Why think God caused the universe to exist?

[Adrift]

In case anyone is interested. Dr. Craig goes over some "Recent Responses to the Kalam Argument" in his latest podcast, covering a few of the issues brought up in this thread.

[shunyadragon]

In case anyone is interested. Dr. Craig goes over some "Recent Responses to the Kalam Argument" in his latest podcast, covering a few of the issues brought up in this thread.

Can you better reference this to reveal what he says about these issues?

[Adrift]

Can you better reference this to reveal what he says about these issues?

No.

[Jichard]

In case anyone is interested. Dr. Craig goes over some "Recent Responses to the Kalam Argument" in his latest podcast, covering a few of the issues brought up in this thread.

By the way; are you ever going to address those blatantly false claims you posted regarding the religious motivations behind opposition to inter-racial marriage?

Or does your concern for truth only extend to truths you find ideologically-convenient?

[Boxing Pythagoras]

I don't think we're going to agree on the existential nature of "to be," so I'm going to focus in on what I find to be the more interesting bit.

First, treating absences as real, existent things, looks like a reification fallacy.

I completely acknowledged that one might deny that an absence is a concrete entity; however, your definition wasn't solely dependent upon concrete entities. Your definition included abstract entities, and absences are most certainly abstract entities.

Second, one can deny the existence of abstract entities (ex: nominalism). That's why I included "abstract" in my bi-conditional:

I had assumed that you included "abstract" for precisely the opposite reason. That is, I thought you included it because one can affirm the existence of abstracts, as Platonists do. If you intended to tailor the argument for Nominalists, then the inclusion of "abstract" seems extraneous.

Third, suppose one thinks that absences could exist. I think it would still be the case that your explanation runs afoul of the distinction between properties/particulars, (or maybe the distinction between states and what those states occur in). To see why, note that typically when you discuss "the absence of X", you're discussing X's absence within a state of affairs. For example, when I mention "the absence of unicorns", I'm talking about an existent context in which unicorns are not present. This context might be the planet Earth up until now, or the universe, or ... So "the absence of unicorns" is said to be present in said contexts. One can phrase this as "the absence of unicorns" is a state within this existent context or that "an absence of unicorns" is a negative property instantiated by this particular context. This reasoning, if anything, is what would allow one to claim that absences could exist. However, this reasoning does not apply to this:

Z : There is nothing iff for every concrete or abstract X, X does not exist

After all, given Z, there is not an existent context to act as the particular that instantiates the negative property of "absence of X" nor is there a context in which "the absence of unicorns" could be a state. Thus, it would make no sense to claim that an absence exists given Z. To say otherwise would be to conflate the existence contexts/particulars containing absences with the non-existence of contexts/particulars.

It seems to me that "does not exist" refers to a state of affairs every bit as much as "absence" does. So "a unicorn does not exist" is said to be true in reference to some existent context. One can phrase this as "a unicorn does not exist" within this exitent context or that "a unicorn does not exist" is a negative property instantiated by this particular context. As such, your proposition Z would remain tautologically false, as it would require the existence of some context in which every X does not exist.