Metaphysical space is not the outer space mentioned more regularly in casual conversation among people who have no investment in the philosophical truths that surround them. Outer space is the universe beyond individual planets and other celestial bodies like moons, the gravity-free vacuum in which no sound is said to travel and which is supposed to contain only relatively miniscule particles of matter; the more ultimate metaphysical space that holds matter, which has a similar word affiliated with it, is a more fundamental part of reality, as it must exist for there to even be a place for the smallest of material objects to exist in the first place.
The fallacious Christian apologist William Lane Craig touched on the nature of the latter kind of space (metaphysical space that would have to hold outer "space") when he recently reposted a 2019 answer to a question about what the universe is expanding into [1]. However, he predictably fails to handle the issue rationally. Rightly denying that the universe is expanding "into" God because God does not hold the universe within him in any sort of spatial sense, Craig conflates the universe itself and the space in which the universe resides and sides with the faulty position that space began to exist at the beginning of the universe, failing to distinguish between the two in a complete sense.
Craig states that space expands with the physical universe, moving outward since the initial Big Bang, before which space did not exist according to him. His claim is that there is no space into which the universe expands. This might be an idea that some scientists associate with the Big Bang, but there is no logical connection between the the ideas of the universe expanding and space expanding because the former is made of matter and the latter is immaterial. The universe therefore has a drastically different nature than the space that holds it. Indeed, the metaphysical differences go far beyond just one being material and the other nonphysical. One is metaphysically necessary in that it is logically impossible for it to not exist.
The world of matter could not have always existed because of the logical impossibility of an infinite chain of past events. If an endless chain of moments and physical events occuring during those moments occurred, the present moment and all events in the universe happening at this immediate time could never have been reached, as there would be no end to the number of moments that must elapse before the present arrives! Space, in contrast to the universe it holds, has to exist with or without matter. Space is not what Craig misunderstands it to be: it is not something that could have had a different nature, whereas physical substance could have acted differently (and might behave differently in the future) and could have never existed at all.
At any spatial boundary which marks the hypothetical or real edge of the physical universe, there is always space beyond on the other side. It is logically impossible for there to be a point or conceptual line dividing space from "non-space," or a place where there is no space, which would still be space. Even if matter does not exist beyond a certain point, regardless of whether that point changes with the expansion of the universe, matter always could have been placed beyond that point by God or by natural forces after the uncaused cause created the original matter of the universe. Thus, space extends in every direction endlessly--and must by necessity exist even if matter had never become a part of reality at all.
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