This is my reply to a video by J. Warner Wallace:
In this clip from J. Warner Wallace’s longer talk on the existence of God from cosmological evidence (based on his book, God’s Crime Scene), J. Warner describes how the philosophy of infinite regress demonstrates that time had a beginning and, therefore, ads to the case for a universe with a beginning.
(Wallace is wising up to his inability to prove things: he has disabled comments for this video at YouTube. Apparently, apologetics has more to do with unobstructed preaching to the choir and less to do with answering critics. Wallace knows about my counter-apologtics blog, and to my knowledge has done precisely NOTHING to attempt any answers, or interact with me).
It wasn't necessary to watch this video, the underlined portion above, showing what Wallace was arguing for, constitutes a logically impossibility, which would remain a fatal flaw regardless of what Wallace had to say about the problems of infinite regression. Such fatal flaw can be demonstrated by comparing the Christian truth claim with other normative truth claims that are couched in grammatically equivalent terms:
It wasn't necessary to watch this video, the underlined portion above, showing what Wallace was arguing for, constitutes a logically impossibility, which would remain a fatal flaw regardless of what Wallace had to say about the problems of infinite regression. Such fatal flaw can be demonstrated by comparing the Christian truth claim with other normative truth claims that are couched in grammatically equivalent terms:
Billy played baseball
Dorothy ate cereral
God created time
Notice: all verbs, and therefore those here (i.e., played, ate, created) presuppose time to already be in existence before the action they describe takes place. Hence:
There was a time before Billy played baseball.
There was a time before Dorothy ate cereal.
There was a time before God created time (!?)
Since all three sentences are grammatically the same, whatever is logically true of the verbs in the first two, must also be true of the verb in the third.
First, "time before time" is clearly illogical because it is question-begging. You may as well talk about the water before water.
Second, every biblical description of heaven depicts events there as taking place in no less temporal progression than they do on earth, suggesting that the bible leaves plenty of room for the supposition that God was doing things, one after the other, before creating this universe. If he was, then 'time' also limits god.
Finally, 'time' is not a fundamental component of reality, it is merely a fictional measuring device we invented to record the fluctuating distances between planetary bodies. That's why at the same moment it is 3 p.m. in California, it's not 3 p.m. in Paris. There is no such thing as seconds, minutes or hours, the only place they exist is in clocks. "time" is nothing but a word that we use to help express our contentions about things past, present and future. The idea that "eternity" is some type of different dimension where God views past and present in some unfathomable all-at-once "now" is pure fundamentalist Christian hocus-pocus, it cannot be sustained from the bible anyway, and is thus a concept worthy of nothing but ridicule.
For all these reasons, the concept of creating time itself is sufficiently incoherent and problematic as to reasonably justify those atheists who laugh at the whole business, who also demand the creationist come up with something slightly less convoluted to 'explain' why a god is 'necessary' to explain reality.
Of course, Wallace has jumped on the Big Bang bandwagon, and will thus pretend that God's creation of time is a completely different thing from actions we engage in on earth. Not so. The force of my rebuttal is contained in the grammatical realities that I pointed out. If you wish to say God created time, you must either
a) accept that this is a logically contradictory idea, or
b) insist that verbs for god's action are not governed by the grammatical realities that govern the verbs describing human action (but you'd have to justify that, and blind appeal to God being so much more wonderful and unlike anything is not going to suffice), or
c) insist that human language is incapable of coherently expressing this wonderful truth, in which case you just admitted that the language of Genesis 1:1 is equally incapable of expressing such alleged wondrous truth.
