Does God Exist? – The Cosmological Argument
Last week we tackled the idea of truth. Using the Roadrunner Tactic and the Law of Noncontradiction, we showed that absolute truth exists and any attempt to say otherwise is self-defeating. In determining that truth exists, we have not proven that Christianity is true. Instead, we’ve determined that truth exists and can be known. At this point Christianity, atheism, or any other set of non-contradictory worldviews could be true. We now look at whether or not it’s true that God exists.
Once again, I’d like to give credit where credit is due. Much of the research that I’ve done has come from a variety of different sources, prominently among them is I Don’t Have Enough Faith to be an Atheist by Norman L. Geisler and Frank Turek. In addition, I’ve relied upon much research from Dr. William Lane Craig, Dr. Ravi Zacharias, and Dr. John Lennox. If you’d like more information, I’d suggest you visit their websites, CrossExamined.org, ReasonableFaith.org, or rzim.org.
As we begin this quest for truth, we must first define what we mean. There are many concepts of god floating around society. You can categorize most world religions into three categories, theism, pantheism, and atheism.
Within theism we find religious worldviews such as Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. This worldview looks to a god that is beyond the world that created the world and sustains the world. A theistic god is like a painter to a painting. The painter paints the painting, his attributes are expressed in the painting, but the painter is not the painting. Michelangelo may have painted the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, but Michelangelo is not the painting. He does not exist within his work.
The worldview that believes the creator is the creation is called pantheism. Hinduism, Buddhism, and New Age all fall into this worldview. God is me, god is you, god is the grass, god is the air, and god is all. We’re all familiar with it. Star Wars is a good example of pantheism, at least before the prequels introduced the idea of midichlorians. There’s a good force and a bad force. It flows through and exists in all things, but it is not personal. It’s not a theistic god, everything’s god.
We then come to the atheistic worldview which states that there is no god. Naturalism and the New Atheists would fall into this category. This worldview states that all things have a natural cause and there are no supernatural forces at work.
As we begin to answer the question, “Does God exist?” what we’re looking at is the evidence for theism. As we do that, we have three arguments in support of a theistic god. There are certainly more arguments than this, but we’ll limit ourselves to these three. There are two scientific arguments and one philosophical argument.
The first argument is from the beginning of the universe. It’s called the cosmological argument. Cosmological comes from the Greek word kosmos which means world or universe. It says that the universe had a beginning, so it must have a beginner. This is the argument that many say points to the big bang. I know, many people out there are saying, “Pastor, we’re Christians. We don’t believe in the big bang.” Well, I believe in the big bang. I just know who banged it.
While many Christians are strongly opposed to the idea of the big bang, as I intend to show, it very much points toward God. Many Christians hold to the idea of a young earth creation story because “that’s what the bible teaches.” The truth is, that’s just what many people think it teaches. There are many bright Christians that lovingly disagree and believe there are other ways to interpret the first chapter of Genesis without undermining the authority of Scripture. We will take a deeper look at this topic in another sermon series after the first of the year.
The evidence for the big bang is quite solid. Even staunchly atheistic scientists agree that the time, space, and matter all came into existence at the same time from nothing. The famed Stephen Hawking is even quoted as saying, “Almost everyone now believes that the universe, and time itself, had a beginning at the Big Bang.”
Alexander Vilenkin, an agnostic astronomer from Tufts University, wrote a book in 2006 titled Many Worlds in One. In that book he wrote, “With proof now in place, cosmologists can no longer hide behind the possibility of a past-eternal universe. There is now no escape, they have to face the problem of a cosmic beginning.”
There are a couple of things to note from his statement. First, is that he uses the word “proof.” It’s very unusual for scientists to use the word proof. They normally say, “The evidence points to,” or “The evidence suggests.” Remember, science doesn’t say anything, scientists do. Being an expert in the field of astronomy, Vilenkin has looked at the evidence and, in his opinion, deemed the evidence to be so strong that he considers it to be proof.
The other interesting note is his use of the word “problem.” Why is it a problem if there’s a cosmic beginning? It’s because a cosmic beginning brings us a little too close to the G word, God. Scientists don’t want to touch that topic with a ten foot pole. For quite some time scientists refused to admit that the universe had a beginning for this very reason. They believed that the universe was static and eternal. This saved them from even having to speculate about the origins of the universe, because something that is eternal doesn’t need to have an origin.
Let me mention something here about Vilenkin. Vilenkin is a believer in the multiverse. In case you’re unfamiliar with that theory, it states that there are many different universes out there and we just happen to be in the one that looks designed. While that theory may be true, Vilenkin says, along with other cosmologists, that even if there’s a multiverse out there, the whole thing still needs an absolute beginning. All the evidence points to space, time, and matter coming into existence out of nothing.
This is what atheist and agnostic scientists are saying the evidence indicates. What evidence am I talking about? In his book and many lectures, Dr. Frank Turek uses the acronym S.U.R.G.E. to help explain the point.
- Second Law of Thermodynamics
- Universe is Expanding
- Radiation Afterglow
- Great Galaxy Seeds
- Einstein’s General Relativity
The second law of thermodynamics, also known as the law of entropy, basically states that we’re running out of usable energy. Evidence shows that as time goes on the amount of energy in the universe is running down. Scientists all agree that someday our sun will use up all of its energy and burn out. That won’t be until billions of years from now, so don’t worry. If you just moved here to North Dakota, you may think that’s what’s happening this winter.
How does this show that the universe had a beginning? Suppose I were to take a flashlight, place it on a table, and turn it on. It starts shining bright, but what would it look like if we came back tomorrow morning? It’d be dim if it was even still shining at all. Why? Because there is only so much energy in the batteries. The longer the flashlight is on, the less energy remains in the batteries.
Suppose I turned that flashlight on an infinite amount of time ago. Would there be any energy left in the batteries? No. Think of the universe as a dying flashlight. If we still have energy left and someday that energy will be gone, the universe must have had a beginning. If the universe has existed forever, we’d be out of energy by now, but we still have energy, the sun is still shining, so the universe must have had a beginning.
The U in S.U.R.G.E. stands for the universe is expanding. Edwin Hubble, you may know of him because of a telescope which was named after him, discovered in 1929 that there was a red shift in the galaxies as he observed them. He deduced that this red shift indicated that these galaxies were expanding away from us. If they were coming toward us, there would be a blue shift.
With this information, Hubble deduced that the galaxies were closer yesterday and even closer the day before. If we could rewind that all the way back to the beginning, the entire universe would collapse, mathematically, back to nothing. Once there was nothing and then the entire universe leapt into existence.
In 1948 scientists were thinking, that the universe had a beginning, and it had a beginning in a big heat explosion. Sir Fred Hoyle, an atheist and a steady state, eternal universe proponent, didn’t like the implications of a beginning. As this idea of a universal beginning and everything coming into existence in a big explosion began to take root, Hoyle mockingly said, “What are you going to call it, the Big Bang?” And the name stuck.
As this idea of the Big Bang began to gain traction, scientists began thinking that if everything had come into existence in a big explosion, there should be some remnant heat out there as evidence. In 1965, Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson, two scientists working in Bell Labs in Holmdel, NJ, completely by accident detected a strange radiation on their antenna. What they discovered ended up being an incredible discovery that resulted in them being awarded a Nobel Prize in 1978.
The radiation they’d discovered is referred to as the cosmic background radiation or the radiation afterglow. It’s the remnant heat left over from the Big Bang which is still out there only a couple degrees above absolute zero. This discovery officially laid to rest any lingering suggestion that the universe was in an eternal steady state. It was the smoking gun, the nail in the coffin of the Big Bang.
After the discovery of the radiation afterglow, scientists theorized that there must be very slight temperature variations within the radiation afterglow that allowed the galaxies to form in the early universe. This is the G in S.U.R.G.E. However, they had no way of measuring these variations from earth. They were going to have to put a satellite in orbit in order to test the theory. In 1989 NASA launched a $200 million satellite named COBE (Cosmic Background Explorer) into orbit around the earth.
The satellite orbited the earth for years taking measurements until 1992 when project leader and astronomer George Smoot announced their findings. His statement on the matter was quoted in newspapers around the world. He said, “If you’re religious, it’s like looking at God.” Stephen Hawking called the findings “the most important discovery of the century, if not of all time.”
Not only did COBE detect the slight temperature variations. Scientists were even more fascinated by their extreme precision, down to one part in one hundred thousand. The discovery shows that the Big Bang explosion was precisely tweaked to cause just enough matter to form together but not so much that the universe would collapse back on itself. Any slight variation either way would result in no galaxies forming or the entire show cut short in an instant. These variations are so exact that Smoot called them the “machining marks from the creation of the universe” and the “fingerprints of the maker.”
Now what does this say about Darwinism? Absolutely nothing. However, many who hold to Darwinian Evolution will cite that if evolution is true that there is no need for a creator. That’s nonsense. The fine tuning of the galaxy seeds happened long before the first life even took place. The Big Bang was not a chaotic explosion but a highly fine-tuned event that remains fine-tuned to this day.
The E in S.U.R.G.E. stands for Einstein’s General Relativity. Einstein knew in 1916 that his General Relativity equations showed without a doubt that the universe had a beginning. Einstein discovered that time, space, and matter were all co-relative. You can’t have one without the others.
Einstein was a steady state, eternal universe proponent. When his General Relativity equations showed that the universe had a beginning, Einstein called the discovery “irritating.” In fact, in order to deal with this irritating dilemma, Einstein added a fudge factor known as the Cosmological Constant to his equations.
In 1922 Russian mathematician Alexander Friedmann officially exposed Einstein’s fudge factor as an algebraic error. Essentially what Einstein did in order to avoid a beginning to the universe was to divide by zero. He later went on refer to the Cosmological Constant as the “biggest blunder of [his] career.”
In 1929 when Hubble discovered the red shift in the galaxies, he called Einstein and essentially told him, “What you predicted back in 1916 by General Relativity, I’m witnessing through my telescope.” He invited Einstein to come see for himself, so in 1931 Einstein went out to Mt. Wilson in Pasadena, CA and looked through Hubble’s Telescope.
Sometime after looking through the telescope, Einstein said, “I now see the necessity of a beginning. The universe did have a beginning. All I’m interested in now is to find the mind of God. The rest are details.” To our knowledge, Einstein was not a Christian. He denied being an atheist and a Pantheist. Maybe he was some sort of deist that believes God set everything in motion and then left it alone. Regardless, his theory, which has been proven accurate to five decimal places, shows that space, time, and matter had a beginning out of nothing.
This evidence led agnostic astronomer Robert Jastrow, the man who eventually superseded Hubble, to write a book called God and the Astronomers. In this book he goes through much of the same evidence we’ve covered here. On page one of the book he states, “I’m an agnostic on religious matters,” meaning he doesn’t know whether God exists or not. However, he goes on to write, “astrological evidence leads to a biblical view of the origin of the world […] the essential element in the astronomical and biblical accounts of Genesis are the same.”
Later in an interview Jastrow is quoted as saying, “Astronomers now find they have painted themselves into a corner because they have proven, by their own methods, that the world began abruptly in an act of creation which you can trace the seeds of every star, every planet, every living thing in this cosmos and on the earth. And they have found that all this happened as a product of forces they cannot hope to discover… That there are what I or anyone would call supernatural forces at work is now, I think, a scientifically proven fact.”
Supernatural forces? Why do they need to be supernatural forces? Why can’t natural forces explain the origin of the Big Bang? Why couldn’t nature have created the universe? Because there was no nature. Nature was the result and therefore can’t be the cause. Some might argue that this is a God of the Gaps argument, that if we give science enough time we’ll find a natural cause. First, that sounds an awful lot like faith. Second, we will never find a natural cause for all of nature. It’d be like saying that given enough time I could prove that I gave birth to my own mother. You can’t in principle. If all nature had a beginning, the cause has to be outside of nature. Jastrow wasn’t the only one to come to this conclusion.
The best data we have (concerning the Big Bang) are exactly what I would have predicted had I had nothing to go on but the five books of Moses, the Psalms and the Bible as a whole. – Arno Penzias
Certainly there was something that set it all of. […] I can’t think of a better theory of the origin of the universe to match Genesis. – Robert Wilson
There is no doubt that a parallel exists between the Big Bang as an event and the Christian notion of creation from nothing. – George Smoot
In light of all of this evidence, it seems that we have a solid case for the universe having a beginning. If the universe had a beginning, then it must have had a cause, a beginner. The evidence leads us to one of the following two options. Either no one created something out of nothing (atheistic worldview), or someone created something out of nothing (theistic worldview). The question then becomes, which is more reasonable?
In an attempt to preserve their worldview, an atheist might claim that the first option is more reasonable, that no one created something out of nothing. Let’s first look at the second option. If someone creates something out of nothing, that’s certainly a miracle, but at least you have a miracle worker. You can then question where the someone came from, but at least you have a place to start.
A miracle happening without a miracle worker seems completely absurd. If you want to say that something can pop into existence without a cause, like the universe, then why doesn’t everything pop into existence without a cause? Why don’t cell phones or laptops pop into existence without a cause? That could’ve saved me a few hundred bucks.
In fact, the law of causality doesn’t say that everything must have a cause, it says that everything that comes to be has a cause. There has to be something that is the uncaused first cause, but everything after that, if it comes to be, must have a cause. Why can’t the universe be the uncaused first cause? We already have evidence that says that it wasn’t, therefore the uncaused first cause must be beyond the universe.
To show how seriously we take the law of causality, that everything that comes to be must have a cause, as you read this, you have no worries that a monkey has suddenly appeared in your car and is defecating on your stereo. You do not worry that a lion will appear out of nowhere and maul you as you read this. You don’t worry about those kinds of things because you know that things don’t pop into existence out of nothing. If we want to doubt the law of causality, we have to do away with all of science, because science is a search for causes. If there is no God, why is there something rather than nothing at all?
How do atheists respond to this question? The prevailing theory is the multiverse theory, which doesn’t really solve the problem but simply removes us one extra step from the problem. As Vilenkin said, even if the multiverse is true, it all still needs a cause. National Geographic wrote an article a few years back trying to explain how the multiverse theory worked. In the article it’s quoted, “multiple universes grow like branches from a tree trunk in a model that allows the universe to create itself.” What?!? Can you create yourself? One scientist in the article admitted, “It’s sort of like we’re brushing our ignorance under the rug of the very early universe.”
Some atheists have attempted to explain this away, but they always seem to fall short. Lawrence Krauss, a professor at Arizona State University, wrote a book titled A Universe from Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather than Nothing. In the book he tries to explain how something could have come from nothing. In an interview promoting his book he states, “Physics has changed what we mean by nothing […] Empty space is a boiling, bubbling brew of virtual particles popping in and out of existence […] if you wait long enough, that kind of nothing will always produce particles.”
Likewise, Stephen Hawking, in his book The Grand Design, tries to answer the question by saying, “Because there’s a law like gravity, the universe can and will create itself out of nothing.” If we take a moment to think on these two statements, a glaring error becomes clear. Because there’s a law like gravity? Gravity is not nothing. Gravity is something. Gravity, as Einstein pointed out, only exists when there’s matter, and space, time, and matter are all co-relative and came into existence out of nothing.
What do we mean by nothing? Greek philosopher Aristotle put it this way, “Nothing is what rocks dream about.” That’s what we mean by nothing. No matter if Krauss wants to redefine his definition of nothing, the truth remains that virtual particles are not nothing, they are something. In fact, after Krauss wrote his book, scientists began coming out of the woodwork saying, “You know that’s not what we mean by nothing.”
So, as most scientists agree, the universe, space, time, and matter, came into existence out of nothing at the Big Bang. Whatever caused it must be spaceless, timeless, and immaterial because it created space, time, and matter. It also must be powerful to create out of nothing and imbue our universe with so much energy. It must be intelligent to have orchestrated the extreme precision to which everything is fine-tuned (we’ll get more into that next week). And it must be personal. Why? Because it chose to create. Impersonal laws don’t choose to do anything. Gravity doesn’t decide whether or not to act on an object. It just does. It does the same thing all the time and never changes.
When we think of a spaceless, timeless, immaterial, powerful, intelligent, personal being, what’s the first thing that comes to mind? Notice, I haven’t said anything about God. Honestly, I don’t know why all of this S.U.R.G.E. evidence isn’t taught in our public schools. If we want to create kids that can think for themselves, give them all the evidence and let them decide for themselves.
Agnostic astronomer, Dr. Robert Jastrow, at the end of his book, after going through all of this evidence to show that the universe had a beginning, concludes by saying, “For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance; He is about to conquer the highest peak; As he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.”
If we follow the evidence, it points towards the universe having a beginning. The cause must be supernatural because it created all of nature. If we keep an open worldview and don’t limit our thinking, the evidence seems to strongly point towards a theistic god.