Peter Kreeft Ph. He has written more than forty books, including Does God Exist? Ronald K. Tacelli, S. Highly recommended. What would you like to know about this product? Please enter your name, your email and your question regarding the product in the fields below, and we'll answer you in the next hours. Handbook of Christian Apologetics. By: Peter Kreeft , Ronald K.
Stock No: WW Kreeft does not bother to explicitly state the most important premise in this argument, namely C :. IF there is at least one thing which is such that its present existence is uncaused, AND there is exactly one thing on which all things that need a present cause outside of themselves in order to exist are dependent for their existence right now, THEN God exists.
Kreeft does not mention premise C and provides no supporting arguments for C. Since this is the single most important premise in Argument 2 , and since it is a highly controversial premise which requires several arguments to justify it, and since Kreeft makes no effort to justify C , Argument 2 clearly FAILS, just like Argument 1.
Argument 2 clearly FAILS, because Kreeft fails to state or to support the single most important premise of the argument, namely premise C , and because Kreeft supports the second most important premise of the argument with a dubious inference that appears to be INVALID, namely the inference from 5a to 6a.
The Argument from Time and Contingency 5. The cause of the coming into being of the universe is eternal. The cause of the coming into being of the universe was a person. However, there is no clear difference between these characterizations. And it is hard, if not impossible, to conceive of objective moral principles somehow floating around on their own, apart from any persons. Having a will means being able to make choices and decisions , especially between alternative courses of action.
X is a being that has at least a human level of intelligence, and X is able to make choices between alternative courses of action. The universe has a cause of its coming into being. IF the universe has a cause of its coming into being, THEN: either the cause of the universe coming into being was a person or the cause of the universe coming into being was not a person. IF the cause of the universe coming into being was not a person, THEN the universe has always existed.
It is not the case that the cause of the universe coming into being was not a person. Premises 14 , 15 and 17 would have to be similarly modified, as well as the conclusion:. At least one cause of the universe coming into being was a person. The galaxies that currently exist are clearly the result of natural causes that operated in both space and time. Star formation which began about million years after the Big Bang is an important natural cause of the coming into being of galaxies that began to exist about million years after the Big Bang.
Argument 6 has other problems besides premise 15 being FALSE, so the argument would still FAIL even if Kreeft did, contrary to reasonable expectations, revise and improve premise 15 to make it true. In this post, I will begin to analyze and evaluate Phase 2 of Argument 6. Whatever begins to exist has a cause of its coming into being. Based on the conclusion of this argument, Kreeft lays out further reasoning in support of these conclusions:. IF the universe has a cause of its coming into being, THEN the cause of the coming into being of the universe is the cause of the entire universe of space and time.
IF the cause of the coming into being of the universe is the cause of the entire universe of space and time, THEN the cause of the coming into being of the universe must be outside the limitations and constraints of space and time.
The cause of the coming into being of the universe must be outside the limitations and constraints of space and time. Anything that is outside the limitations and constraints of space and time is eternal.
The collection of all of the things that currently exist in both space and in time has a cause of its coming into being. IF the collection of all of the things that currently exist in both space and in time has a cause of its coming into being, THEN the cause of the coming into being of the collection of all of the things that currently exist in both space and in time is the cause of the entire universe of space and time.
In that case, 10a is TRUE because the consequent of 10a is a tautology, making 10a itself a tautology. There is no good reason to believe that the cause of what currently exists in both space and time must also be the cause of everything that has ever existed in both space and in time. That is clearly a hasty generalization , and is NOT a logical implication of the antecedent of 10a. But if we interpret the consequent of 10a to be merely a tautology , then we should restate 10a to make the tautology obvious:.
IF the collection of all of the things that currently exist in both space and in time has a cause of its coming into being, THEN the cause of the coming into being of the collection of all of the things that currently exist in both space and in time is the cause of the coming into being of the collection of all of the things that currently exist in both space and in time.
This is clearly an uninformative and useless premise, and in order to make this premise logically connect with premise 11 , we would need to restate 11 in similar terms:. IF the cause of the coming into being of the collection of all of the things that currently exist in both space and in time is the cause of the coming into being of the collection of all of the things that currently exist in both space and in time , THEN the cause of the coming into being of the collection of all of the things that currently exist in both space and in time must be outside the limitations and constraints of space and time.
On this interpretation premise 11b is FALSE, because although the antecedent of 11b is necessarily true, the consequent can be false, and we have good reason to believe that the consequent of 11b is in fact false, so 11b is itself FALSE. We have good reason to believe that the cause or causes of the coming into being of galaxies were perfectly natural causes that existed both in space and in time.
But in order to make use of premise 10b , we must interpret premise 11 to mean what 11b means. In order to be able to rationally determine whether this claim is true or false, we need to first understand what it means. The collection of all of the things that currently exist in both space and in time began to exist. If 2a is true, then 2 is true. If 2a is false, then 2 is false.
So, we need to determine whether 2a is true or false. Because we have clarified the meaning of this claim, it becomes fairly easy to evaluate this claim, and it is now clear to me that this claim is in fact TRUE. Well, basically, this is the collection of the currently existing GALAXIES: Galaxy A galaxy is a gravitationally bound system of stars, stellar remnants, interstellar gas, dust, and dark matter.
Galaxies are categorized according to their visual morphology as elliptical,[4] spiral, or irregular. The collection of galaxies that currently exist began to exist. Statement 2b is clearly a true statement, and since 2b is roughly equivalent to 2a , the fact that 2b is clearly true, provides us with good reason to believe that 2a is true, and if 2a is true, then 2 is also true.
Furthermore, although the galaxies that currently exist might not include absolutely everything that currently exists in both space and in time because, for example, there is some gas between the galaxies , those galaxies and the contents of those galaxies clearly constitute MOST of the things that currently exist in both space and in time. Based on current Big Bang astronomy, stars did not begin to form until about or million years after the Big Bang.
So, for the first million years after the Big Bang, there were no stars and no galaxies or very few stars and galaxies. The oldest galaxy that we know of formed about million years after the Big Bang see the quote above from an article on Galaxies. Clearly, premise 2b is TRUE. Did the collection of galaxies that currently exist begin to exist about million years after the Big Bang?
Well at least ONE of the currently existing galaxies began to exist about million years after the Big Bang. But not all galaxies began to exist at the same time. The Andromeda Galaxy formed about 10 billions years ago see article on the Andomeda Galaxy. Since there are between billion and 2 trillion galaxies that currently exist, it seems likely that some of those galaxies came into existence after the Andromeda Galaxy, perhaps sometime in the last billion years. But one thing is clear: the collection of currently existing galaxies began to exist no earlier than hundreds of millions of years AFTER the Big Bang.
The collection of galaxies that currently exist has a cause of its coming into being. Why is the conclusion 3b irrelevant to the existence of God? We already have a fairly good scientific explanation for how the collection of galaxies that currently exist came into being, for how this collection of galaxies began to exist.
For one thing, we know that they did NOT come into existence from out of nothing. First there was the Big Bang, and about million years later stars began to develop, and about million years after the Big Bang, the first galaxy among those that still exist developed. For at least the next three billion years more and more stars and galaxies developed. Astronomers and astrophysicists can provide evidence-based theories and explanations of how the billions of galaxies that currently exist began to exist, so we have no need of the hypothesis of God to explain this phenomenon.
In Part 24 , I did an initial analysis of Argument 7 , and I pointed out some significant problems with that argument. Argument 6 has the same set of significant problems:. Thus, even if Argument 6 was a sound argument, it would prove the existence of a being that was NOT God.
Kreeft seems to think that Argument 6 proves the existence of a creator of the universe : …the world could not be infinitely old and must therefore have been created by God. Whatever begins to exist has a cause for its coming into being. The universe has a cause for its coming into being. The inference in the argument as stated here appears to be deductively valid, so the only question is whether the premises are both true. In email correspondence, Kreeft has provided some clarifications that eliminate some of the ambiguities in the definition.
X is the collection of all of the things that currently exist both in space and in time. What about the predicate of premise 2? There is an important ambiguity in this expression. It could mean either of the following:. But when we are talking about ordinary things, plants, animals, and human beings, things do NOT come to exist out of nothing.
Plants come from seeds, when buried in soil, and watered. Animals and human beings come from the bodies of their parents. We never experience things, plants, animals, or people coming from nothing. This is not the first time I have examined this argument. When I was an undergraduate student of philosophy, my plan was to apply to Trinity Evangelical Divinity School and to study philosophy of religion and Christian apologetics with Dr.
William Craig. I visited the campus one summer while on a road trip heading for the east coast. I was hoping to meet Craig in person, but he was away at the time. So, I have been aware of this argument since about One major problem with this argument is that it is based on the claim that time does not stretch backwards for an infinite number of years , and thus time has a beginning.
Before we go any further on this interesting philosophical question about the relationship of time to persons, actions of persons, and cause-and-effect, I think we should explore the various logical possibilities about the relationship of time and the universe. If time can begin to exist, then there is no obvious reason why time could not cease to exist as well:.
In those scenarios, all four possibilities concerning the universe would be logically compatible with the character of time, so there are no incoherent scenarios among the last four combinations. All but one of these combinations is incoherent, meaning all but one contains a logical contradiction.
Take combination III for example. In that combination, the universe has existed forever, but time began to exist. This combination logically implies the following claim: The universe was in existence one billion years before time began to exist.
This implication is clearly incoherent, because it is logically impossible for one billion years to elapse while time does not exist. In order for just one year, or even one second, to elapse, time must exist. Thus, combination III logically implies a statement that is clearly incoherent, so combination III is itself an incoherent statement: combination III is a logically impossible state of affairs.
A similar line of reasoning can be used to show that combinations II and IV are also incoherent and logically impossible. Of the first four combinations in the above chart, only combination I is logically possible. There is no contradiction in the idea that both time and the universe began to exist and that both time and the universe will come to an end.
Two of these combinations are logically possible, and two of these combinations are incoherent and thus logically impossible. The problem comes in with combinations where the universe has no beginning, since in all of these four combinations time has a beginning. This is like the problem with combination III, discussed above. If the universe has existed forever, but time had a beginning, then that logically implies this statement: The universe was in existence one billion years before time began to exist.
But this statement is incoherent, so any combination that logically implies this statement is also incoherent and logically impossible. The other two combinations V and VI are logically possible. As with the previous set of four combinations, two of these combinations are logically possible, and two of them are incoherent and thus logically impossible.
The problem comes in with combinations where the universe has no end. If time comes to an end but the universe continues to exist forever, then this logically implies the following statement: The universe will still exist one billion years after time comes to an end.
But this statement is clearly incoherent. It is logically impossible for just one year, or even one second, to elapse when time no longer exists. This is such a good essential book — it is my second one. Tacelli have written an informative and valuable guidebook for anyone looking for answers to questions of faith and reason. Aug 03, Bridget rated it really liked it. It is a Summa-style book a summary of the arguments packed in between these pages.
Sin can be destroyed only by sanctity, prayer, faith, hope, charity, the blood of Christ, and the power of the Holy Spirit. Peter KreeftRonald K. Aug 20, Patrick Gruber rated it it was amazing. Jan 22, Jr rated it it was ok. Book was an assigned reading for Classical Apologetics class. A very solid defense.
Return to Book Page. He presents 20 arguments ranging from the five proofs of Aquinas to modern cosmological arguments to arguments from psychol Details the full breadth of Christian Apologetics.
It is a thorough examination of the logical defense of Christianity. He presents 20 arguments ranging from the five proofs of Aquinas to modern cosmological arguments to arguments from psychology.
It works fabulously both ways. Details the full breadth of Christian Apologetics. The cases for and against are presented in systematic fashion.
Highly recommend for anyone who appreciates reason and seeks truth. Account Options Sign in. My advice to the reader: Selected pages Title Page.
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