Confessor
Puritan Board Senior
I know what your position is. It can be reduced down to non Christian belief is wrong because if you do not see that Christianity is true and all alternatives are false, then you are just wrong. (The whole: we have paradoxes, while others have contradictions issue)
Ultimately, unbelievers are wrong because they deny the obvious fact of Scripture's divine authorship. In that sense, yes, they are just wrong -- even if they are not presented a formidable apologetic for Christianity in their lifetime, they are still absolutely and completely without excuse, per Romans 1. We cannot deny this crucial part of theology in our apologetic. You seem to think we can separate the two.
Apologetics goes to demonstrate that the unbeliever is wrong by showing that all unbelieving starting points lead to absurdity. We do not believe because all other starting points are false -- it is right to believe first of all by the obviousness of Christianity's truthfulness -- but the rational underpinning of the Christian framework is made obvious in apologetics. People who say otherwise -- who say that things (i.e. presuppositions) must be inferentially proven to them before they accept it are presupposing an antitheistic belief that surfaced in the Enlightenment and is without any type of grounds at all. We do not believe in Christianity because we have proven it -- we believe in Christianity because it is obviously true. To show the absurdity of unbelief, and the consistency of belief, we invoke apologetics. Apologetics is not the ground of our faith; God Himself is.
The notion of contradictions and paradoxes are actually not a problem at all. As an obvious example, it would be a paradox (a currently unsolved problem which can logically be "pushed back" towards divine mystery) to say that the Trinity is one essence and three Persons, but it would be an outright contradiction to say that the Trinity is one Person and three Persons. It is absurd to deny the obvious truthfulness of Christianity and claim that contradictions are possible within Christianity, but we can still definitively demonstrate that Christianity has no contradictions.
Actually Hawkins claims infinite density which implies zero mass and zero volume. But if one wants to just say very high density instead of infinite, fine.
That's interesting. All I have seen (and probably what I would claim if I were a materialist) is that the mass of the singularity is infinite or otherwise non-negligible.
So you have the force pulling the singularity in being = to the force wanting to expand. You have an equilibrium. So one needs to propose that a push was given to the system in order to break the equlibrium. But the system is all there is, so there is nothing to give it the push.
I don't know how it worked, but you can't tell me that something material definitely didn't cause it. In fact, all causality that we have perceived in this universe -- and upon which the appropriate premise of the cosmological argument exists -- presupposes the existence of time. Why couldn't the universe be self-caused? You have made a case that nothing can be self-caused into existence but not into occurrence.
All the while the universe is running down (entropy)which implies that if it is material that is eternal, the universe would have already run down.
Only insofar as time has existed.
Sorry I missed this at the time. Infinitesimally small volume does not imply infinite density. I think you are trying to say "arbitrarily small" (as small as you want to go). Think the difference between an really really big number and infinity. You can always think of a larger number than a really really big number but you can't do the same with infinity.
No, I'm trying to say that the volume is infinitesimally small, as in negligible or of zero value.