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

on Natural Theology. Part 10. For more resources from Dr. Craig, go to reasonable faith.org.

We've been looking at the Kalam cosmological argument for God's existence, and last time

we began studying the philosophical arguments and the scientific confirmations of the crucial

second premise that the universe began to exist.

We looked at Ghazali's first argument, first philosophical argument, based

upon the impossibility of the existence of an actually infinite number of things. But he

has a second philosophical argument as well. This argument is independent of the first argument.

That is to say even if you think that an actually infinite number of things can exist,

this argument aspires to show that the series of past events at least cannot be actually infinite.

Now the series of past events, Ghazali observes, has been formed by adding one event after another.

The series of events in the past is like a sequence of dominoes falling one after another until the last domino today is finally reached.

But he argues no series which is formed by adding one member after another can be actually

infinite, for you cannot pass through an infinite number of elements, one element at a time.

Now, I think this is easy to see in the case of trying to count to infinity. No matter how high

you count, there is always an infinity of numbers left to count.

Therefore, no one can count to infinity.

He can go on and on and on and infinity will simply be a limit to the series of numbers

he counts, but he will never arrive at infinity.

But if you cannot count to infinity, how can you count down from infinity?

This would be like someone's claiming to have counted down all of the negative numbers ending at

0, negative 3, negative 2, negative 1, 0.

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