ABSTRACT
In tonight's debate, William Lane Craig presented eight reasons why it's reasonable to believe in God and why metaphysical naturalism is unreasonable, in fact, absurd. Metaphysical naturalism doesn't follow from epistemological naturalism, but it does follow from atheism. The explanation of the universe can lie only in a transcendent reality beyond the universe, beyond space and time, which is metaphysically necessary in its existence. It therefore follows that the best explanation of the existence of the contingent universe is a transcendent, personal being what everybody means by "God". In 2003 Arvind Borde, Alan Guth, and Alexander Vilenkin were able to prove that any universe which has, on average, been in a state of cosmic expansion cannot be infinite in the past but must have a past space time boundary. Philosophers and scientists have puzzled over what physicist Eugene Wigner called "the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics". But the naturalist has no explanation of the uncanny applicability of mathematics to the physical world.
