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

on Natural Theology, Part 6. For more resources from Dr. Craig, go to reasonable faith.org.

We've been looking at the contingency argument for God's existence, and last time I offered

a defensive premise one of the argument that everything that exists has an explanation

of its existence, either in the necessity of its own nature or else in some external cause.

In defense of this premise, I shared Richard Taylor's illustration of going on a walk

through the woods and finding a ball lying on the forest floor.

You would naturally wonder how it came to be there.

And if anyone said it just exists without any explanation of its existence, you

would think he was joking. Well, it's not just the ball that this would apply to any sort

of object you might think of would fit the bill. A tree in your front yard, a car in your driveway,

a person who works at your office. In every case, we would

say there's an explanation of why that thing exists rather than not. And merely increasing

the size of the object does nothing to provide or remove the need for an explanation of its existence.

That leads naturally to the question then what is the explanation of the existence of the

universe.

Now atheists will typically say in response to premise one that this premise, this principle of sufficient

reason as it's called, is true of everything in the universe, but they want to exempt the

universe itself from the principle. The universe itself is the exception to the rule and it

doesn't need to have an explanation of its existence. Everything in the universe is the exception to the rule, and it doesn't need to have an explanation of

its existence. Everything in the universe has an explanation of its existence, but the universe

itself exists without explanation. And I think this atheist response to the principle commits what has been aptly called the

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