Comparative Philosophy

Comparative Philosophy

Debating Effective Methods in Theology: Comparative Analysis of William Crick and Sinnott Armstrong's Cosmological Argument in Proving the Existence and Nonexistence of God

Document Type : Original Article

Author
Taebe Khosravi
Ph.D.,Department of Philosophy and Theology, University of Qom, Qom, Iran
10.30487/cph.2024.2021581.1028
Abstract
William Craig is one of the Christian theologians who, by participating in numerous debates, sought to prove the existence of God against the common atheism among philosophers and scientists. In the scenes with the American philosopher Sinnott Armstrong, which is also published in a book titled "God", Craig first tries to prove the existence of God by denying "real infinity" and relying on the concept of beginning and "the need of every beginning for a cause" and On the other hand, he takes Big Bang as a witness to his claim. While Armstrong rejects Craig's argument by referring to the existence of real infinity in the outside world and the existence of scientific evidence to negate the implication of the Big Bang on the beginning of the world. Considering the confirmation of Sinnott Armstrong's opinion in explaining the Big Bang problem from a scientific point of view, it seems that empirical evidence cannot be used as a verbal argument;Such methods can make the belief in God face a crisis. Therefore, the lack of proper interaction between theology and science can be considered one of the most important weaknesses of Craig's argument on the existence of God. In this critical analysis, by introducing a scientific model, it is possible to provide a solution for the interaction of science and theology in such a way that theological evidence matches with experimental evidence and does not threaten the scientific developments of theism.
Keywords
William Craig
Sinnott Armstrong
The Existence of God
Big Bang
Subjects
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  2. See John Barrow and Frank Tipler, The Anthropic Cosmological Principle (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), 441.
  3. See Bernulf Kanitscheider, “Does Physical Cosmology Transcend the Limits of Naturalistic Reasoning?” in Studies on Mario Bunge’s “Treatise, ” ed. P. Weingartner and G. J. W. Dorn (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1990), 346–347.
  4. Robert Deltete, Critical notice of Theism, Atheism, and Big Bang Cosmology, by William Lane Craig and Quentin Smith, Zygon 30 (1995): 656. (N. B. the review was attributed to J. Leslie due to an editorial mistake at Zygon.
  5. See, for example, Abraham Robinson, “Metamathematical Problems, ” Journal of Symbolic Logic 38 (1973): 500–516.
  6. See Alexander Abian, The Theory of Sets and Transfinite Arithmetic (Philadelphia: W. B. Saunders, 1965), 68; B. Rotman and G. T. Kneebone, The Theory of Sets and Transfinite Numbers (London: Oldbourne, 1966), 61.
  7. See I. D. Novikov and Ya. B. Zeldovich, “Physical Processes near Cosmological Singularities, ” Annual Review of Astronomy and Astrophysics 11 (1973): 401-402; A. Borde and A. Vilenkin, “Eternal Inflation and the Initial Singularity, ” Physical Review Letters 72 (1994): 3305, 3307.
  8. Christopher Isham, “Creation of the Universe as a Quantum Process, ”in Physics, Philosophy and Theology: A Common Quest for Understanding, ed. R. J. Russell, W. R. Stoeger, and G. V. Coyne (Vatican City: Vatican Observatory, 1988), 385–387.
  9. See John D. Barrow, Theories of Everything (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991, 67-68.
  10. Stephen Hawking and Roger Penrose, The Nature of Space and Time, The Isaac Newton Institute Series of Lectures (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 1996), 20.
  11. David Hilbert, “Über das Unendlische, ” Mathematische Annalen 95 (Berlin, 1926): 161–90. Craig cites a reprint of a translation.
  12. Kurt Gödel, “Über formal unendscheidbare Sätze der Principia Mathematica und verwandter Systeme I, ” Monatshefte für Mathematik und Physik 38 (1931).
  13. For more detailed criticisms of Craig’s mathematical arguments, Quentin Smith, “Infinity and the Past” in William Lane Craig and Quentin Smith, Theism, Atheism, and Big Bang Cosmology (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993.
  14. Quoted in Marcelo Gleiser, The Dancing Universe: From Creation Myths to the Big Bang (New York: Penguin, 1997), 287.
  15. S. W. Hawking, “Breakdown of Predictability in Gravitational Collapse, ” Physical Review D14 (1976): 2460 (my emphasis).
  16. On the reality of a singularity, see Quentin Smith in Craig and Smith, Theism, Atheism, and Big Bang Cosmology, p. 208.

 

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