God's Not Dead: Evidence for God in an Age of Uncertainty (10 page)

4
THERE WAS A BEGINNING

A common sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a superintellect has monkeyed with physics.

—F
RED
H
OYLE
, “T
HE
U
NIVERSE
: P
AST
AND
P
RESENT
R
EFLECTIONS”
¹

The best data we have [concerning the Big Bang] are exactly what I would have predicted had I nothing to go on but the five books of Moses, the Psalms, and the Bible as a whole.

—A
RNO
P
ENZIAS,
N
OBEL
L
AUREATE IN
P
HYSICS
²

IT SOUNDS LIKE A GOOD JOKE:

“What did Moses know about the universe that Einstein didn’t?”

“That it began.”

But it’s no joke. The opening statement in the Bible, recorded over thirty-five hundred years ago, makes a scientifically accurate claim that there was a beginning to everything. Cosmologists (physicists who study the structure and origins of the universe) came to agree that there was an initial moment where everything, including space and time, came into being. As theoretical
astrophysicist Stephen Hawking commented, “Almost everyone now believes that the universe, and time itself, had a beginning at the Big Bang.”
³
The fact that the universe is now believed to have begun is a startling development in cosmology. The accepted view from
Aristotle
to Einstein was that it had always existed. “The
Cosmos
is all that is or ever was or ever will be,” is the opening declaration of Carl Sagan’s best-selling book
Cosmos
.
⁴
This was turned into a television series as well and gave legitimacy to the notion that the material world is all that has ever existed, or as atheist philosopher Bertrand Russell argued, “the universe is just there, and that’s all.”
⁵

To provide some historical perspective, this view was supported in the nineteenth century by Charles Darwin’s release of
On the Origin of Species
, which proposed that all of life arose spontaneously through natural causes. This seemed to confirm the notion that there was no need to look beyond nature itself for the answer to how everything began.

As the twentieth century dawned, there were virtually simultaneous breakthroughs in the fields of physics and astronomy. Einstein gave the world the theory of relativity and started a revolution in the way we understand how the world works. The subatomic world was redefined by quantum mechanics that gave us a counterintuitive view of how particles at the smallest level really operated. But maybe the most earthshaking discovery came through the observations of astronomer Edwin Hubble in 1929. Like
Galileo
over three hundred years before him, he looked through his telescope and observed something that would change the world: he saw that the light measured from distant stars appeared to be redder as the distance of the stars from the earth increased. Light appears redder when a star
is moving away from the earth and bluer when coming toward the earth. This is called the
red-shift effect
, and it demonstrated that all distant galaxies are moving away from Earth at velocities proportional to the distance from Earth. This discovery led to the big bang theory, the idea that if you put the observed expanding universe in reverse, everything would come back to a single starting point (single infinitesimally small volume).

“For this reason most cosmologists think of the initial singularity as the beginning of the universe. On this view the big bang represents the creation event; the creation not only of all the matter and energy in the universe, but also of space time itself.”
⁶
Most significantly, this evidence about the beginning of the universe shows that its Creator must have existed outside of time and space, exactly as implied in Genesis.

T
HE
I
MPLICATIONS OF THE
B
IG
B
ANG

Astronomer,
agnostic
, and former head of the
Goddard Institute at NASA
, Robert Jastrow, captured the tension of the big bang theory in his book
God and the Astronomers.

When a scientist writes about God, his colleagues assume he is either over the hill or going bonkers. In my case it should be understood from the start that I am agnostic in religious matters. . . . However, I am fascinated by the implications in some of the scientific developments of recent years. The essence of these developments is that the Universe had, in some sense, a beginning—that it began at a certain moment in time.
⁷

Many in the skeptical community would try to downplay the notion of a definite beginning because of the religious implications. Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington would echo this same reluctance: “Philosophically, the notion of a beginning of the present order of Nature is repugnant to me . . . I should like to find a genuine loophole.”
⁸
The idea of a beginning was uncomfortable for the naturalist who was committed to a worldview that excluded the existence of a supernatural realm. Stephen Hawking noted this discomfort in his bestseller
A Brief History of Time
: “Many people do not like the idea that time has a beginning, probably because it smacks of divine intervention.”
⁹

Astronomer Fred Hoyle came up with the term
big bang
out of ridicule. The thought of a beginning to him was tantamount to slipping in the concept of a Creator:

At first sight one might think the strong anticlerical bias of modern science would be totally at odds with western religion. This is far from being so, however. The big bang theory requires a recent origin of the universe that openly invites the concept of creation, which so-called thermodynamic theories of the
origin of life
in the organic soup of biology are the contemporary equivalent of the voice in the burning bush and the tablets of Moses.
¹⁰

Regardless of the implications, the entire universe along with all matter, energy, space, and time had a beginning. Trying to conceive of what could have existed before the beginning or caused the beginning is mind-bending. However, the
logic
of connecting the evidence for a beginning of the universe to a Creator is too challenging to ignore.

T
HE
L
OGIC
OF
F
AITH

When someone says, “Belief in God isn’t logical,” they are simply hurling an insult at people of faith much like candidates from rival political parties try to marginalize their opponents. Maybe a person can’t articulate her or his faith logically, but that doesn’t mean faith in God itself is illogical or irrational. This is illustrated by one of the oldest arguments for God’s existence, known as the
cosmological argument
. William Lane Craig is a noted philosopher and theologian who has become a leading voice in the origins debate. He has written numerous books and published scores of peer-reviewed articles on these related issues. He and coauthor J. P. Moreland are also experts on the cosmological argument, the concept that there was a “first cause” or “uncaused cause” to the universe.

The cosmological argument is a family of arguments that seek to demonstrate the existence of a Sufficient Reason or First Cause of the existence of the cosmos. The roll of the defenders of this argument reads like a
Who’s Who
of western philosophy:
Plato
,
Aristotle
, ibn Sina, al-Ghazali,
Maimonides
,
Anselm
,
Aquinas
,
Scotus
, Descartes,
Spinoza
, Leibniz and Locke, to name but some.
¹¹

One form of the cosmological argument is stated in this way:

1. Whatever begins to exist has a cause.

2. The universe began to exist.

3. Therefore, the universe has a cause.
¹²

Step one
is undoubtedly true. The key phrase is “begins to exist.” This obviously would not include a Being with no beginning.

Step two
is as close to a physical fact that there is:

For not only all matter and energy but also space and time themselves came into being at the initial cosmological singularity. . . . On such a model the universe originates ex nihilo in the sense that it is false that something existed prior to the singularity.
¹³

Step three
is a cause that must itself be uncaused. The cause of the universe must exist outside of space and time, since space and time came into existence in this beginning. It must be therefore eternal, nonmaterial, and ultimately personal since the universe appears to have the purposeful intent of supporting human life.

The uncaused First Cause must transcend both time and space and be the cause of their origination. Such a being must be, moreover, enormously powerful, since it brought the entirety of physical reality, including all matter and energy and space-time itself, into being without any material cause.

Finally, and most remarkably, such a transcendent cause is plausibly taken to be personal.
¹⁴

Some are content to give token assent to the fact that a divine force is behind the universe. The sheer magnitude of evidence for this so-called uncaused cause calls for consideration for the existence of God. Just so long as this entity remains anonymous
and impersonal, everything’s fine. But this kind of caring, personal God, who answers
prayer
and judges sin is frightening to the imagination. If the Creator of the eye actually sees or if the Maker of the ear actually hears, then we are responsible and accountable for our words and actions.

W
HY
I
S
T
HERE
S
OMETHING
R
ATHER THAN
N
OTHING?

The German
mathematician
and philosopher Gottfried Leibniz posed the question in the seventeenth century, “Why is there something rather than nothing?”
¹⁵
This question seems to capture the essence of the quandary the skeptical position is in. Why are we here? Why is anything here? The responses to this question have ranged from the absurd to the sublime.

Once at the
University of New Orleans
, I was conducting a meeting for students on campus and made this statement: “Either everything you see around you started itself, or it was started by something besides itself.” I thought,
Surely this is just simple logic
.

Surprisingly a student in the back of the class raised his hand and said, “Well, there’s a third choice.”

“What is it?” I asked.

Trying to sound very philosophical he said, “Maybe we aren’t really here at all.” So much of contemporary dialogue is riddled with blatant assertions like this. People say anything they want, regardless of the evidence or logic, and expect the idea to be given equal consideration to other, far more reasonable voices.

My only comeback was, “If we aren’t really here, then you wouldn’t be here, so be quiet.”

Though the class laughed, the fact remains: we are here!

The skeptical responses are divergent and at times irrational as the one just described in that classroom. On one hand, Dawkins says that the
why
question is silly. Silly? He tries to avoid the topic by pretending it isn’t important. This is whistling in the dark at best. He frequently flip-flops like an inexperienced politician who hasn’t quite realized that his previous comments have been recorded. In fact, in a debate with John Lennox, he stated that the why question was what lured him into his career in science.
¹⁶
It wasn’t a silly question when he asked it.

Lawrence Krauss, a physicist from Arizona State, tried to answer the why question in his book
A Universe from Nothing
. As a devout materialist he attempted to give an answer to this question from a purely naturalistic, or at least an impersonal, point of view. Any notion of the impossibility of such an explanation would be disastrous.

His first trick was to redefine the word
nothing
. Nothing isn’t really nothing in Krauss’s view. “For surely ‘nothing’ is every bit as physical as ‘something,’ especially if it is to be defined as the ‘absence of something.’ It then behooves us to understand precisely the physical nature of both these quantities. And without science, any definition is just words.”
¹⁷

M
UCH
A
DO
A
BOUT
N
OTHING

This kind of science gives legitimacy to as many absurd ideas as skeptics claim religion does. Just think for a moment how much time and effort has to be spent to define
nothing
. The atheists tell a tale worthy of a Shakespearean play, truly
Much Ado About Nothing
. I must digress for a moment and acknowledge how obscure and pedantic this discussion may sound to many. In spite of this, it must be addressed because it is within this obscurity that the proof for God’s
non-necessity
or
non-personality
is asserted.

The reality is that what Krauss means by
nothing
isn’t really nothing. Throughout
A Universe from Nothing
Krauss continually changes his definition of nothing, and his definitions almost always are not
nothings
but actual
somethings
. Most nothings do not eliminate the need for Something beyond that explains how the “lacks” become filled. In a detailed review of Krauss’s book, Hugh Ross explained that the nothings Krauss describes can do amazing things that, nonetheless, still require God.
¹⁸

Atheist Victor Stenger wrote, “Something is more natural than nothing,”
¹⁹
and his colleague Michael Shermer stated,