An Educational Video and Ammo Against Cosmological Arguments

The couple behind the SkyDivePhil YouTube account have produced another awesome educational video on modern cosmology that's well worth watching (as are their other videos).

In this video they discuss Roger Penrose's Conformal Cyclic Cosmology (CCC) model, which is interesting for those of us in the counter apologetics area since it supports the view of an eternal universe.




The video is well worth watching in its entirety, but something of particular interest shows up at the 20:05 mark, where they ask Roger Penrose about William Lane Craig's interpretation of the CCC model.  Suffice it to say that Craig isn't much of a fan of the CCC given that it would contradict the Kalam Cosmological Argument.

The summary of it is that Craig represents the CCC model as some kind of multiverse theory, or one where there's a singular origin point of two parallel universes.  Sir Roger is very quick to point out that this is not a correct interpretation of his model, and that he is proposing a sequential series of cyclic universes.

A bit of egg, nothing more

I don't want to make much more of this than there is here.  Craig is eager to dismiss the CCC for obvious reasons, but it'd be more than a bit uncharitable to claim he was intentionally misleading people.  I honestly don't think he'd do that.

What's far more likely is that Craig was simply wrong in his interpretation of the CCC.

Now it's kind of embarrassing to be quite so wrong on this given that:

1. One of the first papers on the CCC was titled "Before the big bang"
2. The book Sir Roger wrote explaining the model is called "cycles of time"
3. Sir Roger was on the Christian radio show "Unbelievable" which sponsored Dr Craig's debates and he was asked if the universes in his model could be eternal into the past, he said yes. 
4. Sir Roger has been arguing that there are signals in the CMB form before the big bang, verifying his model. If the universes were not chronologically prior, how could such a claim make sense?

Note: A special thanks goes to SkyDivePhil for providing these four points to me in an email.

 

That last point is potentially very important, since the data is preliminary, but it is quite possible that there is experimental evidence that could confirm the CCC model.

 

That all aside, other than Craig possibly having some egg on his face here, there's a pretty important point.

 

The Point

 

The point isn't that the CCC is probably true, therefore the Kalam is false. We don't yet know if the CCC is completely accurate.  There are competing models by other cosmologists that very well could be correct.

 

The point is that apologists are so very quick to assert that the entire material universe must have had a beginning in order to try and drill out a god shaped hole to stick Yahweh in.   The problem for apologists is that there's no evidence that all of material reality must have had a beginning.  What we have is simply an unknown in our current understanding, with numerous competing theoretical models that could explain the data we have. 

 

Right now the best apologists can do is try to read their preferred metaphysical positions into the Big Bang and make arguments from those assumptions, but it's nothing more than that.