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

on Natural Theology, Part 8.

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

Today we turn to a new argument for God's existence, the so-called Kalam cosmological argument.

As a boy, I wondered at the existence of the universe.

I wondered where it came from.

Did it have a beginning or has it always existed?

I can remember lying in bed at night trying to think

of a beginningless universe. Every event would be preceded by another event back and back

and back with no stopping point or more accurately no starting point. My mind just

reeled at the concept, it seemed to me inconceivable. There must have been a beginning

at some point I thought in order for everything to get started. Well, little did I realize that for centuries men had grappled with the idea of an infinite

past and whether the universe had a beginning.

Ancient Greek philosophers, like Aristotle, believed that matter was necessary and uncreated and therefore eternal

in the past. God may be responsible for introducing order into the cosmos, but he did not create

the universe itself.

This Greek view was in contrast to the even more ancient Jewish view on the subject.

Hebrew writers held that the universe has not always existed but had a beginning point

at some time in the past at which it was created by God.

As the first verse of the Hebrew Bible states, in the beginning, God created the heavens

and the earth, Genesis 1-1.

Now eventually these two traditions, Greek and Jewish, began to interact and there arose

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