Dear Dr. Craig, firstly, although I am not a Christian, I must say your rigorous and strong defense of the Christian faith provide any

non-Christian with significant challenges. I had a specific question on your defense of the Kalam.

Why is it that you defend the second premise of the Kalam with philosophical arguments regarding

the metaphysical possibility of the actual infinite? You offer a philosophical argument on the impossibility of the

actual infinite due to the absurdities it raises. However, I'm not convinced that the universe

lacking a beginning necessarily entails an actual infinite number of moments prior to now.

For example, as far as I'm aware in your theology, God never begins to

exist, but has only existed for a finite amount of time in the sense that time only began

14 billion years ago. In the same way, the universe could have had a timeless part that gave way

to the physical reality in which, we see? From what I understand, all cosmological models suggest that

there was always something, whether that's mathematical laws, or a vacuum, or physical reality.

Roger Penrose's theory of conformal cyclical cosmology seems to be very plausible to me.

Although the universe is eternal, it doesn't require

an actually infinite number of moments before this one. I don't think any model goes from a literal

philosophical nothing to the universe as we see it, excluding creation ex-nilo in Abrahamic faiths.

So if we define the universe broadly as the existence of something,

it seems plausible that something has always existed, and this wouldn't necessarily commit one

to the metaphysical absurdity of an actual infinite. I would love to hear your thoughts

on whether this line of reasoning avoids the need for invoking the actual

infinite in discussing the beginning of the universe. Thank you. Warmly, Jack, Canada. I call your

proposal the hypothesis of a quiescent universe, Jack, and I addressed it years ago in my note the Kalam cosmological argument

and the hypothesis of a quiescent universe, published in Faith and Philosophy, Volume 8,

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