Craig’s God Cannot Create a Temporal Universe

Abstract

William Lane Craig’s inuential kalam cosmological argument concludes that the universe has a cause of its beginning (the “first cause”). Craig provides some supplementary reasoning to suggest that the first cause is God—a God that exists timelessly without the universe and temporally with the universe. I argue that Craig’s hypothesis about the nature of the first cause is impossible. In particular, it cannot be the case that God timelessly wills to create the universe and the universe begins to exist.