More Quentin Smith!
Our author invokes the Hartle-Hawking model of the Big Bang to prove that the universe appeared by itself out of nothing. (The Improbability of God, Ch. 7, “Why Stephen Hawking’s Cosmology Precludes a Creator”)
Stephen Barr explains: “Some idea of what is involved can be had by the analogy of a mathematical cone. Such a cone has a singular point at the sharp end, where its curvature is infinite. We can call that point ‘t = 0′ and imagine ‘time’ as running down the cone from the smaller to the larger end. Hartle and Hawking’s idea has the effect of smoothing out that sharp point. One might imagine that, smooth or not, there still has to be an ‘earliest’ point on the cone. But it turns out that in the Hartle-Hawking scheme time radically changes its character near ‘the beginning’ and becomes like space. Instead of three spatial and one temporal dimensions, there are four space dimensions. It becomes impossible, then, to talk about which point is really ‘first’.”
(NB: Barr doesn’t get the First Cause argument right either. The First Cause must be present not in some remote past but in simultaneous series of causes right now. And yes, the natural laws are the formal cause of the universe, but God is the efficient cause of that form.)
So, timeline of the universe does not span [0, now] but (0, now]. Sufficiently close to 0 the universe “just is.” But where is the “nothing”?
Thus, Craig, though criticized by Smith, seems to be right in saying that “the probability of finding any three-dimensional cross-section of spacetime in such quantum models is only relative to some other cross-section given as one’s point of departure.” (98) Given Barr’s explanation, Craig’s comment seems almost self-evident. Smith goes into “Bible study,” attempting to prove that Hartle and Hawking meant something different, but I don’t see how they could.
Smith considers an objection: “It may be said that God could will that the Hartle-Hawking wave function law obtain and leave it to chance, a 99 percent chance, that a Hartle-Hawking universe begin to exist uncaused. But then God is not the creator of the universe, and we no longer have the god of classical theism.” (97) Well, why can’t God work through secondary causes to finish His work of creating the universe? And as for the 1% risk that God supposedly takes, then surely if God is omniscient, he had foreseen that the universe would be created. Moreover, perhaps this was the most efficient and elegant way of making a universe, and as Smith himself points out elsewhere,