To delve into the question of God is to delve into the question of existence. One of the deepest, and simplest questions we can ask is, why does anything exist? Why is there something rather than nothing? Why are we even here, able to ask the question?
If anything begins to exist, it had to have a cause. If something begins to move, something had to set it in motion. Since we have no reason or experience with uncaused things in our universe, it is reasonable to conclude that something besides the universe caused the universe to exist.
Before the observations of twentieth-century astronomy, some astronomers and cosmologists held to the steady-state theory: the idea that matter is eternal. After observations had increasingly refuted the steady-state theory, it left atheistic scientists with a problem. As Robert Jastrow, founder and former director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, put it, “The astronomical proof of a Beginning places scientists in an awkward position, for they believe that every effect has a natural cause, and every event in the Universe can be explained by natural forces, working in accordance with physical law. Yet science can find no force in nature that might account for the beginning of the Universe; and it can find no evidence that the Universe even existed before that first moment.”
The alternative is to simply believe that the universe has always existed. But that appears even more difficult to believe than the idea that it began.
To account for the beginning of the universe, we need a cause that is great enough to begin something with the mass and energy of the universe. Some recent proposals have suggested massive branes of hyper-dimensional space that clashed and caused the Big Bang, or quantum foam, or multiverses. Of course, this simply pushes the question one step back: what caused the quantum foam, or the branes, or the multiverses? If you keep finding a cause for your first cause, you just move your first cause to second place, and start again, looking for your first cause.
To avoid an infinite regress of causes, you eventually need an Uncaused Cause, something without beginning. You need something that was its own cause, something that always existed. You need something not restricted by time or space if it is to create time and space. It cannot be material if it is the source of matter.
At this point, the question becomes, what is more plausible: an eternal What or an eternal Who? An Uncaused Thing, or an Uncaused Person? A timeless, spaceless, immaterial, uncaused and powerful It, or a He?
To put it another way, did mindless matter create minds out of matter? Or did a Mind create matter and other minds?
Though the question of existence does not infallibly prove that God exists, it lays a heavy burden of proof on the atheist to explain existence without a God.
Dean, I don’t think this post supports or promotes Big Bang cosmology. It simply points to the turn in cosmology to view the universe as having an absolute beginning, which is significant for all creationists who have been saying so all along, on the basis of faith in the revealed Word of God. Furthermore, even those who hold to Big Bang cosmology are forced to reckon with the question of whether the universe was caused by impersonal or personal forces. The further one goes back in trying to have eternal, impersonal causes, the more ridiculous it becomes.
I agree that the deepest “proofs” are, in fact, intuitive (Ro 1:19). But as we speak the Word and call for repentance, we are not remiss in simultaneously pointing to nature and calling the unbeliever to explain the evidence. As we give them the biblical interpretation of the evidence, it will always end up supported by the empirical facts, correctly interpreted -for God’s Word and God’s world are authored by the same One.
Thank you for your meditation.
I think Christians should beware of embracing Big Bang cosmology as a proof of a beginning for the universe.
Quite apart from all the scientific arguments against the Big Bang (they are many), an objective reading of Genesis 1-2 positively refutes it..
For there we learn that in the beginning God simply spoke, and bang, the protean time-space-matter universe existed, after which it received its forming and filling in six literal creation days, and so became the (ordered) cosmos.
The better apologetic for the existence of the triune physical cosmos is found in Romans 1, where the apostle declares what we all know, intuitively and self-evidently: that the universe was MADE by an eternal, omnipotent, divine being, and is now sustained and ruled by him for the good of his (all too ungrateful) creatures (Romans 1:19-20; Acts 17:28).
Another apologetic, closely related to the first, is to ask, “Who is asking this question about the origin of the universe, life, and man?”
This question about the question focuses attention to the great mystery of human consciousness, which is not a natural (i.e., material) reality, but a supernatural.
That is, consciousness is not part of nature at all, and so cannot be seen, heard, touched, smelled, tasted, weighed, measured, etc.
This supernatural reality (i.e., our souls), by its very nature, has the capacity to look for and to contemplate the first cause of all things.
And far more than the physical cosmos, an examination of the spiritual cosmos that is our soul leads us most naturally to conclude that the First Cause of all is not natural, but supernatural, and–unlike us with our poor-man’s version of eternity imprinted upon our minds (Eccl. 3:11)–TRULY eternal, in the sense of being pure original being: being without beginning or end, and also the being from which all lesser being—consisting of time, space, matter, souls, and (perhaps) other dimensions—derives whatever existence it has.
And who is sufficient for these things?
Not I!
Blessings,
DD
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