Category: The Cosmological Argument for God

Be Ready!

Apologetics Tools are now available!

Here are concise summaries of several recent posts to joshualetter, designed to be easily remembered so as to equip believers to be ready to address many of the concerns often raised by those who are seeking the truth.

Suggestions welcome!

SEVEN PRACTICAL APOLOGETICS TOOLS

1. The pioneers of modern science were virtually all Christians and were scientists specifically because of their religious beliefs.  In particular, they were scientists because they believed in a rational God who created an intelligible universe and man as a rational being capable of comprehending that universe.  For more information, see Thomas Alderman, Science and Religion: Exploding the Myth of Conflict, (a five-part series)(go to www.joshualetter.com and search for “exploding”).

2. The universe had a beginning and must therefore have had a cause outside itself.  That cause had to be timeless, immaterial, and inconceivably powerful.  More info: joshualetter.com, subject index: The Cosmological Argument for God.

3. The laws of physics are incomprehensibly fine-tuned for life.  The most plausible explanation (if not the only plausible explanation) is that they were intended to be that way by a cosmic designer.  More info: joshualetter.com, subject index: The Fine-Tuning of the Universe.

4. Objective moral values exist.  The most plausible explanation is that they are rooted in the character of a good Creator.  More info: joshualetter.com, subject index: The Moral Argument for God.

5. Jesus’ disciples were transformed by His post-Resurrection appearances from cowering fugitives to fearless evangelists.  Many of them died for their proclamation; none recanted.  The best explanation is that they truly encountered the risen Christ.  More info: joshualetter.com, search field, “minimal facts.”

6. The authors of the New Testament were honest and had ready access to the eyewitnesses of the events in the life of Jesus.  More info: joshualetter.com, search for “honesty.”

7. While it is true that many errors were introduced into the New Testament in the course of being manually copied, scholars have succeeded in identifying and correcting virtually all of those errors – as even skeptical New Testament scholars have acknowledged.  More info: joshualetter.com, search for “recovery.”

Find this helpful? Share it with your friends!

Questions? Contact us at:  

editor.joshualetter@thomasowensalderman.com

Science and religion: Exploding the Myth of Conflict

A Five-Part Series

Part Five: Twentieth Century Physics and the Recovery of Theistic Science

In the beginning, God created the heavens and the Earth.

– Genesis 1:1

The author of the Book of Genesis was very clear about it: there was an absolute beginning.  But Aristotle (384 BC – 322 BC) didn’t get the news.  He taught that the universe was eternal, and that view prevailed in Europe until the early 20th Century.  What happened then is one of the most fascinating stories in the history of science, and one of the most important.  What is most significant about the story for our immediate purposes, is that it demonstrates that science and religion are allies in the search for truth, and not adversaries.

In 1915 Albert Einstein published his General Theory of Relativity (GTR), by which he explained gravity as a distortion in the fabric of space-time under the influence of massive objects.  How this happens is beyond the scope of this paper (which is fortunate, seeing that it is beyond my comprehension too).  What concerns us is that Einstein’s GTR mathematical equations implied that the universe is not static (and hence not eternal), but is either expanding or contracting.  Einstein himself found that idea repugnant, and he eliminated it by introducing a “fudge factor,” or rather a “cosmological constant” into his equations.

In 1922 Alexander Friedmann showed that Einstein’s original equations were correct, and Einstein acknowledged the fudge factor to be his “biggest blunder.”  Then in 1929 Edwin Hubble produced the first empirical confirmation of GTR by observing that the distant galaxies are moving away from us; indeed, he saw that the farther away the galaxies are, the faster they are receding.  Thus Hubble showed that as between a contracting or an expanding universe, we definitely occupy an expanding one.

Then in 1931 Georges Lemaitre showed that by extrapolating the expansion of the universe backward in time, it could be shown that the universe began from a “singularity” in which all the material of the universe was concentrated into an infinitely dense and hot, infinitesimal mathematical point, strongly suggesting an absolute beginning.

Not everyone was convinced; and it was not until 1965 that Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson found the radiation (the “cosmic microwave background radiation,” or CMBR) that was left over from the creation event, confirming Big Bang theory.  For this they were awarded the Nobel Prize.

The fact that many scientists did not immediately embrace what has become known as “Big Bang” cosmology illustrates beautifully the unavoidable interrelatedness of science and religion.  An absolute beginning has obvious theistic implications.  Since the universe began to exist, it must have had a cause.1  The cause must have been spaceless, timeless, and inconceivably powerful and intelligent.  This would not necessarily be a personal God, but it does indicate a Creator of some kind.  Many scientists were slow to acknowledge this.  William Lane Craig states that the history of twentieth-century theory is a long series of failed attempts to falsify Big Bang cosmology:

With each successive failure of alternative . . . theories to avoid the absolute beginning of the universe predicted by the Standard Model, that prediction has been corroborated. It can be confidently said that no cosmogonic model has been as repeatedly verified in its predictions and as corroborated by attempts at its falsification . . . as the Standard Big Bang Model.

Moreover, leading theorists have pronounced the matter closed.  Craig puts it this way:

A watershed of sorts appears to have been reached in 2003 with Borde, Guth, and Vilenkin’s formulation of their theorem establishing that any universe which has on average over its past history been in a state of cosmic expansion cannot be eternal in the past but must have a spacetime boundary. . . . [T]he Borde-Guth-Vilenkin theorem . . . single-handedly sweeps away the most important attempts to avoid the absolute beginning of the universe, especially the darling of current cosmologists, the eternal inflationary multiverse.  Vilenkin pulls no punches: “It is said that an argument is what convinces reasonable men and a proof is what it takes to convince even an unreasonable man.  With the proof now in place, cosmologists can no longer hide behind the possibility of a past-eternal universe. There is no escape, they have to face the problem of a cosmic beginning.”2

Why, then, has a segment of the scientific community struggled so mightily to avoid the beginning?  It seems sufficiently apparent that they are bringing their prior metaphysical (i.e., religious) commitments to bear upon their science, which confirms again the interrelatedness of science and religion.

Atheism is as much a religious viewpoint as is theism.  Both address the perennial religious questions: Who am I, Where did I come from, Where am I going, Why are people so selfish, and What can we do about it?  It is the questions themselves which qualify a viewpoint as religious.3

It is impossible to separate completely science and religion from each other.  What matters is that when we practice science, we do it well, and when we practice religion, we do it well.  That entails avoidance of doing religion and calling it science.

The Fine-Tuning of the Laws of Physics

The Twentieth Century produced two more blockbuster scientific discoveries that re-establish the plausibility of theism and of theistic science: the discovery that the laws of physics have been “fine-tuned” to an astonishing degree so as to produce a universe hospitable to life; and the elucidation of the DNA molecule.

In 1961 Robert H. Dicke discovered that gravity and electromagnetism must be fine-tuned for life – that is, that they have very precise values, and that if they did not have exactly those very values, there would be no life anywhere in the universe.  Hawking has stated, “It would be very difficult to explain why the universe should have begun in just this way, except as the act of a God who intended to create beings like us.”4  In the ensuing decades, scientists have learned that almost everything about the physical cosmos is fine-tuned.5 Suffice it to say, anyone who is not flabbergasted at the astonishing fine-tuning of the cosmos, is not paying attention.  

DNA

In addition to the Big Bang and the Fine-Tuning, Twentieth Century science has made one more discovery having sweeping implications, and that is the discovery of the mind-boggling complexity of living things.

The human body has roughly 30 trillion cells and twenty thousand different kinds of proteins.  Proteins carry out all of the life functions of the organism, from respiration to metabolism to digestion to the immune system, to name a few.  Proteins also build and maintain the system in which the instructions for fabricating all of these proteins are contained in the three billion base pairs of DNA, not to mention the system for communicating those instructions to the ribosomes, where all the proteins that the body needs are manufactured.  The complexity is overwhelming.  One way to gain a deep appreciation of this would be to read Fazale Rana’s Fit For a Purpose.6  The impression of design is unavoidable.  Rana shows that cellular functions take place at the atomic and the subatomic levels, one proton at a time, one electron at a time, performing precisely their instructions from DNA.

Conclusion

It makes my head spin when I consider that until 1929 scientists believed that the universe was static and eternal.  It spins faster when I recall that the Big Bang was presented to me in high school in 1965 as a commonplace fact, as if we had always known the universe had an absolute beginning.

Did I mention that until 1924 we thought the Milky Way was the only galaxy?  Do you remember when you first learned there are billions of galaxies, each containing billions of stars?  I don’t.  People weren’t talking about it much when I was growing up.  We’re still not talking about it.

Listen.  If there was a beginning, then there is a Creator.  If there is a Creator, naturalism is false.  This is news!  The whole project of investigating nature needs thoroughgoing reform.

But there is much more than that.  There was a beginning, and there is a Creator.  Who cares about naturalism?  There is a Creator!  Who is this person?  Did he, as the Bible teaches, take human form, walk the planet, and promise me eternal life?

I know that He did.

Thomas Alderman

December 3, 2024

ENDNOTES

1I have previously demonstrated this necessary causal relationship.  See Part Four, fn 2.

2William Lane Craig, Reasonable Faith (Crossway 2008), 139-140.

3I have also addressed this question in a previous post.  See joshualetter.com June 13, 2015 blog post, “The Definition of Religion.”

4Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time (New York: Bantam Books, 1 1998, 1996), 129-131.

5I have discussed this topic at length also.  See joshualetter.com June 28, 2018 blog post, “The Existence of God: Four Philosophical Arguments,” pp 18-27 at https://joshualetter.com/2018/06/28/the-existence-of-god/

And see joshualetter.com January 27, 2023 blog post, “The Heavens Declare the Glory” at https://joshualetter.com/category/philosophy/the-existence-of-god/

And see joshualetter.com July 26, 2022 blog post, “Water: Designed for Life,” at https://joshualetter.com/?s=water.

And see reasons.org Design Compendium at https://reasons.org/explore/publications/articles/rtb-design-compendium-2009.

6Fazale Rana, Fit For a Purpose (Reasons to Believe Press, 2021).  Rana is the Executive Director of Reasons to Believe.

Postscript to the Cosmological Argument

As children growing up, each of us at some point becomes aware of the laws of cause and effect.  Every effect has a cause, and each cause must be sufficient to produce the effect in question. 

Then when in childhood or adolescence we become aware also of the beauty and power of nature, most of us will say to ourselves, “There must be an explanation for all of this.”  What we see is this magnificent natural world, and we know intuitively that it must have a cause, and that the cause must itself be colossal.

Not only that; but we have also by this time learned to distinguish objects and events that are designed from those which result from impersonal forces such as wind erosion, earthquake, or chemical reactions.  We may not be able to articulate exactly how we make such distinctions, but every child can accurately tell a slab of marble from a statue.  (We will elucidate the precise criteria for design in a future post.)  Finally, we also have understood by this time that design invariably signals personhood – that is, it implies intention, which is an activity of mind, and only of mind.  Put it this way: design is a mental activity — and we know this as children.

But then the child returns to her classroom and does not consider the matter further for months or years, until her next experience of nature, and again she tells herself, “There must be an explanation for all of this.”  Even then she does not pursue the inquiry in any deliberate way; and before long her elders begin teaching her that her intuition is not true, that it is irrational and superstitious, and that science shows that everything is the unintended result of impersonal forces.

But it is perfectly rational to apply the laws of cause and effect to the universe itself – why wouldn’t we? – and perfectly rational to infer mind from design.

Anything which exists either had a beginning or it didn’t, and if it did, then it either had a cause or it didn’t.  The evidence of science overwhelmingly shows that the universe did have a beginning.  What is irrational is to suppose that anything could come into existence, uncaused.

What we all need is someone to confirm that our childhood intuition was and is true.

Those who confirmed that intuition for me are men such as William Craig, Michael Behe, Hugh Ross, J. P. Moreland, John Lennox, and Stephen Meyer.  I thank my God for each one.

A Little Deeper Into the Cosmos

More on the Cosmological Argument for the Existence of God

Why is there something rather than nothing?

If anything exists, then an uncaused being exists.  How do we know this?

Something does exist: the universe; and the universe either had a beginning or it didn’t.  If it didn’t, then it has an infinite past, and neither has a cause nor can it have a cause, and that would end the inquiry.

But we happen to know that the universe did have a beginning, and since it did not create itself, it must have had a cause outside itself.  Thus there exists, in addition to the universe itself, at least one other being – specifically, whatever it was that caused the universe to exist.

Either the cause of the universe was itself uncaused, or it was preceded by an infinite regress of caused causes.  An actual infinite regress of caused causes is impossible.  Therefore, the universe was caused by an uncaused cause.  QED.

What kind of being is this uncaused cause of the universe?

Big Bang cosmology entails that space and time themselves came into existence with the matter and energy of the Creation event.  Therefore, the cause of the universe must be:

     Uncaused

     Spaceless

     Timeless

     Immaterial

     Stupendously powerful

Other observations enable us to add to the list of divine attributes.  The fine-tuning of the universe shows that the First Cause has crafted the constants of physics to achieve a particular purpose, namely, a universe hospitable to complex life.  Purpose is a mental activity: only minds have purposes.  Therefore the First Cause is a personal being.  The fine-tuning demonstrates also that the First Cause is transcendently intelligent.

Why does the universe exist?  Why is there something rather than nothing?  Because God caused the universe to exist.  Then why does God exist?  I do not believe there is an answer to that question.  God does not exist for a reason: he just is.  He is the uncaused cause.  He, and only He, contains in Himself the explanation of His own existence.  As He said to Moses: “I am that I am.  Tell them that I am sent you.”

So to someone who asks, “If God created the universe, then who created God?” the proper response is to point out that the answer is obvious, but that it is the wrong question.  The question is not who created God, but how can it be that God exists, uncaused?  What is the reason for God’s existence?  And the only answer I know of is that He just exists.  He and He alone contains within himself the explanation for his own existence.

And we are in awe once again, and our hearts overflow with gratitude.

Many philosophers maintain that the reason God exists is that He is the necessary being.  I’m not clear on what that means.  Wouldn’t it be possible that nothing at all exists?  Then God would also not exist, right?  Then He doesn’t exist by any sort of logical necessity.  In what sense, then, is he the necessary being?

I suspect the answer is that if God did not exist, then nothing would exist.

So my answer to the question how we know God exists is that we know it from the fact that something that is not God exists and had a beginning.  Everything else follows by logical necessity.

The Cosmological Argument for the Existence of God is Virtually Conclusive

I cannot leave this argument alone.  Every time I sit down to write about the teleological argument for the existence of God (the argument from design), my thoughts turn to the cosmological argument instead.  Here is my latest effort to reduce the argument to its essence.

There are only four possible explanations for the existence of the universe:

  1. The universe is past-eternal;
  2. The universe had an uncaused beginning;
  3. The universe was caused by a caused cause; or
  4. The universe was caused by an uncaused cause.

We can eliminate the first three explanations.

If the universe is past-eternal, then it did not have a beginning.  If so, then it did not have a cause, but just is.  God may or may not exist, but an uncaused universe does not require it.

Empirical science has shown, however, that the universe did have a beginning.  This leads to two more possible explanations for its existence: either it had a caused beginning, or it had an uncaused beginning.  If the universe had an uncaused beginning, then God may or may not exist, but as noted above, an uncaused universe does not require it.

But an uncaused beginning is unlikely because it would violate the laws of cause and effect.  At the very least, it would seem to do so: there is no plausible basis for maintaining that the universe could have had an uncaused beginning. 

The universe, then, must have had a caused beginning.  If so, then again there are two possible explanations for its existence: either the cause itself had a beginning and hence a cause, or the cause itself did not have a cause and hence was past-eternal.

A caused cause is merely one element in an infinite series, unless the series itself has a beginning; and it can only begin with an uncaused cause.  An actual infinite series is impossible and absurd.  Therefore the series of causes must “end” (begin) with an uncaused cause, which uncaused cause must be past-eternal.

(Every caused universe is past-finite and every past-finite universe which can be actualized is caused.  Every uncaused universe which can be actualized is past-eternal and every past-eternal universe is uncaused.)

Thus three of the four possible explanations for the existence of the universe have been excluded: a past-eternal universe; an uncaused beginning; and a beginning brought about by an infinite series of caused causes.  The remaining explanation, that the universe was brought into being by an uncaused, past-infinite cause, must be true.

The Existence of God: A Concise Summary

Since publishing my essay on the existence of God, I have wanted to provide a concise summary of the argument.

Why do I do this?  It is because when I see the trees and the stars, realizing the transcendent genius which was required in order to create them, I hear a voice saying to me, “I love you.”

The classic cosmological argument for the existence of God rests on the premise that whatever begins to exist – that is to say, anything which is not past-infinite, anything which is not eternal – must have a cause for its existence.  But even before one considers whether or not to accept that premise, it is useful to observe that there are really only four possible scenarios for the origin of the universe.  This can be clearly seen from the following set of necessary propositions.

Either the universe had a beginning, or it didn’t.

If the universe had a beginning, then either it had a cause or it did not have a cause.

If the universe did have a cause, its cause likewise either had a beginning, or it didn’t.

Those three binary possibilities are exhaustive; that is, there are no other possibilities.  This leads to four possible origin scenarios.

  1. Possible scenario #1.: The universe did not have a beginning; that is, it has always existed.

Modern science has shown this simply not to be the case.  There is a scientific consensus, based on extensive observation, that the universe had a beginning approximately 13.8 billion years ago.

  1. Possible scenario #2.: The universe had a beginning, and it popped into existence out of nothing, uncaused.

This is not logically impossible, but it is implausible because it violates the principles of causation, which affirm that nothing happens without a cause.[1]

  1. Possible scenario #3.: The universe had a beginning, and it was caused by some separate entity which itself also had a beginning.

This too is logically possible, but it entails an infinite regress of non-eternal causes, since one must then ask, what caused the cause, and then, what caused that cause, etc., etc.  If the regression is infinite then it begs the question: how did the regression begin if it did not begin with an eternal cause?  The only way for the regression not to be infinite is for it to come sooner or later to a cause which had no beginning, which is equivalent to the fourth scenario.

  1. Possible scenario #4.: The universe had a beginning, and it was caused by some separate entity which did not itself have a beginning – that is, the cause of the universe was some eternal entity. This is one step from theism. Theism does not entail any of the difficulties inherent in the other possibilities: it has not been falsified empirically, it does not violate the principles of causation, and it does not beg the question.  Thus, theism is truly the only plausible explanation for the existence of the universe.

Scientists believe that all matter and energy, along with space and time themselves, came into existence about 13.8 billion years ago.  If so, and if the universe had a cause, then the cause must have been immaterial, timeless, and immensely powerful.  The Fine-Tuning of the universe shows that the cause was a conscious, purposive Agent of incomprehensible intelligence.  These are some of the attributes which science shows the Creator possesses, to a virtual certainty, and now we have come all the way to theism.  God exists.

There is another basis for concluding that the Creator is a personal entity.  If that were not the case – if the cause of the universe were some physical state of affairs existing from eternity past, then all of the conditions needed for the universe to come into existence would themselves have existed from eternity past; and if so, then there would have been nothing to prevent those conditions from producing the universe at some time in the infinite past.  And if that had occurred, then because of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which states that in a closed system entropy (disorganization) always increases with time, the universe would already have reached heat death.  It has not done so; therefore, the cause of the universe could not have been a purely physical state of affairs existing from eternity past.

[1] This is the first premise of the cosmological argument.  For a more complete analysis of this premise, see joshualetter.com/blog, June 28, 2018, page 11.