Is William Lane Craig open to the possibility of evolutionary creationism?

It ain’t no guess Mark. It’s a rational fact. The only possible, parsimonious, uniformitarian, self-evident truth.

If you knows of a better axiom, go to it. No one, as in no one, does. Not even God.

Logically it doesn’t at all, but to WLC it does in his codicil to the basic truism.

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@ManiacalVesalius and Klax, I do appear to be distinguishing between the “universe” and the “cosmos” too glibly to suit my POV. Sorry about that. But the alternative seems to be to talk of multiple singularities and big bangs at a distance to one another which puts them beyond our ability to peer just now. All the comments made regarding the uniqueness of our ‘universe’ (as I had been using it) would seem to apply to the uniqueness of the big bang event of which we are a part.

This seven minute video seems to agree with me. I know, it would be more surprising if no video saw things my way given how permissive the internet is. Still these dudes at least have more astrophysics cred than I. The fellow being interviewed is (from wiki): Steven Weinberg (/ˈwaɪnbɜːrɡ/; born May 3, 1933) is an American theoretical physicist and Nobel laureate in Physics for his contributions with Abdus Salam and Sheldon Glashow to the unification of the weak force and electromagnetic interaction between elementary particles.

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It is foolish and irrational to presume that the God who is cannot intervene in his children’s physical lives as some here in their ‘rationality’ have professed, not unlike what Jesus did in the storm,* no matter which universe we live in.
 


*“and it was completely calm” so they had to row all the way back! :grin:

God is beautiful, and he has made beautiful and interesting things for us to enjoy and to be thankful to him for.

I’ll watch Mark. But you and I know at least as much as he. His genius has nowt ter do wi’ it.

‘In 2007, Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg suggested that if the multiverse existed, “the hope of finding a rational explanation for the precise values of quark masses and other constants of the standard model that we observe in our Big Bang is doomed, for their values would be an accident of the particular part of the multiverse in which we live.”

I, a bloke on the bus, think he’s wrong. These values precipitate, coalesce, damp down, emerge out of the interstices of intersecting dimensions of being. As dodecahedrons emerge from soap bubbles.

Whether God grounds them or not, and nature just abhors a null.

Well in this scrap of video he gives no indication that multiple bangs are any kind of logical problem that would indicate we’ve made an error. I don’t know any more about him than this but he seems to take the bunch of bangs theory seriously but without alarm.

@Dale how can pushing God’s work back to the bang cycle be any kind of problem for you? He has survived every other enlargement of his creation accomplishment I don’t see why this would be a step too far.

I don’t disagree regardless of His true nature.

I don’t know that it is. But ‘cycle’ is still just conjecture. Even if you are as ‘rational’ as Martin. :grin:

I don’t see any reason to dress it up. All I have is speculation but my better angels are whispering in my ears that I’m right. Check mate, theist. :wink:

Sorry, I’m not following you.

To what ‘dressing’ do you refer?

I mean by calling what is basically my best guess rational.

Ah. But it was in scare quotes. :slightly_smiling_face:

Sorry but I’m not keeping up. You obviously have something in mind that is getting past me.

I’m not agreeing with the Kalam if I think there is a level of existence at which singularities come and go out of existence somewhat routinely in keeping with an internal order we are in no position to understand.

I’m not quite sure what you’re basing this theory on. If it is sheer speculation, then why favour it over the Kalam? There is also an uncertainty in the way you theorize. You seem to assume this one realm of spacetime in which singularities pop in and out of existence all the time. But that simply makes us ask where this larger spacetime entity came from. Finally, I’m afraid there is no such thing as something popping into existence out of nothing. I can prove this mathematically. Let nothing be represented by 0, and let something be represented by some nonzero value. To get something out of nothing would be to start with 0 and spontaneously end up at a nonzero value. It would be tantamount to saying 0 = 1. It is mathematically invalid.

Einstein showed that space and time are two sides of the same coin. Ultimately, time has a beginning, meaning that spacetime has a beginning. As I noted in my previous response, this can be proven from the logically contradictory nature of an eternal past. Furthermore, we can also say that this beginning is not spontaneously from nothing, per the above. The further we dive, the more theistic in constraint our conclusions will have to be.

EDIT: Just saw the Weinberg multiverse video. Allow me to watch it. I will update this comment with a second edit notice after seeing it with my comments.

EDIT 2: It is interesting but, for the sake of this conversation, speculation.

Infinity is a rational fact.

Infinity can not be actualized in the real world. It is only valid as a mathematical concept. By any chance, have you taken calculus? In calculus, we learn that values, in real application, can only approach infinity but do not ever reach infinity. And the phrase “approach infinity” simply means that the value in question gets bigger forever and does not have, at some limit, some finite value.

I also don’t see any real basis for a multiverse. The only time I ever see a multiverse get supposed in when someone wants a quick escape hatchet from the idea of the universe being finely tuned - although the multiverse, as it turns out, does not save anyone from fine tuning, even if true. Which I find it is not. In any case, the logical paradoxes of an infinite past apply whether or not we’re talking about a universe or a multiverse. There is no such thing as an infinite amount of time passing, it’s obviously impossible. No matter how much time passes, the number will get bigger and all, but it … doesn’t ever reach infinity. This applies to the universe, multiverse, cosmos, or whatever you want to call it.

Agreed. But at this level of remove isn’t it all speculation? I think we just have a different sense of what is reasonable, parsimonious and likely. But I’m not representing my conclusions as more than that. I’m certainly not basing any argument for or against God on such speculation.

There is no such thing as fine tuning. Only is self tuning. Your category error calculus analogy is nothing to do with the reality, the inescapable rational reality of infinite nature from, for forever and ever. Mind lurching though that is. Whether God grounds it or not. If God then He has always created. If not God, nature grounds itself, it abhors null, or rather null is abhorred; that is nature. It lacks, wants for nothing regardless. And what logical paradoxes are in eternal nature? And read up on Cantor’s aleph numbers. He’s a tad beyond calculus. It’s utterly irrelevant how we feel about increasing infinity, here we are doing it.

‘Some Christian theologians (particularly neo-Scholastics) saw Cantor’s work as a challenge to the uniqueness of the absolute infinity in the nature of God[6] – on one occasion equating the theory of transfinite numbers with pantheism[7] – a proposition that Cantor vigorously rejected.’.

They still do. With no warrant whatsoever.

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