ABSTRACT
William Craig's rich paper contains a mass of material, and as a non–physicist I will not try to enter into a discussion of the physical issues dealt with in the first part of his paper. As far as I can judge, however, Craig's account of recent cosmological theories is adequate and complete (see, for example, Kanitscheider 2004). And I take it that it can be summarized by saying that all alternatives so far put forward to the standard Big Bang Model have one or more serious flaws: they are merely speculative and have little or no evidence in favour of them; some of them even have substantial evidence against them; some of them are internally contradictory or involve serious conceptual implausibilities; and some of them, at a rather remote level, require a sort of temporal beginning or an initial singularity themselves although the original motivation to establish those models was to avoid such a beginning or singularity. Craig takes these flaws as an argument for a temporal beginning of the universe. In the second part he sketches an argument which (by pleading for a wider account of causation and by invoking a version of the metaphysical principle of causality) shows that there is a cause of the universe which displays the traditional theistic properties and can hence be identified with God.
