Long, long ago (back in 1979), William Lane Craig came up with a new version of the Kalam cosmological argument.
WLC's version of Kalam seemed to make it sound like modern physics supported the Kalam argument, and so he became very popular with theists.
"See?" they would say. "Physics proves that God is real!"
Over time, his arguments attracted the attention of actual physicists, who pointed out what was wrong with his claims about physics. WLC has had to backpedal so furiously, that he is now forced to try and disprove Einsteinian relativity in order to salvage his version of Kalam.
In other words, he is now trying to disprove the very thing that he once claimed supported his Kalam argument. He is now flailing about trying to disprove the thing he once claimed as a premise for his version of Kalam.
Aside: Some of Craig's arguments (especially the arguments against "actual infinity") come from 11th-century Muslim scholar Al Ghazali, who once argued that mathematics comes from Satan. Neil deGrasse Tyson argues that Al Ghazali is in part responsible for the decline of Muslim academic contributions to humanity.
His attempts to disprove Einstein's Relativity are patently ridiculous. Above is a video by a physics student named Martymer 81 (who normally only goes after the dumbest people on the Internet) explaining just how dumb Craig's attempts to disprove modern physics are.
But how did he get backed into this corner where he is now attacking what was once a foundational premise of his argument?
His argument is that everything that begins to exist must have a cause. The universe begins to exist, therefore the universe must have a cause, therefore Jesus is proved to be real.
He never actually proves the first premise, he "confuses" different philosophical meanings of "create" (he pulls a switcheroo with creatio ex materia and creatio ex nihilo), and there are many other problems with the philosophy and logic of his argument (such as the incredible logical leap to "the universe has a cause" to "therefore the Christian god"). You can find plenty of people on the Internet explaining what is wrong with the logic of his argument.
What about Relativity?
Georges Lemaitre noticed that Einstein's equations suggested that space-time is expanding, and if space-time is expanding now, then it was probably expanding in the past. If we go backward in time and look at the universe, space-time would shrink the further we look back in time. Since space-time can't get smaller than zero, the universe must have had a beginning. Two years after Lemaitre proposed what we now call the Big Bang theory, Hubble confirmed that the universe is expanding by measuring the redshift of galaxies and plotting their speed against distance.
At the time of Lemaitre's proposal, most scientists believed in something called the steady-state model of the universe: that the universe was exactly as it was and never changed. Einstein himself believed in the steady-state model and added an extraneous term to his equations for no other reason than to make them stop saying that the universe was changing.
Many theists immediately latched on to the Big Bang theory as "proof" that the Bible was right all along about the universe having a beginning, which is probably why Craig originally tried to use Relativity as support for his argument.
Here we run into problems with human language. Language comes with a lot of hidden premises (assumptions) that we don't realize that we are making, such as that time and space exist everywhere and everywhen. Human language does a very bad job of describing not-space or not-time, and thus, most of us have trouble thinking about this.
We also run into a problem with language. When most people learn about the Big Bang theory, they do not understand that when physicists talk about "the universe," they are talking about space-time, while most non-physicists think "the universe" refers to all the stuff within space-time (e.g. matter, energy, et. al.).
What does it even mean to claim that the universe has a cause?
Again, our language assumes the existence of space-time. So when I say "I am outside of the shed," my statement assumes that space exists at the shed, at me, and in between me and the shed. But what does the word "outside" even mean if space only exists at the shed?
This is what we run into when someone says "outside of the universe." We get the same problem with time when someone says "before the universe."
If I say that "A causes B," then I am assuming that time exists at A, exists at B, and exists in between A and B. But what if time only exists at B? What does the word "cause" even mean in that case?
This is the problem we run into when we talk about the universe having a cause. In this case, time itself is the effect.
Put another way, space-time came into existence with the universe (because in this parlance, space-time is the universe), so there can be no such thing as "before the universe" as time didn't exist yet. If A cannot come before B, then A cannot cause B, at least not in the sense any of us mean when we use the word "cause." It doesn't matter what A is, if time doesn't exist until B, then B cannot have a cause.
Cause and effect
At first, Willian Lane Craig tried to get creative with the whole idea of cause and effect. He tried to argue that pottery wheels prove that the cause doesn't have to go before the effect, therefore the universe can have a cause.
This caused much hilarity as it showed that Craig does not fully understand how the law of cause and effect works even with something as mundane as a potter's wheel.
When a potter shapes clay on a potter's wheel, the cause does indeed come before the effect, even if the potter's wheel is spinning fast enough to confuse the eye and make it seem like the changes are happening to every angle of the clay simultaneously.
Once Craig's attempt to redefine cause and effect such that the cause doesn't have to go before the effect failed, that was when he was left with trying to disprove Relativity so that he could claim that space-time always existed as it is and has never changed.
In other words, Craig has now shifted to arguing for a steady-state model in his attempts to salvage his version of the cosmological argument.
All of which brings us to Craig making a fool of himself trying to disprove Relativity. In case you're not sure about Relativity, every time you use a GPS device, you're adding to the evidence for Relativity. If you want to see how Craig's arguments against Relativity hold up, click on the picture above.
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