Tag: bible

Hell Is Purgatory Where You Don’t Let Go Of the Sins?

On By Christopher LansdownIn Christianity, Philosophy, Uncategorized3 Comments

In his excellent book The Great Divorce, C.S. Lewis depicts Hell and Purgatory as the same place, with the difference being whether people consent to leave or whether they decide to stay. Truth to tell, it’s a bit of timid description of purgatory because Lewis was trying to be non-denominational and so he was trying to avoid offending people who are rabidly anti-Catholic in their biases (possibly including himself—He was born in Belfast where anti-Catholicism was in the water). But it’s a very interesting idea which could really use a bit more development, especially with regard to the more fiery depictions of Hell and the more actively unpleasant depictions of Purgatory.

Purgatory is an oft-misunderstood doctrine, but its etymology is a good place to start understanding it. “Purgatory” comes from the same root as the word “purge,” as in “to clean” or “to make clean”. The doctrine of purgatory is a straightforward logical deduction from starting off sinful at death and being sinless in heaven. Something must happen between those two steps, and the thing that happens which cleanses people of their sins was called, very practically, “cleaning,” except it happened to come from the Latin rather than the German roots of English, and hence, “purge”→”Purgatory”.

If you consider how cleaning normally works, on physical objects, you do it by abrading the surface until all of the dirt is gone. If you want to do a thorough job, you often have to be rough with the thing being cleaned—which is why children do not like baths, especially baths which get them thoroughly clean, including, for example, under their fingernails. If we move from the physical to the spiritual, how much more invasive must the cleaning be which cleanses your soul from things like lust, greed, envy, hatred, etc?

From here, it’s a relatively short jump to the metaphor of using fire to purify metal. If you heat metal up roughly to its melting point, any organic contamination will burn away and you will be left with pure metal. (In practice, it will probably need a polishing afterwards, but this doesn’t matter to the metaphor.) And this metaphor for cleaning happens to work very well with the description of Hell as a burning grounds.

That Hell is a burning grounds with constant fire is taken to be metaphorical for the obvious reason that it can’t actually be completely literal. Quite apart from literal fire requiring the afterlife to be just more of the same, rather than different in important ways, if the fire consumes the damned, then they’re not there later be burnt anymore. If the fires don’t consume the damned, they’re not being burnt. It would be, at worst, like chili peppers—awful at first, but if you spend enough time with them you get used to them because you know the sensation doesn’t actually mean anything bad. Since orthodox Christians do not presume God to be incompetent, the fires must be, to some degree at least, metaphorical.

If you put these together, it produces an interesting version of C.S. Lewis’s presentation of Hell in The Great Divorce: if all of the souls go through something which is incompatible with sin, analogous to a bath or purifying metal with fire, and they let go of their sins, this is Purgatory, and they emerge from that process made fit for being perfectly happy being eternally in God’s presence. (Let me emphasize, due to the context of some odd heresies existing, that we are made clean entirely by God’s grace, and entirely by his power. This cleaning is purely receptive on our part and we merely cooperate with it.)

But if the person refuses to let go of their sin, this cleaning never finishes, and therefore becomes eternal—specifically, eternal punishment.

This actually goes quite well with the idea I saw somewhere (I think in G.K. Chesterton) that the fires of Hell are actually the burning love of God, rejected. Bishop Barron used the analogy of a person at a party who doesn’t want to be there, who hates everything that is making the people who do want to be there happy. But if we stick with the metaphor of fire, the light of God’s truth works quite well as a purifying fire that burns away all impurities, since all sin is some kind of lie, and light also heats. In the fullness of the light of God’s truth, unveiled, all lies will burn away, and if a person lets them go, they have been cleaned of the dirt of these lies. But if they will not let go, if they shield the dirt from the burning light of God with their own bodies, then they eternally are tormented by trying to do what they can’t—believe the lies.

This is all, of course, highly speculative metaphor. I’m not trying to say that this is exactly what will happen after we die. For one thing, I have no special revelation so I don’t know. For another, I doubt that any language we humans have on this side of death even contains the words needed to describe what actually happens after death. (The fact that our Lord never tried to tell us strongly suggests, to me, at least, that this is so.)

But I think that this does at least suggest an answer, or at least part of an answer, to the question of how eternal punishment can be just. The point isn’t really to identify the answer, though of course that would be nice. The point is to show that an answer is possible, and therefore any argument which relies on it being impossible is wrong.

The Parable of the Dishonest Steward

On By Christopher LansdownIn Christianity, Uncategorized2 Comments

The parable of the dishonest steward appears in the Gospel of Luke, and is very interesting:

Then he also said to his disciples, “A rich man had a steward who was reported to him for squandering his property. He summoned him and said, ‘What is this I hear about you? Prepare a full account of your stewardship, because you can no longer be my steward.’ The steward said to himself, ‘What shall I do, now that my master is taking the position of steward away from me? I am not strong enough to dig and I am ashamed to beg. I know what I shall do so that, when I am removed from the stewardship, they may welcome me into their homes.’ He called in his master’s debtors one by one. To the first he said, ‘How much do you owe my master?’ He replied, ‘One hundred measures of olive oil.’ He said to him, ‘Here is your promissory note. Sit down and quickly write one for fifty.’ Then to another he said, ‘And you, how much do you owe?’ He replied, ‘One hundred kors of wheat.’ He said to him, ‘Here is your promissory note; write one for eighty.’ And the master commended that dishonest steward for acting prudently. “For the children of this world are more prudent in dealing with their own generation than are the children of light. I tell you, make friends for yourselves with dishonest wealth, so that when it fails, you will be welcomed into eternal dwellings.”

This is a perplexing parable because Jesus is drawing a lesson from a dishonest man, which presents the difficulty of figuring out which parts we’re supposed to copy and which parts we’re not. And other questions like, “why did the master praise the dishonest steward for giving away his property?” To figure this out, we need to look at what actually happened: yes, the dishonest steward gave away some of his master’s property by canceling some of the debt, but he didn’t give it all away. And he could have.

In modern times, when a person is fired, the usual procedure is to lock them out of all of the computer systems of a business before telling them that they’re fired, so they can’t do anything bad on their way out. But the master doesn’t do this with the dishonest Steward. Instead, he leaves him Steward until he has drawn up a full account of his stewardship. Why?

Because the master didn’t know what he had.

In order to know what was his, he needed the dishonest steward to tell him. The dishonest steward was thus in a position to give away everything. If he told his master, “I’m sorry, but you’re broke” the master did not know better.

Further, since he was still steward, he was within his rights to entirely cancel the debts of the people whose debts he partially forgave. It was not honest, but it was his right. So why didn’t he entirely cancel out the debt of those debtors?

We’re not told, of course, but there is a strong hint in the fact that he did not forgive the same amount to both debtors. He forgave one half his debt and the other a fifth of his debt. Since he was praised for being prudent, we must assume that he forgave different amounts because of reasons specific to each, that is, because it was prudent. Perhaps the one could only repay half anyway, and the other could repay four fifths. Perhaps the one who was forgiven half had done something for the master earlier while the one who was forgiven a fifth hadn’t. We don’t know, but we must presume that the actions made sense in context.

And what about this from the master’s perspective, when he hears about it? Had the Steward canceled the entire debt, he would be very angry at the dishonest steward. But he was left with two thirds of what he was owed, which was far better off than he might have been. It’s not optimal, but if the master was realistic—and he seems to have been realistic—he got rid of the steward far more cheaply than he might realistically have and better than many have. (Just look up the history of how many sports figures were left penniless by dishonest business managers.) Moreover, he might even have received some small benefits from the forgiveness of the debt in addition to the money he got back. If the one who was forgiven half of his debt had done something for the master, that debt is now paid. If the debtor was only able to pay half, he might now get the half promptly. If nothing else, in not making a fuss over the canceled portion of the debt, he might at least receive good will from the debtor in case the situation is ever reversed and the master is the one who owes. It’s possible that he got rid of the dishonest steward even more cheaply than we know.

This also shows a great deal of understanding of human nature on the part of the dishonest steward, because consider what happens next: he’s going to ask the people whose debts he reduced for a job. That’s a delicate thing to do when he was just fired for dishonesty. Sure, they have reason to like him, but at the same time a job for many years can easily cost a lot more than twenty kors of wheat, especially if the guy is dishonest. Critically, he shows that while he’s dishonest, he’s not too dishonest. If the debtors are at all reasonable, they know that it’s very hard to find a completely honest man—consider how long Diogenese looked without finding one—so one who is only a bit dishonest is a reasonable choice. And he proved himself to be only somewhat dishonest by his actions when the metaphorical fecal matter had hit the artificial wind generator, i.e. when he was deeply stressed and might have been desperate or resentful.

Putting this all together, we can see what Christ referred to when he said that the children of his world are more prudent in dealing with this generation. The dishonest steward knew how people thought and acted, and acted accordingly. In modern terms, his psychology was good, even if his morals were not. He knew how to effectively manipulate people; he manipulated them with the truth. The great advantage of manipulating people with the truth is that, when they find out, they are not angry with you.

And here we come to the part to imitate: the common name for manipulating a person to his own benefit is “supporting” him. We, each of us, have an influence on the people we meet in this life, and if we will their good, we should support them. To do that, we must be able to understand things from their perspective, and how we and they and the things under our control relate, and then use the truth to manipulate them to their benefit. That is, to effectively support them.

I think that this also sheds some light on what Jesus says after—to use dishonest wealth to make friends so we will be welcomed into eternal dwellings. All wealth—all possessions—always have some dishonesty about them because we never do a perfect job. Everything we make, or deliver, or do for another is always, because of our human weakness, at least slightly less than it should be. But this does not completely invalidate it; there is still good that we can do with it and if we use it well—that is, prudently—it can make people better off and it’s worth doing this. And it’s not easy to do this and it’s worth putting the effort into doing it well.

This stands against the mistake of being “so good that you’re good for nothing,” that is, so fixated on purity that you never accomplish anything good. That’s not to say that one should choose to be dishonest; heaven forbid. But it does mean that there are limits to how much one should allow the fear of what is technically called “remote material cooperation” to prevent one from ever doing anything.

Mary Harrington on Lily Phillips and Possession

On By Christopher LansdownIn Christianity, Philosophy, UncategorizedLeave a comment

Mary Harrington wrote about our modern day Messalina, Lily Phillips, who recently and famously fornicated with 100 men in a day as a PR stunt for her pornographic OnlyFans channel. This event would be fairly unremarkable, given what society is presently like, except that a documentary film was being made of it and her immediate reaction upon finishing was deep distress, which has spawned a great deal of commentary. In the face of most people arguing about individual responsibility vs. responsibility to others, Ms. Harrington’s piece suggests an unusual framing: that of possession. (Demonic if you are tough enough for solid food, symbolic if you haven’t yet been weaned, though of course she doesn’t put it that way and for all I know doesn’t think of it that way.) This is a very interesting framing, and I’d like to explore it a bit.

Before I get into the main part, I do want to make some notes about demons, possession, and demonic influence which I think will be helpful to ensure that we’re all on the same page because popular culture tends to depict demons in egregiously stupid ways.

The first thing that I want to note is that within Catholic philosophy, the symbolic interpretation of things like demonic possession is not exclusive of the literal interpretation of them. They can be both at the same time, just in the way that a father can feed his child when the child is hungry as a simple physical act but, at the same time, this also archetypally represents all manner of things from God’s act of creation to a teacher teaching a student. None of these is wrong or one real while the others are fake. They’re different, but all legitimate as themselves.

The second thing is that full-on possession2 is not the same thing as a person being influenced by a demon; demons are capable of subtlety. Demons are simply angels who reject the good; they are beings of pure spirit and greater intelligence than humans, so they’re capable of more subtlety and cunning than human beings are. They can make bad ideas seem good and let us do the rest. If you are taking the symbolic interpretation alone, the complexities of social interactions are more complex than an individual, and can mislead us without completely overwhelming us.

The third thing to note is that demonic possession is not necessarily adversarial with the person possessed. A human being is capable of cooperating with a demon, in whole or in part. Demons make promises, which are usually empty, and people may well cooperate with the demon because of them. In the purely symbolic interpretation, you can see this in something like a person who takes foolish risks or a reality show contestant.

The fourth and perhaps most important thing to note is that demonic possession is not exclusive of things like psychological or social pressures. A person can be possessed by a demon and also worry about what his neighbor will think of him and be anxious about how to pay his bills.

OK, so that common ground established, I’d like to consider Ms. Harrington’s framing of Lily Phillips’ stunt as possession, or the alternative phrase she offers, an “egregore”. (An egregore is “a concept in Western esotericism of a non-physical entity or thoughtform that arises from the collective thoughts and emotions of a distinct group of individuals”.) Put very abstractly, the question which arises when one hears of Lily Phillips’ stunt and how predictably bad she felt afterwards is: how could anyone choose to do something so foolish? And the answer of possession or an egregore is, basically, that she didn’t choose this, she is a slave to a wicked master, and that master chose it for her.

To modern ears this can sound like trying to shift blame. And indeed, some people are trying to do that; to some degree that’s what Louise Perry’s article, The Myth of Female Agency, is about (though it is more complex than that). Properly understood, though, demonic possession is not about shifting blame. It’s about understanding that we are not gods. We must serve something; the most important choice in our lives is who or what we will serve.

Ms. Harrington quotes the story from the gospel of Luke where Jesus asks a demon its name and it replies, “My name is Legion, for we are many.” More illustrative is when Jesus describes what happens when an unclean spirit is driven out:

When an unclean spirit goes out of someone it wanders through waterless country looking for a place to rest, and not finding one it says, “I will go back to the home I came from.” But on arrival, finding it wept and tidied, it then goes off and brings seven other spirits more wicked than itself, and they go in and set up house there, and so that person ends up worse off than before.

If you merely reject a spirit because you don’t like it—even if you just want to think of it as the zeitgeist or spirit of the age or an egregore—if you do not replace it with something, you will remain empty until it comes back. But nature abhors a vacuum, and your emptiness will pull in more than just what you drove off, because you will take in several things hoping they’ll fill the emptiness. You’ll probably think that you’re just trying them or considering them, but you’ll take them in.

On a technical level, this is because your life must have some kind of purpose for you to do anything at all. People who have merely absorbed their purpose from the zeitgeist will often doubt this because they’ve never paused to consider what the purpose of their life is and so can foolishly believe they don’t have a purpose, but they eventually tend to notice this as they get older and especially if they’re successful at the purpose they absorbed. “I’ve gone to school and gotten a job and paid for therapy so I can be better at my job so I can afford more therapy so I can be better at my job—but what’s it all for? Is this it?”

The only people who make their own purpose are madmen—this is necessarily so on the technical level since people who make their own purpose cannot work toward the same goals as others except accidentally and cannot be intelligible to others who do not share their purpose. Moreover, we find ourselves in a physical world we did not create with physical properties we did not create that requires us to do things we do not choose in order to stay alive. Whatever purpose we create for ourselves must necessarily include these things that we did not choose, which is a simple contradiction. You can’t create something you didn’t choose. If you are to survive, you must discover a purpose, not create it. And our purpose is just another way of saying who or what we serve. Which brings us back to Lily Phillips and possession.

Lily claimed, in the weeks leading up to her stunt, that she was serving herself. She wanted to bang 100 men in a day, was excited for it and looking forward to it, etc. etc. etc. Then when it happened, she was devastated. There’s a good reason why my favorite part of the Catholic baptismal promises are “Do you reject Satan? And all his empty promises?” Lilly Phillips was not serving herself, since that’s not really possible, and, critically, she was not serving anyone she held to be worth serving. Feminism told women that it was there for them, that if they just gave it their souls, they would not die, but would be gods. It turns out that’s an old story. Truly, there is nothing new under the sun3.

So, ultimately, I think that Ms. Harrington is right to frame this in terms of possession, though it is important to understand that this is a voluntary possession. Lily became an OnlyFans prostitute because of the spirit of the age meeting her particular circumstances; she came up with this stunt for some reason then felt an obligation to her fans to go through with it and to not let them down—she served many masters, and none of them were good. And there is only one outcome to serving a bad master.

1 . Wife of Emperor Claudius, who famously held a contest with a prostitute to see who could copulate with the largest number of men in a day. (Messalina won.)

2. Technically, there is a form of possession where there is no cooperation and the demon literally possesses the body of the person against their will. Philosophically speaking, this is very akin to a viral infection and, from reports by exorcists, is incredibly rare and far more akin to the kind of thing you see in a movie like The Exorcist. An unfortunate person in this state may be confusable with someone in the throws of deep mental illness, but not with a normal person making bad choices, so this kind of thing is irrelevant. I will be using the term “possession” in the sense of persistent influence or cooperative possession, rather than this sense, because Ms. Harrington does and because this sense is so sui generis that no reasonable person will mistake the two.

3. Except Christianity. True or false, before Christianity no one had the idea of God taking on flesh and becoming his own creature in order to offer himself as an innocent blood sacrifice to atone for the sins of his creatures and so make them fit to become incorporated into the divine life.

Secular People Still Need to Explain Religious Truths

On By Christopher LansdownIn Christianity, Philosophy, UncategorizedLeave a comment

There are a lot of stupid secular theories abounding today, such as red pill dating advice or mimetic-rivalry-hoe-phase-theory, which receive a lot of criticism from people who are sane. But this criticism usually has no effect because, to believers in these theories, it amounts to nitpicking. This is because they are secular people trying to explain religious truths. Their theories are (necessarily) secular and when you try to explain religious truths with secular theories, the theories have to be idiotic, for the same reason that if you jam a square peg into a round hole, it will end up as a very funny looking square.

The religious truths that people are trying to explain are the necessity of having ideals and the impossibility of achieving the ideals, or to give them their proper names, everything has a nature and it is a fallen world. God created the world to be perfect, but the world chose sin over perfection, but God has not abandoned the world and is working to save it. Within this religious framing, it’s easy to explain why it is that we must strive to achieve perfection and also why we must accept quite a bit of imperfection. You do not need to throw out the ideal for one which seems achievable, and you do not need to worry (overmuch) about not achieving it.

This framework is not available to secular people. Secular people can, of course, have lofty ideals and, in pure pragmatism, accept that no one achieves it and keep going anyway. Most people want some kind of rational relationship between their thoughts and actions, even if they are completely incapable of expressing that rational relationship in words. So for the vast majority who can’t just hold incompatible beliefs with no explanation, they either come up with an explanation (which doesn’t make sense if you look at it too closely) or alter the beliefs.

Red pill dating and hoe-phase-theory are the same basic philosophical move of throwing out the ideal and substituting one that they think is achievable. The benefit to this is that trying to achieve the ideal is actually a rational activity since the ideal is achievable. The downside, of course, is that it’s an evil ideal.

Modern ideas about marriage are the opposite, though with a bit of a twist. Modern ideas of marriage demand the perfect realization of the ideal, which is no small part of why so many people aren’t marrying (though by no means the only cause). The twist is that the ideal is modified to one which makes sense within the secular worldview, so we get marriage not as a covenental relationship or as the mutual self-sacrifice of the parents for the sake of their children, but as a thing which is supposed to be mutually fulfilling. That is, marriage is supposed to fill both parties up so that they are happy. And this happiness is increasingly demanded; where it is lacking this is taken as a sign that the marriage isn’t real and so divorce is just recognizing the reality of the failure to form a real marriage. This is not particularly more sane than the red pill dating ideas, though its insanity is less spectacular.

I am reminded of a wonderful section of G.K. Chesterton’s novel Manalive, about being happy in marriage:

“But really, Michael, really, you must stop and think!” cried the girl earnestly. “You could carry me off my feet, I dare say, soul and body, but it may be bitter bad business for all that. These things done in that romantic rush, like Mr. Smith’s, they– they do attract women, I don’t deny it. As you say, we’re all telling the truth to-night. They’ve attracted poor Mary, for one. They attract me, Michael. But the cold fact remains: imprudent marriages do lead to long unhappiness and disappointment– you’ve got used to your drinks and things–I shan’t be pretty much longer–“

“Imprudent marriages!” roared Michael. “And pray where in earth or heaven are there any prudent marriages? Might as well talk about prudent suicides. You and I have dawdled round each other long enough, and are we any safer than Smith and Mary Gray, who met last night? You never know a husband till you marry him. Unhappy! of course you’ll be unhappy. Who the devil are you that you shouldn’t be unhappy, like the mother that bore you? Disappointed! of course we’ll be disappointed. I, for one, don’t expect till I die to be so good a man as I am at this minute– a tower with all the trumpets shouting.”

“You see all this,” said Rosamund, with a grand sincerity in her solid face, “and do you really want to marry me?”

“My darling, what else is there to do?” reasoned the Irishman. “What other occupation is there for an active man on this earth, except to marry you? What’s the alternative to marriage, barring sleep? It’s not liberty, Rosamund. Unless you marry God, as our nuns do in Ireland, you must marry Man–that is Me. The only third thing is to marry yourself– yourself, yourself, yourself–the only companion that is never satisfied– and never satisfactory.”

(It must be born in mind that Michael Moon is his own character and not a mouthpiece for Chesterton; Michael does have some good points among his mad ramblings, even if he doesn’t have the fullness of appreciation of the committed single vocation.)

But his fundamental point is quite sound: it is a mistake to try, as one’s primary goal, to be happy in that earthly sense of the word happiness. There will always be pain and sorrow and trials, and worst of all we will let ourselves and each other down. The big thing is whether we always pick ourselves up again. But happiness is a terrible goal in marriage, because marriage exists to accomplish wonderful things—making new people and teaching them how to be human—and trying to be happy gets in the way of accomplishing things. There’s so much more to aim for in this life than happiness.

Happiness in the sense of smiling and having a good time and enjoying yourself, that is. Happiness in the sense of the Greek makarios, which can also be translated as “blessed”—that’s quite a different thing. But in that sense, it’s important to remember that this is a painting of the happiest man alive:

I’m sure that Chesterton has said it before me, but the problem with reasonable goals is that they always end up being completely unreasonable. And that’s because this world is about God, and so doesn’t make sense on its own. And every attempt to make sense of it in itself, without reference to God, will fail in one of only a few ways.

The Universe Can’t Have Always Existed

On By Christopher LansdownIn Atheism, Uncategorized4 Comments

One of the stranger things that one comes upon from atheists is the idea that the universe always existed. This is obviously impossible because it’s a simple contradiction in terms because simple observation shows that things happen because of causal linkage. Though it is more common for people to describe this model as “a causal chain that never started”, it would be more accurate to describe this model as “an infinite series that terminated.” I’m referring to the mathematical concept of an infinite series, so I think it might make sense to pause for a moment to explain what little you need to know about the mathematics of infinite series because most people don’t study higher mathematics.

Speaking a little loosely, an infinite series consists of two things:

  1. A starting value (optional)
  2. A way to generate the next value from its index in the list, the previous values, or both

One example of an infinite series, N, is: N1=1, Ni+1=Ni+1. That is, the first element in the series is 1 and each successive element is the element before it, plus one.

That’s it. That’s all infinite series are. They can be defined any way you want; you can reference more than one element, such as in the famous Fibonacci sequence where (starting with the third element) each element is the sum of the previous two. You can define them without reference to the previous element, such as a series of numbers where each is the index squared (1, 4, 9, 25, 36…). But in each case, what you have is a rule for how to generate all of the elements. What you don’t have is the elements. Yet.

This gets us to the famous mathematical fact that “infinity is not a number.” Infinity isn’t a thing, it’s rather the concept of, “you never stop.” If you ever stop, it’s not infinity. And as you can see in how we defined the infinite series above, it never stops. That’s what makes it an infinite series.

Now, the moments of time clearly form a series; they are ordered not merely by the passage of time but also by causal connections. If I push a glass off of the table, it falls after I pushed it and not before.

Now, the thing is, the set of all moments leading up to the present moment forms a sequence with a final element. A sequence with a final element, by definition, is a finite sequence. However, by the hypothesis of the world always having existed, this would be a finite sequence with infinitely many elements. That’s a contradiction, and since it is indisputable that the sequence of moments leading up to the present moment has a final element, the number of elements in that set cannot be infinite. Quod Erat Demonstrandum.

Uncowed by mere logic and obvious truth, the atheists who hold this kind of thing will then say that there’s no reason you have to stop when counting backwards. It could be infinite in that direction! Whether or not that’s true, it’s irrelevant, because time doesn’t go that way. Time moves forwards, not backwards. God, or the laws of physics, or brute facts, or a drunken elf named Fred, or something clearly already picked a direction for time to flow, and we’re all stuck with it. All manner of things might be true if we lived in a completely different universe than the one we live in, and the first rule of tautology club is the first rule of tautology club if tautology club has rules and they’re well ordered. (Mathematically, a well-ordered set is an ordered set which has a first element. Not all ordered sets do. The rational numbers greater than zero under the standard ordering are not well-ordered, for example, because for any hypothetical first element, simply divide it in half an you have a rational number which comes before it.)

Interestingly, it has been a common theme in arguments for God to simply side-step the problem and give arguments which do not rely on the universe having started. The argument from motion (change) and the the argument from contingency and necessity are the two most obvious examples. Plenty of others don’t require it, either. (The Kalam cosmological argument is the obvious exception, of course.) I can see the appeal of simply side-stepping the problem since it’s irrelevant, but I do somewhat wonder at the wisdom of it. It may be falling on the wrong side of answering a fool according to his folly; by allowing people to persist in holding as true something that’s obviously wrong, it has allowed the fools to be wise in their own eyes.

Then again, they’d do that anyway. Most of them are clearly not seriously thinking through their own ideas. But for the few of them who are, I think it’s worth at least pointing out that the universe can’t have existed forever before explaining why it doesn’t matter anyway.