(July 19, 2017 at 3:22 pm)SteveII Wrote: 1. What does that have to do with anything I've said? Where did the fluctuating quantum vacuum come from? It cannot be past infinite no more than anything else that is physically changing can be past infinite--or are you saying the quantum field is somehow timeless? To extrapolate that energy fluctuations of virtual particles, as far as we know, happen uncaused in a quantum vacuum to universes springing into being is a leap only taken for no other reason than the uncomfortable logical conclusion there had to be an uncaused first cause.
2. Only someone who does not want to think about it avoids the question of what was prior to the Big Bang.
3. In all that verbiage, what you want us to believe is that the universe is a brute fact without explanation. Most people are not satisfied with such an answer when it goes against all reason.
4. No way in the world am I going to rebut your constant youtube and link posting. You are so confident that these people have defeated 'WLC', you should understand it enough to lay it out for us.
#1: The virtual particle-antiparticle pairs are not caused by anything; they are uncaused. If so, what do you think it is that causes them, and what causes that to cause them, and so forth. Again, I am not talking about some quantum event that created our Universe. What causes these particles to appear? Please be specific.
#2: I think that the Universe is eternal, along with the multiverse; eternal models of cosmology exist that describe this, but such is probably beyond empirical Science, hence, physics. One can simply say that there was no "before" before the beginning. The Hartle-Hawking model describes such a Universe:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hartle%E2%...king_state
Dr. Craig is simply not qualified to critique this model; he simply does not understand the math. He can say that it is "metaphysically absurd" but so is quantum tunneling and we have a real-life example of that in the form of an electron microscope, and you might as well say that "evil spirits" are the source of the exquisite images.
#3: People used to say the same thing about an Earth that moved. It was absurd. Even if what you are saying is true (and, it isn't), it just shows that half of the US population is ignorant, but if you follow the surveys closely, only about 10% of Bible-thumpers out there are "absolutely sure" that "God did it". Again, a quantum oscillator is absurd, but it is well defined and agrees precisely with experiment and observational physics.
#4: If the Universe is infinite (and, theory and observation strongly suggest that space-time is flat, hence, infinite), then actual infinities exist in the physical World. QED.