Philosopher argues for ‘a universe from someone’

The philosopher Peter S Williams, whose new book, A Universe from Someone, argues that the universe has a personal creator, has been pondering questions about God’s existence for a very long time. ‘As a three-year-old, I surprised my mother by stopping in the middle of a road crossing to ask her: “If God made everything, who made God?” She doesn’t remember her response, though it presumably satisfied me enough at the time to get me out of the road!’

The book, which has just been published, contains Williams’s papers, articles and debate speeches on the existence of God over the past decade. In an autobiographical preface, he reveals that his question as a three year-old was sustained into his teens, when he found intellectual satisfaction in grappling with the cosmological argument for the existence of God. He went to university to study English literature, but switched to philosophy partly because he became frustrated by the postmodernism of the English course, and after he had written an essay on Aristotle entirely in the form of poetry.

He now works as a Christian philosopher and apologist, and is the author of numerous books, as well as being a longstanding trustee of the Christian Evidence Society.

The book’s title is a riposte to the theoretical physicist, cosmologist and anti-theist Lawrence Krauss. Williams explains: ‘As a philosopher it has long seemed to me that, far from being “a universe from nothing” as atheist Lawrence Krauss notoriously claims, ours is a universe best explained as being “a universe from someone”.’ Williams devotes a chapter of combative response to Krauss’s book, which he concludes is ‘riddled with red herrings, circumscribed by circular argumentation and undercut by self-contradiction.’

A Universe from Someone is a highly readable work of philosophy, which is not an easy trick to pull off. One reviewer, a professor of philosophy, praises Williams for his ‘well-developed skills in taking hard material and making it accessible to a wide audience in an engaging way’. The book works as a primer for theism, as well as a report on the current state of the philosophical case for God, and includes a wealth of resources for anyone who wishes to pursue the argument outside the covers of the book.

Read more about A Universe from Someone on the Peter S Williams website.

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