Hello, Dr. Craig. I'm a big fan of your work, and I have argued with the Calam for a while now, but I've recently started to question the argument and whether time might actually be infinitely old because of this line of reasoning.

One, any decree from God that is made outside of time is eternal.

Two, God's decree to make time was, is outside of time, so God has eternally been making time.

3. Therefore, time has to be eternal or infinitely old.

I'm probably making some dumb mistake, so I'd love if you could give me some clarity

and help me understand why the kalam still works and why the universe isn't infinitely old.

Also, I realize that an infinitely old universe is a logical contradiction, which just makes

this confuse me more. Thanks. Asher, United States.

These are thought-provoking questions, Asher, but require us to define our terms carefully.

Premise one is correct if we define eternal to mean without beginning an end.

Something may be without beginning an end, either by being timeless or by existing throughout time.

While God's timeless decrees are by definition timeless and therefore eternal,

they are obviously not eternal in the sense of existing throughout time.

Now, in order to avoid the fallacy of equivocation, we must hold the meaning of our terms constant.

But in premise two, you seem to switch to the other meaning of eternal.

For in order to get your conclusion that time has to be eternal or infinitely old,

you must understand God has eternally been making time

in the sense that he has been doing this throughout beginning less

and endless time. But then you're equivocating on the meaning of eternal. If on the other hand,

premise two means that God has timelessly been making time, then apart from the inappropriateness

of using tense verbs, proponents of divine timelessness would agree that God timelessly creates time.

There is a way of rescuing your argument, I think, and that would be by claiming that on a

...