[Ben]Hello I'm Ben. [Craig] Hi. [Ben] So my question has to do with the Kalam Cosmological
Argument and how you know part of the defense is defending the absurdity of you know past
infinitude, and there had to be a first moment etc. I was wondering if you could talk about
how the so-called A and B theories of time relate to that argument, and I know you've said in your
work that you have to assume the A-theory the time in order for a lot of those arguments to get off
the ground, and so why is it, how do they relate and why is it that we should accept the A-Theory
of time over B-theory? [Craig] Oh my, wow that's a big question. Let me first begin by defining what
Ben is talking about for those of us who aren't familiar with philosophy of time. Philosophers of
time have identified two broadly competing views of time. One would be what is called the A-theory
of time. On the A-theory of time, there is a real difference between past, present, and future. The
present exists, but the future is unreal. It's just potentiality. The past no longer exists. And
temporal becoming is real. That is to say things actually come into existence, and then they go
out of existence. Temporal becoming as a real and objective feature of the world. This is the
common-sense view of time that virtually everyone has who hasn't studied high-level philosophy or
physics. The B-theory of time by contrast says that there really isn't any difference between the
past, present, and future, that the past, present, and future are all equally real. You're eating
breakfast tomorrow, your future marriage, your death are just as real as what's happening now,
and they're down the line so to speak. Similarly, things that happen in the past, they're still real
too. They haven't vanished into non-being. And so the difference between past, present, and future
on the B-theory is that this is just an illusion. It's an illusion of human consciousness. For us,
2012 is present but for the people in 2020, 2020 is present and we're in the past, and neither is
right and the other wrong. It's just any illusion. So on this view there is no such thing as temporal
becoming. Things don't come into being and go out of being. Rather they just are all real. They
just exist. Now how does this impact the argument? Whatever begins to exist has a cause. The universe
began to exist. Therefore, the universe has a cause. Well first and foremost, I think that the
A-theory of time underlies that first premise. When I say everything that begins to exist has
a cause, what I mean is the things can't come into being without a cause. Things don't just pop into
existence. They have causes that produce them in existence. And that presupposes this A-theory. On
a B-theory of time, nothing really ever comes into existence. The universe begins to exist on the
B-Theory only in the sense that a yardstick begins to exist at the first inch. It just has an edge,
but the yardstick doesn't come into existence at the first inch. So on the B-theory it seems to me
that the premise whatever comes into being has a cause, that would still be true but nothing comes
into being so the the universe didn't begin to exist in that sense. So you could still
run Leibniz's question why is there something rather than nothing, why does this universe, this
space-time block exists rather than nothing, but I don't think you could run the Kalam argument. In
addition to that very fundamental point, some of the arguments for the finitude of the past
seemed to presuppose the temporal becoming is real. For example, the argument I shared
earlier tonight about how do you get through an infinite series of events by going one event at
a time. That presupposes that these events are actually happening, that they're actually lapsing,
but just beyond the B-theory that idea of a temporal lapse of time is an illusion. The whole
yardstick just exists and nobody is moving from the first inch to the last inch. It just is there.
So it seems to me that the A-theory does underlie this Kalam argument in several ways. And therefore
my penultimate research proposal that I spent 11 years on prior to my work on divine aseity was on
the A and B theories of time and divine eternity, and I published a couple of books on this in which
I lay out philosophical arguments for the A-theory. I answer objections to it. I pose
some philosophical objections to the B-theory, and I answer philosophical arguments for the B
theory. These are collected in my book "Time and Eternity," which is published by Crossway, and so
I would refer you to those if you're interested in the arguments pro and con on this. But basically,
I stick with the common sense view of time that is the the lay persons' view, that temporal
becoming is real, and there's a real objective difference between past, present, and future.