Zebra In The Kitchen Series

What produced us? What sustains us? Purposeless, cold forces, or deity of one kind or another? Are we here alone, or does God exist? And if so, does this God come “only in silent shadows and dreams,” or can we know more about Him?

Of the two options, then, which one follows it better?

Suppose one day you came home and found a massive zebra drinking out of your kitchen sink. Surprised, you ask your spouse (or whomever you live with), “Where did this zebra come from?”

“It came from nothing,” the other person responds.

From nothing?

Ridiculous! Why? Because nothing comes from nothing. The old Latin phrase ex nihilo, nihil fit (“out of nothing, nothing comes”) is an obvious first principle, a truth too basic even to debate. How could anything arise from nothing? Zebras (whether in the jungle or in the kitchen) must originate from something, not from “nothing,” because “out of nothing, nothing comes.” It would be easier to get six out of three than to get something—anything— out of nothing.

Then what about the earth, the sky, the stars? Or you, your shoes, your mother? Certainly they, like the zebra, couldn’t have come from nothing, could they? Anything created, anything that once was not but came to be, did so only by something other than itself, by something previous to it. The shoemaker obviously existed prior to your shoe.

For many years people believed that the universe was eternal. Being uncreated, it had always existed. There was never a time when the universe was not. Despite the difficult philosophical questions such a position raised, of a Creator. The universe didn’t have a Creator because always existing, it didn’t require one.

Scientists now believe, however, that the universe was not eternal but had a beginning. Yes, at some point in the past, it did not exist. Stephen Hawking, perhaps the greatest scientist since Einstein, wrote that “almost everyone now believes that the universe, and time itself, had a beginning at the big bang.”5 Like your shoe, the universe wasn’t always there.

The conclusion that the universe had a beginning leads to the obvious question: If the universe had a starting point, then what or who set it in motion? If it’s absurd to believe that a zebra in your kitchen came from nothing, how much more so to believe that the universe and all that it contains—ourselves and zebras included—did as well. Therefore, before the big bang, before the universe was, something had already had to be—something powerful enough to set the forces in motion that led to life on earth, not to mention the existence of billions of galaxies and stars. And other than God, who or what could that be?

Once scientists agreed that the universe came into being at some time, they forced upon themselves the inescapable question of “God.” As Hawking conceded, “So long as the universe had a beginning, we could suppose it had a creator.”6

The nothing argument

“Suppose” is right. The implications surrounding a created universe point so strongly to God that some scientists have been compelled by the obvious to embrace the absurd. Instead of God being the Creator of the universe, they argue that “nothing” was the creator.