All throughout history men have assumed that the universe as a whole was unchanging. 5 Electric Vehicle (EV) Charging Stations at Carrefour Mrignac. The point is this: if God does not exist, then life is objectively meaningless; but man cannot live consistently and happily knowing that life is meaningless; so in order to be happy he pretends life has meaning. And it's interesting to see many thinkers betray their views when they're pushed to their logical conclusions. , Dr. Terry Mortenson M.Div, Dr. Jason Lisle. Augustines attitude toward faith and reason is very difficult to interpret, especially because his views apparently evolved over the years. As Pascal said, we have nothing to lose and infinity to gain. 2). The end of this view is population control in which the weak and unwanted are killed off to make room for the strong. When the woman protested, the nurse was insistent: "Look, your baby is going to die anyway. If one lives consistently, he will not be happy; if one lives happily, it is only because he is not consistent. Other animals have instincts to guide them, but man has learned to ask questions. Each day the baby lost weight, a fact that was eagerly monitored by Dr. Mengele. . There is no God, and there is no immortality. We can fully expect that new theories will be proposed, attempting to avoid the universes beginning. The universe will become a featureless soup in which no life is possible. Whats significant about this is that while a cone can be extended indefinitely in one direction, it has a boundary point in the other direction. [1]. But none of them has been successful. Or finally, take the biological determinism of a man like Francis Crick. Therefore, it is without ultimate significance. Desperately this poor woman tried to keep her baby alive by giving it pieces of bread soaked in coffee, but to no avail. But it is important to see that it is not just immortality that man needs if life is to be meaningful. Now modern man lives in the lower story because he believes there is no God. . But before he arrived, all the rooms were already full! It must transcend space and time, since it created space and time. Boltzmann refers to these isolated regions of disequilibrium as worlds. Our universe just happens to be one of these worlds. He was concerned that Muslim philosophers of his day were being influenced by ancient Greek philosophy to deny Gods creation of the universe. Therefore, the temporal series of events cannot be an actual infinite. Man, like all biological organisms, must die. As Craig says, If you have a sound and persuasive case for Christianity, you dont have to become an expert in comparative religions and Christian cults. Boltzmann suggested that perhaps the universe is, in fact, in a state of overall equilibrium. No Ultimate Value Without Immortality and God. When they came again, he was gone. All come from the dust and all return to the dust" (Eccles 3:19-20). They could go on and on and still be utterly without meaning. "I do not know the solution," he confessed." Let me give three reasons in support of premise (1'): 1. Were in a state of disequilibrium, where energy is still available to be used and the universe has an orderly structure. Heres the problem: If a cause is sufficient to produce its effect, then if the cause is there, the effect must be there, too. It therefore follows that the universe has a cause of its beginning. Al-Ghazali was a twelfth century Muslim theologian from Persia, or modern day Iran. In fact, the manager could do this an infinite number of times and always accommodate infinitely more guests. on the Internet. Reasonable faith : Christian truth and apologetics / William Lane Craig.3rd ed. PPI. Ghazali has a second, independent argument for the beginning of the universe. He said he had been raised on the farm and was used to seeing the animals being born and dying. This is admittedly hard for us to imagine. Listen to Dr. Craig as he tackles issues facing Christians today. Capture a web page as it appears now for use as a trusted citation in the future. Wall shows that, given the validity of the generalized Second Law of Thermodynamics in quantum gravity, the universe must have begun to exist, unless one postulates a reversal of the arrow of time (time runs backwards!) . I was puzzled by how different our two perspectives on death were and found it difficult to understand why he did not feel the threat of non-being. As a student once remarked to me, Hilberts Hotel, if it could exist, would have to have a sign posted outside: No Vacancy (Guests Welcome). Can such a hotel exist in reality? This is the horror of modern man: because he ends in nothing, he is nothing. It gets worse! Through them the impression arises that man is not perishing, but only that one day the world has the whim no longer to appear to him." Modern set theory shows that if you adopt certain axioms and rules, then you can talk about actually infinite collections in a consistent way, without contradicting yourself. For before he could count 0, he would have to count -1, and before he could count -1, he would have to count -2, and so on, back to infinity. Be the first one to, Reasonable faith : Christian truth and apologetics, Advanced embedding details, examples, and help, urn:lcp:reasonablefaithc0000crai_c2s7:lcpdf:2537f1ac-bf9f-4d45-b781-7d3eccb40e6e, urn:lcp:reasonablefaithc0000crai_c2s7:epub:59558d81-2c39-42e0-ae4e-d8724d0b136f, Terms of Service (last updated 12/31/2014). And the universe, too, faces death. But the true existential significance of my death can only be appreciated from the first-person perspective, as I realize that I am going to die and forever cease to exist. French existentialists Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus understood this, too. Rue would undoubtedly regard such an option as repugnant. William Lane Craig (PhD, University of Birmingham, England; DTheol, University of Munich) is research professor of philosophy at Talbot School of Theology in La Mirada, California, and at Houston Baptist University in Houston, Texas. But no atheist, no agnostic, can live consistently with such a view. Ghazali maintained that the answer to this problem is that the First Cause must be a personal being endowed with freedom of the will. EVBox B.V. | Mrignac, Nouvelle-Aquitaine | EV Station - PlugShare Language. But this is, of course, entirely inconsistentfor without God, man and the universe are without any real significance. (We cant slip out of this argument by saying that infinity is not a number. Some time passed, and she noted that she no longer saw any of these women. . Another illustration: suppose we meet someone who claims to have been counting down from eternity past and is now finishing: . Look at it from another perspective: Scientists say that the universe originated in an explosion called the "Big Bang" about 13 billion years ago. American Philosophical Quarterly 21 (1984): 90. (3) Therefore, those doctrines taught by Scripture that are neither demonstrably provable nor empirically evident may be accepted by faith on the authority of Scripture. Eventually the distance between any two points in space becomes zero. Without God the universe is the result of a cosmic accident, a chance explosion. It appeared that we are at the center of a cosmic explosion, and all of the other galaxies are flying away from us at fantastic speeds! First penned in the 1980s. But if you cant count to infinity, how could you count down from infinity? If God does not exist, then you are just a miscarriage of nature, thrust into a purposeless universe to live a purposeless life. Now already in the nineteenth century scientists realized that the Second Law implied a grim prediction for the future of the universe. English. If in a finite amount of time, the universe will reach equilibrium, then, given infinite past time, it should by now already be in state of equilibrium. Men did not yet truly comprehend the consequences of what they had done in killing God. Thus, the distinction Thomas makes between truths of reason and truths of faith is rather like Augustines distinction between seeing and believing. It is a state of equilibrium. I'm reminded of Nietzsche's story of the madman who in the early morning hours burst into the marketplace, lantern in hand, crying, "I seek God! Now either there was something on the other side of that boundary or not. If something can come into being from nothing, then it becomes inexplicable why just anything or everything doesnt come into being from nothing. But now, says Hilbert, lets imagine a hotel with an infinite number of rooms, and lets suppose once again that all the rooms are full. Fred Hoyle, the English astronomer, attributes to the universe itself the qualities of God. But more than that: even if it did not end in death, without God life would still be without purpose. As I said, infinite set theory is a highly developed and well-understood branch of modern mathematics. Jean Paul Sartre, "Portrait of the Antisemite," in Existentialism from Dostoyevsky to Satre, rev. The vertical dimension represents time. The only answer the relativist can give is that social coherence is in my self-interestbut the problem with this answer is that self-interest and the interest of the herd do not always coincide. Its fatal flaw is that if our world is just a chance fluctuation from a state of overall equilibrium, then we ought to be observing a much smaller patch of order. And insofar as he denies the existence of God and the objectivity of value and purpose, this dilemma remains unrelieved for "post-modern" man as well. There is no goal no purpose for the universe. The Absurdity of Life without God and Immortality. It is a lie, because it tells us that the universe is infused with value (which is a great fiction), because it makes a claim to universal truth (when there is none), and because it tells me not to live for self-interest (which is evidently false). But he cannot live happily in such an absurd world; therefore, he continually makes leaps of faith into the upper story to affirm meaning, value, and purpose, even though he has no right to, since he does not believe in God. If the universe began to exist, then the universe has a cause of its beginning. But now turn the story around: suppose Jupiter and Saturn have been orbiting the sun from eternity past. Hilbert first invites us to imagine an ordinary hotel with a finite number of rooms. If Freudian psychology is really true, then it doesn't matter if it's degrading to women. If Skinner's theories are right, then there can be no objection to treating people like the rats in Skinner's rat-box as they run through their mazes, coaxed on by food and electric shocks. Did Jesus Really Rise from the Dead? There are no reviews yet. There are infinitely many Grim Reapers (whom we may identify as gods, so as to forestall any physical objections). It is therefore the Uncaused First Cause. Ghazalis cosmological argument thus gives us powerful grounds for believing in the existence of a beginningless, uncaused, timeless, spaceless, changeless, immaterial, enormously powerful, Personal Creator of the universe. This small retail estate is home to a fine modern establishment that has been entirely revamped, with made-to-measure furniture (in particular the half-moon tables) and crockery that matches the ethos of the kitchen team. In fact, at any point in the past, he has already had infinite time and so should already have finished. Download or read book Contemporary Scholarship and the Historical Evidence for the Resurrection of Jesus Christ written by William Lane Craig and published by . Their approaches were determinative for the Middle Ages. Sometimes critics will try to justify this move by saying that if an actual infinite could exist, then such situations are exactly what we should expect. Rather there are just no empirical facts which make these truths evident or from which these truths may be inferred. Thus, Aquinas diminished the view of faith as trust or commitment. Once we have seen through the fiction, then the Lie has lost its power over us. If man and the universe could exist forever, but if there were no God, their existence would still have no ultimate significance. .} This is easy to see in the case of trying to count to infinity. So again, why isnt our region in such a state if the universe has already existed for infinite time? William Lane Craig | Apologetics | Reasonable Faith Ultimately it makes no difference. . You are alive at midnight. Life Without God is Meaningless: William Lane Craig argues that, if there is no God, then life itself lacks meaning, value, and purpose. Faith was essentially intellectual assent to doctrines not provable by reasonhence, Aquinass view that a doctrine cannot be both known and believed: if you know it (by reason), then you cannot believe it (by faith). Contemporary physicists have universally rejected Boltzmanns daring Many Worlds Hypothesis as an explanation of the observed disequilibrium of the universe. You can read this before Reasonable Faith: Christian Truth and Apologetics PDF EPUB full Download at the bottom. But Nietzsche predicted that someday people would realize the implications of their atheism; and this realization would usher in an age of nihilismthe destruction of all meaning and value in life. Who is to judge that the values of Adolf Hitler are inferior to those of a saint? This cause must be itself uncaused because weve seen that an infinite series of causes is impossible. He shows that there is good reason to think Christianity is true. Common experience and scientific evidence confirm the truth of premise 1'. All he finds is a dead earth, save for a few lichens and moss, orbiting a gigantic red sun.

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