Very Bad Apologetics For Honest Seekers
Fundamentalist apologists like Shining One often post reams of links to apologetics articles, but rarely have the wherewithal to defend the arguments in those links when challenged. I'm taking the opposite tack in this thread, posting a criticism of a small but important part of Fundamentalist apologetics written by one of its most popular writers.
This is a critical review of the first part of chapter one of the book Who Made God? And Answers to Over 100 Other Tough Questions of Faith (Ravi Zacharias and Norman Geisler, General Editors, Zondervan, 2003). According to the "Contributors" section (p. 17), Norman Geisler is a Ph.D. philosopher and well known author of more than 50 books and hundreds of articles, mostly of the Fundamentalist Christian-apologetic genre. Of course, most of such literature is not focused on Christianity in general, but on the Fundamentalist Christianity one finds in the American "Bible Belt" -- the sort that claims that Genesis is to be taken literally and that the universe was created by fiat some 6,000 years ago.
At the end of this post is a complete, uninterrupted quotation of Geisler's statements that I will be concerned with in this review of portions of Chapter 1, "Tough Questions About God", so that readers can see for themselves without interruption what Geisler wrote.
Chapter 1, "Tough Questions About God", by Norman Geisler
Geisler starts this section off by stating that Christians ought to be able to answer the "tough questions" about Christianity that even children are capable of asking such as, "Daddy, who made God?" (p. 23) Geisler attempts to deal with this question in his next subheading, "Who Made God?", pp. 23-24, according to the way a child is supposed to reason:
Who made God? No one did. He was not made. He has always existed. Only things that had a beginning -- like the world -- need a maker. God had no beginning, so God did not need to be made.
Note in Geisler's statements a host of assumptions: "God" is assumed to be the Judeo-Christian God. He was not made. He has always existed. God had no beginning.
But in fact, every single statement that Geisler makes about God is an unproved assumption. This is important in the context of Geisler's further arguments, which really consist of a variety of unproved assumptions, special pleadings, circular reasonings, and the usual assortment of logical fallacies that also so well characterize the literature of Jehovah's Witnesses. Geisler continues:
For those who are a little older, a little more can be said. Traditionally, most atheists who deny the existence of God believe that the universe was not made; it was just "there" forever.
Note that Geisler provides no references for the traditional denials from his "atheists", so his characterization of what "atheists" generally believe is nothing but a straw man. I suspect, but cannot prove, that he's misusing the views of mathematician and philosopher Bertrand Russell. The fact is that modern physicists are usually extremely careful to distinguish between what is solidly known and accepted, and what is poorly known and only partially accepted, if at all. Furthermore, the most recent speculations in cosmology postulate the existence of what I will call "the macro-cosmic universe" which contains, not just our own relatively miniscule 'bubble' of a universe in a much bigger macro-cosmic universe, but perhaps an infinite number of such small 'bubbles'. The cosmologists who speculate about this admit that hardly anything solid is known at all about the overall structure of this macro-cosmic universe, of which -- once again -- our own observable universe is but a tiny part. After all, new observational instruments keep finding things "way out there" that confound present cosmological theories and force a continual reevaluation of these present theories. No scientist worth a plugged nickel will say otherwise. So Geisler's comments are just a gross oversimplification of science designed to support bad analogies and bad science. See below for specific examples.
Furthermore, Geisler ignores the fact that most cosmologists today accept the notion of a "big bang" in which our present, local space-time universe originated perhaps 14 billion years ago. And so it's something of a mystery why Geisler claims that most atheists believe that this universe was just "there" forever.
According to cosmologists who speculate about the origin of our space-time universe, it may have originated when certain objects that exist in a higher-dimensional macro-cosmic regime collided and generated "shock waves" that form the fabric of our local space-time universe. Quantum physicists describe a similar thing happening when "quantum fluctuations" of the "quantum vacuum" exceeded some critical level and our universe popped into being in the big bang. I know this is all very mysterious and speculative, but since it's part of speculative science, and Geisler is supposedly dealing with all views of scientists, it must be included in our discussion. Here is just one of many websites the touch on these ideas: http://zebu.uoregon.edu/~js/ast123/lectures/lec17.html
They appeal to the first law of thermodynamics for support: "Energy can neither be created nor destroyed," they insist. Several things must be observed in response.
Sort of ok, so far, except that Geisler -- like Watchtower writers -- fails to give proper source references. In failing to give these source references, he fails to give a really correct scientific definition of "the first law of thermodynamics". According to Halliday & Resnick, Physics, Part One (John Wiley & Sons, 1977, p. 555), the "first law states that energy is conserved." What Geisler fails to note, so far, is that the "first law" is based purely on observation, and that it has always been observed that energy is conserved, thus allowing the formulation of these observations into a general "law of physics". This does not mean that observation can never be violated. Observation is only as good as what has been observed up to a specific point in time, and if new things arise, observations and conclusions based upon them will change accordingly.
Of course, Halliday & Resnick carefully explain that this "first law" is the result of a huge number of experiments, where no matter how one calculates it, a quantity called "energy" is "conserved". This is not quite the "law" that Geisler states.
With the above in mind, note how Geisler goes on to create a straw man:
First, this way of stating the first law is not scientific; rather, it is a philosophical assertion.
Here, Geisler trots out his straw man. His statement of the "first law of thermodynamics", i.e., that "Energy can neither be created nor destroyed," appears to be applicable in our own local space-time universe, but our observations our are limited by being restricted to that universe. We can say nothing about what might exist outside this local universe. That this is something known to Geisler in principle is shown by his later arguments that God created this "space-time universe" and so He must exist outside of it.
Science is based on observation, and there is no observational evidence that can support the dogmatic "can" and "cannot" implicit in this statement. It should read, "[As far as we have observed,] the amount of actual energy in the universe remains constant." That is, no one had observed any actual new energy either coming into existence or going out of existence.
Absolutely correct up to this point. But because this is exactly what science textbooks say, Geisler has only succeeded in knocking down his straw man.
Readers will note that this admirable standard of objectivity is generally violated by Fundamentalist Christian apologists. We have only to note Geisler's article here to see this.
Once the first law is understood properly, it says nothing about the universe being eternal or having no beginning.
That's right, and this statement is proof of Geisler's intent to misrepresent what atheists and other non-Fundamentalists of various sorts believe.
As far as the first law is concerned, energy may or may not have been created.
This is stated to leave open the notion that God created energy.
It simply asserts that if energy was created, then as far as we can tell, the actual amount of energy that was created has remained constant since then.
Right.
Further, let us suppose for the sake of argument that energy -- the whole universe of energy we call the cosmos -- was not created, as many atheists have traditionally believed.
Here comes another straw man argument. Let's see how Geisler develops it.
If this is so, it is meaningless to ask who made the universe. If energy is eternal and uncreated, of course no one created it. It has always existed.
If our local space-time universe is uncreated, then of course it is meaningless to ask who created it. But it is quite meaningful to ask questions about how we know that it's uncreated, and about how something as big and complex as our universe could possibly be uncreated. Geisler's argument is designed to sidestep such questions about God.
Also, if it is meaningless to ask, "Who made the universe?" since it has always existed, then it is equally meaningless to ask "Who made God?" since he has always existed.
This is the key point Geisler has been aiming for. Unfortunately for the argument, though, it's a completely circular one, and as shown above, it misrepresents the views of scientists. First, it relies on a wrong view of the possibilities of the entire realm of existence by ignoring the "macro-cosmic universe" that I mentioned above. Second, it simply assumes that "God" has always existed, and that this God is the God of Fundamentalist Christians. Third, it ignores another argument that is universally used by creationists: "complex things need a designer, and since life is complex, it must have been designed." Indeed, Geisler's entire argument is special pleading designed to circumvent this basic creationist claim where God is concerned. It is nothing but special pleading to baldly claim that God is an exception to the rule because "He has always existed." This needs to be proved, which is exactly what Geisler has set about to do, and so invoking this notion results in an argument where the conclusions become the assumptions -- which is circular reasoning.
Geisler also fails to note the inherent hypocrisy of his argument: If it is reasonable and possible to assume that God is uncreated, then it is reasonable and possible to assume that the universe is also uncreated. That applies to any universe for which there is no evidence of a beginning. In particular, it does not apply to our local space-time universe, for which there is good evidence for a "big bang" beginning, but not to the speculative macro-cosmic universe I've discussed above, for which there is only speculative evidence. And of course, the evidence for the existence of the Fundamentalist Christian God is equally speculative. What's good for the goose is good for the gander, no?
The bottom line here is that Geisler's argument contains the seeds of its own refutation. Put simply: if it is reasonable to say that God is "just there", then it is equally reasonable to say that the macro-cosmic universe is "just there".
If the universe is not eternal, it needs a cause. On the other hand, if it has no beginning, it does not need a cause of its beginning. Likewise, if a God exists who has no beginning, it is absurd to ask, "Who made God?" It is a category mistake to ask, "Who made the Unmade?" or "Who created the Uncreated?" One may as well ask, "Where is the bachelor's wife?"
By now the reader should be able to point out all the fallacies in Geisler's arguments.
Subheading, "Why Couldn't the World Always Have Existed?", pp. 24-27
Christians naturally believe there must be a God because the world had a beginning.
Not so. Fundamentally, Christians believe there must be a God because they learned it in childhood, or for emotional reasons they accepted the Bible and the Bible says there is a God, or any number of other non-scientific reasons. They cannot possibly believe it for scientific reasons, since the existence of God cannot be proved scientifically. Furthermore, since today's science agrees that our local space-time universe (this is obviously what Geisler is talking about in his article) had a beginning, Geisler's statement amounts to a claim that Christians believe there must be a God because of the scientific evidence. But that is not only demonstrably untrue in the case of countless Christians, but Geisler and countless other Christians would strenuously object to it. So he isn't even aware that his statement -- stripped to its real meaning -- is objectionable to a great many Christians.
What is true -- and what Geisler should have said -- is that Christians believe the world had a beginning because they believe that God created it.
And everything that had a beginning had a beginner. But the tough question to answer is how we know the world had a beginning. Maybe the world always existed.
Geisler is starting to get repetitious.
Famous agnostic Bertrand Russell presented this dilemma: Either the world had a beginning, or it did not. If it did not, it did not need a cause (God). If it did, we can ask, "Who caused God?" But if God has a cause, he is not God. In either case, we do not arrive at a first uncaused cause (God).
It's again irritating that Geisler provides no source reference so that readers can check out his summary of Russell's argument. I will point out that the statement that, "if God has a cause, he is not God", is yet another basic Christian assumption. Why should the Creator of our universe not have a cause? Of course, we get into the problem of an infinite regression of Creators when we do this, but what evidence is there that there isn't a finite regression, so that the Creator of our universe (God) had a Creator who had a Creator and so on back to some ultimate, "buck stops here" super-Creator? None.
The answer to this tough question is that it, too, asks a meaningless question: Who made God? To put it another way, it wrongly assumes that "everything must have a cause" when what is claimed is that "everything that had a beginning had a cause." This is quite a different matter. Of course, everything that had a beginning had a beginner. Nothing cannot make something. As Julie Andrews once sang, "Nothing came from nothing. Nothing ever could." So God does not need a cause because he had no beginning.
I've dealt with the essentials of these claims above. One wonders, how does Geisler know that God had no beginning?
This being the case,
The case has been disproved.
we need only to show that the universe had a beginning, to show that there must have been a cause of it (i.e., God).
Geisler is again forgetting that if one can properly argue that God is uncaused, then one can properly argue that the macro-cosmic universe is uncaused.
Two strong arguments will be offered as evidence that the universe had a beginning. One is from science -- the second law of thermodynamics. The second is from philosophy, namely, the impossibility of an infinite number of moments.
Both of these "strong arguments" will be shown to be wrong below.
According to the second law of thermodynamics, the universe is running out of usable energy.
Let's be pedantic here, so that readers will know what the second law actually says.
One formulation of the second law states that for any process, the final entropy is greater than or equal to the initial entropy. Entropy is a technical measure of the "disorder" of a system. In what are called reversible adiabatic processes, the final and initial entropies are equal, by definition. (cf. Halliday & Resnick, Physics, Part One, John Wiley & Sons, 1977, p. 555) What this means is that some processes, at least in principle, result in no loss of energy. One thing that certainly cannot be said is that the observations that scientists have made in our local space-time universe, which result in the generalization called "the second law of thermodynamics", apply to any other part of a possible macro-cosmic universe, since it's possible in principle that completely different "laws" might apply in a virtually infinite number of other "universes".
But if the universe is running down, it cannot be eternal. Otherwise, it would have run down completely by now. While you can never run out of an unlimited amount of energy, it does not take forever to run out of a limited amount of energy. Hence, the universe must have had a beginning. To illustrate, every car has a limited amount of energy (gas). That is why we have to refuel from time to time -- more often than we like. If we had an unlimited (i.e., infinitely) large gas tank, we would never have to stop for gas again. The fact that we have to refill shows that it was filled up to begin with. Or, to use another example, an old clock that gradually unwinds and has to be rewound would not unwind unless it had been wound up to begin with. In short, the universe had a beginning. And whatever had a beginning must have had a beginner.
This is essentially a repeat of what Geisler said before. Again, the argument basically relies on the existence of scientific evidence that our local universe had a beginning. Conversely, if it ever turns out that scientists are wrong about this, would that disprove the existence of God?
Therefore, the universe must have had a beginner (God).
Geisler has no idea how easily his arguments are turned against his claims.
Some have speculated that the universe is self-winding or self-rebounding. But this position is exactly that -- pure speculation without any real evidence.
So is the claim that there is one and only one Creator God who has always existed, is infinite in energy, etc., and who created our local universe.
In fact, it is contrary to the second law of thermodynamics. For even if the universe were rebounding, like a bouncing ball in reverse, it would gradually peter out.
Here Geisler ignores a good deal more cosmology. It is still an open question in science as to whether our local universe is "open" or "closed". "Open" means that it will expand forever, with a "heat death" gradually occurring as untold eons pass on to infinity. "Closed" means that it will expand to a maximum size, then start to shrink under the influence of gravity or whatever, collapse back to a "singularity" like it started from at the instant of the big bang, and perhaps repeat the process again. But all of this is almost entirely speculative, just as is the existence of Geisler's God.
There is simply no observational evidence that the universe is self-winding.
There is no observational evidence that the Christian God created our universe.
Even agnostic astronomers like Robert Jastrow have pointed out: "Once hydrogen has been burned within that star and converted to heavier elements, it can never be restored to its original state." Thus, "minute by minute and year by year, as hydrogen is used up in stars, the supply of this element grows smaller."
If the overall amount of actual energy stays the same but the universe is running out of usable energy, it has never had an infinite amount -- for an infinite amount of energy can never run down. This would mean that the universe could not have existed forever in the past. It must have had a beginning. Or, to put it another way, according to the second law, since the universe is getting more and more disordered, it cannot be eternal. Otherwise, it would be totally disordered by now, which it is not. So it must have had a beginning -- one that was highly ordered.
At this point, readers should be able to understand why Geisler has missed the boat in so many areas that his conclusion is truly irrelevant to his basic point of who created God.
Next we find Geisler making an argument where he proves that he's completely ignorant of simple facts, and doesn't understand the content of the source reference he's using to prove his point.
A second argument that the universe had a beginning -- and hence a beginner -- comes from philosophy. It argues that there could not have been an infinite number of moments before today; otherwise today never would have come (which it has). This is because, by definition, an infinite can never be traversed -- it has no end (or beginning).
Apparently Geisler has never thought about Zeno's paradox. In Zeno's story of the Tortoise and Achilles, the tortoise challenges Achilles to a race, but wants a head start. The tortoise, using essentially the same argument that Geisler uses above, argues that Achilles can never win the race, and so Achilles concedes.
The problem with this is that if the paradox were a real one, it would make all motion impossible. But we know that motion exists, and so the paradox is a false one. For a nice discussion of Zeno's paradox, and its simple resolution, see here: http://www.mathacademy.com/pr/prime/articles/zeno_tort/index.asp
What Geisler fails to understand is that the concept of "infinity" is a purely mathematical one, and that in the realm of pure mathematics, we have both the infinitely big and the infinitely small, and even big and little infinities. In math, an infinite number of infinitely small things can add up to a finite number.
For instance, take the sequence: 1/2 + 1/4 + 1/8 + 1/16 + . . . This infinite sequence adds up to one. Similarly, "an infinite number of moments", where the "moments" (which Geisler has left undefined) are infinitely small, can certainly add up to a finite amount of time. If the reader doesn't believe this, then he should try to explain Zeno's paradox.
But since the moments before today have been traversed -- that is, we have arrived at today -- it follows that there must only have been a finite (limited) number of moments before today.
A demonstrably false conclusion, and one that anyone who understands even a little bit of mathematics knows.
That is, time had a beginning.
This doesn't follow from Geisler's false argument.
But if the space-time universe had a beginning, it must have been caused to come into existence. This cause of everything else that exists is called God. God exists.
False conclusions followed by unproved assumptions followed by more false conclusions. Wow!
Even the great skeptic David Hume held both premises of this argument for God.
Not really. Geisler again provides no references for his claim, but since he demonstrably does not understand what he quotes from Hume below, there is no reason to think that his claim here is correct.
What is more, Hume himself never denied that things have a cause for their existence.
Analysts of Hume's works appear divided on that question, since opposite conclusions can be derived from his writings. But whether he did or didn't, Hume's ideas are probably not, overall, what Geisler would agree with. In his greatest philosophical work, which Geisler quotes below, Hume undermined much of the basis for religion.
He wrote, "I never asserted so absurd a proposition as that anything might arise without a cause."[3] He also said that it was absurd to believe there were an infinite number of moments: "The temporal world has a beginning. An infinite number of real parts of time, passing in succession and exhausted one after another, appears so evident a contradiction that no man, one should think, whose judgment is not corrupted, instead of being improved, by the sciences, would ever be able to admit it."[4]
Hume's argument, taken out of context as Geisler has done, is wrong for exactly the same reason that Zeno's paradox is a false one. But note that Hume was actually arguing against applying the purely mathematical concept the infinite to real situations. In other words, he was arguing that the concepts of the infinitely large and the infinitely small that are the basis for the mathematics of continuous phenomena, namely, the Calculus invented by Newton and Leibnitz, make no sense if applied to the everyday world. For example, Hume wrote ( http://eserver.org/18th/hume-enquiry.html ):
The chief objection against all abstract reasonings is derived from the ideas of space and time; ideas, which, in common life and to a careless view, are very clear and intelligible, but when they pass through the scrutiny of the profound sciences (and they are the chief object of these sciences) afford principles, which seem full of absurdity and contradiction. No priestly dogmas, invented on purpose to tame and subdue the rebellious reason of mankind, ever shocked common sense more than the doctrine of the infinitive divisibility of extension, with its consequences; as they are pompously displayed by all geometricians and metaphysicians, with a kind of triumph and exultation. A real quantity, infinitely less than any finite quantity, containing quantities infinitely less than itself, and so on in infinitum; this is an edifice so bold and prodigious, that it is too weighty for any pretended demonstration to support, because it shocks the clearest and most natural principles of human reason.
Hume is pretty heavy going, but readers who want to wade through his writing will see why Geisler's use of Hume is inapplicable. In other words, Geisler doesn't understand what Hume said. Geisler continues:
Now if both of these premises are true,
We've seen that the first is undecidable, given our present state of knowledge, and the second is false.
it follows that there must have been a creator of the space-time universe we call the cosmos -- that is, God exists.
Geisler has certainly failed to prove his point. Rather, he has proved that he uses horrendously bad argumentation -- unstated assumptions, unproved assumptions, false assumptions, and commits a great many other logical fallacies. In this, Geisler is no different from so many other Fundamentalist apologists, including Jehovah's Witnesses. Indeed, I'm afraid that much of the horrendously bad argumentation we see from Fundies is based on what they see published by people like Geisler. If a Ph.D. philosopher like Geisler is the best that Fundamentalism can produce, then it's in serious trouble.
AlanF
Norman Geisler's article uninterrupted:
Who Made God? And Answers to Over 100 Other Tough Questions of Faith (Ravi Zacharias and Norman Geisler, general editors, Zondervan, 2003)
Chapter 1, "Tough Questions About God", by Norman Geisler
Subheading, "Who Made God?", pp. 23-24
Who made God? No one did. He was not made. He has always existed. Only things that had a beginning -- like the world -- need a maker. God had no beginning, so God did not need to be made.
For those who are a little older, a little more can be said. Traditionally, most atheists who deny the existence of God believe that the universe was not made; it was just "there" forever. They appeal to the first law of thermodynamics for support: "Energy can neither be created nor destroyed," they insist. Several things must be observed in response.
First, this way of stating the first law is not scientific; rather, it is a philosophical assertion. Science is based on observation, and there is no observational evidence that can support the dogmatic "can" and "cannot" implicit in this statement. It should read, "[As far as we have observed,] the amount of actual energy in the universe remains constant." That is, no one had observed any actual new energy either coming into existence or going out of existence. Once the first law is understood properly, it says nothing about the universe being eternal or having no beginning. As far as the first law is concerned, energy may or may not have been created. It simply asserts that if energy was created, then as far as we can tell, the actual amount of energy that was created has remained constant since then.
Further, let us suppose for the sake of argument that energy -- the whole universe of energy we call the cosmos -- was not created, as many atheists have traditionally believed. If this is so, it is meaningless to ask who made the universe. If energy is eternal and uncreated, of course no one created it. It has always existed. However, if it is meaningless to ask, "Who made the universe?" since it has always existed, then it is equally meaningless to ask "Who made God?" since he has always existed.
If the universe is not eternal, it needs a cause. On the other hand, if it has no beginning, it does not need a cause of its beginning. Likewise, if a God exists who has no beginning, it is absurd to ask, "Who made God?" It is a category mistake to ask, "Who made the Unmade?" or "Who created the Uncreated?" One may as well ask, "Where is the bachelor's wife?"
Subheading, "Why Couldn't the World Always Have Existed?", pp. 24-27
Christians naturally believe there must be a God because the world had a beginning. And everything that had a beginning had a beginner. But the tough question to answer is how we know the world had a beginning. Maybe the world always existed.
Famous agnostic Bertrand Russell presented this dilemma: Either the world had a beginning, or it did not. If it did not, it did not need a cause (God). If it did, we can ask, "Who caused God?" But if God has a cause, he is not God. In either case, we do not arrive at a first uncaused cause (God).
The answer to this tough question is that it, too, asks a meaningless question: Who made God? To put it another way, it wrongly assumes that "everything must have a cause" when what is claimed is that "everything that had a beginning had a cause." This is quite a different matter. Of course, everything that had a beginning had a beginner. Nothing cannot make something. As Julie Andrews once sang, "Nothing came from nothing. Nothing ever could." So God does not need a cause because he had no beginning.
This being the case, we need only to show that the universe had a beginning, to show that there must have been a cause of it (i.e., God). Two strong arguments will be offered as evidence that the universe had a beginning. One is from science -- the second law of thermodynamics. The second is from philosophy, namely, the impossibility of an infinite number of moments.
According to the second law of thermodynamics, the universe is running out of usable energy. But if the universe is running down, it cannot be eternal. Otherwise, it would have run down completely by now. While you can never run out of an unlimited amount of energy, it does not take forever to run out of a limited amount of energy. Hence, the universe must have had a beginning. To illustrate, every car has a limited amount of energy (gas). That is why we have to refuel from time to time -- more often than we like. If we had an unlimited (i.e., infinitely) large gas tank, we would never have to stop for gas again. The fact that we have to refill shows that it was filled up to begin with. Or, to use another example, an old clock that gradually unwinds and has to be rewound would not unwind unless it had been wound up to begin with. In short, the universe had a beginning. And whatever had a beginning must have had a beginner. Therefore, the universe must have had a beginner (God).
Some have speculated that the universe is self-winding or self-rebounding. But this position is exactly that -- pure speculation without any real evidence. In fact, it is contrary to the second law of thermodynamics. For even if the universe were rebounding, like a bouncing ball in reverse, it would gradually peter out. There is simply no observational evidence that the universe is self-winding. Even agnostic astronomers like Robert Jastrow have pointed out: "Once hydrogen has been burned within that star and converted to heavier elements, it can never be restored to its original state." Thus, "minute by minute and year by year, as hydrogen is used up in stars, the supply of this element grows smaller."
If the overall amount of actual energy stays the same but the universe is running out of usable energy, it has never had an infinite amount -- for an infinite amount of energy can never run down. This would mean that the universe could not have existed forever in the past. It must have had a beginning. Or, to put it another way, according to the second law, since the universe is getting more and more disordered, it cannot be eternal. Otherwise, it would be totally disordered by now, which it is not. So it must have had a beginning -- one that was highly ordered.
A second argument that the universe had a beginning -- and hence a beginner -- comes from philosophy. It argues that there could not have been an infinite number of moments before today; otherwise today never would have come (which it has). This is because, by definition, an infinite can never be traversed -- it has no end (or beginning). But since the moments before today have been traversed -- that is, we have arrived at today -- it follows that there must only have been a finite (limited) number of moments before today. That is, time had a beginning. But if the space-time universe had a beginning, it must have been caused to come into existence. This cause of everything else that exists is called God. God exists.
Even the great skeptic David Hume held both premises of this argument for God. What is more, Hume himself never denied that things have a cause for their existence. He wrote, "I never asserted so absurd a proposition as that anything might arise without a cause."[3] He also said that it was absurd to believe there were an infinite number of moments: "The temporal world has a beginning. An infinite number of real parts of time, passing in succession and exhausted one after another, appears so evident a contradiction that no man, one should think, whose judgment is not corrupted, instead of being improved, by the sciences, would ever be able to admit it."[4] Now if both of these premises are true, it follows that there must have been a creator of the space-time universe we call the cosmos -- that is, God exists.
[3] David Hume, The Letters of David Hume, vol. 1, ed. J. Y. T. Greig (Oxford: Clarendon, 1932), 187.
[4] David Hume, Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Chas. W. Hendel (New York: Liberal Arts, 1955), 165-66.