Finding Your Identity

Two weeks ago we started an apologetics series called, “What do you believe?” Last week, we raised the following three questions: What is Truth? Can the truth be known? Can the truth about God be known? We talked about the 5 big questions that humanity has sought to answer throughout the ages:

1. Where did we come from? (origin)

2. Who are we? (identity)

3. Why are we here? (purpose)

4. How should we live? (morality)

5. Where are we going? (destiny)

Today we aren’t just going to look at what the Bible says about God and the Christian worldview but start with some observable evidence for God’s existence from a logical or philosophical perspective. We are going to be talking about the beginning of time, space, and matter because this helps us to answer question number one: Where did we come from? In other words, how did we get here? How and when did everything begin?

Plato, Aristotle, and other great thinkers, philosophers, scientists sought to give a sufficient reason for the existence of the world and universe. Aristotle, in his “Five Ways,” or “Proofs” for God’s existence argued that there must be a First Uncaused Cause. This was referring to the principle of cause and effect because if you see an effect there must first be something that caused the effect. Example, if you walk out of a restaurant after a nice dinner and see a big dent in your car, the first question you would ask is, “How did this dent get here? What caused the dent?” Or else if you were admiring a magnificent sculpture or painting you might ask, “who created this masterpiece?”

In the same way, Aristotle was studying the splendor of the universe and wondered the same - where did it all come from? Who or what caused this universe to come into being? Ultimately, he concluded that the First Uncaused Cause for the universe was God—a living, intelligent, immaterial, eternal, and most good being who is the source of order in the cosmos.” Thomas Aquinas called this argument the Cosmological argument for the existence of God.

Medieval Islamic scholars and philosophers refined this argument for the explanation for the universe's existence and it’s now called the Kalam Cosmological Argument. The argument goes like this:

1. If the universe came into existence, there must have been something that caused it to come into existence.

2. The material universe (the cosmos) came into existence. In one moment, the creation of all energy, matter, and time itself came into being.

3. Therefore, the material universe must have had a cause.

How do we know if this Kalam Argument or principle of cause and effect is valid? First, a few questions would need to be answered:

? Did the universe have a beginning? If it did then

? What caused the universe to come into being? Either it is something or nothing. Because something cannot come from nothing. Then the third question is:

? Why does the universe even exist?

Let’s start with the first question:

1. Did the universe have a beginning?

Gen 1:1 tells us,

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.

“In the beginning” refers to the beginning of everything. The text indicates that God created everything in the universe, which affirms that he did in fact create it ex nihilo (Latin for “out of nothing”). The effect of the opening words of the Bible is to establish that God, in His inscrutable wisdom, sovereign power, and majesty, is the Creator of all things that exist. This verse tells us a few things: the universe had a beginning, and it was God who brought it into being. It does not tell us how long ago it happened but that there was a moment when time, space, and matter began to exist.

Heb 11:3 says:

By faith we understand that the entire universe was formed at God’s command, that what we now see did not come from anything that can be seen.

In other words, God as the First Uncaused Cause created something out of nothing.

In our pursuit of the truth - Does this biblical truth claim correspond with reality. Is this true? Is the universe eternal or did it have a beginning? Did it come from nothing? How does the beginning of the universe point to the existence of God?

There have been all types of debates and theories that have been presented regarding the origin of the universe and a quest to discover if it is infinite or if the universe had a beginning. If the universe is eternal, then as Stephen Hawking once exclaimed - “there is no need for the divine.” Historically, there was no way to support the argument that the universe had a beginning until the 20th century when scientists such as Vesto Slipher in 1912, Hubble in 1924, Robert Wilson and Arno Penzias in 1964 confirmed that the universe was expanding at a steady rate. The logical conclusion to the fact that the universe is expanding is that time, space, and matter began at a point in time.