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

on Natural Theology. Part 11. For more resources from Dr. Craig, go to reasonable faith.org.

We've been looking at philosophical arguments for the second premise of the Kalam cosmological

argument and we saw that the impossibility of forming an actually infinite collection

of things, adding one member after another implies that the universe began to exist, which is the second premise of that argument.

So we can summarize this argument as follows.

Premise 1, a collection formed by successive edition cannot be an actual infinite.

Two, the temporal series of events is a collection formed by successive edition.

Three, therefore the temporal series of events cannot be an actual infinite.

So now we have two philosophical arguments for the second premise of the cosmological argument,

one based upon the impossibility of the

existence of an actually infinite number of things and the other based upon the impossibility

of forming a collection of actually infinite number of things by successive addition, adding

one member after another one at a time.

Now, lest we lose the forest for the trees, let's just step back a moment and ask what we've

done here.

What we've basically argued is that the idea of an infinite past is absurd, that the past cannot be infinite, and therefore it must have a beginning.

And these arguments, though seemingly very complex and mind-stretching, can be shared in a very

simple way.

That's important to understand lest you just throw up your hands and say, oh, all this

mathematics is too difficult for me.

The first argument based on the impossibility of an actually infinite number of things, what

...