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

on Natural Theology.

Part 9.

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

Last week we began talking about the Kalam cosmological argument and I offered a defense of the first premise.

Today we want to turn to the second premise of that argument, which is that the universe began to exist.

This is obviously the more controversial of the two premises.

It's fairly obvious, I think, that if the universe began to exist, then the universe has

a cause of its existence.

But it's by no means obvious that the universe began to exist.

So I want to examine both philosophical arguments and scientific evidence in support of this

second premise. And if you were to ask me what the relationship is between these two, I would

say that for me at least the first line of defense for this second premise is the philosophical

arguments and I see the scientific evidence

as simply a confirmation empirically of a conclusion already established on the basis of philosophical

arguments.

So I will often speak of the support for this premise in terms of philosophical arguments

and scientific confirmation.

Now let's look at the first philosophical argument.

Al-Hazali, the 12th century Muslim theologian, whom we've taken as our springboard for examining this argument, argued

that if the universe never began to exist, then there has been an infinite number of past events

prior to today. But he argued an infinite number of things cannot exist, and therefore it follows that

...