(January 31, 2016 at 2:52 pm)Esquilax Wrote: The problem with Craig (well, one of many) is that he either doesn't understand how infinite sets work, or he benefits from presenting a misunderstanding of them. All an infinite set really does is describe a set without an upper or lower bound, and yet WLC seems to be asserting that progression or development of any sort is impossible due to that lack of bounds. The problem with the assertion that the universe would have transitioned to classical spacetime "from eternity past, if at all," is that the 13 billion year span that the universe has possessed classical spacetime is itself a part of "eternity past." In a very real sense, that's exactly what happened, because an eternal reality doesn't preclude the existence of progression from a given state to another state within the context of the set, just that the set itself has no beginning or end point. The universe, at least the model of it Craig mistakenly thinks his incredulity will debunk, may not have had a beginning, but it's not a crazy idea at all that it might still have taken time for the conditions within it to arrange in such a way that classical spacetime results, because a lack of a beginning or end does not preclude the notion of change within specified time frames in the set. Hell, we're not even capable of understanding how common or uncommon the conditions that led to classical spacetime may be in the context of the immediately previous state of the universe, it could simply be that what we perceive as spacetime arising is a particularly rare event that takes a certain amount of time to coalesce. Craig's contention isn't even a problem.
Another issue here is that Craig's terminology is so fucked up and loaded with assumptions that it can't even really be considered a cogent thought. On the one hand, Craig acknowledges that classical spacetime is a phenomenon with a concrete beginning, and then he goes right on to assume that the state of reality prior to that behaves exactly like an ordered, linear progression such that he can apply his baseless ideas about actual infinites to that... but there's no reason for this to be so. Notions like "eternity" may not even be applicable, we have no way of knowing yet, and yet Craig is happy to just assume that for his own benefit.
So, the problem- aside from the special pleading, which isn't surprising from Craig- is that he's using a willfully ignorant understanding of infinities, to ask a fundamentally mangled and malformed question, which itself has a more parsimonious answer even within the framework of its ridiculous, fucked up premises.
... Pretty standard Craig argumentation, if you ask me.
He applies to the Cosmos what he refuses to apply to god. And yet, if god had no beginning, then god waited an infinite amount of time, in which he had an infinite amount of thoughts, to create the Universe 13.8 billion years ago.
