In Hands Off Our Logic, God-Boy, I
mentioned the fact that Craig refers to his god as “enormously powerful”. I noted that “power” is time related and want
to address a possible wriggle manoeuvre that Craig and his disciples might try. Possibly, they might argue, Craig is using a
different definition of “power”, the “power” that would be necessary to make
the universe out of nothing:
If Craig is using a magic version of these concepts, then
he’s doing an argument like this:
In The Last Day of the
Dinosaurs, the renowned palaeontologist Mathew Wedel holds forth on “how
these majestic creatures went extinct”.
(Note that there is
no clear indication that Wedel is responsible for the quote that I attributed
to him. Even if he is, it’s a
mine-quote, and more than likely it’s a misattributed mine-quote that I took
from an inappropriate source, namely tvtropes.org in an article which has a
link to a complaint by Wedel that he had been totally misquoted by the production company responsible for the Discovery channel show mentioned.)
“Majesty” derives from the
existence of royalty, but where did this “majesty” come from? It couldn’t have come from human kings and
queens because they were not around during the time of the dinosaurs, and
dinosaurs had no kings and queens.
(Note that this is a
misuse of the term “majestic” and of authority.)
Therefore, when seen as part of a
cumulative argument, this shows that there must be a beginningless, uncaused,
spaceless, timeless, immaterial, enormously powerful, and sovereign, Personal
Creator of the universe!
(Note that this is a
very minor change from Craig’s own words as uttered during his debate with
Stephen Law.)
In his argument about the creation of the universe however, Craig is
specifically talking physics. In
physics, power is the rate at which energy is transferred, used or
transformed. So “enormously powerful”
means having the capacity to transfer vast quantities energy (or,
alternatively, more modest quantities of energy over very short periods of
time). Hang on a second though … what is
energy? Energy has the SI unit “joule”
and 1 joule is 1 kilogram multiplied by the square of 1 metre divided by the
square of 1 second. Both power and
energy imply the existence of time and space.
So how did we end up with a spaceless and timeless being who
is also “enormously powerful”?
I’ll leave it up to the apologists to provide an
answer. I won’t try to stuff more words
in their mouths.
(And, if I am to be completely fair, I have to acknowledge
that this simple physics based critique may be unreasonable since I am taking
Craig’s gibberish far more seriously than is truly warranted.)
