Dr. Craig is a liar.

[SteveII]

Craig has no interest at all in demonstrating the first premise- in fact he, and I quote, "takes it as obvious," despite later going on to acknowledge that spacetime as we understand it began at the big bang- and similarly no interest in demonstrating the conclusion. Yet through some sleight of hand, Craig seeks to sweep the fact that he's only justified one third of his argument under the rug and simply moves on from "confirming" premise two, summarizing that Kalam must be true and provides a good basis for a "transcendent cause" for the universe. The fact that he's established no such thing merely passes him by.

This is one of the things I both respect and despise Craig for in equal measure; he's an absolute master at manipulating cognitive biases on stage to make his arguments seem more solid without ever actually defending them. What has he done in this case? He's presented an argument that, at best, leads to a cause of some kind, skipped justifying how that argument applies to his god in favor of justifying a small fraction of that argument and then, taking advantage of a cognitive trick known as a framing bias, he continues on a narrowed train of thought, framing his justification of premise two as justification of the whole.

In reality, the only thing Craig provided evidence for is one third of a vaguely tangential argument to his main claim, without even taking the effort to connect it to his position. It just looks like he's done more because he's good at glossing over the thin parts of his speeches and ending on the thicker bits. There's really nothing there for Carroll to refute. 

You don't think Craig has written on why he thinks Premise (1) is true? 

Ghazali’s reasoning involves three simple steps:

1. Whatever begins to exist has a cause of its beginning.

2. The universe began to exist.

3. Therefore, the universe has a cause of its beginning.

Let’s look at each step of this argument.

Premiss 1

Notice that Ghazali does not need a premiss so strong as (1) in order for his argument to succeed. The first premiss can be more modestly stated.

1'. If the universe began to exist, then the universe has a cause of its beginning.

This more modest version of the first premiss will enable us to avoid distractions about whether subatomic particles which are the result of quantum decay processes come into being without a cause. This alleged exception to (1) is irrelevant to (1'). For the universe comprises all contiguous spacetime reality. Therefore, for the whole universe to come into being without a cause is to come into being from nothing, which is absurd. In quantum decay events, the particles do not come into being from nothing. As Christopher Isham, Britain’s premier quantum cosmologist, cautions,

Care is needed when using the word ‘creation’ in a physical context. One familiar example is the creation of elementary particles in an accelerator. However, what occurs in this situation is the conversion of one type of matter into another, with the total amount of energy being preserved in the process.[2]

Thus, this alleged exception to (1) is not an exception to (1').

Let me give three reasons in support of premiss (1'):

1. Something cannot come from nothing. To claim that something can come into being from nothing is worse than magic. When a magician pulls a rabbit out of a hat, at least you’ve got the magician, not to mention the hat! But if you deny premise (1'), you’ve got to think that the whole universe just appeared at some point in the past for no reason whatsoever. But nobody sincerely believes that things, say, a horse or an Eskimo village, can just pop into being without a cause.

2. If something can come into being from nothing, then it becomes inexplicable why just anything or everything doesn’t come into being from nothing. Think about it: why don’t bicycles and Beethoven and root beer just pop into being from nothing? Why is it only universes that can come into being from nothing? What makes nothingness so discriminatory? There can’t be anything about nothingness that favors universes, for nothingness doesn’t have any properties. Nor can anything constrain nothingness, for there isn’t anything to be constrained!

3. Common experience and scientific evidence confirm the truth of premise 1'. The science of cosmogeny is based on the assumption that there are causal conditions for the origin of the unuiverse. So it’s hard to understand how anyone committed to modern science could deny that (1') is more plausibly true than false.

Read more: http://www.reasonablefaith.org/popular-a...z46BzCRr97