God Killer

God is being killed by a new weapon devised by the very humans who seek to animate God. This God-killer is called “theophilosophy.” It is to God what Kryptonite is to Superman.

Here is one example of theophilosophy at work:

Long ago, the Arabians buried deep an argument that they saw had the potential to result in unfavorable results. It was a cosmological argument abandoned by Al-Ghazali, a Persian who marked the beginning of the decline in scientific exploration in exchange for theology. The argument was buried because it resulted in an infinite regress of Allah (the god proposed by the discourse or “Kalam,” as it is called in Arabic). Recently, the argument was revived by a careless American theist named William Lane Craig who thought to build an entire road show and book upon this old discarded “discourse” and plug the Christian God into the hole where Allah was supposed to fit.

Here is the original cosmological argument which was passed down through history from Aristotle:
P1. Everything that has a beginning of its existence has a cause of its existence;
P2: The universe has a beginning of its existence;
Therefore:
C1: The universe has a cause of its existence.

This argument left wide open the problem of a “prime mover” (supposedly the god of monotheism) requiring a prime mover which in turn required a prime mover and so on ad infinitum. This makes the god that created this universe the lesser of all gods before it going back indefinitively. Big problem.

But then the argument was revived by conveniently inserting a few more premises:

Argument based on the impossibility of an actual infinite
P1: An actual infinite cannot exist;
P2: An infinite temporal regress of events is an actual infinite;
Therefore:
C1: An infinite temporal regress of events cannot exist.

Argument based on the impossibility of the formation of an actual infinite by successive addition
P1: A collection formed by successive addition cannot be an actual infinite;
P2: The temporal series of past events is a collection formed by successive addition;
Therefore:
C1: The temporal series of past events cannot be actually infinite.

The problem with WLCs need for there not to be an infinite is that he relies on the very limited perception of human thinking and pleads “it is intuitively evident.”

Not so says the cosmologists who actually study cosmology and not simply contemplate it as does WLC. There are many models that exist that the KCA are in clear conflict with and none of those models are considered by WLC and his road show. Also, WLC asserts that his resurrected new improved argument only applies to A-time theory and not B-Time theory. So his argument is only operating in half of the possible scenarios on a larger scale and avoiding several possibilities within that half. There are simply too many ifs and exclusions for his logic to hold up in the big picture which is, ironically, what he claims the be demonstrating.

What theists don’t realize in their quest to try and revive and protect the now suffering economic powerhouse (that also provides assumed positions of authority over the masses) known as “Christian Apologetics,” is that these types of arguments, while they may give a short false feeling of accomplishment and help to build careers for showmen like WLC, are easily defeated. And this would not be so much a problem if it were not the absolute best known logical argument for God. Once we pull back the curtain and realize that this spectacular show is actually a poorly revived argument that failed in the past and is certain to fail in the now, God gets even smaller. And the “life” of God which was so briefly animated by the traveling showman starts to resemble the rash the snake oil caused when it was supposed to bring relief.