The Mormon View of Creation is the title of an episode of the Reasonable Faith Podcast, recorded on February 16, 2010, in which William Lane Craig, a renowned Christian apologist, philosopher and theologian, was interviewed about his contribution to the book The New Mormon Challenge.
In a nutshell, the main objection stems from William Lane Craig's famous Kalam cosmological argument, which argues against infinite regresses and concludes that the universe was brought into being ex nihilo by an immaterial, timeless, spaceless, eternal uncaused cause -- contrary to the Mormon view of creation.
Question: How do Latter-day Saints respond to William Lane Craig's philosophical objections to their view of creation?
Below a few relevant quotes from the interview (emphasis mine):
Kevin Harris: Dr. Craig, you had the opportunity to contribute to an article in a book called The New Mormon Challenge. [1] The book is very good in that there are many essays that contrast a Mormon view with a Christian view on a very philosophical level. You had the opportunity with Paul Copan to contribute an article on creation ex nihilo, or creation out of nothing or from nothing, [2] which Mormon theology tends to have a problem with. They don’t hold to (apparently, at least the bulk of Mormon theologians) creation out of nothing. They teach that God had preexisting material from which he crafted the universe. So he had some things to work with. Now there seems from the get-go to be some problems there. Would that say that there is some kind of matter or stuff that is co-eternal with God?
Dr. Craig: Well, yes. In fact on the Mormon view God is a material object. This is one of the strange things about Mormonism that I think most people don’t realize. In fact, probably I suspect many Mormons don’t even realize what Joseph Smith and the Mormon church has traditionally taught. [...] Joseph Smith believed that God is a material humanoid being who lives on a planet in outer space who is the product of physical intercourse from his parents, and who will in turn beget children of his own, and that this regress is infinitely into the past.
Kevin Harris: In other words, there was a god before him and a god before him and a god before him. Then we got the problem with an infinite regress.
Dr. Craig: Yes, exactly. It wasn’t long after I had published the kalam cosmological argument that some people who were involved in ministries to Mormons came to me and said this argument is absolutely devastating, if it goes through, to Mormon theology because it is inherent in Mormon doctrine that not only did the world not have a beginning (as you say, the material universe has always existed) but that God is part of the material universe. God himself is a physical object which has been begotten by other physical gods before him. So Mormonism is a form of polytheism of the crassest sort, namely, that there are material, physical humanoid gods and goddesses that are responsible for the creation of worlds and who are the gods over these different worlds and universes.
[...] Dr. Craig: No. God is an imminent object in the universe. It is quite astonishing. I mean, really Kevin, this is like Roman and Greek polytheism in many ways. Of course, this view is very difficult to reconcile with modern cosmology because the universe is expanding which means at some time in the past it was contracted down to a superdense, hot state. What happened to all of these deities if you go back in time and contract down? Did they all get squished down to nothingness? Or are they like ball-bearings in a loaf of bread that are just sort of stuck in there? It is very, very strange.