Once more to the hotel

Abstract

William Lane Craig's defence of the so-called ‘Hilbert's Hotel Argument’ for the beginning of the universe seems to be in conflict with his own presentist views, as I argued in my earlier article ‘Heartbreak at Hilbert's Hotel’ (2014). In response, Andrew Loke (2014) has defended a modified version of the argument which avoids this problem, and this defence has been endorsed by Craig (2018). After clarifying the dialectic, I argue in this article that Loke's modification is not as straightforwardly successful as he and Craig seem to think, and that it in fact requires a controversial independent assumption – namely, that creation ex nihilo is possible. I show that some of the more obvious ways of supporting this assumption are either unsuccessful or unavailable to the proponent of the Hilbert's Hotel Argument. Moreover, I show that accepting this assumption conflicts with a key premise in the Hilbert's Hotel Argument. Hence, Loke's modified argument has not successfully established that the universe – including time itself – began to exist.