The Case for a Creator (16 page)

I knew this investigation would take me into the slippery world of theoretical physics, where it’s sometimes difficult to discern between what’s profoundly scholarly and what’s just plain silly. That was well-illustrated in late 2002 when a debate broke out over a highly speculative theory from two French mathematical physicists (who happened to be twins) about what might have preceded the Big Bang.

As amazing—and amusing—as it seems, the scientific community couldn’t figure out whether the brothers “are really geniuses with a new view of the moment before the universe began or simply earnest scientists who are in over their heads and spouting nonsense,” said a
New York Times
article that featured the provocative headline: “Are They
a)
Geniuses or
b)
Jokers?”

While one professor found their work “intriguing,” another dismissed it as “nutty.” Yet another protested: “Scientifically, it’s clearly more or less complete nonsense, but these days that doesn’t much distinguish it from a lot of the rest of the literature.” The journal that published a paper by the disputed scientists, who had both received their doctorates with the lowest passing grades, later repudiated it.
¹³

Obviously, delving into the dawning of the universe—way back to the first 1/10 million trillion trillion trillionths of a second, which is the furthest back scientists believe they can peer—is going to require a certain degree of speculation. Theories abound. Conceded one prominent cosmologist from Stanford University: “These are very close to religious questions.”
¹⁴

As for myself, I wasn’t interested in unsupported conjecture or armchair musings by pipe-puffing theorists. I wanted the hard facts of mathematics, the cold data of cosmology, and only the most reasonable inferences that can be drawn from them. And that’s what sent me to Georgia to visit the home of a widely published expert who has studied and debated these issues for decades.

INTERVIEW #3: WILLIAM LANE CRAIG, PHD, THD

As a college student who graduated in 1971, Bill Craig had been taught that various arguments for the existence of God were weak, outdated, and ultimately ineffective. And that’s what he believed—until he happened upon philosopher Stuart C. Hackett’s 1957 book,
The Resurrection of Theism.
¹⁵

This dense tome never burned up the best-seller list. In fact, the self-effacing Hackett commented years later that “the book fell stillborn from the press because of its heavy style and technical context.”
¹⁶
Still, it absolutely stunned Craig.

Hackett is a brilliant thinker who took these theistic arguments seriously, rigorously defending them from every objection he could find or imagine. One argument in the book was that the universe must have had a beginning and, therefore, a Creator. Craig was so intrigued that he decided to use his doctoral studies under British theologian John Hick to come to a resolution in his own mind concerning the soundness of this argument. Would it really withstand scrutiny? Craig ended up writing his dissertation on the topic—an exercise that launched him into a lifetime of exploring cosmology.

Craig’s books include a landmark debate with atheist Quentin Smith called
Theism, Atheism and Big Bang Cosmology
, published by Oxford University Press;
The
Kalam
Cosmological Argument
;
The Existence of God and the Beginning of the Universe
;
The Cosmological Argument from Plato to Leibniz
; and
Reasonable Faith
, as well as contributions on this and related topics to the books
Does God Exist?
;
Faith and Reason
;
A Companion to Philosophy of Religion
;
Questions of Time and Tense
;
Mere Creation
;
The History of Science and Religion in the Western Tradition
;
Naturalism: A Critical Appraisal
; and
God and Time
.

His articles on cosmological issues also have appeared in a wide range of scientific and philosophical journals, including
Astrophysics and Space Science
,
Nature
,
The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science
,
The Journal of Philosophy
,
and
International Studies in the Philosophy of Science
.

A member of nine professional societies, including the American Philosophical Association, the Science and Religion Forum, the American Scientific Affiliation, and the Philosophy of Time Society, Craig currently is a research professor at the Talbot School of Theology.

I hardly needed directions to Craig’s suburban Atlanta home. In previous visits, I had interviewed him for
The Case for Christ
and
The Case for Faith
, both times walking away thoroughly impressed by his scholarly depth and disarming sincerity. He has an uncanny ability to communicate complex concepts in accessible and yet technically accurate language—a rare skill that I would certainly put to the test again with this challenging subject.

Craig answered the front door wearing a short-sleeved shirt, dark blue shorts, and brown moccasins. We descended a short flight of stairs to his office, where a soft, humid breeze wafted through a half-opened window. He sat behind his desk and leaned back in his chair, clasping his hands behind his head. I pulled up a chair and set up my tape recorder.

We were ready to investigate what Craig himself believes to be “one of the most plausible arguments for God’s existence”
¹⁷
—an argument based on evidence that the universe is not eternal, but that it had a beginning in the Big Bang.

THE
KALAM
COSMOLOGICAL ARGUMENT

“You’re a famous proponent of an argument for God’s existence that’s formally called the ‘
kalam
cosmological argument,’ ” I said in opening our conversation. “Before you define what that is, though, give me some background. What does
kalam
mean?”

“Let me describe the origins of the argument,” he said. “In ancient Greece, Aristotle believed that God isn’t the Creator of the universe but that he simply imbues order into it. In his view, both God and the universe are eternal. Of course, that contradicted the Hebrew notion that God created the world out of nothing. So Christians later sought to refute Aristotle. One prominent Christian philosopher on the topic was John Philoponus of Alexandria, Egypt, who lived in the fourth century. He argued that the universe had a beginning.

“When Islam took over North Africa, Muslim theologians picked up these arguments, because they also believed in creation. So while this tradition was lost to the Christian West, it began to be highly developed within Islamic medieval theology. One of the most famous Muslim proponents was al-Ghazali, who lived from 1058 to 1111.

“These arguments eventually got passed back into Latin-speaking Christendom through the mediation of Jewish thinkers, who lived side-by-side with Muslim theologians, particularly in Spain, which at that time had been conquered by the Muslims. They became hotly debated.

“Bonaventure, the Italian philosopher, supported the arguments in the thirteenth century; John Locke, the British philosopher, used them in the seventeenth century, though I don’t know if he knew of their Islamic origins; and eventually they found their way to Immanuel Kant, the German philosopher, in the eighteenth century.

“Now, back to your question about the word
kalam
—it reflects the argument’s Islamic origin. It’s an Arabic word that means ‘speech’ or ‘doctrine,’ but it came to characterize the whole medieval movement of Islamic theology. That was called
kalam
—this highly academic theology of the Middle Ages, which later evaporated.”

I spoke up. “Obviously, none of these early philosophers knew about any of the scientific evidence for the origin of the universe,” I said. “How did they argue that the universe had a beginning?”

“They relied on philosophical and mathematical reasoning,” he said. “However, when scientists in the last century began to discover hard data about the Big Bang, this provided a more empirical foundation.”

“How do you frame the
kalam
argument?”

“As formulated by al-Ghazali, the argument has three simple steps: ‘Whatever begins to exist has a cause. The universe began to exist. Therefore, the universe has a cause.’ Then you can do a conceptual analysis of what it means to be a cause of the universe, and a striking number of divine attributes can be identified.”

I decided to work my way through all three steps of al-Ghazali’s nearly millennium-old argument, starting with a point that—surprisingly—has become more and more disputed in recent years.

STEP #1: WHATEVER BEGINS TO EXIST HAS A CAUSE

“When I first began to defend the
kalam
argument,” Craig said, “I anticipated that its first premise—that whatever begins to exist has a cause—would be accepted by virtually everyone. I thought the second premise—that the universe began to exist—would be much more controversial. But the scientific evidence has accumulated to the extent that atheists are finding it difficult to deny that the universe had a beginning. So they’ve been forced to attack the first premise instead.”

Craig shook his head. “To me, this is absolutely bewildering!” he declared, his voice rising in dismay. “It seems metaphysically necessary that anything which begins to exist
has
to have a cause that brings it into being. Things don’t just pop into existence, uncaused, out of nothing. Yet the atheist Quentin Smith concluded our book on the topic by claiming that ‘the most reasonable belief is that we came from nothing, by nothing, and for nothing.’
¹⁸
That sounds like a good conclusion to the Gettysburg Address of Atheism! It simply amazes me that anyone can think this is the most rational view.

“Generally, people who take this position don’t try to prove the premise is false, because they can’t do that. Instead, they fold their arms and play the skeptic by saying, ‘You can’t prove that’s true.’ They dial their degree of skepticism so high that nothing could possibly convince them.”

“On the other hand,” I interjected, “they have every right to play the skeptic. After all, the burden of proof should be on you to present affirmative evidence to establish this first premise.”

Craig conceded my point with a nod. “Yes, but you shouldn’t demand unreasonable standards of proof,” he cautioned.

I asked, “What positive proof can you offer?”

“In the first place,” he replied, “this first premise is intuitively obvious once you clearly grasp the concept of absolute nothingness. You see, the idea that things can come into being uncaused out of nothing is worse than magic. At least when a magician pulls a rabbit out of a hat, there’s the magician and the hat!

“But in atheism, the universe just pops into being out of nothing, with absolutely no explanation at all. I think once people understand the concept of absolute nothingness, it’s simply obvious to them that if something has a beginning, that it could not have popped into being out of nothing but must have a cause that brings it into existence.”

Admittedly, that was difficult to dispute, but I needed something more substantial. “Can you offer anything harder than just intuition? What scientific evidence is there?”

“Well, we certainly have empirical evidence for the truth of this premise. This is a principle that is constantly confirmed and never falsified. We never see things coming into being uncaused out of nothing. Nobody worries that while he’s away at work, say, a horse might pop into being, uncaused, out of nothing, in his living room, and be there defiling the carpet. We don’t worry about those kinds of things, because they never happen.

“So this is a principle that is constantly verified by science. At least, Lee, you have to admit that we have better reason to think it’s true than it’s false. If you’re presented with the principle and its denial, which way does the evidence point? Obviously, the premise is more plausible than its denial.”

Still, my research had yielded at least one substantive objection to
kalam’s
first premise. It emanates from the wacky world of quantum physics, where all kinds of strange, unexpected things happen at the subatomic level—a level, by the way, at which the entire universe existed in its very earliest stages, when electrons, protons, and neutrinos were bursting forth in the Big Bang. Maybe our commonplace understanding of cause-and-effect doesn’t apply in this circus-mirror environment of “quantum weirdness,” a place where, as science writer Timothy Ferris writes, “the logical foundations of classical science are violated.”
¹⁹

IS THE UNIVERSE A FREE LUNCH?

I pulled out the copy of the
Discover
magazine that I had been prompted to purchase after I had seen the marble-sized universe on its cover. I flipped it open and read the following to Craig:

Quantum theory . . . holds that a vacuum . . . is subject to quantum uncertainties. This means that things can materialize out of the vacuum, although they tend to vanish back into it quickly. . . . Theoretically, anything—a dog, a house, a planet—can pop into existence by means of this quantum quirk, which physicists call a vacuum fluctuation. Probability, however, dictates that pairs of subatomic particles . . . are by far the most likely creations and that they will last extremely briefly. . . . The spontaneous, persistent creation of something even as large as a molecule is profoundly unlikely. Nevertheless, in 1973 an assistant professor at Columbia University named Edward Tryon suggested that the entire universe might have come into existence this way. . . . The whole universe may be, to use [MIT physicist Alan] Guth’s phrase, “a free lunch.”
²⁰