Philosophia Christi Vol. 23, No. 2 © 2021 Craig’s God Cannot Create a Temporal Universe Erik J. Wielenberg DePauw University Abstract: William Lane Craig’s influential kalam cosmological argument con- cludes that the universe has a cause of its beginning (the “first cause”). Craig provides some supplementary reasoning to suggest that the first cause is God—a God that exists timelessly without the universe and temporally with the universe. I argue that Craig’s hypothesis about the nature of the first cause is impossible. In particular, it cannot be the case that God timelessly wills to create the universe and the universe begins to exist. 1. Introduction William Lane Craig’s kalam cosmological argument (KCA) continues to be a topic of fierce philosophical debate. e preponderance of that debate focuses on the two central premises of the argument: first, that if the universe began to exist, then the universe has a cause of its beginning, and, second, that the universe began to exist. 1 If these two premises are true, then the uni- verse has a cause of its beginning (call this cause “the first cause”). at con- clusion, if true, is striking, but leaves unsettled the nature of first cause. Craig provides some supplementary reasoning that aims to establish that the first cause must have some of the properties that Christians (and other monothe- ists) attribute to God. For instance, Craig argues that the first cause must be a person possessing libertarian free will, and that the first cause is eternal or timeless without the universe and temporal when the universe exists. 2 is supplementary reasoning has received much less attention than the two main 1. William Lane Craig, “e Kalam Cosmological Argument,” accessed March 14, 2021, https://www.reasonablefaith.org/writings/popular-writings/existence-nature-of-god/the -kalam-cosmological-argument, and “e Kalam Cosmological Argument,” in Two Dozen (or So) Arguments for God, ed. J. Walls and T. Dougherty (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 389–405. ere are two recent books devoted entirely to the second premise of the KCA: Paul Copan and William Lane Craig, eds., e Kalam Cosmological Argument, vol. 1, Philosophical Arguments for the Finitude of the Past (New York: Bloomsbury, 2018), and Paul Copan and William Lane Craig, eds., e Kalam Cosmological Argument, vol. 2, Scientific Evidence for the Beginning of the Universe (New York: Bloomsbury, 2018). 2. William Lane Craig, Time and Eternity: Exploring God’s Relationship to Time (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2001), 243, and “e Kalam Cosmological Argument.” See also Andrew Loke, God and Ultimate Origins: A Novel Cosmological Argument (New York: Palgrave, 2017), 173–8. roughout this paper I use “timeless” and “eternal” synonymously to refer to a state of existing outside of time.