Hey everyone. In today’s episode I wanted to share with you the talk that I gave at last year’s Catholic Answers Conference. The theme was, I believe in God and I talked about how the arguments for the existence of God can really be improved and what we can do and all the great research and books that have been written by faithful Christians on this subject. So I’m excited to share that with you. And by the way, if you want to attend this year’s conference, we still have tickets left for sale. It’s in the last weekend of September being hosted in San Diego, California. And if you go, you can hang out with myself, Jimmy Aiken, Tim Staples, all the Catholic Answers, apologists and other special guests. So if you want to do that, check out the link in the description below and here’s the talk that I gave at last year’s Catholic Answers Conference.

Alright, so I was asked to give a presentation on the new case for God and what I wanted to focus on are developments in philosophy of religion and defense of theism, of the existence of God that we have in the last 20 or 30 years. And I do want to give a caveat that this talk, I don’t want to run you through. Here’s the entire argument and here’s every premise and here’s how to answer the objection and by the end of the 45 minutes, okay, you understand everything, right? No, I don’t. Just kick back, enjoy. This is an appetizer sampler platter. We’re going to have some spinach, arctic choke dip from ethics, some jalapeno poppers from metaphysics. Try a little bit of each one and for you to see what’s out there and see the resources and then hopefully go and check them out yourself if you want to go deeper in that.

And we have really seen a renaissance in philosophy of religion from a Christian perspective back in 1966. Actually April, I remember the day it was right here, April 8th, 1966, time Magazine released this very famous image for its cover is God dead. It was very emblematic of where philosophy of religion had been going since the early 20th century, which had really been poisoned with philosophies like verification saying that theology and religion isn’t just false, it’s meaningless it if you can’t empirically verify the terms that you’re discussing. Of course, people then pointed out that verification itself would be refuting. Since you can’t empirically define what it means to verify and other things like that, it becomes incoherent. But there was going out of the early 20th century, sort of in the academic world, this feeling that, oh, well God is just something for the common folk. Academics have nothing to do with it.

But it turns out then after that period in these 60 years since then, we’ve seen a wonderful growth in the Christian philosophy of religion. Even within a year after this time magazine cover was published, so much so that a few years later people know about this picture. It’s very famous time, had to admit a few years later in 1969, is God coming back to life? Oops. People hear about, they see the former one, but they don’t actually know. Time did publish a semi bit of a retraction, and one of the reasons for that was you started to have work from Christian philosophers like Alvin Plantinga, who is at the University of Notre Dame, a protestant philosopher, very smart guy. If you want to watch a funny, he’s like one of the smartest guy’s philosophers I’ve ever read. And there’s a hilarious video of him. He lives at Notre Dame or he was at Notre Dame.

It was a news report talking about a record heat wave where people’s air conditioning don’t work and then they’re just interviewing. And here’s Alvin talking about his air conditioner and the smartest guy, I just can’t seem to make it work exactly. This guy who can have 85 premise arguments and he can’t get his air. So look up Alvin planting an air conditioner. It’s funny, Richard Swinburne, the existence of God in 2001, an atheist philosopher who actually passed away in 2020, Quentin Smith, he wrote this, this is in the early two thousands talking about the change he had seen in academia, and I’ll read it to you. He said The secularization of mainstream academia began to quickly unravel upon the publication of planting his book God and other minds. In 1967, it became apparent to the philosophical profession. This book displayed the realist theists were not outmatched by naturalists in terms of the most valued standards of analytic philosophy, conceptual precision, rigor of argumentation, and in-depth defense of an original worldview in philosophy. It became almost overnight, academically respectable to argue for theism belief in God making philosophy, a favored field of entry for theism field of entry for intelligent and talented theists entering academia today. And it was really neat for me to read this in 2001 because that’s when I started my investigation into religion, going to websites, listening to debates. YouTube wouldn’t show up for about four years. So I was downloading every MP three. You could fit one debate on a floppy disc. It was a time to be alive, it was a time to be alive.

So these are some of the arguments that I’m going to go through and as I said, this is our appetizer sampler. So the different arguments I want to talk about if you don’t like quesadillas, once again, there are mozzarella sticks. There’s some for everybody here. So I just want to go through a few of them and some of them will seem familiar too. I’ll talk about the argument its roots and how it’s been developed and how philosophers are expanding upon it. In the past 2030, even the past 10 years, people are still working to improve on the different subjects that they encounter. So the first one would be the argument for motion pop quiz. I’m sure you all know this argument because Tim explained it to you. You don’t need me to re-explain it to you, you understand that. But if I had to give a little bit of a summary of it, Aquinas is saying that even if the universe existed for all time, we see motion, motion is just when something potential becomes actual.

So the water here it is potentially solid, can’t become ice on its own. It needs something to actualize it. Cold air. Air doesn’t become cold on its own. Something has to actualize that there’s a chain. The chain is kind of like this little choo train here. Imagine you had a box car going by you, it’s being pulled by another box car and it’s okay. What’s pulling that box car, another box car. What’s pulling that one? Let’s say you have a friend who says, I think there’s just an infinite number of box cars each pulling the one before it. That’s not an explanation because you could have an infinitely long train of box cars that stand still. Why do you have an infinitely long train of box cars that’s moving rather than standing still? The answer is there is a car that gives motion to the train without receiving motion from anything else, A prime mover and purely actual actualizer of potential.

The argument from motion, this is also a great, I like this analogy and people say, well, if God created the universe who created God, I say to someone who says that your question is like asking if a locomotive pulls a train. What pulls the locomotive? You don’t understand just as a locomotive is not another car on a train. God is not another being within the universe that he created. The argument for promotional of course has been criticized by people, philosophers in the early 20th century. It was dismissed a lot of it, the dismissal. When I look at philosophers Mackey, for example, in his book, the Miracle of Theism, he thought it was a miracle anybody could be a theist. Nowadays, when I look at him and William Rowe and others, they oftentimes will go back to Anthony Kenny’s 1969 essay on the Five Ways saying that Kenny refuted Aquinas Aquinas uses Aristotelian physics, that his arguments don’t work.

Saying that in order to become actual something potentially hot needs to be actualized by something that is hot. So something that can potentially be on fire has to be actualized by something that is on fire. And so you can only light wood on fire with other fire. And then Kenny says, well, I mean you can rub two sticks together. They’re both potentials and they actualize themselves. But of course other philosophers have answered these arguments and answered these criticisms and expanded the argument. One of them is the Catholic philosopher Edward Faser, who teaches at Pasadena City College in his book, five Proofs of the Existence of God. Faser answers this objection saying that the critic has misconstrued Aquinas. Aquinas is not saying a potential can only be actualized by something that is the actual of that type. Like wood only becomes fire by actual fire. It’s just potentials can only be actualized by something that is actual to actual pieces of wood being rubbed together.

Aquinas is not saying that whatever causes something actually to be F, like fire must itself be fire in some way, but rather that whatever causes something must itself be actual. Nothing merely potential can cause anything. There are other arguments that come forward actually to bring this here. We had people like Graham Oppy who’s a very intelligent atheist. He has a book 2006 book called Arguing About Gods. He has other objections to Aquinas saying, well, all Aquinas is proved is that there is a purely actual cause of one thing. So maybe there’s a purely motion based cause that gives motion. Maybe all light comes from something that’s pure light. Maybe all heat comes from something that’s pure heat. Those are the actual causes of things. You don’t need one purely actual Actualizer or God. And what Faser has done, he has a 50 premise argument for the existence of God in five proofs. But the most interesting part is probably the first 14 premises where Faser breaks down the argument more into systematic premises. And this is helpful because the five ways, when Aquinas presented them, they were just notes for novice theology students.

They were not meant Aquinas would be aghast if he thought people read the five ways and thought this was his definitive defense of the existence of God. These were notes to catch people up. When you read the Summa Theolog and it says that this is designed for beginners, you feel really dumb like because we need a useful textbook for those who are beginners. I shall write this like, yeah, losers wouldn’t understand any of this stuff. So what Phasers done is taking the argument, extrapolated, adding more premises, including this very important premise here, premise nine talking about how even if you did have pure light, pure motion, pure heat, the potential for those pure things to exist at all would have to be actualized by something that is pure existence itself. And this is an important premise that he has defended at length, engaging API on the criticism that things can exist and just persistent existence, what’s called existential inertia.

So when it comes to argument for motion phase is not the only one. There are others who have published in Blackwell and in other journals, other variants of the argument from motion. But I like the one that’s here in five proofs of the existence of God. And Faser has a good response to general objections from atheists at the end of the book, but he has that argument from motion there. Let’s move on to a fun one. You might remember this from yesterday. I had my dialogue with Jimmy Aiken. This would be the Klum cosmological argument. Alright, so Aquinas and Bonaventure disagreed on a particular issue in their time. And if you were at the dialogue with Jimmy, you may remember some of this. If not, here’s your presentation for others a little bit of a refresher. And the question is, can we know from reason alone that the universe began to exist, that its past is finite.

We know from faith we know that God created the universe he told us. So the church teaches us that from nothing in the finite past. But could you prove that a finite past is impossible? Reason shows the past cannot be infinite. Aquinas did not think so. St. Bonaventure did think. So both are doctors of the church. So there are two positions you were allowed to hold as a Catholic. The argument though, because Aquinas is kind of a heavy hitter because he didn’t like it. Well, I’m not going to like it either. So a lot of people weren’t big fans of it after that, even for the next 700 years until a evangelical philosopher and theologian named William Lane, Craig published a dissertation on the argument called the Kal cosmological argument. Kal is an Arabic word, it means speech and others have worked to improve on the argument since then.

Very simple argument. Whatever begins to exist as a cause, the universe began to exist, therefore the universe has a cause. This is his 1978 dissertation and he’s now since then, what’s interesting, one of the objections to the argument is that it relies on particular views of things like the philosophy of time. We talk about a past infinite, well, what is time itself at all? We have to settle that. So in the meantime, Craig had updated his argument in 2009. He published a very lengthy defense of it in the Blackwell companion to natural theology. And he uses two different kinds of arguments to prove the second premise here. So whatever the universe began to exist, you see that here, whatever begins to exist as a cause. Well, how do we know the universe began to exist so that it has a cause? How do we know that?

He uses two forms of argument. One would be scientific evidence saying, look, we look at evidence from the Big Bang, look at evidence from cosmology. And it seems that the universe had a particular point of beginning though Jimmy was very careful and I agree with him in the dialogue we had yesterday. This is more suggestive than completely demonstrative. Science is tentative. Maybe it’ll find a beginning even before this point here in the Big Bang. But many people look at this evidence and it seems that the universe, they say, okay, I could see the universe comes from nothing. That’s the scientific evidence. Craig uses arguments from philosophies saying that, well, no, the past cannot be infinite because that would lead to contradictions. Actual infinites cannot exist. And he uses examples like Hilbert’s Hotel developed by the German mathematician, David Hilbert, late 19th, early 20th century. Hilbert’s Hotel says, look, if Hilbert said that the infinite exists as an idea because when you have it in reality, you get all kinds of weird contradictions.

You could have everybody in the hotel and you could continue to check in an infinite number of people by shifting them around in the rooms if you subtract identical quantities. So if you subtract all the odd numbered guests from Hilbert’s Hotel, how many are left an infinite number? Everyone in the even rooms, if everybody after room four checks out from the hotel, you remove an infinite number of guests. How many are left? Four. Infinity minus infinity in one case equals infinity. In another case, infinity minus infinity equals four. It’s a contradiction. That’s why in trans finite arithmetic, it’s prohibited to subtract infinite sets. But you can’t stop these people from leaving Hilbert’s hotel or can you? So that’s the argument that Craig had made since the late seventies, early eighties, though there are particular objections that are leveled at it. And I actually do agree with these objections.

It is humbling as an apologist or a philosopher or theologian, anyone who puts forward an argument in the public square, you’ll receive criticism of your argument, you’ll receive, and I think it’s quite a mark of intellectual integrity if you can receive criticism and then modify your argument in the face of the criticism instead of just bluntly ignoring it. And that’s what all of us try to do as apologists. Whether it doesn’t have to be the existence of God, it could be anything. It’s about the New Testament, the church fathers, we will go out, I’ll put forward an argument in a debate. Some will do well, other arguments that one didn’t do so hot, I need to change it or drop it. And it’s hard because we’re not our own worst critic sometimes, but we can learn from how others criticize it and it’s great. That’s why I love the dialoguing with Jimmy yesterday here at the conference, because the best people, I love to cherrypoint, my arguments are my smart apologist friends.

We all have goodwill in our hearts. We’re not going to be mean to each other, but we can point out problems that we see. And so that’s why the book of Proverbs says that iron sharpens iron. So man sharpens his fellow man. That’s what we do a lot at Catholic answers. So there’s a few different criticisms of the argument. One is that it relies on a theory of time that is not super popular with physicists and philosophers not going to get into all this because it’s kind of complicated. What does the past and future, do they exist or does only the present exist? That’s presentism. This is kind of a goofy model that I like because I’m a goofy guy called the growing block. The past is real. Only the present though for me is where consciousness is and the future is still open. Many physicists hold to this block view, past, present, and future are equally real.

So if that is the case, you have to be careful. As Jimmy pointed out in our argument, sorry, our discussion yesterday, because we as Christians believe that the future is endless. If your argument for a beginningless past, if you say yeah, the past cannot be infinite, you better be careful. You don’t want to have an argument that shows that the future cannot be infinite because you have a problem. God told us the future is infinite. He promised us that in the book of Revelation we have endless life. It’s infinite. So since we know the future is infinite, any argument that would show the past and the future are finite. That’s just, that’s not going to work. So one is to take that into account. The other problem is that impossible actual infinites, even if something like Hilbert’s hotel can’t exist, say yeah, you can’t have hotel with infinite rooms.

All kinds of crazy stuff happens there that might not apply to the past because past events they don’t exist. Like all of this stuff. If you, Craig, William Lane Craig, he holds to this presentist view where the past does not exist anymore and the past don’t longer exist, the future doesn’t exist yet. So there is no actual infinite events here all together like at Hilbert’s Hotel for the contradictions to arise. So that creates a lot of problems to the argument. Are there ways to, so that’s why in my dialogue with Jimmy, I’ve sought to try to rework the argument and deriving, and I’m drawing from other people who looked at the argument to say, maybe we can rework it a little bit. I like the work of Andrew Looch, for example. He teaches, I think at Hong Kong Baptist University, very smart guy. He’s written a number of books.

In fact, I have two of them in this presentation refer you to, he has another book on the cosmological argument. This one’s good, the teleological and cosmological arguments revisited. This is not in his book, but it’s based on stuff that is in here. I would put an argument like this, if the past were infinite, then contradictions would generally be possible. This might, this is not my correct version of the talk that is not helpful. What if we just cut this point out of the presentation right now? Let’s see if I can, all right, no one. Look at my desktop. It’s just as messy as my room. How can look? Can that not be my correct one? All right, lemme try this. All right, hold on. Alright, let’s try this. Yes, I did work on my presentation like 20 minutes before I came up here. It’s how I roll people.

The spirit just moves me. All right, there we go. Let’s see. There we are. I know that’s correct. I still didn’t fix this part. If the past were infinite, then contradictions would be possible. Contradictions are not possible. Therefore, the past is not infinite. I do fix this later, but for me, what I’m trying to say in the argument is not that an infinite past is a contradiction that can’t exist, but an infinite past leads to contradictions. So for Craig’s argument saying that, okay, well Hilbert’s hotel and past events aren’t the same thing, you’re right. But if the past were beginningless, you could build one hotel room at a time, or you could have one indestructible object come into existence every 10 gazillion years. If you had one indestructible object pop into existence every 10 gazillion years or two particles hit, two more particles come into existence.

It doesn’t matter how, even if the space between the events is huge, a Google years one in a hundred zeros, it would still have an actual infinite number of things in the present moment. An infinite past would yield these kinds of contradictions. You would have a Hilbert’s hotel today. You would not have that if you started building Hilbert’s hotel into an endless future. The contradictory hotel will not exist, but you would in an infinite past. So that shows there can be problems with an infinite past. Another thing that we’ve seen in the past few years in the 2010s, Alex Press, who is a Catholic philosopher at Baylor University, along with Rob Koons, who is a Lutheran convert to Catholicism, have worked on a theory called causal fism. And this is the argument that causal chains must be finite, or at least there can be infinite causal chains that are paradoxical and cannot exist.

Alright? So we have to be careful. They’ll make an argument based on this saying that look, even if the past is infinite, let’s say you could have hilbert’s Soel, let’s say. You could have that. You could have all of these causal ISTs paradoxes that arise. And I shared one with Jimmy yesterday at our dialogue, suppose you had an infinite, suppose God made an infinite number of immortal people and they’ve always existed and every year they have a task to do. They pass a paper into the future, for example. That seems fine. But the problem is if you had an infinite past, you could have the same number of people do paradoxical things that can’t actually happen. So you imagine you have Mr Zero, Mr one, mr two, mr three, mr four. They have all of these names for each year that they act. And this is Rob Koon’s paper passer experiment.

I explained with Jimmy suppose here’s the rule. Each person here is named after a number, one of the natural numbers. And so there’s an infinite number of them. There’s an infinite number of natural numbers. They have a rule, they receive a paper from the guy to their left. If the paper is blank, they write their name on it. If the paper already has a name on it, IEA number, they pass it to the right. Alright? So they just go and Mr five gets it. If it’s blank, he writes his name. It won’t be blank. I’m sure six wrote something and they pass it along. Now, the paradox that arises is this, what name is on Mr. Zero’s paper because it can’t be one. He couldn’t get a one because we got a one. It would’ve been blank here. And if it was sorry, it would be blank when one got it, if it were blank, well two would’ve written his name and it couldn’t have been blank when two got it because three would’ve written his name.

And so we have this sort of paradox that arises that if every person in this infinite chain follows this rule, a Bernadette rule named after the mathematician, Jose Bernadet... Read more on Catholic.com