بسم الله الرحمن الرحيم
The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology
Edited by: William Lane Craig & J. P. Moreland
The Leibnizian Cosmological Argument
· The kalam argument proceeds by arguing, on a priori or a posteriori grounds, that the past is finite and hence, in fact, no infinite regress occurred. [The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology, Edited by: William Lane Craig and J. P. Moreland, 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd, Page 25.]
· In any case, rare is the Christian cosmological arguer who claims to be able to show that the First Cause is a Trinity, and indeed Christian theologians may say this is good, since that God is a Trinity is a matter of faith. [The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology, Edited by: William Lane Craig and J. P. Moreland, 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd, Page 91.]
· Typical metaphysical arguments, on the other hand, argue that a First Cause must have some special metaphysical feature, such as being simple or being pure actuality, from which feature a number of other attributes follow. [The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology, Edited by: William Lane Craig and J. P. Moreland, 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd, Page 91.]
· Finally, one can bring to bear the full panoply of design arguments available. The First Cause is an entity that has produced a universe apparently fi ne-tuned for life, containing beauty and creatures attuned to beauty, containing moral obligations and creatures aware of them; a universe containing conscious beings with free will; and a universe some of whose contents have objective functions (eyes are for seeing and so on – these kinds of functional attributions arguably cannot be reduced to evolutionary claims, although there is a large literature on this controversial claim). We have shown, let us suppose, that there is a First Cause. The further supposition that the First Cause is a highly intelligent and very powerful person acting purposively is highly plausible given all this data. [The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology, Edited by: William Lane Craig and J. P. Moreland, 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd, Page 92.]
· It is at least plausible that if something has parts, then it makes sense to ask why these parts are united. If so, then the existence of a being with parts cannot be self-explanatory. The same is true of what one might call “metaphysical parts,” like distinct powers, tropes, and so on. If we suppose that the First Cause’s existence is self-explanatory, rather than explained in terms of some further metaphysical principles, then we might well conclude that there cannot be any composition in the First Cause. [The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology, Edited by: William Lane Craig and J. P. Moreland, 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd, Page 93.]
The Kalam Cosmological Argument
· The cosmological argument is a family of arguments that seek to demonstrate the existence of a Suffi cient Reason or First Cause of the existence of the cosmos. [The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology, Edited by: William Lane Craig and J. P. Moreland, 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd, Page 101.]
· Following the Muslim conquest of North Africa, this tradition was taken up and subsequently enriched by medieval Muslim and Jewish theologians before being transmitted back again into Christian scholastic theology. [The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology, Edited by: William Lane Craig and J. P. Moreland, 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd, Page 101.]
· In light of the central role played by this form of the cosmological argument in medieval Islamic theology, as well as the substantive contribution to its development by its medieval Muslim proponents, we use the word “kalam” to denominate this version of the argument. [The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology, Edited by: William Lane Craig and J. P. Moreland, 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd, Page 101.]
· Jewish theologians in Muslim Spain, who rubbed shoulders both with the Arabic East and the Latin West, were the means by which the kalam cosmological argument found its way back into Christian thought. [The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology, Edited by: William Lane Craig and J. P. Moreland, 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd, Page 102.]
· After suffering several centuries of eclipse, the argument has enjoyed a resurgence of interest in recent decades, doubtlessly spurred by the startling empirical evidence of contemporary astrophysical cosmology for a beginning of space and time. [The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology, Edited by: William Lane Craig and J. P. Moreland, 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd, Page 102.]
· In his Kitab al-Iqtisad, the medieval Muslim theologian al-Ghazali presented the following simple syllogism in support of the existence of a Creator: “Every being which begins has a cause for its beginning; now the world is a being which begins; therefore, it possesses a cause for its beginning” (al-Ghazali 1962, pp. 15–6). [The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology, Edited by: William Lane Craig and J. P. Moreland, 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd, Page 102.]
· وجوده تعالى وتقدس، برهانه أنَّا نقول: كلُ حادثٍ فلحدوثه سبب، والعالم حادث؛ فيلزم منه أنَّ له سبباً، ونعني بالعالم كلّ موجود سوى الله تعالى. [أبو حامد محمد الغزالي (المتوفى: 505هـ): الاقتصاد في الاعتقاد، دار الكتب العلمية ببيروت، الطبعة الأولى، صـ24]
· The argument, then, is extremely simple: (1) Everything that begins to exist has a cause. (2) The universe began to exist. (3) Therefore, the universe has a cause. [The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology, Edited by: William Lane Craig and J. P. Moreland, 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd, Page 102.]
· Since an actual infinite cannot exist and an infinite temporal regress of events is an actual infinite, we may conclude that an infinite temporal regress of events cannot exist. Therefore, since the temporal regress of events is finite, the universe began to exist. [The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology, Edited by: William Lane Craig and J. P. Moreland, 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd, Page 117.]
· If one cannot count to infinity, how can one count down from infinity? If one cannot traverse the infinite by moving in one direction, how can one traverse it by moving in the opposite direction? In order for us to have “arrived” at today, temporal existence has, so to speak, traversed an infinite number of prior events. But before the present event could occur, the event immediately prior to it would have to occur; and before that event could occur, the event immediately prior to it would have to occur; and so on ad infinitum. One gets driven back and back into the infinite past, making it impossible for any event to occur. Thus, if the series of past events were beginningless, the present event could not have occurred, which is absurd. [The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology, Edited by: William Lane Craig and J. P. Moreland, 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd, Page 118.]
· To say that the infinite past could have been formed by successive addition is like saying that someone has just succeeded in writing down all the negative numbers, ending at −1. [The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology, Edited by: William Lane Craig and J. P. Moreland, 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd, Page 119, 120.]
· The first is that the universe will eventually die, wallowing, as it were, in its own entropy. This is known among physicists as the ‘heat death’ of the universe. The second is that the universe cannot have existed for ever, otherwise it would have reached its equilibrium end state an infinite time ago. Conclusion: the universe did not always exist. (Davies, P. (1983) God and the New Physics. New York: Simon & Schuster., p. 11) [The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology, Edited by: William Lane Craig and J. P. Moreland, 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd, Page 122.]
· For example, Ellis, Kirchner, and Stoeger ask, “Can there be an infinite set of really existing universes? We suggest that, on the basis of well-known philosophical arguments, the answer is No” (Ellis, G. F. R., Kirchner, U., and Stoeger, W. R. (2003) Multiverses and physical cosmology. http://arXiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0305292 (accessed July 11, 2008)., p. 14; emphasis added). [The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology, Edited by: William Lane Craig and J. P. Moreland, 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd, Page 125.]
· “Of all the great predictions that science has ever made over the centuries,” exclaims John Wheeler, “was there ever one greater than this, to predict, and predict correctly, and predict against all expectation a phenomenon so fantastic as the expansion of the universe?” (Wheeler, J. A. (1980) Beyond the hole. In H. Woolf (ed.), Some Strangeness in the Proportion, 354–75. Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, p. 354). [The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology, Edited by: William Lane Craig and J. P. Moreland, 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd, Page 129.]
· If we extrapolate this prediction to its extreme, we reach a point when all distances in the universe have shrunk to zero. An initial cosmological singularity therefore forms a past temporal extremity to the universe. We cannot continue physical reasoning, or even the concept of space-time, through such an extremity. For this reason, most cosmologists think of the initial singularity as the beginning of the universe. On this view the big bang represents the creation event; the creation not only of all the matter and energy in the universe, but also of space-time itself. (Davies, P. (1978) Spacetime singularities in cosmology. In J. T. Fraser (ed.), The Study of Time III, 78–9. Berlin: Springer Verlag, pp. 78–9) [The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology, Edited by: William Lane Craig and J. P. Moreland, 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd, Page 130.]
· As Barrow and Tipler emphasize, “At this singularity, space and time came into existence; literally nothing existed before the singularity, so, if the Universe originated at such a singularity, we would truly have a creation ex nihilo” (Barrow, J. D. and Tipler, F. (1986) The Anthropic Cosmological Principle. Oxford: Clarendon Press, p. 442). [The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology, Edited by: William Lane Craig and J. P. Moreland, 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd, Page 130.]
· String theory is by far the most popular method proposed so far to unify quantum theory with GR. Essentially, string theory proposes that the elementary entities of nature are not point particles (zero-dimensional objects) but are strings (one-dimensional objects). [The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology, Edited by: William Lane Craig and J. P. Moreland, 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd, Page 159.]
· First and foremost, the principle is rooted in the metaphysical intuition that something cannot come into being from nothing. For to come into existence without a cause of any sort is to come into being from nothing. To suggest that things could just pop into being uncaused out of nothing is to quit doing serious metaphysics and to resort to magic. Nobody sincerely believes that things, say, a horse or an Eskimo village, can just pop into being without a cause. But if we make the universe an exception to (1.0), we have got to think that the whole universe just appeared at some point in the past for no reason whatsoever. [The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology, Edited by: William Lane Craig and J. P. Moreland, 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd, Page 182.]
· This objection, however, is based on misunderstanding. In the fi rst place, wholly apart from the disputed question of whether virtual particles really exist at all, not all physicists agree that subatomic events are uncaused. A great many physicists today are quite dissatisfied with the traditional Copenhagen interpretation of quantum physics and are exploring deterministic theories like that of David Bohm. [The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology, Edited by: William Lane Craig and J. P. Moreland, 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd, Page 183.]
· Second, even on the in-deterministic interpretation, particles do not come into being out of nothing. They arise as spontaneous fluctuations of the energy contained in the subatomic vacuum, which constitutes an indeterministic cause of their origination. [The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology, Edited by: William Lane Craig and J. P. Moreland, 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd, Page 183.]
· Popularizers touting such theories as getting “something from nothing” apparently do not understand that the vacuum is not nothing but is a sea of fluctuating energy endowed with a rich structure and subject to physical laws. Such models do not, therefore, involve a true origination ex nihilo. [See remarks by Kanitscheider, B. (1990) Does physical cosmology transcend the limits of naturalistic reasoning? In P. Weingartner and G. Doen (eds.), Studies on Marco Bunge’s “Treatise,” 337–50. Amsterdam: Rodopi.] [The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology, Edited by: William Lane Craig and J. P. Moreland, 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd, Page 183.]
· Second, if things really could come into being uncaused out of nothing, then it becomes inexplicable why just anything or everything does not come into existence uncaused from nothing. Why do bicycles and Beethoven and root beer not pop into being from nothing? Why is it only universes that can come into being from nothing? What makes nothingness so discriminatory? There cannot be anything about nothingness that favors universes, for nothingness does not have any properties. Nothingness is the absence of anything whatsoever. [The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology, Edited by: William Lane Craig and J. P. Moreland, 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd, Page 186.]
· Finally, (1.0) is constantly confirmed in our experience. Scientific naturalists thus have the strongest of motivations to accept it. [The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology, Edited by: William Lane Craig and J. P. Moreland, 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd, Page 187.]
· Elsewhere, Mackie reveals his true sentiments: “I myself find it hard to accept the notion of self-creation from nothing, even given unrestricted chance. And how can this be given, if there really is nothing?” (Mackie, J. L. (1982) The Miracle of Theism. Oxford: Clarendon Press, p. 126). [The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology, Edited by: William Lane Craig and J. P. Moreland, 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd, Page 189.]
· For Hume himself clearly believed in the Causal Principle. In 1754, he wrote to John Stewart, “But allow me to tell you that I never asserted so absurd a Proposition as that anything might arise without a cause: I only maintain’d, that our Certainty of the Falsehood of that Proposition proceeded neither from Intuition nor Demonstration, but from another source” (Grieg, J. (ed.) (1932) The Letters of David Hume, 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1: p. 187). [The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology, Edited by: William Lane Craig and J. P. Moreland, 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd, Page 190.]
· Even Mackie confesses, “Still this [causal] principle has some plausibility, in that it is constantly confirmed in our experience (and also used, reasonably, in interpreting our experience)” (Mackie, J. L. (1982) The Miracle of Theism. Oxford: Clarendon Press, p. 89). [The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology, Edited by: William Lane Craig and J. P. Moreland, 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd, Page 190.]
· But what is wrong with (iii), that God is, without creation, timeless? This may be “mysterious” in the sense of “wonderful” or “awe inspiring,” but it is not, so far as we can see, unintelligible; and Mackie gives us no reason to think that it is. [The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology, Edited by: William Lane Craig and J. P. Moreland, 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd, Page 190.]
· There being no reason to perpetuate the series of events beyond the origin of the universe, Ockham’s Razor, which enjoins us not to posit causes beyond necessity, strikes such further causes in favor of an immediate First Cause of the origin of the universe. The same principle dictates that we are warranted in ignoring the possibility of a plurality of uncaused causes in favor of assuming the unicity of the First Cause. [The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology, Edited by: William Lane Craig and J. P. Moreland, 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd, Page 192.]
· This First Cause must also be beginningless, since by contraposition of Premise (1.0), whatever is uncaused does not begin to exist. Moreover, this cause must be changeless, since, once more, an infinite temporal regress of changes cannot exist. [The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology, Edited by: William Lane Craig and J. P. Moreland, 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd, Page 192.]
· From the changelessness of the First Cause, its immateriality follows. For whatever is material involves incessant change on at least the molecular and atomic levels, but the uncaused First Cause exists in a state of absolute changelessness. Given some relational theory of time, the Uncaused Cause must therefore also be timeless, at least sans the universe, since in the utter absence of events time would not exist. [The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology, Edited by: William Lane Craig and J. P. Moreland, 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd, Page 192.]
· In any case, the timelessness of the First Cause sans the universe can be more directly inferred from the finitude of the past. Given that time had a beginning, the cause of the beginning of time must be timeless.100 It follows that this Cause must also be spaceless, since it is both immaterial and timeless, and no spatial entity can be both immaterial and timeless. If an entity is immaterial, it could exist in space only in virtue of being related to material things in space; but then it could not be timeless, since it undergoes extrinsic change in its relations to material things. Hence, the uncaused First Cause must transcend both time and space and be the cause of their origination. Such a being must be, moreover, enormously powerful, since it brought the entirety of physical reality, including all matter and energy and space-time itself, into being without any material cause. [The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology, Edited by: William Lane Craig and J. P. Moreland, 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd, Page 192.]
· First, as Richard Swinburne (Swinburne, R. (1991) The Existence of God, rev. edn. Oxford: Clarendon Press, pp. 32–48) points out, there are two types of causal explanation: scientific explanations in terms of laws and initial conditions and personal explanations in terms of agents and their volitions. [The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology, Edited by: William Lane Craig and J. P. Moreland, 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd, Page 192.]
· Now a first state of the universe cannot have a scientific explanation, since there is nothing before it, and therefore, it cannot be accounted for in terms of laws operating on initial conditions. It can only be accounted for in terms of an agent and his volitions, a personal explanation. [The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology, Edited by: William Lane Craig and J. P. Moreland, 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd, Page 193.]
· For there appear to be only two candidates which can be described as immaterial, beginningless, uncaused, timeless, and spaceless beings: either abstract objects or an unembodied mind. [The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology, Edited by: William Lane Craig and J. P. Moreland, 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd, Page 193.]
· But no sort of abstract object can be the cause of the origin of the universe, for abstract objects are not involved in causal relations. Even if they were, since they are not agents, they cannot volitionally exercise a causal power to do anything. If they were causes, they would be so, not as agents, but as mindless events or states. But they cannot be event-causes, since they do not exist in time and space. [The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology, Edited by: William Lane Craig and J. P. Moreland, 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd, Page 193.]
· The best way out of this dilemma is agent causation, whereby the agent freely brings about some event in the absence of prior determining conditions. Because the agent is free, he can initiate new effects by freely bringing about conditions which were not previously present. For example, a man sitting changelessly from eternity could freely will to stand up; thus, a temporal effect arises from an eternally existing agent. Similarly, a finite time ago a Creator endowed with free will could have freely brought the world into being at that moment. In this way, the Creator could exist changelessly and eternally but choose to create the world in time. By “choose” one need not mean that the Creator changes his mind about the decision to create but that he freely and eternally intends to create a world with a beginning. By exercising his causal power, he therefore brings it about that a world with a beginning comes to exist.101 So the cause is eternal, but the effect is not. In this way, then, it is possible for the temporal universe to have come to exist from an eternal cause: through the free will of a personal Creator. [The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology, Edited by: William Lane Craig and J. P. Moreland, 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd, Page 194.]
· We may not understand how the cause brought the universe into being out of nothing, but such efficient causation without material causation is not unprecedented, as we have seen, and it is even more incomprehensible, in this sense, how the universe could have popped into being out of nothing without any cause, material or efficient. One cannot avert the necessity of a cause by positing an absurdity. [The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology, Edited by: William Lane Craig and J. P. Moreland, 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd, Page 196.]
The Teleological Argument
· This precise setting of the structure of the universe for life is called the “fine-tuning of the cosmos.” This fine-tuning falls into three major categories: that of the laws of nature, that of the constants of physics, and that of the initial conditions of the universe. [The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology, Edited by: William Lane Craig and J. P. Moreland, 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd, Page 202.]
· The multiverse hypothesis is widely considered the leading alternative to a theistic explanation. [The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology, Edited by: William Lane Craig and J. P. Moreland, 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd, Page 203.]
· My basic argument first claims that, given the fine-tuning evidence, the existence of a life-permitting universe (LPU) strongly supports the Theistic hypothesis (T) over the naturalistic single-universe hypothesis (NSU). I call this the core fine-tuning argument. [The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology, Edited by: William Lane Craig and J. P. Moreland, 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd, Page 205.]
· The core fi ne-tuning argument relies on a standard Principle of Confirmation theory, the so-called Likelihood Principle. This principle can be stated as follows. Let h1 and h2 be two competing hypotheses. According to the Likelihood Principle, an observation e counts as evidence in favor of hypothesis h1 over h2 if the observation is more probable under h1 than h2. [The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology, Edited by: William Lane Craig and J. P. Moreland, 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd, Page 205.]
· The fi rst major type of fi ne-tuning is that of the laws of nature. The laws and principles of nature themselves have just the right form to allow for the existence embodied moral agents. To illustrate this, we shall consider the following fi ve laws or principles (or causal powers) and show that if any one of them did not exist, self-reproducing, highly complex material systems could not exist: (1) a universal attractive force, such as gravity; (2) a force relevantly similar to that of the strong nuclear force, which binds protons and neutrons together in the nucleus; (3) a force relevantly similar to that of the electromagnetic force; (4) Bohr’s Quantization Rule or something similar; (5) the Pauli Exclusion Principle. If any one of these laws or principles did not exist (and were not replaced by a law or principle that served the same or similar role), complex self-reproducing material systems could not evolve. [The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology, Edited by: William Lane Craig and J. P. Moreland, 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd, Page 211.]
· Gravity is a long-range attractive force between all material objects, whose strength increases in proportion to the masses of the objects and falls off with the inverse square of the distance between them. [The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology, Edited by: William Lane Craig and J. P. Moreland, 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd, Page 211, 212.]
· Now consider what would happen if there were no universal, long-range attractive force between material objects, but all the other fundamental laws remained (as much as possible) the same. If no
· such force existed, then there would be no stars, since the force of gravity is what holds the matter in stars together against the outward forces caused by the high internal temperatures inside the stars. This means that there would be no long-term energy sources to sustain the evolution (or even existence) of highly complex life. Moreover, there probably would be no planets, since there would be nothing to bring material particles together, and even if there were planets (say because planet-sized objects always existed in the universe and were held together by cohesion), any beings of signifi cant size could not move around without fl oating off the planet with no way of returning. This means that embodied moral agents could not evolve, since the development of the brain of such beings would require signifi cant mobility. For all these reasons, a universal attractive force such as gravity is required for embodied moral agents. [The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology, Edited by: William Lane Craig and J. P. Moreland, 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd, Page 212.]
· It must be strong enough to overcome the repulsive electromagnetic force between the protons and the quantum zero-point energy of the nucleons. Because of this, it must be considerably stronger than the electromagnetic force; otherwise the nucleus would come apart. Further, to keep atoms of limited size, it must be very short range – which means its strength must fall off much, much more rapidly than the inverse square law characteristic of the electromagnetic force and gravity. Since it is a purely attractive force (except at extraordinarily small distances), if it fell off by an inverse square law like gravity or electromagnetism, it would act just like gravity and pull all the protons and neutrons in the entire universe together. In fact, given its current strength, around 1040 stronger than the force of gravity between the nucleons in a nucleus, the universe would most likely consist of a giant black hole. Thus, to have atoms with an atomic number greater than that of hydrogen, there must be a force that plays the same role as the strong nuclear force – that is, one that is much stronger than the electromagnetic force but only acts over a very short range. [The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology, Edited by: William Lane Craig and J. P. Moreland, 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd, Page 212.]
· Third, consider electromagnetism. Without electromagnetism, there would be no atoms, since there would be nothing to hold the electrons in orbit. Further, there would be no means of transmission of energy from stars for the existence of life on planets. It is doubtful whether enough stable complexity could arise in such a universe for even the simplest forms of life to exist. [The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology, Edited by: William Lane Craig and J. P. Moreland, 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd, Page 212.]
· The constants of physics are fundamental numbers that, when plugged into the laws of physics, determine the basic structure of the universe. An example of a fundamental constant is Newton’s gravitational constant G, which determines the strength of gravity via Newton’s law. [The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology, Edited by: William Lane Craig and J. P. Moreland, 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd, Page 213.]
· As astrophysicist Martin Rees notes, “In an imaginary strong gravity world, even insects would need thick legs to support them, and no animals could get much larger” (2000, p. 30). [The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology, Edited by: William Lane Craig and J. P. Moreland, 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd, Page 214.]
· Indeed, other calculations show that stars with lifetimes of more than a billion years, as compared with our Sun’s lifetime of 10 billion years, could not exist if gravity were increased by more than a factor of 3,000 (Collins 2003). This would significantly inhibit the occurrence of embodied moral agents. [The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology, Edited by: William Lane Craig and J. P. Moreland, 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd, Page 214.]
· Probably the most widely discussed case of fi ne-tuning for life is that of the cosmological constant. The cosmological constant, Λ, is a term in Einstein’s equation of General Relativity that, when positive, acts as a repulsive force, causing space to expand and, when negative, acts as an attractive force, causing space to contract. [The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology, Edited by: William Lane Craig and J. P. Moreland, 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd, Page 215.]
· Einstein originally hypothesized the existence of the cosmological constant so that his theory would imply a static universe. Thus, the original cosmological constant that Einstein postulated was not associated with contributions to the vacuum energy of the various fields of physics. [The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology, Edited by: William Lane Craig and J. P. Moreland, 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd, Page 216.]
· The smallness of the cosmological constant compared to its non-fi ne-tuned, theoretically expected value is widely regarded as the single greatest problem confronting current physics and cosmology. [The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology, Edited by: William Lane Craig and J. P. Moreland, 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd, Page 216.]
· As astrophysicist John Peacock notes, “supersymmetry, if it exists at all, is clearly a broken symmetry at present day energies; there is no natural way of achieving this breaking while retaining the attractive consequence of a zero cosmological constant, and so the Λ problem remains as puzzling as ever” (1999, p. 268). [The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology, Edited by: William Lane Craig and J. P. Moreland, 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd, Page 218.]
· Some aspects of these initial conditions are expressed by various cosmic parameters, such as the mass density of the early universe, the strength of the explosion of the Big Bang, the strength of the density perturbations that led to star formation, the ratio of radiation density to the density of normal matter, and the like. Various arguments have been made that each of these must be fi ne-tuned for life to occur (see e.g. Rees 2000; Davies 1982, chap. 4). [The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology, Edited by: William Lane Craig and J. P. Moreland, 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd, Page 220.]
· According to Roger Penrose, one of Britain’s leading theoretical physicists, “In order to produce a universe resembling the one in which we live, the Creator would have to aim for an absurdly tiny volume of the phase space of possible universes” (Penrose 1989, p. 343). How tiny is this volume? According to Penrose, if we let x = 10123, the volume of phase space would be about 1/10x of the entire volume (1989, p. 343). This is vastly smaller than the ratio of the volume of a proton – which is about 10−45 m3 – to the entire volume of the visible universe, which is approximately 1084 m3. [The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology, Edited by: William Lane Craig and J. P. Moreland, 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd, Page 220.]
· For example, if one decreases the strength of the strong nuclear force by more than 50 percent (while keeping the electromagnetic force constant), carbon becomes unstable, and with a slightly greater decrease, no atoms with atomic number greater than hydrogen can exist (Barrow & Tipler 1986, pp. 326–7). [The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology, Edited by: William Lane Craig and J. P. Moreland, 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd, Page 223.]
· There are many other cases of fi ne-tuning that I have not discussed, such as those extensively discussed by biochemist Michael Denton (1998). These latter consist of various higher-level features of the natural world, such as the many unique properties of carbon, oxygen, water, and the electromagnetic spectrum, that appear optimally adjusted for the existence of complex biochemical systems (Denton 1988, chaps 3–6, pp. 19–140). [The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology, Edited by: William Lane Craig and J. P. Moreland, 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd, Page 225.]
· According to atheist Keith Parsons: If atheism is correct, if the universe and its laws are all that is or ever has been, how can it be said that the universe, with all of its ‘fi nely tuned’ features, is in any relevant sense probable or improbable? Ex Hypothesi there are no antecedent conditions that could determine such a probability. Hence, if the universe is the ultimate brute fact, it is neither likely nor unlikely, probable nor improbable; it simply is. Further, even if the universe were somehow improbable, it is hard to see on the hypothesis of atheism how we could ever know this. If we were in the position to witness the birth of many worlds – some designed, some undesigned – then we might be in a position to say of any particular world that it had such-and-such a probability of existing undesigned. But we simply are not in such a position. We have absolutely no empirical basis for assigning probabilities to ultimate facts. (1990, p. 182) [The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology, Edited by: William Lane Craig and J. P. Moreland, 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd, Page 226.]
· For example, Michio Kaku states in his recent textbook on superstring theory, “Not a shred of experimental evidence has been found to confi rm . . . superstrings” (1999, p. 17). [The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology, Edited by: William Lane Craig and J. P. Moreland, 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd, Page 263.]
· As astrophysicists Bernard Carr and Martin Rees note “even if all apparently anthropic coincidences could be explained [in terms of some fundamental law], it would still be remarkable that the relationships dictated by physical theory happened also to be those propitious for life” (1979, p. 612). [The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology, Edited by: William Lane Craig and J. P. Moreland, 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd, Page 275.]
5 The Argument from Consciousness
· Crispin Wright notes: A central dilemma in contemporary metaphysics is to find a place for certain anthropocentric subject-matters—for instance, semantic, moral, and psychological—in a world as conceived by modern naturalism: a stance which inflates the concepts and categories deployed by (finished) physical science into a metaphysics of the kind of thing the real world essentially and exhaustively is. On one horn, if we embrace this naturalism, it seems we are committed either to reductionism: that is, to a construal of the reference of, for example, semantic, moral and psychological vocabulary as somehow being within the physical domain—or to disputing that the discourses in question involve reference to what is real at all. On the other horn, if we reject this naturalism, then we accept that there is more to the world than can be embraced within a physicalist ontology—and so take on a commitment, it can seem, to a kind of eerie supernaturalism. (Wright 2002, p. 401) [The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology, Edited by: William Lane Craig and J. P. Moreland, 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd, Page 282, 283.]
· William Lyons claims that: [physicalism] seem[s] to be in tune with the scientifi c materialism of the twentieth century because it [is] a harmonic of the general theme that all there is in the universe is matter and energy and motion and that humans are a product of the evolution of species just as much as buffaloes and beavers are. Evolution is a seamless garment with no holes wherein souls might be inserted from above. (Lyons 1995, p. lv) [The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology, Edited by: William Lane Craig and J. P. Moreland, 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd, Page 283.]
· Wilfrid Sellars said that “in the dimension of describing and explaining the world, science is the measure of all things, of what is that it is, and of what is not that it is not” (Sellars 1963, p.173). [The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology, Edited by: William Lane Craig and J. P. Moreland, 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd, Page 284.]
· Theists (e.g. Robert Adams (1992, pp. 225–40) and Richard Swinburne (1979, chap. 9; 1986, p. 183–96)) have advanced a different theistic argument from consciousness. The argument may be construed as an inference to the best explanation, a Bayesian-style argument, or a straightforward deductive argument in which its premises are alleged to be more reasonable then their denials. Setting the inductive forms aside, AC becomes the following: (1) Mental events are genuine nonphysical mental entities that exist. (2) Specific mental and physical event types are regularly correlated. (3) There is an explanation for these correlations. (4) Personal explanation is different from natural scientific explanation. (5) The explanation for these correlations is either a personal or natural scientific explanation. (6) The explanation is not a natural scientific one. (7) Therefore, the explanation is a personal one. (8) If the explanation is personal, then it is theistic. (9) Therefore, the explanation is theistic. [The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology, Edited by: William Lane Craig and J. P. Moreland, 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd, Page 295, 296.]
· First, Searle says that naturalists are troubled by the existence of irreducible mental entities because they are misled into thinking that the following is a coherent question that needs an answer: “How do unconscious bits of matter produce consciousness?” (Searle 1994, p. 55; cf. pp. 32, 56–7). Many “find it difficult, if not impossible to accept the idea that the real world, the world described by physics and chemistry and biology, contains an ineliminably subjective element. How could such a thing be? How can we possibly get a coherent world picture if the world contains these mysterious conscious entities?” (Searle 1994, p. 95). [The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology, Edited by: William Lane Craig and J. P. Moreland, 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd, Page 301, 302.]
· Paul Churchland says: The important point about the standard evolutionary story is that the human species and all of its features are the wholly physical outcome of a purely physical process. . . . If this is the correct account of our origins, then there seems neither need, nor room, to fi t any nonphysical substances or properties into our theoretical account of ourselves. We are creatures of matter. And we should learn to live with that fact. (Churchland 1984, p. 21) [The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology, Edited by: William Lane Craig and J. P. Moreland, 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd, Page 305.]
· “Moral properties constitute so odd a cluster of properties and relations that they are most unlikely to have arisen in the ordinary course of events without an all-powerful god to create them” (Mackie 1982, p. 115; cf. Moreland & Nielsen 1993, chap. 8–10). [The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology, Edited by: William Lane Craig and J. P. Moreland, 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd, Page 311.]
· As B. F. Skinner noted just before his death: Evolutionary theorists have suggested that ‘conscious intelligence’ is an evolved trait, but they have never shown how a nonphysical variation could arise [in the first place] to be selected by physical contingencies of survival. (Skinner 1990, p. 1207) [The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology, Edited by: William Lane Craig and J. P. Moreland, 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd, Page 311.]
· Jaegwon Kim acknowledges that: We commonly think that we, as persons, have a mental and bodily dimension … Something like this dualism of personhood, I believe, is common lore shared across most cultures and religious traditions … (Kim 2001, p. 30) [The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology, Edited by: William Lane Craig and J. P. Moreland, 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd, Page 326.]
6 The Argument from Reason
· The argument, as we shall see, takes a number of forms, but in all instances it attempts to show that the necessary conditions of logical and mathematical reasoning, which undergird the natural sciences as a human activity, require the rejection of all broadly materialist worldviews. [The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology, Edited by: William Lane Craig and J. P. Moreland, 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd, Page 343.]
· Third, I will examine three sub-arguments: the argument from intentionality, the argument from mental causation, and the argument from the psychological relevance of logical laws, showing how these demonstrate serious and unsolved difficulties for materialism. [The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology, Edited by: William Lane Craig and J. P. Moreland, 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd, Page 343.]
· Psychology of course must not be question-begging. It must not explain intelligence in terms of intelligence, for instance assuming responsibility for the existence of intelligence to the munificence of an intelligent creator, or by putting clever homunculi at the control panels of the nervous system. If this were the best psychology could do, the psychology could not to the job assigned to it. (Dennett 1976, p. 171) [The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology, Edited by: William Lane Craig and J. P. Moreland, 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd, Page 348, 349.]
· We think conscious, subjective states really exist, but strictly speaking, they do not. As Susan Blackmore puts it: … each illusory self is a construct of the memetic world in which it successfully competes. Each selfplex gives rise to ordinary human consciousness based on the false idea that there is someone inside who is in charge. (Blackmore 1999, p. 236) [The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology, Edited by: William Lane Craig and J. P. Moreland, 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd, Page 350.]
· As Anscombe puts it: It appears to me that if a man has reasons, and they are good reasons, and they genuinely are his reasons, for thinking something–then his thought is rational, whatever causal statements can be made about him. (Anscombe 1981, p. 229) [The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology, Edited by: William Lane Craig and J. P. Moreland, 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd, Page 358.]
· In order to keep the strands of the argument straight, I divided the argument from reason into the following six sub-arguments: (1) The argument from intentionality (2) The argument from truth (3) The argument from mental causation in virtue of propositional content (4) The argument from the psychological relevance of logical laws (5) The argument from the unity of consciousness (6) The argument from the reliability of our rational faculties [The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology, Edited by: William Lane Craig and J. P. Moreland, 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd, Page 363.]
· As Feser points out: More to the point, brain processes, composed as they are of meaningless chemical components, seem as inherently devoid of intentionality as soundwaves or ink marks. Any intentionality they would also have to be derived from something else. But if anything physical would be devoid of intrinsic intentionality, whatever does have intrinsic intentionality would thereby have to be non-physical. Sine the mind is the source of the intentionality of physical entities like sentences and pictures, and doesn’t get its intentionality from anything else (there’s no one “using” our minds to convey meaning) it seems to follow that the mind has intrinsic intentionality, and thus is non-physical. (Feser 2005, p. 136) [The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology, Edited by: William Lane Craig and J. P. Moreland, 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd, Page 365.]
· Suppose I dialed your phone number and said “Would you join us for dinner at our house on Saturday at 7:00?” You replied “yes.” On Saturday, I act in the way I should act if I believed that you were coming to dinner. But if neither of us had any beliefs, intentions, or other states attributed by “that”-clauses, it would be amazing if I actually prepared dinner for you and if you actually showed up. (Baker 1987, p. 130) [The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology, Edited by: William Lane Craig and J. P. Moreland, 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd, Page 370.]
· As Jerry Fodor once put it: If it isn’t literally true that my wanting is causally responsible for my reaching, and my itching is causally responsible for my scratching, and my believing is causally responsible for my saying … if none of that is literally true, then practically everything I believe about anything is false and it’s the end of the world. (Hasker 1999, p. 69–75) [The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology, Edited by: William Lane Craig and J. P. Moreland, 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd, Page 376.]
7 The Moral Argument
· Edward O. Wilson and Michael Ruse have agreed together that “ethics as we understand it is an illusion fobbed off on us by our genes in order to get us to cooperate” (Ruse & Wilson 1989, p. 51). [The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology, Edited by: William Lane Craig and J. P. Moreland, 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd, Page 393.]
· “Epigenetic rules giving us a sense of obligation have been put in place by selection, because of their adaptive value” (Ruse 1998, p. 223). [The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology, Edited by: William Lane Craig and J. P. Moreland, 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd, Page 393.]
· Ruse explains: The Darwinian argues that morality simply does not work (from a biological perspective), unless we believe that it is objective. Darwinian theory shows that, in fact, morality is a function of (subjective) feelings; but it shows also that we have (and must have) the illusion of objectivity. (Ruse 1998, p. 253) [The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology, Edited by: William Lane Craig and J. P. Moreland, 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd, Page 393.]
· An argument – call it the argument from evolutionary naturalism (AEN) – thus emerges from such considerations. Perhaps the following is in the spirit of what Lewis has in mind: (1) If EN is true, then human morality is a by-product of natural selection. (2) If human morality is a by-product of natural selection, then there are no objective moral facts. (3) There are objective moral facts. (4) Therefore, EN is false. [The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology, Edited by: William Lane Craig and J. P. Moreland, 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd, Page 394.]
· “Although atheism might have been logically tenable before Darwin, Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist” (Dawkins 1986, p. 6). [The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology, Edited by: William Lane Craig and J. P. Moreland, 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd, Page 394, 395.]
· Before Darwin, the inference to Paley’s Watchmaker seemed natural, if not inevitable, given a world fi lled with things “that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose” (Dawkins 1986, p. 1). [The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology, Edited by: William Lane Craig and J. P. Moreland, 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd, Page 395.]
· As Darwin asserted: The following proposition seems to me in a high degree probable—namely, that any animal whatever, endowed with well-marked social instincts, the parental and fi lial affections being here included, would inevitably acquire a moral sense or conscience, as soon as its intellectual powers had become as well, or nearly as well developed, as in man. (Darwin 1882, p. 98) [The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology, Edited by: William Lane Craig and J. P. Moreland, 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd, Page 397.]
· If . . . men were reared under precisely the same conditions as hive-bees, there can hardly be a doubt that our unmarried females would, like the worker-bees, think it a sacred duty to kill their brothers, and mothers would strive to kill their fertile daughters, and no one would think of interfering. (Darwin 1882, p. 99) [The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology, Edited by: William Lane Craig and J. P. Moreland, 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd, Page 403.]
· As Tamler Sommers and Alex Rosenberg (2003) have put it, “if our best theory of why people believe P does not require that P is true, then there are no grounds to believe P is true” (p. 667). [The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology, Edited by: William Lane Craig and J. P. Moreland, 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd, Page 404.]
· Nearly a century ago, in his Gifford Lectures, W. R. Sorley cited “Lotze’s Dictum,” after the nineteenth-century German philosopher Rudolph Hermann Lotze: “The true beginning of metaphysics lies in ethics” (Sorley 1935, p. 3). [The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology, Edited by: William Lane Craig and J. P. Moreland, 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd, Page 406.]
· An appeal to those considered judgments that tip off the process of reflective equilibrium would hardly assuage Sharon Street’s worry: If the fund of evaluative judgments with which human reflection began was thoroughly contaminated with illegitimate influence … then the tools of rational reflection were equally contaminated, for the latter are always just a subset of the former. (2006, p. 125) [The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology, Edited by: William Lane Craig and J. P. Moreland, 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd, Page 407.]
· Adams again says: If we suppose that God directly or indirectly causes human beings to regard as excellent approximately those things that are Godlike in the relevant way, it follows that there is a causal and explanatory connection between facts of excellence and beliefs that we may regard as justifi ed about excellence, and hence it is in general no accident that such beliefs are correct when they are. (1999, p. 70) [The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology, Edited by: William Lane Craig and J. P. Moreland, 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd, Page 414.]
· “That conscience which is in every man’s breast, is the law of God written in his heart, which he cannot disobey without acting unnaturally, and being self-condemned” (Reid 1983, p. 355). [The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology, Edited by: William Lane Craig and J. P. Moreland, 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd, Page 417.]
· “Justice implies something which it is not only right to do, and wrong not to do, but which some individual person can claim from us as his moral right” (Mill 2001, p. 50). [The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology, Edited by: William Lane Craig and J. P. Moreland, 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd, Page 423.]
· To have a right, then, is, I conceive, to have something which society ought to defend me in the possession of. If the objector goes on to ask, why it ought? I can give him no other reason than general utility. (Mill 2001, p. 54) [The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology, Edited by: William Lane Craig and J. P. Moreland, 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd, Page 423.]
· “The standard of right action is to do whatever an entirely virtuous person would do” (Betzler 2008, p. 2) [The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology, Edited by: William Lane Craig and J. P. Moreland, 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd, Page 427.]
· Mary Midgley observes: Anyone who refrained from cruelty merely from a wish not to sully his own character, without any direct consideration for the possible victims, would be frivolous and narcissistic. (Midgley 1986, p. 157) [The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology, Edited by: William Lane Craig and J. P. Moreland, 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd, Page 429, 430.]
· The Astonishing Hypothesis is that ‘You,’ your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules. As Lewis Carroll’s Alice may have phrased it: ‘You’re nothing but a pack of neurons.’ This hypothesis is so alien to the ideas of most people alive today that it can be truly called astonishing. (Goetz & Taliaferro 2008, p. 22) [The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology, Edited by: William Lane Craig and J. P. Moreland, 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd, Page 433.]
· We now understand that the mind is not, as Descartes confusedly supposed, in communication with the brain in some miraculous way; it is the brain, or, more specifi cally, a system or rganization within the brain that has evolved in much the way that our immune system or respiratory system or digestive system has evolved. Like many other natural wonders, the human mind is something of a bag of tricks, cobbled together over the eons by the foresightless process of evolution by natural selection. (Dennett 2006, p. 107; emphasis in the original) [The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology, Edited by: William Lane Craig and J. P. Moreland, 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd, Page 434.]
· Bertrand Russell observed: A strange mystery it is that Nature, omnipotent but blind, in the revolutions of her secular hurryings through the abysses of space, has brought forth at last a child, subject still to her power, but gifted with sight, with knowledge of good and evil, with the capacity of judging all the works of his unthinking Mother. (Russell 1957, p. 107) [The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology, Edited by: William Lane Craig and J. P. Moreland, 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd, Page 437.]
8 The Argument from Evil
· The argument from or problem of evil concludes that the existence of evil is, in one way or another, incompatible with the existence of an omnipotent, omnibenevolent, and omniscient being (God). [The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology, Edited by: William Lane Craig and J. P. Moreland, 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd, Page 449.]
· First, the problem of evil is fundamentally, in the words of C. S. Lewis, the problem of pain (Lewis 1962), where an experience of pain is an irreducible, conscious feeling or quale that hurts. [The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology, Edited by: William Lane Craig and J. P. Moreland, 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd, Page 449.]
· Over the course of the last 50+ years, it has become common practice to distinguish between two kinds of incompatibility, namely, the logical and the evidential. According to the logical problem of evil, the mere existence of evil is inconsistent with or logically contradicts the existence of God. The evidential problem of evil, while it concedes that the existence of evil is logically compatible with God’s existence, maintains that the amount and/or kinds of evil in this world provide evidence against the existence of God such that belief that God exists is unjustified and probably false. [The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology, Edited by: William Lane Craig and J. P. Moreland, 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd, Page 453.]
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