Discussion Review: William Lane Craig and CosmicSkeptic on the Kalaam Cosmological Argument
بسم الله الرحمن الرحيم
I recently reviewed this great discussion between WLC and CosmicSkeptic. Below, I have posted the original video, my review, and then the notes I used when making the video.
Original Video
My Response
My Notes (Uneditted)
how can something which does not exist have a property? i.e. any property whatsoever, including the property of “being able to come into being with no effecient cause”? For something like “sherlock holmes” he exists conceptually and so we can talk about his properties.
If universes can come into being without an efficient cause, it logically follows that nothing prevents a nonexistent universe from becoming existent and therefore there must be an actually infinite number of universes. If Craig is correct, however, this should be impossible.
If universes can come into being from non-being without an efficient cause, why do we not see universes popping into being within our own universe? You’d have to say that the existence of one universe precludes another coming into being within its own boundaries, but if something can come into being without an effecient cause then there should be no condition on its coming into being; therefore it shouldn’t be possible to have preventative conditions. For e.g. if I say why doesn’t a flower come into existence on my carpet, the answer is that it requires soil in order to come into being; the carpet therefore prevents a flower from coming into being. But if a flower required no efficient cause whatsoever, then why would carpet or soil be relevant?
I thought fundamental particles are the only things that really exist i.e. there is no “universe” per say, and so if that’s the case why can’t fundamental particles pop into being everywhere arranged universe-wise or horse-wise or eskimo village-wise?
If mierological nihilism is true, then that would imply that “I” don’t exist. Alex did not address this point; he says that wholes are mind-imposed; but on materialism a person himself is just a composition of his parts (i.e. the mind just is the brain), in which case it reduces to incoherence to say that the mind is mind imposed because how could the mind impose the mind on itself if it doesn’t exist?
