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.
In 1916, Albert Einstein came out with his theory of General Relativity. However, he didn’t like where his calculations were leading because if they were correct it would point to the fact that the universe was not eternal but had a beginning. Einstein later called his discovery “irritating.” He wanted the universe to be self-existent—not reliant on any outside cause—but the universe appeared to be one giant effect. What was that cause for the universe coming into existence at some point in time? Clearly, all effects have causes. Pretty basic, and entirely consistent with our common-sense experience and the pursuit of science.
Francis Bacon (the father of modern science) said, “True knowledge is knowledge by causes”
and Aristotle wrote, “Knowledge is the object of our inquiry, and men do not think they know a thing till they have grasped the ‘why’ of it (which is to grasp its primary cause). In other words, science involves the search for causes. That’s what scientists do—they attempt to discover what causes what.
Another principle that points to a finite universe is the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics or the principle of entropy. All material things are subject to this law. It states that nature tends to bring things from order to disorder. That is, with time, all things naturally fall apart. Your car falls apart; your house falls apart; your body eventually falls apart. This includes all the energy in the universe. The universe will continue to expand but move toward a cosmic Black Death. It will move toward a state of increasing coldness, disintegration, and deadness, with nothing left to show for it besides a dilute gas of fundamental particles and radiation. Eventually the universe will run out of gas. Since we still have life and order and energy left, this aspect of the Second Law also tells us that the universe had a beginning.
The late NASA Astronomer Robert Jastrow likens the universe to a wound-up clock. If a wind-up clock is running down, then someone must have wound it up. The question is who or what? This brings us to our second question:
2. What caused the universe to come into being?
If you were to reverse time the universe would be brought to a single point where all of time, space, and matter began to exist in a millisecond. The philosophical question is, “What existed before or sans creation?” Can we go backwards forever and say this came from this and this came from this, and so on? You could, but it only postpones the question of where everything came from and how everything began to exist. Whether you believe the universe came into being with the Big Bang 14 billion years ago or instantaneously 6,000 years ago this line of thinking puts the cause of the universe outside of the known material universe. What does the creation of the universe point to? Paul Davies, a Deist physicist asked:
What caused everything to come into being?” . . . One might consider some supernatural force, some agency beyond space and time as being responsible for the big bang, or one might prefer to regard the big bang as an event without a cause. He goes onto to say “It seems to me that we don’t have too much choice. [It was] Either . . . something outside of the physical world . . . or . . . an event without a cause.
In other words, either nothing caused the universe to come into being or something caused the universe to come into being. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, a German mathematician and philosopher, believed that in order for the universe to be created it would require a necessary Being who is not subject to time, matter or space.
From this reasoning alone, Norman Geisler confirms that the First Cause must be:
a. Self-existent, timeless, non-spatial, and immaterial (since the First Cause created time, space, and matter, the First Cause must be outside of time, space, and matter). In other words, He is without limits, or infinite; These characteristics points us to God.
Psalm 90:2 tells us,
Before the mountains were born Or before You had given birth to the earth and the world, Even from everlasting to everlasting, You are [the eternal] God.
b. Unimaginably powerful - to be able to create the entire universe out of nothing.
Jeremiah 32:17 says,
Lord God! It is you who have made the heavens and the earth by your great power and by your outstretched arm! Nothing is too hard for you.
c. Supremely intelligent - to design the universe with such incredible precision.
The psalmist wrote in Psalm 147:5,
Great is our [majestic and mighty] Lord and abundant in strength; His understanding is inexhaustible [infinite, boundless].
d. Personal - This First Cause must be personal in order to choose to convert a state of nothingness into the time-space-material universe (an impersonal force has no ability to make choices).
Psalm 8:3-4 says,
When I see and consider Your heavens, the work of Your fingers, the moon and the stars, which You have established, What is man that You are mindful of him, and the son of man that you care for him?
The First Uncaused Cause describes the nature of a personal, supremely intelligent, unimaginably powerful, self-existent, infinite God to a tee. So, finally, this brings us to the third question:
3. Why does the universe even exist?
In light of the evidence, we are left with two options: nothing created something out of nothing, or else someone created something out of nothing. Which view is more reasonable? Nothing created something? Or Someone eternal, extremely powerful, intelligent, and personal created something?
Lawrence Krauss, theoretical physicist and cosmologist, tried to prove that nothing can create something in his book: A Universe from Nothing. He did this by redefining the meaning of nothing as virtual particles existing in a vacuum. But virtual particles can’t be considered nothing, they are something. Even Stephen Hawking, who later admitted that his earlier theories about an eternal universe were wrong, adopted Krause's view. But simple logic and observation would show us that nothing, not a thing, comes from nothing. Nothing can never choose to do a thing. Nothing can will itself into being.
If nothing existed before the universe came into being then, “Why does the universe even exist at all?” This statement addresses the question about the purpose or meaning of life. Is there any purpose in life? Concerning the meaning of life, Richard Dawkins sums up the atheist worldview as follows:
Life has no higher purpose than to perpetuate the survival of DNA... life has no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind pitiless indifference.
According to the Christian worldview the universe, the world, and life as we know it were created by God. He created human beings in His image, a little lower than the angels, crowned us with glory and honor, and to have dominion over the works of His hands. We were created by God on purpose and for a purpose. We are not accidents, we are not just here to live, breathe, eat, sleep, go to work, procreate, and then die. Each person was created to know the everlasting God who gives extraordinary meaning to life. If you want to know where you came from and why you are here, get to know the God of the universe who created you. We will delve into this question about why we exist later in the series.
