Welcome to Defenders, the teaching class of Dr. William Lane Craig.

Today, the Doctrine of Creation, Part 7.

For more information and resources from Dr. Craig, go to reasonable faith.org.

We've been talking about objections to Creatio X. Niilo,

and we ended our time in our last lesson by looking at the objection

that quantum physics can show that things can come into being from nothing, and therefore

no creation is needed in order for the universe to come into existence out of nothing.

You'll recall I quoted Lawrence Krauss, a physicist, to this effect.

He writes, in fact, one of the things about quantum mechanics is quantum mechanics is nothing.

Not only can nothing become something, nothing always becomes something. Nothing is unstable. Nothing will always produce something in quantum mechanics. And if you apply quantum mechanics to gravity, you can show that it's possible

that space and time can come into existence when nothing existed before. So that's not a problem.

Now I explained that these sorts of claims mistakenly take the word nothing to be a singular term referring to something.

For example, the quantum vacuum or quantum mechanical fields.

These are physical realities and therefore most emphatically not nothing. They are clearly

something. And therefore, to call these realities nothing, as Krause does, is at best misleading

and at worst is a deliberate misrepresentation of science.

In his review of Krause's book, A Universe from Nothing, David Albert, who is a very

eminent philosopher of quantum physics, explains, and I quote, quantum states are particular arrangements of elementary physical stuff.

The fact that some arrangements of fields happen to correspond to the existence of particles,

and some don't, is not a whit more mysterious than the fact that some of the possible arrangements

of my fingers happen to correspond to the existence of a fist, and some don't.

And the fact that particles can pop in and out of existence over time as those fields rearrange themselves is not a whit more mysterious

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