The Case for a Creator (17 page)

I closed the magazine and tossed it on Craig’s desk. “Maybe Tryon was right when he said, ‘I offer the modest proposal that our universe is simply one of those things which happen from time to time.’ ”
²¹

Craig was listening intently. “Okay, that’s a good question,” he replied. “These subatomic particles the article talks about are called ‘virtual particles.’ They are theoretical entities, and it’s not even clear that they actually exist as opposed to being merely theoretical constructs.

“However, there’s a much more important point to be made about this. You see, these particles, if they are real, do
not
come out of nothing. The quantum vacuum is not what most people envision when they think of a vacuum—that is, absolutely nothing. On the contrary, it’s a sea of fluctuating energy, an arena of violent activity that has a rich physical structure and can be described by physical laws. These particles are thought to originate by fluctuations of the energy in the vacuum.

“So it’s not an example of something coming into being out of nothing, or something coming into being without a cause. The quantum vacuum and the energy locked up in the vacuum are the cause of these particles. And then we have to ask, well, what is the origin of the whole quantum vacuum itself? Where does
it
come from?”

He let that question linger before continuing. “You’ve simply pushed back the issue of creation. Now you’ve got to account for how this very active ocean of fluctuating energy came into being. Do you see what I’m saying? If quantum physical laws operate within the domain described by quantum physics, you can’t legitimately use quantum physics to explain the origin of that domain itself. You need something transcendent that’s beyond that domain in order to explain how the entire domain came into being. Suddenly, we’re back to the origins question.”

Craig’s answer satisfied me. In fact, there didn’t seem to be any rational objection that could seriously jeopardize the initial assertion of the
kalam
argument. And it has been that way since the early philosophers began to use it centuries ago.

“Even the famous skeptic David Hume didn’t deny the first premise,” Craig noted. “Hume wrote in 1754, ‘I never asserted so absurd a proposition as that anything might arise without a cause.’
²²
It wasn’t until the discovery of scientific confirmation for the beginning of the universe in the twentieth century that people began to say, well, maybe the universe just came from nothing.

“Nobody has defended such an absurd position historically,” said Craig, “which, again, makes me inclined to think this is just a corner they’re being backed into by the evidence for the beginning of the universe.”

STEP #2: THE UNIVERSE HAD A BEGINNING

Turning to the second premise of the
kalam
argument, I said to Craig, “If we were sitting here a hundred years ago, the idea that the universe began to exist at a specific point in the past would have been very controversial, wouldn’t it?”

“No question about it,” replied Craig. “The assumption ever since the ancient Greeks has been that the material world is eternal. Christians have denied this on the basis of biblical revelation, but secular science always assumed the universe’s eternality. Christians just had to say, well, even though the universe appears static, nevertheless it did have a beginning when God created it. So the discovery in the twentieth century that the universe is not an unchanging, eternal entity was a complete shock to secular minds. It was utterly unanticipated.”

Still, I needed evidence. “How do we really know that the universe started at some point in the past?” I asked. “What proof is there?”

“Essentially,” said Craig, “there are two pathways toward establishing it. One could be called either mathematical or philosophical, while the other is scientific. Let’s begin with the mathematical argument, which, incidentally, picks up on the thinking of Philoponus and the medieval Islamic theologians I mentioned earlier.”

THE PATHWAY OF MATHEMATICS

The early Christian and Muslim scholars, Craig explained, used mathematical reasoning to demonstrate that it was impossible to have an infinite past. Their conclusion, therefore, was that the universe’s age must be finite—that is, it must have had a beginning.

“They pointed out that absurdities would result if you were to have an actually infinite number of things,” he said. “Since an infinite past would involve an actually infinite number of events, then the past simply can’t be infinite.”

It took a moment for that statement to sink in. I have always been a reluctant student of mathematics, especially such esoteric permutations as transfinite arithmetic. Before we could venture into any mathematical complexities, I reached over and pushed the “pause” button on my tape recorder.

“Hold on a minute, Bill,” I said. “If I’m going to track with you on this, you’re going to have to give me some illustrations to clarify things.”

Craig already had some in mind. “Okay, no problem,” he replied. When I turned the recorder back on, he continued.

“Let’s use an example involving marbles,” he said. “Imagine I had an infinite number of marbles in my possession, and that I wanted to give you some. In fact, suppose I wanted to give you an infinite number of marbles. One way I could do that would be to give you the entire pile of marbles. In that case I would have zero marbles left for myself.

“However, another way to do it would be to give you all of the odd numbered marbles. Then I would still have an infinity left over for myself, and you would have an infinity too. You’d have just as many as I would—and, in fact, each of us would have just as many as I originally had before we divided into odd and even! Or another approach would be for me to give you all of the marbles numbered four and higher. That way, you would have an infinity of marbles, but I would have only three marbles left.

“What these illustrations demonstrate is that the notion of an actual infinite number of things leads to contradictory results. In the first case in which I gave you all the marbles, infinity minus infinity is zero; in the second case in which I gave you all the odd-numbered marbles, infinity minus infinity is infinity; and in the third case in which I gave you all the marbles numbered four and greater, infinity minus infinity is three. In each case, we have subtracted the identical number from the identical number, but we have come up with nonidentical results.

“For that reason, mathematicians are forbidden from doing subtraction and division in transfinite arithmetic, because this would lead to contradictions. You see,
the idea of an actual infinity is just conceptual
; it exists only in our minds. Working within certain rules, mathematicians can deal with infinite quantities and infinite numbers in the conceptual realm. However—and here’s the point—
it’s not descriptive of what can happen in the real world.”

I was following Craig so far. “You’re saying, then, that you couldn’t have an infinite number of events in the past.”

“Exactly, because you would run into similar paradoxes,” he said. “Substitute ‘past events’ for ‘marbles,’ and you can see the absurdities that would result. So the universe can’t have an infinite number of events in its past; it must have had a beginning.

“In fact, we can go further. Even if you could have an actual infinite number of things, you couldn’t form such a collection by adding one member after another. That’s because no matter how many you add, you can always add one more before you get to infinity. This is sometimes called the Impossibility of Traversing the Infinite.

“But if the past really were infinite, then that would mean we have managed to traverse an infinite past to arrive at today. It would be as if someone had managed to count down all of the negative numbers and to arrive at zero at the present moment. Such a task is intuitively nonsense. For that reason as well, we can conclude there must have been a beginning to the universe.”

Still, I spotted an inconsistency that threatened to unravel Craig’s argument. “If the idea of the universe being infinitely old leads to absurd conclusions, then what about the idea of God being infinitely old?” I asked. “Doesn’t your reasoning also automatically rule out the idea of an eternal deity?”

“That depends,” he said. “It rules out the concept of a God who has endured through an infinite past time. But that’s not the classic idea of God. Time and space are creations of God that began at the Big Bang. If you go back beyond the beginning of time itself, there is simply eternity. By that, I mean eternity in the sense of timelessness. God, the eternal, is timeless in his being. God did not endure through an infinite amount of time up to the moment of creation; that would be absurd. God transcends time. He’s beyond time. Once God creates the universe, he could enter time, but that’s a different topic altogether.”

I quickly reviewed in my mind what Craig had said so far, concluding that it was logically coherent. “How convincing do you think the mathematical pathway is?” I asked.

“Well, I’m convinced of it!” he replied with a chuckle. “In fact, this is such a good argument that even if I were living in the nineteenth century, when there was little scientific evidence for the beginning of the universe, I would still believe that the universe is finite in the past on the basis of these arguments. For me, the scientific evidence is merely confirmation of a conclusion already arrived at on the basis of philosophical reasoning.”

THE PATHWAY OF SCIENCE

At this point, we turned the corner to begin discussing the scientific evidence for the universe being created in the Big Bang billions of years ago. “What discoveries began pointing scientists toward this model?” I asked.

“When Albert Einstein developed his general theory of relativity in 1915 and started applying it to the universe as a whole, he was shocked to discover it didn’t allow for a static universe. According to his equations, the universe should either be exploding or imploding. In order to make the universe static, he had to fudge his equations by putting in a factor that would hold the universe steady.

“In the 1920s, the Russian mathematician Alexander Friedman and the Belgium astronomer George Lemaître were able to develop models based on Einstein’s theory. They predicted the universe was expanding. Of course, this meant that if you went backward in time, the universe would go back to a single origin before which it didn’t exist. Astronomer Fred Hoyle derisively called this the Big Bang—and the name stuck!

“Starting in the 1920s, scientists began to find empirical evidence that supported these purely mathematical models. For instance, in 1929, the American astronomer Edwin Hubble discovered that the light coming to us from distant galaxies appears to be redder than it should be, and that this is a universal feature of galaxies in all parts of the sky. Hubble explained this red shift as being due to the fact that the galaxies are moving away from us. He concluded that the universe is literally flying apart at enormous velocities. Hubble’s astronomical observations were the first empirical confirmation of the predictions by Friedman and Lemaître.

“Then in the 1940s, George Gamow predicted that if the Big Bang really happened, then the background temperature of the universe should be just a few degrees above absolute zero. He said this would be a relic from a very early stage of the universe. Sure enough, in 1965, two scientists accidentally discovered the universe’s background radiation—and it was only about 3.7 degrees above absolute zero. There’s no explanation for this apart from the fact that it is a vestige of a very early and a very dense state of the universe, which was predicted by the Big Bang model.

“The third main piece of evidence for the Big Bang is the origin of light elements. Heavy elements, like carbon and iron, are synthesized in the interior of stars and then exploded through supernovae into space. But the very, very light elements, like deuterium and helium, cannot have been synthesized in the interior of stars, because you would need an even more powerful furnace to create them. These elements must have been forged in the furnace of the Big Bang itself at temperatures that were billions of degrees. There’s no other explanation.

“So predictions about the Big Bang have been consistently verified by scientific data. Moreover, they have been corroborated by the failure of every attempt to falsify them by alternative models. Unquestionably, the Big Bang model has impressive scientific credentials.”

“And that,” I observed, “has surprised a lot of people.”

“It was an absolute shock!” he declared. “Up to this time, it was taken for granted that the universe as a whole was a static, eternally existing object.”

I knew, however, that there have been more recent refinements of the standard Big Bang model. “Most scientists would add inflation theory to the description of how the universe got started,” I said. “How has that changed the way we look at the Big Bang?”

“Yes, inflation is a wrinkle that most theorists would add,” he acknowledged. He paused for a moment, then added: “Personally, though, I think the reasons for it are a bit suspect.”

That took me aback. “Why is that?”

“You see, the Big Bang was not a chaotic, disorderly event. Instead, it appears to have been fine-tuned for the existence of intelligent life with a complexity and precision that literally defies human comprehension. In other words, the universe we see today—and our very existence—depends upon a set of highly special initial conditions. This phenomenon is strong evidence that the Big Bang was not an accident, but that it was designed. Theorists who are uncomfortable about this want to avoid the problem by trying to explain how you can get a universe like ours without these special initial conditions. Inflation is one attempt to do this.”

I had read about inflation theory in several books and articles, but I asked Craig to describe it so that we were working from a common definition.