sometimes these arguments are really this, what is the intellectual price you're willing to pay to hold on to your atheism? This Kalam argument, I think is more persuasive than the others, even if it's not as airtight, right? So this, what the Kalam argument gives you is persuasion. But it's not as airtight logically. What the Kalam argument is, is our very first probabilistic argument. And so we looked at, for example, arguments against infinities existing. I never said that to believe in actual infinities is illogical. Remember what I said? I said it's metaphysically impossible. Well, that is a probabilistic type of argument. I'm saying that the weight of evidence is against it. In fact, one of the scholars at Reasons to Believe, we were sitting at lunch, and we were having a scholar's lunch, and we were talking about these issues. And one of the scholars said, look, I've talked to a lot of William Lane Craig fans who say the infinity is absolutely impossible. And I said, well, I would never say that. And he actually gave this example. He said, it's logically possible, metaphysically impossible. Right. I said it's metaphysically impossible. He said, so here's a hypothetical. We don't know with absolute certainty that space is infinite or not. We say it's finite. But it could be that God just created space, and the space he created was infinite in all directions. And we just think from our perspective, because we're linear and all that, the space is finite. And I said, so the arguments for the actual infinity not existing, you would say they don't prove because of this hypothetical possibility that God created an infinite space. Y'all get this, right? If God created an infinite space, then the actual infinite does exist. He said, exactly, so you've not proven to me that it's illogical that actual infinities don't exist, because it's at least logically possible that God created an infinite space. And I said, precisely. I said, so let's say that tomorrow a scientist discovers that space came into existence, and when it did come into existence, it was infinite. What would I say at that point? I would say, oops. I would say, well, I guess I can't use these arguments anymore against the actual infinite. Because I would have to come, let's say that they discover that over the summer, I would be looking at you gentlemen and I would be saying, you know, I screwed up, man. I was wrong. We've discovered something new, and that new discovery shows that this particular argument for the beginning of the universe is a bad argument, right? And then he starts nodding his head, and I said, now, until you discover that, I'm going to maintain the position that you will never discover it. I don't believe that will ever happen. I don't believe you will ever have a discovery wherein we prove that space is infinite. Why? Because of these arguments. These arguments, however, are not logical arguments. They're metaphysical arguments. We're saying that from what we can tell now, there's no way you're ever going to discover an actual infinite in the real world, because that's just metaphysically impossible. I grant that what I think is metaphysically impossible might not really be metaphysically impossible. And if you discover it, you discover it. But what does the rational person do at any given moment? They go where the evidence points. And it's at that point that this scientist who said, okay, I totally agree with you. And it was almost like he was saying, I can, with a clean conscience now, give these arguments based on the actual infinity to people, because I'm not overstating my case. See, physicists will hear an argument like that, and they'll go, that's just strange, because theoretical physicists are all the time playing with the idea of the infinite. Mathematicians are all the time playing with the idea of the infinite. The infinite is not a logical impossibility, but it is metaphysically impossible. Does that make sense to all of you? The issue of the A theory of time versus the B theory of time is basically this. The way it ties into it is that those views of time are presupposed in the argument, or at least the conclusion regarding which view of time is true is presupposed by the argument. So can you be a B-theorist and accept the conclusion that, excuse me, to the Kalam argument? I'll talk about what the B-theory is in just a second, but can you be a B-theorist and believe and accept the conclusion of the Klum argument? The answer is no. So what are these views of time? Well, imaginary time is really just a mathematical construct that Stephen Hawking uses to deal with the origin of the universe. What he's trying to do And what some other physicists are trying to do, theoretical physicists, what he was trying to do is he was trying to account for how the universe can be finite and yet eternal. And so he uses imaginary numbers to explain how the universe can be finite and also never have a beginning. And so the imaginary numbers would correspond to imaginary time. Once you leave his imaginary realm and convert all this back to real numbers, time's arrow goes straight forward as always, and we still experience time as it is and so forth. You've got to understand something about Stephen Hawking. He's not a realist in his science. OK? He's a non-realist. And what that means is that our scientific theories are really just mental constructs that help us cope with the universe. But we're not trying to say that our theories are actually describing the way the universe actually is. This is why in the opening sections of his book on The Grand Miracle, he says it's just as rational to be a young Earth creationist as an old Earth creationist. because these are just constructs. Which, by the way, is a really interesting thing. If you are a non-realist, if your philosophy of science is non-realistic, then basically what you're saying is that your theories are really just mind games that you play that don't really correspond to the way things really are. Now, the tragedy of that is that your scientific theories therefore never really touched the real world. And so now you're locked in your mind. We're back to Immanuel Kant and all the things that he said. The B-theory of time is suggesting that time is real, but it's saying that all moments exist at once. So imagine the timeline is just spread out, and we have a four-dimensional space-time manifold. that just is there. And the only thing is, if the universe had a beginning, there would be an edge, right? But then times there would just go on indefinitely into the future. But that edge still exists right now as I speak. And you and I are now having this conversation. So what are some of the arguments against the B theory? Well, one argument that I have against the B theory is that it's just positively bizarre. Because what it means is that I'm now at RTB, I'm having this conversation with you, I'm being born, I'm dying, Jesus being crucified, Nero is fiddling over Rome. All of that is happening now. At the same time. And so what you have on the B-theory of time is that time becomes timeless. Now, it turns out that a lot of your physicists are not going to accept the Kalam argument, at least from the philosophical perspective, from a philosophical perspective, precisely because most of your physicists are B theorists. All right, well, then how do I deal with that? Well, I remind the physicists that the issue of time is a metaphysical issue. And therefore, it is in the realm of philosophy that we assess the theory of time. So an atheist like Quentin Smith is an atheist. And he himself has said, as I quote here in this chapter, he himself has said, if you really want to understand these issues, you've got to look at what philosophy is doing. You have to approach this from a philosophical standpoint, not a physics standpoint. The physicists are always trying to tell us that they are discovering these metaphysical truths through their scientific research. And we always have to remind them, no, you're presupposing your metaphysical views as you're doing your research. Ultimately, this is a philosophical issue. Why do you keep talking about physicists only? Because in this particular context, it is physics that deals, astrophysics, astronomers, they are the ones that deal with cosmology. We're not talking about biology. The biologist is limited to the realm of life on this planet. Unless you want to talk about exobiologists, I guess you could call them. They're biologists that are actually thinking about what the preconditions of life are. And so what kind of planet will we have to discover? What would that planet look like if we think that it has a running chance of having life on it? So there are biologists that do deal with cosmic issues, but it will be still a limited domain. Yeah, the cosmos has not yet had its Darwin. He wants to extrapolate natural selection and extend it. to cosmology. But natural selection was originally intended to be an explanation for life, and not even the explanation for the origin of life, but rather an explanation for the origin of species, the diversity of species we have on this planet is accounted for through natural selection. And that means that natural selection presupposes the existence of life. It starts with that as it's given. And therefore, natural selection can be extrapolated out to account for the origin of the universe. So physics is the most fundamental of the sciences. And the next most fundamental would be chemistry. And it seems like they almost go in two different directions, but with the same massive scope. In one way that I understand you said it, we're talking about an extremely large and hard to grasp universe. And in chemistry and biology, we're talking about the same kind of gigantic problem, but it's by getting smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller and more complex. And so there's almost just as much to ponder going in that direction as there is in what is so far outside of us. Absolutely. But you're starting with the primordial soup, right? With the koalas. With the origin of life, we're starting with we're born in soup. With the kalam, we're starting with nothing. Right. The soup is not the one that you get from the restaurant that has instructions in the alphabet. Right, exactly. Precisely. So, getting back to these theories of time, the issue of what is time is a metaphysical issue. And therefore, the physicists can't really discover what view of time is true through their physics. They're already presupposing it. This is actually precisely why you can't scientifically prove God exists. The Kalam argument, contrary to what a lot of people are going to tell you, if you get on the internet, you'll come across some Christians who will say, science has proven God. Science has not proven God. Science will never prove God. in the way that they're saying, at least. Science is a discipline you use to understand the natural world. And therefore, since science by definition doesn't really deal with God, you can't use science to prove God, as if to say, I go into the lab, I cook up some chemicals, and out pops a proof for God's existence. That just isn't the way it works. The argument that we're giving here is a philosophical argument that uses science to bolster some of its premises. And that's a different thing altogether than the bald claim that science proves God. And so you settle the issue of whether the A theory or B theory are true using philosophical considerations. And the B theory I don't think can be true because I just think the idea that you've made time timeless is incoherent. The A theory of time says that the only thing that does exist is the present moment. The past no longer exists. The future does not exist. All that exists is the now. And so that the change that you experience in your consciousness, that flow of time where there's real change, and I'm moving from one moment to another, and there's a distinction in those moments, one from the other. That embracement of the genuine reality of change just is the heart of the A Theory. And the Klom argument, if you think about it, really does presuppose this view of time because it says time came into existence. But the past does exist because it has consequences. And those consequences exist where? When somebody dies, they're gone. Right. In the future, if you killed somebody, they're dead. Right, but where do those consequences exist? They exist in the present. So if you died right now, you would no longer exist, unless of course you have a soul and so on, but your body would be dead. and it would remain dead in the present. Your death, the experience that you had of your death, that would be a past experience. And one day it will be a past experience. There will be a day where we speak of the death of Lance and we mourn you and all that. It's just like I tell my students, you know, someday you guys are gonna be sitting around the table and you're gonna go, do you hear what happened to Dr. Campbell? No, what happened? He died. Oh man, that sucks. Could you please pass the pepper? And that's it. We're gone. So I would not continue to exist unless, of course, the theistic worldview is true. But I wouldn't be in this physical manifold. And if I do continue to exist, I exist in the present. But there's no sense in speaking of me existing in the past. When you guys go home after this lecture, I am not still lecturing. The consequences of my lecturing may endure in the sense that you remember what I said, or we've recorded it, and that sort of thing, but that doesn't mean that I am still lecturing. I wrote this, right? I'm not still writing this chapter. Although this chapter does exist, because we've been able to preserve it. Right? There's an awful lot going on in the moment, though. Sure. Have you ever seen that, I think it's on YouTube, or maybe it's something that you posted. There's a lady lying in a field, and it starts rising and rising and rising. You can barely see her body. Then you see the city. Then you see the planet. Sure. And it gets this giant thing. and it drills into the micro. Yeah, micro world and all the city that's going on in her body. Have you seen that? I've seen it. I've never posted it, but I've seen that. It's a very interesting thing. And you're absolutely. It's all in one moment. Yeah, it's all in one moment. And the interesting thing about that is that what the Kalam argument seems to suggest is that there is a thing called absolute simultaneity. Now, modern proponents of Einstein's theory of relativity follow Einstein's interpretation of this. But you have to understand that Einstein did not give us the core of relativity. He was not the first to do this. The guy that gave us the mathematical core was H.A. Lawrence. It was Einstein that gave us the interpretation of this. And Einstein believed that all moments in time are relative. That means that there is no absolute observer. There's no absolute time frame from which you observe events. Time is just different for every observer. What Lawrence argued is that body clocks are relative, but time itself is not relative. So if you throw my body into a spaceship and I go the speed of light and come back an hour later, I would still be the same age I am. But you guys might be dead by now, because it would be 80 years later. You've all seen these paradoxical statements that modern physicists have given. That's one of them. But what does that prove? Does that prove that time is relative? No, it proves that our body clocks are relative. And so that body clocks can slow down or speed up, but that doesn't mean that time itself is doing that. There is an absolute simultaneous perspective from which all events are seen. And that little video kind of illustrates the point. While the worm is burying into the ground, there's an asteroid billions of light years away that's colliding with another one. Well, there are entire universes right now in the sea of creatures that we may have never discovered. Isn't in that that shark movie that came out a few weeks ago, what was the name of it? Megadon or Magladon or whatever. I mean, the idea is that you guys were going too deep into the ocean and you conjured up this prehistoric creature that's now going to terrorize all of us. But that's at least a possibility, right? I mean, we haven't explored the oceans to the degree that we can. Yeah, they do. Every now and then they'll come across with a creature that was just way down deep in the ocean and we've rediscovered them. So there's so much to discover in this world and in terms of time, all this stuff is going on at once. It's not like Those creatures are experiencing a different time than we are. Their body clocks record it differently. And this is why a dog's life looks different than ours. In dog years, my dog is like 60 years old or something. If you had to sum up the A theory and the B theory of time in a sentence, what would that look like? I would do it with a question, is change real? And the B theory says no. The A theory says yes. Right? Because if I'm just a continuum of people on a timeline, then you can just put a block around my life with edges, and that's just me. And therefore, all of those changes are really just illusions created by my consciousness. Because right now, as we speak, I'm dying. And I'm being born. So this moment that we're experiencing right now is an illusion. So if you're a pantheist, you've got to be a B-theorist. You can be a B-theorist if you're a theist. I just don't think you should be. So I've got a pair of blue jeans at home that are size 33. And I like to remember, I used to fit in those. You're proof of the expanding universe. And that change is real. And that change is real, yeah. Now, notice when I gave the Thomistic argument, I didn't get into any of this stuff about time, because the Thomistic argument does not require you to take on so many presuppositions. In other words, the least number of presuppositions you have to take on, the stronger your argument is. This is why the design arguments are not as persuasive to a lot of your atheists, because they, and they're right about this, there's a lot you have to take on in terms of your presuppositions. including the idea that math really corresponds to reality. So when you give out figures of how improbable this is, they're not persuaded by that because this is the only game in town. There can't be a god, and therefore it had to have come about this way. You gave the example of the recording thing. listen to if you were on the beat theory of time. If somebody hits that recording, I guess we have to come back every time and do it every time somebody hits the button. Right. Or there was never a time when I began to give the lecture and end it. I'm giving the lecture always. Perpetually. Yeah. And so the example is like you have a string of light bulbs connecting two buildings, and you shoot an electric spark through the cord, sustaining those light bulbs. Well, the light bulbs don't come into existence. They're always there. But when the electric current is going by, it lights up the light bulb successively. And so the only thing that is different is that right now our consciousness is awakened to this moment. It's not that the moment came into existence. It's just that we're awakened to it. So we're moving that song right here, right now. That's the only place I'd rather be. Watching the world wake up from history. Well, I think that is a clear indication of an A theory of time, right? But the B theorist might say, no, that just means that consciousness is lit up in the moment. But the past, present, and future just always exist. Now. Well, yeah, I mean, it makes us somewhat like God. I mean, Einstein comforted, he had a friend that died, and he comforted the family by saying, he's not dead, he just exists in the past. And so if you could invent a time machine, time travel is only possible on the B-theory, because there's a place to go to. There's not a place to go to only a theory. There's that's what time time travel is possible forward on the a theory you could in principle Slow down your body clock in such a way that you can kind of transcend the moment in other words you can slow down your body clock in such a way that you survive into the future and you don't experience the future is kind of like you fall asleep and then you wake up and it's a Have you ever done that? You've had a very deep sleep? Huh? But once you get there, there's no path to go back to. Once you get there, there's no path to go back to. So you could go the speed of light and not experience this history for 80 years, and then you wake up to it when you come back from your journey. Well, you've leapt over those moments, in a sense. But it's not like you can go back and recover those moments. Remember the original Superman movie? Yeah. Yeah. He reverses the rotation of our Earth. By the way, that's a very shallow view of time. That's definitely B, right? It's the B theory of time, and it suggests that the dimension we call time can be determined But it's also an assumption that Einstein's interpretation of relativity is true. Because it's not like when he was changing time on Earth, he was changing it all over the universe. Well, that would mean that time is relative to us. So there's a lot of assumptions that go into that, right? And if Hugh Ross were here, he would probably do a deconstruction of that scene. out the yin-yang and ruin the movie for you, right? He tends to do that. He tends to go, well, as a scientist, I just can't accept this because I invited him to go see the Independence Day movie when it came out a few years ago. And so we sat in the theater and watched it. There's a scene, I thought the sequel to Independence Day was horrible. I mean, it was just a horrible movie. But there's a scene where the aliens come and when they land, they land on a, the spaceship that lands on Earth takes up like a couple of continents. I mean, it's just huge. So from outer space, you can just see it. And he points out how physically, he's in the movie deconstructing. you know, this. So he made the movie worse than it already was because he was just showing how scientifically impossible this is. So physicists are fun to be around because they show you, you know, what you conjure up in science fiction is not, that's not easy. I mean, why is it that Star Trek, why are they able to go so many great distances? all over the place, and then they come back to Earth, and it's the same continuity as it was. Because if Einstein is right, then you go away, and you come back, and it's 80 years later. So what is going on here? Well, notice that they don't have hyperdrive in the Star Trek universe. They have warp drive. So what is warp drive? Well, if you look at the very first episode, the pilot episode of Star Trek, they actually tell you what it is. They actually refer to them as time warps. Our time warps are state of the art now. So what is warp drive? Warp drive is a manipulation of space time. And Lawrence Krauss wrote a really good book in the 90s called The Physics of Star Trek. And he points out that really what's going on in the Star Trek universe is they are skating along space time. And they've learned to warp time in such a way that they can maintain their continuity in their lives and yet still travel great distances and explore galaxies and stuff. Yeah, and then only a few years have passed. So like the original crew, Kirk and his crew, they go away on a five-year mission to explore strange new worlds. When they come back to Earth, it is five years later. It's not 80 years later. It's not 100 years later. It's five years later. Why are they able to do that? Because they have time warps in their engines. The warp drive is not just a spatial thing that gets you from one space to the other. It's a time thing that allows you to manipulate your body clock in such a way that you skate along space time. Well, obviously, the physics, the technology that you would have to have to be able to invent such a ship is ridiculous. But people go, they see these science fiction movies, and they just don't see it as impossible. I mean, I got in a long argument with my wife about Star Wars. And I was like, Star Wars is logically possible. It's physically impossible. And she's like, how do you know that? Because you can't have a laser that just arbitrarily stops midair. A lightsaber is physically impossible. You would have to have some sort of energy field that is on top of that, that surrounds it, in which case it would encase the laser. Right. Now, and see, science fiction is great that way because you can just say, well, it just is. Right? And George Lucas is very conscientious about that. In an interview on Star Wars, he said, if I create a rule, I can't break it. So from the very beginning of the franchise, we hear sound in space. That's why throughout the movies, there's sound in space. Well, is that true? Is that physically true? Do you hear sound in space? No, we know that there's no sound in space. But that's the universe he created. And therefore, the point is, once you lay a rule down, you can't break it. That's just the point. That's why The Last Jedi, the latest Star Wars movie, was such a bad movie. Because it broke the rules. of the force that were already laid down in the other movies. You can't just have Princess Leia flying throughout a space like Mary Poppins. That's a good analogy. I mean, that was a horrible scene. So this is why The Last Shadow was a bad movie. This is why I do not go to any more Star Wars movies. I've boycotted Star Wars. They've ruined the franchise. I will see the earlier movies again, but I will never see the new movies ever again. Except maybe for Rogue One, right? Solo was pretty good. I didn't watch it, so I do. OK. While out in California, there were some big Star Wars fans that were telling me how I needed to see Solo. But see, Evan told me it was just OK. Yeah, they did pretty good with it. And he's one of my all-time favorite characters, so just OK. You know, just OK. Anyway. They tied it together. Or take Luke looking at a dual sunset. That just can't happen. You're not going to be able to survive on a planet with two suns. No, but he started it, so now he can't stick with it. Yeah, and he started it. He now has to stick with it. But now you know you're in the realm of fantasy. This is a fantasy world. So this is not just a galaxy far, far away. This is a different universe altogether. You can't have a planet with life on it that has two suns, given the laws of physics. You just can't. I think the threshold for just OK is probably different than when you were at his age. And now that all the things that he has seen to get past OK is a very high bar. Well, that might be true. But I mean, I might watch it when it comes out on Netflix or something. I'm not going to go out of my way to see it. Is it? I could see a logical possibility with two sons if you had a stereo image. It is a logical possibility. It is a logical possibility. Yeah, it's a logical possibility. It's a logical possibility to have a laser sword that stops mid-air. That's a logical possibility. No one's saying that the Star Wars universe is illogical. The reason you can watch it and enjoy it is because there's a coherency to it. What frustrates people? Why do people not like sequels where The original actor or actress isn't in the sequel. They like continuity. They like to see, you know, so this week there was a big blow up over whether Henry Cavill's going to come back as Superman. So that's still a big question mark. Warner Brothers said, three websites were saying, no, it's not even up to yesterday. They were saying, we still don't know. Warner Brothers gave this very ambiguous statement. So right now, as we speak, we don't know. A lot of people are now just screaming, going, well, I'm not going to go see any more of these DC movies, because they've already attached themselves to Henry Cavill. And therefore, another person taking on that image of Superman in this universe is just not going to be there, and people are not going to want to accept it. That was the Marvel movie. And the Marvel Cinematic Universe. That's not DC, yeah. Two different franchises. Well, I'm looking forward to that. I'm looking forward to seeing. But one of the reasons why the Marvel Universe has been so successful is the extreme continuity between the movies. They've done 20 movies almost. And by the time we watch the next Avengers movie, that will be their 21st movie. And so what we're looking at is extreme continuity. Well, all of this is logically possible, and the viewer buys it. It's just your fantasy. It's just your way of leaving the world that you live in right now and moving into this fantasy world. And we are extremely resistant to incoherencies. This is why Lucas has to have a rule. If I make a rule, I can't break it. If I have sound and space, I always have to have sound and space. Why? Because that's the rule. And you can't change that. Well, and he said children are my biggest critics because they're the ones that point out the contradictions more than even the adults. Well, is it logically possible for there to be two suns governing a planet? Yeah, it's logically possible. Is it physically possible? No. Given the laws of physics, you can't have two suns governing a planet and there be life on it. That's a physical impossibility. Now, why don't we just change the laws of physics? Sure, but we can't just do that. Our universe, the laws of physics that govern this planet, govern the entire universe. And you can't just change them. I think you talked a little bit about that in this insert. Yeah. Excursus in creatio ex nihilo. Yeah. Is that right? Yeah, I mean, I've talked about that several times. Now, what we're doing, as I said before, is we're still just kind of in review mode today. And what I wanted to do is, at the very end of the Klom argument, We're on page 360 and following. I just wanted to make sure that as we move into this, we kind of rush through it. Last time we were looking at the Klom argument, we kind of rushed through the last couple of pages here. And I wanted to make sure that you guys are sort of up to speed with where we are in terms of the argument. Like God's relationship to time. any questions about that, how God relates to time. Do y'all want to walk through that? Yeah, so why don't we just walk through this. Saying that the A-theory time is true does not really indicate how God relates to it. And so, in the middle of the page, how is God related to time, I point out that Craig has suggested that God is atemporal without the creation and temporal with the creation. Because we have embraced an aetherium time, we cannot, as some theologians have, picture God as existing outside of time and seeing the whole story of the universe at a glance, analogous to a man who stands on top of a building to watch a parade. This view of God presupposes a B theory of time, where all events exist simultaneously. But on the A theory, the only event that exists is the present, with past and future being non-existent. The eternity of God cannot be construed as an endless series of successive events for reasons we have already noted. God's eternity is, in the words of Boethius, a simultaneously whole and perfect possession of interminable life. God experiences no succession. in thoughts or consciousness, for his mind comprehends all truth in one eternal act of intuition. And that's a pretty amazing thing, right? God doesn't have propositions that make up the content of his mind. So God's thoughts are not an infinite number of propositions. Why? Because infinites can't exist. And so how do we construe God's knowledge? It's a pure intuition. It's a pure intuition. So dwell on that for a minute. Thoughts about that. Here's the difference between the way you and I think and the way God thinks. You and I have a lot of little skinny ideas called propositions. And those that are true and those that we have warrant for believing are those that we know. So our knowledge is propositional in character. So England exists. That's a proposition that's in my mind. And the United States is a nation that exists. And George Washington was the first president. And William of Normandy conquered England in 1066. And I can go on and on, and I just add the propositions that I know, and that makes up my knowledge. But God's knowledge is not like that. He doesn't have a whole lot of skinny ideas. He has one big fat idea, and it's just one idea. And that one big fat idea comprehends literally everything. And so what we do when we know we are literally participating in the mind of God in the sense that our little skinny ideas are slivers from the divine mind. So he's the foundation for our knowledge. The only reason we know anything is because God reveals it to us, either through the creation or through special revelation. And we haven't even vindicated special revelation yet, right? So we only know things through our experience with creation to one degree or another. Even the a priori arguments are not wholly a priori in the sense that we have no experiences before we have those arguments. Those arguments are reflections on our ideas in our mind. And that is our reflection on creation itself because we are creatures and our ideas themselves are created. It's a pretty amazing thought. So as Van Til used to say, if I want to know how many socks are in my drawer, I got to get up and go count the socks. But God just knows. He just knows. However, God's decision to create the universe is an eternal decision, and yet his creation is not eternal, but temporal, with each moment successfully coming into existence and going out of existence. He must be causally related to these events, for he is the one who sustains them, and he is the one who allows them to perish when they are over. Does this entail that God's consciousness of time must change from moment to moment as the events of the universe's history unfold? No. To give an analogy, a teacher can choose to give an assignment to his students that is to be done immediately, or he can choose to give an assignment that will last for several days, in which case the one assignment, which encompasses everything the student is to do, is accomplished over a few days. In a similar way, God could have given a single decree that all events in time exist eternally. This is the logical possibility and infinite existing, in which case it would be the logical possibility of the B-theory of time, right? I'm not saying the B-theory of time is impossible, absolutely speaking. It's just highly puzzling to think that time is timeless, right? But there could be just one big block of time existing out there with all the events existing simultaneously. I just don't think that that's true and I just don't think that that's reasonable given our experience. Does that make sense to you all? So none of this is just an absolute proof. We're just going with the evidence as best we can. And I say that God could have just done that. He could have given a single decree that all events in time exist eternally, but in light of our argument, the Kalam argument, we must say that God instead gives a single, eternal, powerful and creative decree which encompasses every event in the universe's history and guarantees that the temporal events of the universe will come into being and then go out of being successively throughout time. It is in this sense that God is the creator and sustainer of the universe. In other words, his decree ensures that a moment is going to come into existence, be sustained for that moment, and then as it's perishing into oblivion, the new moment arises. So everything that I just did here, holding up my hand, giving this talk, I mean, those moments are perishing. But God is sustaining the continuity between the moments, moment by moment. And how does he do that? Through the decree. He decrees that at this moment, Travis Campbell is giving these words. And that is an eternal decree. God didn't wake up yesterday and go, you know, I think I'm going to decree a universe. He didn't wake up any day and do that. He's eternal. He doesn't experience succession of moments. And therefore, he spoke his decree from eternity. Okay, that's a powerful thought. Yes. Yes. He decreed that they would freely choose to make their decision. So the decree is the foundation, not only of the choice, but the way the choice is made, it is made freely. So in this kind of theistic thinking, the word chance really doesn't have any place. Chance is just a probability quotient that expresses our ignorance. It's like a statistical probability. But for God, chance is just, there's just no such thing as chance. There's nothing beyond his control. Or his decree. Right, his decree literally does encompass all events. Does that mean that God is the author of evil? That is the number one issue plaguing the theist, in a sense, because you have to construe this in such a way that God foreordains all that comes to pass, but in such a way that he is not the author of evil. And the Westminster Confession of Faith goes out of its way to say that very thing. So how is that true? Well, that's a different topic for a different day. But that would depend on your view of free will, how that interacts with divine sovereignty. I mean, you get into all kinds of issues there, and we've touched on it somewhat. For example, I say that God has foreordained everything that comes to pass. But I've also said that once you rule out the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth. And I pointed out in our discussion of the Thomistic argument that it is absolutely impossible for God to be the creator of evil. And therefore, the ultimate origin of evil has to have its place in the created realm. So that God's decree permitted it to happen, but did not actually cause it to happen. So God causes all things to happen unless we're dealing with defective causes. And so if you want an analogy, think of the man who walks with a limp. The mode of power is what causes him to walk, but the defect in his leg is what causes the limp. So why is it that I'm able to make the choices I make? Well, the cause of the choice is the divine decree. But the sin and the choice is me. I'm the defective cause of whatever's wrong in my choices. So that would be, and that's still a deep thing to think about, but that would be the explanation. How is God the one who foreordains everything that comes to pass, and yet is not the author of evil? There's not an answer to your question yet either. Of course. There's still a mystery there. Why did God want a universe to exist that would have evils in it? There's not an explanation for why all the evils that happen, happen. Because at any given time, God could have stopped them. That's probably the single question you'll get across all of these doubting views that you'll have to be able to answer. Yeah, if you talk to anybody that's, they were once Christians and are now not, it's usually because they had an experience that caused them to doubt in an extreme manner to the breaking point where they just finally gave up their faith. That experience was so detrimental to them. They lost a loved one or some tragedy happened to them personally. They were in a war, and their legs were blown off, and now they can't afford to take care of their children. I mean, you have all kinds of things that happen to people, and these are horrible, horrible things. And so these tragedies in their life is what causes them to doubt God's existence. So we have to be extremely sensitive to that. I would say to any person, though, a general answer I can say is this, I don't know why this tragedy happened to you. But if you say that the God that I believe in doesn't exist, then your tragedy has no meaning whatsoever. If the God that I believe in exists, then yes, this was a tragedy, but God can bring good out of it. And therefore, knowing that there's a purpose for why you encountered this, may not comfort you now, but in the long run, it is a tremendous comfort to think that this was not just some stupid accident. You lose a loved one. If there is no God, then the loss of that loved one was just a tragic accident of cosmic history, and your loved one doesn't exist anymore, literally. And I think of John Walsh right now. Mm-hmm. Because when his son was kidnapped and eventually killed, that was around that age. Mm-hmm. And it was a horrifying story. But look what he went on to do after that. A lot of good was brought out of that terrible tragedy. Yeah. I mean, not just the laws that were changed, but the work he did after that with the Center for Exploitation. I mean, it took a toll. I think he and his wife eventually divorced. And their family did have another child. But he went on to Sure. Sure. So that would be John Walsh's story, as horrible as it was. And we never discount the horrendous nature of what he went through. And yet God was able to bring good out of it. If there is no God, then there was no meaning. to his son's life, let alone his son's death. His son was just a cosmic accident that lived and died. And one bag of matter came and did something to another bag of matter, and that was it. And everything after that was just a series of chances. Yeah, for which there's no genuine objective moral evaluation of it. We can't say good was brought out of it. We would just say something was brought out of it, and that's all we can say about it. Whether it's good or bad is just a different issue. All right, but with all these events coming and going out of existence, passing by the gaze of God, so to speak, is God at least changing in the sense that he is constantly related to the universe in different ways? Our answer is yes. God changes relationally, but not essentially. This is an important point. In this sense, Craig is correct. God is all temporal without creation, but temporal with creation. This means that God experiences extrinsic changes, but he never experiences intrinsic changes. Aquinas seems to have affirmed as much, stating that God's relationship to the world is analogous to a pillar and a man who walks past it. There is a change in relationship between the man and the pillar as the man walks past it, but it is only the man who has changed intrinsically, not the pillar. Yeah? Sorry. You got a footnote there at 195 after that statement. This is precisely where we disagree with Craig. Because Craig thinks that God changes intrinsically. So God experiences intrinsic changes and extrinsic changes once he enters into time. And I'm saying, no, he only experiences extrinsic changes. He changes in the way he relates to us, but he does not change in who he is. Another example of the difference between an intrinsic change and an extrinsic change My son is getting to the point where he might be taller than me. He's still growing. Not as quickly as he once did, but he's still growing. Well, assuming that my son does grow up to be taller than me, we can say that I changed and he changed. I changed from being taller than my son to being shorter than my son. But did I change? Well, I changed in relation to my son, but it was really my son who did all the changing. So that is the difference between extrinsic changes and intrinsic changes. Evan changes both intrinsically and extrinsically with a relation to me. I only change extrinsically. Does that make sense? You're still his dad. I'm still his dad. Now, but which is why I need to beat him up before he gets any bigger. So it is, let's see, Aquinas seems to affirm this, I've already read that, and so it is good to call God Lord, for he really is the Lord of creation. But it is meaningless, says Aquinas, to refer to God as Lord until there is a creation, for God was not Lord until he had a creature subject to him. So notice that, again, Aquinas is agreeing that God relates to time differently once time comes into being. God is not Lord until he has something to lord over, right? But that doesn't mean there's a change in God. That just means that there's a change between God and something else, a relationship between God and something else. We have a difficult time understanding these words unless A, God experiences extrinsic changes with respect to his creatures, and B, the A theory of time is true. All right, so the last couple of premises, I think, follow very easily. And I think we rushed to that in our last lecture on the Kalam argument. The cause or uncreated creator greatly resembles the god of classical theism or monotheism, and therefore a god, much like the one described by classical monotheism, exists. All the attributes theists have predicated upon the God of classical monotheism are true of the creator of the cosmos, and since this creator of the cosmos exists, we must conclude that the God of classical monotheism exists. One confession tells us that God is a spirit, infinite, eternal, and unchangeable in his being, wisdom, power, holiness, justice, goodness, and truth. The statement was given long before the cosmos' origin came to light. And we were amazed that the conviction that God is, as well as who or what God is, has been confirmed through both philosophical reflection and scientific observation. And then I give that famous quote by Robert Jastrow, who was himself an agnostic when he wrote these words. And apparently he was agnostic all the way until his death. He says, at this moment, it seems as though science will never be able to raise the curtain on the mystery of creation. For the scientist who has lived by his faith and the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance. He is about to conquer the highest peak. And as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries. On the appendix, which we never got to, I asked the question whether the Kalam argument is itself sufficient to demonstrate that God exists. And the bottom line is, the answer is yes and no. The Kalam argument, as I argue here, is probabilistic in character and therefore is not as strong as the Thomistic argument. That's why my first foot forward was always to give these more logically airtight arguments first and then move into the more probabilistic versions. But I will say that the Thomistic argument is in one sense not sufficient in and of itself either to prove that the God of Abraham exists. In a way, you need both arguments, because what the Columb argument proves is that a creator of the universe exists. It proves it with a great deal of probability, but it proves it with probability. And what does the rational person always do? The rational person always goes where the evidence leads. The Thomistic argument proves far more tightly that a sustainer exists. But if all you have is a uncaused sustainer of the universe, you don't have the God of Abrahamic theism. So what if we were to prove, QED, that creation is eternal? In other words, what if we were to prove that there is no creation? All we have is an eternally existing universe. Well, for my part, I would still believe that God exists. Why? Because we still have the Thomistic argument to contend with. And I genuinely believe that Thomas proved God's existence. So you wouldn't disprove God's existence to my satisfaction. However, you would disprove Christianity, Judaism, and Islam if you proved that the universe didn't have a beginning. By the way, showing that the Kalam argument is a bad argument is not the same thing as showing that the universe never had a beginning. All that proves is that our argument for a beginning of the universe is a bad argument. But if you knock down the Kalam argument, which I don't think the critic has done, we've gone through their criticisms, but if you knock down the Kalam argument and then went on to show, say using some of the arguments of Aristotle, that our universe is eternal, then the only reason I would ever darken a church again would be just for funerals and weddings. I would say that you've disproved Christianity. So the Kalam argument, it establishes a necessary condition for Christianity to be true, although obviously it doesn't establish a sufficient condition. It's not a sufficient condition because just because God is creator doesn't mean he revealed himself through Jesus Christ. Maybe he revealed himself in the Koran. So you still have to go through all of that. But if God is not creator, then the heart of the Christian worldview, and for that matter, Judaism and Islam, can't be true. Does that make sense to you all? Because they all intersect there, right? Well, they all intersect at creation out of nothing. So what we've proven is the God of Abraham exists when you combine these arguments together. that a God, much like the one described in the Abrahamic traditions, does exist. Why? Because the Bible itself says that God is the creator of the universe out of nothing and its sustainer. To me, the other part, and I think you've heard me say this before, and it might be naive, but there's a statement that Winston Churchill was the Prime Minister of England during World War II. And then there's another statement that says on the third day, Jesus rose. So if you take those as equivalent statements, then the third piece to what you said is, Jesus said the Bible is factual and reliable. So you can reverse engineer your faith from that one factual historical reality. Right. Again, we're not in Christianity yet, but assuming you can do all of that, yeah, that would be a very good line of reasoning. But any argument you give for any miracle, whether it's the resurrection of Jesus or the resurrection of Elvis, any argument you give for a miracle must presuppose God's existence. So you can't say the resurrection happened, therefore God exists. Now, William Lane Craig is one of several apologists that actually argues that way, and this is one of the areas where I just disagree with him. Any argument for the resurrection assumes that there's a God. And therefore, why? Because a miracle, by definition, is an act of God. Only if God exists. If God exists, and then Jesus did say those things, and then if he did rise from the dead, all big question marks at this point in our own study. Is that a chicken and an egg? I'm actually trying to solve the riddle of the chicken and an egg apologetically. What comes first, the chicken or the egg? I think the chicken came first. And what comes first logically? God or Jesus rising from the dead, logically God has to come first. You have to do your theistic homework before you do your Christian homework. In other words, you have to first show that a kind of God exists that could raise Jesus from the dead before you can demonstrate that Jesus did rise from the dead. There's two sources of revelation that prove that to you, right? There's the natural and then there's the reneal. Yes. Oh, no. Oh, wait, wait. The natural theology alone is the argument for God's existence. I don't have any, because any argument I give you for revealed theology would presuppose natural theology in that sense. Well, the argument that we're going over has nothing to do with intelligent design. Actually, I think it is. If you walk through the Kalam argument, we get to a certain point where the attributes that you must predicate upon the cause of the universe just are those attributes we predicate upon the God of the Bible, and therefore The cause of the universe just is the God of classical theism. And what's really interesting about the arguments, which I'm about to show you, is that there's a kind of confluence to where the kind of God revealed in the Thomistic argument is the same God revealed in the Kalam. So that you have this overlap of what you're proving in these arguments. And that's what makes the whole case strong. So there are two ways to construe natural theology, and I think you can do both. One is to just look at each argument in isolation, which we've been doing. And we've been battering these arguments with every criticism we can think of. And we see the arguments emerge whole and complete and as a proof for God's existence. So that's one way to do it. And now we're seeing this big ball roll down the mountain. because with each argument, it starts with a little piece of snow, but with each argument, we're seeing an avalanche of evidence coming down the mountain, this big ball just roaming down the mountain, because we're adding evidence to evidence to evidence to this case for theism. So the ontological argument gives us a God who's the greatest conceivable being, all-knowing, all-powerful, all-good, and necessarily existent. The Thomistic argument gives us all that plus simplicity and some other attributes. The Kalam argument gives you the same thing. And therefore, it's confirmation after confirmation after confirmation. Each argument standing on its own to one degree or another. I say that because the Kalam argument is probabilistic in character, right? But each argument can be argued on its own. But you can also just bring these arguments together. So Craig is right about this. You can look at the arguments as a chain. with the chain being no stronger than its weakest link. Or you can look at the arguments as chain male with one reinforcing the other. And I think you can do both and. So now as we're transitioning into design arguments, that's how I want you to start looking at the proofs. We've been looking at them as chains, ontological argument, domestic argument, Kalam argument. But now start putting them together, and this becomes sort of your chain male for theism. Because how is the atheist going to penetrate your mind now and show you that God doesn't exist? Well, first of all, he's got to get past that chain mail. He's got to get past your arguments. He's got to show that your arguments are bad. Before we had the arguments, he had to just show that God was illogical. And we had to deal with that. And we assumed in the first series that none of these arguments are any good. And we built a case now to where it's actually getting really, really strong. And one of the things that I do in the appendix is I demonstrate how the Kalam argument can actually be used to knock out these worldviews. So for example, I'm just going to give one example. On page 366, The Kalam arguer can actually use the argument not only to disprove pantheism, right? Because pantheism says there's no difference between the creation and the creator. But you can also use the Kalam argument to knock out process theism. And this is what Craig says. He says, to try to wed process theology with modern cosmology can only make us smile at the incongruity. A pitiable God, indeed, whose poor body explodes from a point of infinite density and perishes in the cold reaches of outer space, It is ironic that theologians should have developed such a view of God and the universe at precisely the same time that scientists were accumulating evidence that tended to confirm creation out of nothing. See, panentheists or process theologians are all saying that the universe we live in is eternal and the universe just is God's body and God is the soul of it. But if the Big Bang Theory is true, then that means that God's body exploded into existence and is perishing in the cold outer regions of space. So therefore, you can't have process theology wedded to this. And what's interesting is that the Klamm argument is now therefore being able to use, we can use this against these other views of God. So we also have on page 367 polytheism being eliminated. I mean, what do polytheists believe about their gods? They believe that the gods are themselves created by the universe. Right? Where does Zeus come from? Where does the Mormon god come from? They were born and raised in this universe. But the universe itself had a beginning, huh? God was born on a planet like us in yonder heavens. And so, These gods that the Mormons worship and that the other polytheists worship, if they do exist, must depend upon the greater God who created them. And so I've actually used the Kalam argument when talking to Mormons. I mean, I've literally said, hey, let me ask you this. You believe that the universe is eternal, right? And they'll nod their heads and say, yeah, the universe has always been here. And I said, well, what do you do with the Big Bang Theory? Or if a man was trying to reach zero from counting to negative infinity, would he ever reach zero? And they're like, well, of course he wouldn't. I was like, well, right. So you're saying that you can't traverse the infinite. But in order for the present moment to arise, you have to traverse an infinite number of moments to get to right now. So how did we get to right now if our universe is eternal? And they've literally walked out of that discussion going, that's a very interesting point. And I'm like, yeah, so what I'm trying to get at is that this proves that the universe must have had a beginning, because if it didn't have a beginning, we wouldn't be having this discussion right now. But we are having this discussion right now, and therefore must have had a beginning. Well, they've been moved by the argument. I didn't say that they converted away from Mormonism, but it stumped them, and it forced them to think about their own religion. So you can actually use the Kalam argument not only to rebut the atheist, but also to rebut the other worldviews out there. It's a very good, powerful tool. And as I pointed out before, it's almost always my first step in presenting a case for God's existence. When I'm out there and someone says, why do you think God exists? I always hit them with a Kalam argument. I say, do you agree with the majority of scientists that the universe started with the Big Bang? Well, of course. Scientists are all knowing, right? It's like, well, if the Big Bang theory is true, that means the universe had a beginning. Yeah, well, that means that it has to have a beginner. I never have to go further than that with the average person out on the street. They just automatically are like, yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And so they walk away going, yeah, I guess God must exist at all. To the skeptical atheists who say, well, that doesn't mean that the beginner is God. Of course I have to engage in further discussion and argument. But most people with common sense realize that if there is a starter to the start, if there's a beginner to the beginning, that beginner must transcend the universe. In which case, the universe can't be all there ever is or was or will be, in the words of Carl Sagan. It just can't be. There's something beyond the universe. And so this Kalama argument can be used to refute polytheism, pantheism, panentheism, atheism. I mean, it does a really great hammering job crushing these other worldviews. So the transcendental argument argues indirectly to God by showing that the other worldviews are false. So it directly shows that the other worldviews are false and indirectly shows that God exists. The Thomistic argument, and now the Kalam argument, kind of flips that. The Kalam argument directly argues to God, but along the way it indirectly shows that these other worldviews can't be true. If there's a difference between the creator and the creation, then pantheism can't be true. If the universe is not God's body, then panentheism can't be true. And if there was one God who did it, who was pure actuality, which we've proven, then polytheism can't be true. So when you start thinking about the uncaused cause that's outside the universe, where does that contingency lead you? I mean, where does he live if it's outside? Well, when you say where, this is the $64,000 question. Where does God exist if God is outside of time? The question creates a category mistake. Because the word where presupposes space, but he who created space must be spaceless. So there is no where God exists. There's no when God exists, unless you're speaking of an eternal now. There is no where God exists. You know, in other words, there has to be something there metaphysically, right? Has to be something, where does, what do you mean there has to be something there metaphysically? I mean, to be the cause of the universe. To be the cause of the universe. The cause of everything, there has to be metaphysically something, right? Yes, something can't pop into being uncaused out of nothing. This is the problem with atheism. If you're an atheist, you have to swallow a very big pill. I'm talking about contingent things. When you get back to the contingent and you track it all the way back, there can't be another cause for. It has to end in an uncaused cause. Right. So now we're talking about where the uncaused cause is metaphysically. Okay, so to answer your question, there's no when God exists unless you're talking about the eternal now. And there's no where God exists unless you're talking about everywhere. So what does it mean when it says Jesus sits at the right hand of God? You're talking about his human nature. God's human nature? No, Jesus' human nature. The divine nature is never commingled with the human. And so Jesus sits at the right hand of God. meaning it may very well be that Jesus is sitting on a throne of power, and that right hand of God doesn't mean that God has a hand. It means that the right hand of power is a metaphor for being bequeathed with divine authority, with authority given to the human person Jesus by God. It's like when I say you're my right-hand man, that doesn't mean that you're always at my right. It just means that I'm depending on you to help me or what have you. It's a metaphor. And so this is poetic language trying to illustrate the fact that Jesus is the Messiah. That's what the biblical text means. So God doesn't have a body because God is pure spirit He's immaterial and he doesn't exist somewhere. He exists everywhere Right. He didn't begin to create He always created He in fact you should you should just express it tenselessly God eternally wills that in a temporally finite universe be or that a temporally finite universe exists and Mm-hmm. And God was in a specific place. Walking through the garden. Right. So what that would mean, what that would not mean, or it could not mean, is that the essence of God is physical, and God journeying from heaven to earth to hang out with Adam and Eve. What it has to mean, giving the omnipresence of God, right? You can't go anywhere where God is not. So what does it mean to say that God was walking in the garden? It means that God took on some sort of form and manifested himself to them, gave them a visible object to think about. But all along, God was still everywhere in the universe. It's not like he stopped being omnipresent when he did that. So at the end here, I want to put all of these arguments together. So how do we put all the arguments we did in the first apologetic series? How do we put them together? And on page 369, I do that very thing. This is our grand 369. I will give it to you right after. I'll give you my copy right after we finish. I made three copies today. So 369. Whatever begins to exist requires a cause for its coming into existence. The causal principle is supported by three considerations. It is analytically true, it is a precondition of thought, it is constantly verified in experience. To deny the principle implies that something can come from absolutely nothing, but nothingness is a contradiction in terms. Ergo, something must exist necessarily, and that something is either the cosmos or something else. The universe or cosmos undeniably exists. The senses are reliable and can sense many things which together make up a whole we call the universe. I am a contingent being and thus caused to exist by another. Therefore, there is more than one thing and hence the sum total of such things can be called a cosmos or a universe. The universe began to exist. This is premise C. And here's the evidence for it. If the universe is past eternal, then an actually infinite number of moments have transpired, but actual infinities cannot exist in the real world. Therefore, the universe is not past eternal. Two, even if actual infinities could exist, it is impossible to traverse such an infinite through successive addition. But if the universe is past eternal, an actually infinite number of moments have been traversed, in order to get to the present, therefore the universe is not past eternal. Three, there is scientific confirmation of our philosophical arguments. The general theory of relativity predicted the expanding universe, which entails a cosmic beginning. B, the expansion of the universe has been empirically verified. C, the COBE satellite has further verified this. D, the second law of thermodynamics has verified this. E, the life story of stars has verified this. F, the amount of helium in the universe has verified this. And G, the consistent failure of alternative hypotheses has constantly verified this. D, the universe was caused to come to existence. Whatever is contingent is currently being caused to exist by another. The universe is contingent. How do we know this? Because it came from nothing. Therefore, it can not be. Therefore, it is a real composition of actuality and potentiality. The universe is currently being caused to exist by another. The cause of the universe's origin and current existence cannot be created or created by another. The cause of the universe's origin and current existence cannot be self-created or self-caused. The cause of the universe's origin and current existence is uncaused and are uncreated. The uncaused creator and sustainer of the universe is eternal, timeless, without creation, extrinsically changing with time. Necessary, factually speaking, because he is pure act. Logically speaking, because A, nothingness cannot be conceived. And B, the greatest conceivable being is analytically undeniable. For one, whatever can possibly exist in both the mind and reality might possibly be greater than that which exists in the mind alone. The greatest conceivable being at least exists in the mind. If the greatest conceivable being does not exist, then it might possibly be greater than it is. Thus, the antecedent of three entails a contradiction. Ergo, the greatest conceivable being exists. The uncaused cause is also immutable, unlimited, independent, omnipotent, one, omnipresent and immense. immaterial and incorporeal, and omniscient. The creator and the sustainer comprehends all truth in one eternal act of intuition, for if his knowledge were propositional in character, as ours is, and since it is infinite, then he would have to know an infinite number of propositions, but actual infinities cannot exist, therefore his knowledge is simple and intuitive. He is simple, therefore his knowledge is simple. Also, it seems counterintuitive to believe that there are abstract objects like propositions and logical laws existing apart from a mind who conceives them. Thus, conceptualism must be true, which entails that all truly exist in abstract objects and here within the divine mind coherently, intuitively, and thus simply. And lastly, it is indubitable that knowledge is possible. But coherence is a precondition of knowledge. However, no finite mind can be coherent. Thus, there must be an infinite mind that is purely coherent and hence provides the human mind with the transcendentals or preconditions of knowledge. But then that would mean that this being must be truth also, the real, since the uncreated creator is the most real being. And that leaves us with basically the god of classical theism. So do y'all see how I just put all those arguments together and showed how they reinforce each other? We could go on and on, but yeah. All right, so y'all have any questions before we close out this two hour session? Did you have fun today? I try not to ask questions after you tell them. You mentioned the chain. I remember the fifth law of the Navy is on the strength of one making the cable dependent on the might of the chain. Who knows when that may be tested, so live it thou barest strength. I remember that. I'm still struggling with the parentheses of time-space-matter. The reason you're having a hard time is that your mind's eye can't picture God's relationship to time. And to give you an analogy... I can't conceive of it. I can't conceive of something not... Well, I'm going to give you pushback on that one, but let's... The atheist will say, because you can't imagine this, it's just incoherent, it's gobbledygook, right? Why is it gobbledygook? Because anything that can't really be imagined can't be conceived. And if it can't be conceived, it can't be coherent. And so if I say that a non-temporal being causes the universe, I'm contradicting what I experience of causes all the time. Causes happen in time. Or if I say there's a being beyond time, every being I'm familiar with is temporal and spatial. Now, remember when we, this is in the very first apologetic series, we began our critique of atheism. And I quoted, I gave that really famous quote by Francis Bacon, who said, he is a ill discoverer who claims that there is no land because all he can see is sea, right? The atheist says, I can't conceive what I can't imagine. And since I can't imagine it, it can't exist. Well, there's a clear distinction between what is conceivable and what is imaginable. I can conceive of a thousand-sided geometric figure. And mathematicians will promise us that such a thing is genuinely conceivable. But try to picture that in your mind's eye. In your mind's eye, you can imagine it. But that doesn't mean you can't conceive it. To give another example, the Big Bang Theory is conceivable, but it's not imaginable. When you think of the Big Bang, remember we went through this, when you think of the Big Bang, what do you think of? You think of a light in the distance exploding into a pre-existing space. That is a wrong picture of the Big Bang. It doesn't match what the theory is saying, because the theory says that space itself began to exist. So where did the Big Bang happen? It happened right here. And it happened right there. And it happened everywhere. And therefore, the Big Bang Theory is literally unimaginable, but it's perfectly conceivable. So there I've given you two examples of things that you cannot imagine, but you can conceive. Now the notion of being is itself not a temporal notion. Being is just what is. Whether it's temporal or not, contingent or not, or whatever, That's just a different issue. So being need not be temporal to be being. And therefore, a being who can cause need not be temporal to be a cause. But because you can't, in your mind's eye, imagine this, you're trying to picture God in some sort of pre-existing space where he goes, hmm, I'm going to make a universe and then he makes it. That's not what happened. God doesn't exist in a pre-existent space. The members of the Trinity are not spatially related to each other. What is their relationship? It's an eternal relationship, assuming we haven't proven the Trinity in this series, but we believe in the Trinity as Christians. Well, we don't believe that the relationships between them are linear or causal or even spatial or temporal. Well, does relationship have to have those elements to it to be a true relation? I don't think so. I think that the medieval scholastics, especially Aquinas, demonstrated that there can be processions and a being who is pure act without that being caused. Well, how? Well, it's ultimately a mystery, but there's a rationale for it that we've actually explored in our series on the Trinity. And so if you want to learn more about that, you can go listen to what I did in the Sunday school class. And we are, by the way, tomorrow in Sunday school starting our Christology section in Systematic Theology. What a great reason to start coming to Sunday school. I want to encourage you to come to Sunday school and start getting a feel for who Christ is. And we're not going to do this apologetically. Although there will be some apologetics in it, we're going to be doing it theologically. And so when we finally get around to studying the evidences for Christianity, you will appreciate them more having gone through the Sunday school section. But that's what you're going to wrestle with for the rest of your life. You're going to have to wrestle with this idea that, gosh, you know, I just can't picture this. But just because you can't picture it doesn't mean it's not true or coherent. And just to say one more thing, this is why Thomas was- The picture in my mind is blackness. And blackness is something. Yeah. And since it's the beginning of the universe from nothing, there wasn't even blackness. That's the part that they can start to imagine, not imagining the blackness out there. Right. It goes back to Edward's point that you can't conceive of nothing. You can define nothing. Nothing is the absence of anything. But you can't conceive it, because even when you conceive of nothing, you're still conceiving of something. So nothingness is inconceivable. Beginning is a big bang. It's the beginning of time, which means there's time. Okay, so to walk through this line of reasoning that I just started, you can't conceive of nothing, because when you conceive of nothing, you're still thinking of something. And what that means is that there must be a logically necessary being, and we call him God, okay? Now, is the universe's beginning unimaginable or inconceivable in the same way nothingness is? Well, I would suggest that it's unimaginable, but it's not inconceivable. Because the mathematics and all the scientific evidence we have points in that direction. What a great question. Right. Well, see, and that's why Lawrence Krauss says a universe for nothing. Well, when he starts unpacking what he means by that, nothingness becomes just a word he uses to describe a certain kind of something. And so he's not really getting a universe from nothing. I mean, his book is metaphysically absurd. But see, this is a physicist who's trying to enter into territory without the conceptual tools you need to assess whether what he's saying is coherent. So you're really left with the universe exploded into being uncaused out of nothing, which I submit is absurd because there's no blackness, there's no time, there's no space, there's not even the potential for there to be a universe. And therefore, when you say it could happen, that itself is not true because there's no potential. And therefore, your only hope is to say there is a cause of the universe that, to repeat my point, there's a cause of the universe that exists beyond time. And the atheist can go on and on and on about how that's impossible. But I would say the burden is on you now to prove that that's impossible. The word being, again, carries with it no intrinsic idea of temporality. The word cause carries with it no intrinsic idea of temporality or contingency. But you can't imagine it, and this is the point that I really want to drive home to you. This is why you must do everything you can to escape the trap of univicism. The idea that your ideas of God have a one-to-one correspondence with God himself. All of your knowledge of God is analogous. It's not univocal. So when I say God is good, I mean something similar, but not something exactly the same as when I'm saying my dog is good or that humans are good. God is good, similar to the way we're good, but also there's no direct correspondence there. So all of our knowledge of God is analogous, all of it. We can't know what God is. We can only know what God is like. And Thomas would argue, Thomas Aquinas would argue, that that literally is what heaven is. That's where we actually see the essence of God. That's when we know what God is. That is the reward we get when we die. Those of us who are redeemed enter into the divine presence and we actually, for the first time in our existence, we know the essence of God. And so the classical Christian tradition interprets Jesus' words that way. Blessed are the righteous, for they will see God. But what does he mean by seeing God? Is God something you can see with your eyes? No, this is a mental seeing. Or as Paul says, we look in a mirror darkly. What's he getting at? The beatific vision has not been given to us. It's been shielded from us. God is epistemically distant from us at this point. But heaven just is that moment where he brings us into his presence and we see his essence for the first time. And then we know what God is. But we will not know what God is in this life. We will only know what God is like. I think that's a good place to end.