"I cannot think of any other belief which we have that is so fundamental and so powerfully warranted as the belief that time is real . . ."
--William Lane Craig [1]
Once again, William Lane Craig has disappointed me with his laughably inept summary of some aspect of reality. In a 2014 article that I recently found, Craig literally says that time is the most certain and foundational thing we can know of. It is astonishing to me that a professional philosopher would say that about anything other than logic and consciousness, since they alone constitute the very core of reality, as logic governs the absolute foundations of everything and there is no knowledge without a consciousness.
Truth and logic exist even in the total absence of time, matter, and conscious minds [2]--they cannot be false and cannot not exist, and nothing short of absolute certainty is what they impart. Yes, I have absolute certainty that the present moment exists and I cannot be mistaken about this, yet the existence of time is not at the foundation of necessary truths and knowledge of time is certainly not at the absolute core of epistemology and metaphysics.
There are necessary truths that are self-evident, but the existence of the past is not among them (and Craig seems to be arguing that the past, as well as the present, is obvious and at the foundation of knowledge and reality). Craig argues that because we have "temporal experience" that we are automatically justified in believing that the past exists as it appears to us, saying that "It follows from the above argument that we are prima facie justified in holding our belief in the objective reality of the distinction between past, present, and future." The existence of the present moment is self-evident in the sense that to doubt the present moment I have to exist in it, rendering any objection to the present moment self-defeating, as there cannot not be a "right now" by the nature of the way reality is [3]. But the existence of the present moment is still not as foundational as the laws of logic, the existence of truth, or the self-evidence of my own consciousness, which are all at the absolute core of my knowledge. And the past is not affirmed simply by establishing the present.
I know that the past exists because by the time I have focused on or reflected on the present moment, the present has elapsed and the moment I started focusing on has left and gone into the past. At the very least, the past has existed for a moment. This is in no way a prima facie assumed belief, as it is one that is logically demonstrable, and thus cannot be false. If I did not have this basis rooted in logic, I would have no justification for believing in the past at all, contrary to what Craig claims.
No one is prima facie justified in believing in anything, since the absence of a "defeater," as Craig sometimes calls it (meaning a refutation of something), does not establish the veracity of a claim. Prima facie means something is held to be true, i.e. believed, until disproven. However, an inability to disprove something does not prove that it is true, and there is an enormous difference between calling something seemingly probable and calling it true.
Craig has a habit of accepting certain things as true simply because he acknowledges he can't prove them false (the presence of the Holy Spirit [4], the correctness of his moral feelings, the accuracy of his sensory perceptions, etc). But I cannot prove that I should not kill every living being I come across--so should I therefore believe that I should kill every living being I can? This does not follow at all! This is one of the most asinine arguments one could ever make for anything. It is intellectually honest and rational to admit that one cannot know something if that thing truly cannot be known, and this might mean that a claim has to be rephrased so that it becomes defensible. I hope that someone does not need to even identify the stupidity of prima facie beliefs to see that knowledge and the existence of time are not at the absolute foundation of epistemology and reality--they are very foundational, but cannot be at the very foundations of them.
[1]. https://www.reasonablefaith.org/writings/question-answer/the-reality-of-time
[2]. See here:
A. https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2018/04/the-impossibility-of-absolutely-nothing.html
B. https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2017/10/the-immateriality-of-logic.html
[3]. https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2017/12/metaphysics-and-absolute-certainty.html
[4]. https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2018/04/william-lane-craigs-foundational.html
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