Dr. Craig is a liar.

[Edwardo Piet]

I think existence itself has always existed and always will... that's what I think.

That's even the theist position if they thought about it more. A universe is the set of all things that exist. If God exists and nothing else does, God is the universe. Even in theology there was never not a universe; and there was never 'philosophical nothingness'.

Absolutely. I'm sometimes approached by people familiar with Lawrence Kraus' book "A Universe From Nothing" saying that his theory proves that the universe come from nothing...

The way I understand it is it it IS literally impossible that something came from nothing. Theists often say "Something can't come from nothing" as a really annoying reason to believe in God, but nevertheless that does make logical sense. It is indeed logically impossible for something to come from nothing unless we redefine "Nothing" to be something.

Lawrence Kraus' book should really have been called "A Universe From Empty Atomic Space That Isn't Really Completely Empty But Is Actually Teeming With Quantum Activity" but that wouldn't have made a very catchy book title

It's just like how the original meaning of "atom" meant a completely indivisable building block of reality, so it's impossible by definition to divide an atom into smaller parts.... but then when scientists discovered that what they thought were the atoms of reality were in fact made of smaller parts, they kept the definition and remodelled it rather than redefining the even smaller parts as "atoms" and calling what they initially called atoms something else.... because 1. That would have been confusing 2. Every time they found something even smaller they would have to then call that an "atom" 3. That itself does no good because even if they eventually fail to ever find a smaller part than whatever the smallest they find is, science can't prove the non-existence of something so nothing can actually prove that they ever find the true indivisible "atom". 4. This is the way science works, it remodels stuff, and the other previous 3 points I hope helps show to folks who aren't already familiar with what I am saying that if science worked differently it would be far more confusing.

Science needs working definitions, to keep calling atoms atoms even when they are found not to be what atoms actually are defined to be is better than the alternative which would be to keep redefining what they found as atom.

TL;DR it's better for scientists to keep the same label (e.g "atom", "empty space", etc) and change their model of what that label refers to than to keep redefining the label to fit their model.

Hmmm. If I wanna work on my conciseness maybe I should try writing a bunch of stuff then doing the "TL;DR" at the end and then deleting all the previous stuff I rambled on and on about what do folks think of that suggestion?

-Hammy