People believe or disbelieve in God for many different reasons.
Some people’s experience of God has been so strong, or so unsatisfying or zero, that has pretty much determined their belief, or lack of belief. Those experiences may be subjective, but they can be very real.
But I’ve always felt that what I believe needs to be connected to objective reality – to scientific and historical facts. And so I value evidence and logical arguments.
And there’s one argument, and its supporting evidence, that is so compelling to me.
The most basic of arguments
It’s surely one of the first thing people think about when wondering about God.
What caused the universe? Did it just happen, or did God create it?
This argument has been discussed, in different forms, for millennia, and philosophers have refined it and expressed it in logical forms. This post summarises how I’ve tried to make sense of all the arguments and facts.
Does everything have a cause?
In our experience, everything that happens is a result of some earlier cause.
Even apparently random events, from rolling a dice to a quantum event, have causes, they are just not predictable (at present, anyway). The action of a person and the physical forces on the dice are the causes. Likewise, a quantum field is the cause of a quantum event – we just can’t predict the timing of it.
Everything we know of in our universe seems to have a cause. So surely the universe has a cause too?
Could the universe have no cause?
If we had enough knowledge, we could trace everything in a chain of cause and effect back to the big bang. And if the big bang was caused by another universe (as some cosmologists believe), then we could do the same back to its beginning. And so on.
Eventually we would either reach a first beginning of everything material that has ever existed or we would never reach an end – the chain would go back forever.
If the universe had a beginning ….
…. then what caused it?
Some argue that just because everything else in the universe has a cause, that doesn’t mean the whole universe necessarily has a cause. But I can’t buy that. There’s no reason to think the logic of causation is different, and all human experience to believe that the universe almost certainly has a cause. You wouldn’t want to bet against it.
Surely something cannot appear out of nothing with no reason and no cause!?
…. or is it infinitely old?
But could the universe be infinitely old, and thus there never was a beginning, and so no need for a cause?
There are both physical and logical reasons why this seems highly unlikely.
Physical
Theoretical physicists (e.g. Alexander Vilenkin, Aron Wall and Luke Barnes) tell us there are a number of theoretical models of the universe, but most of them involve a beginning.
Further, the Second Law of Thermodynamics (one of the most certain laws in Physics) says that the universe is “running down”, moving from a state of highly uneven temperature and distribution of matter, to a state of being homogeneous. This is inexorable – though there can be localised times and places where the process reverses, in the long run the second law will apply.
But if the universe consisted of a beginningless series of events, every physical process that could occur would have occurred, and the universe would have long since become a homogenous eventless “soup”. The fact that the universe is still dynamic is proof that it hasn’t been around an infinite time.
In fact thinking about this exposes another difficulty for the infinite universe idea. In an infinitely old universe, how could any physical processes begin? Everything would have to be continuous and cyclic, which isn’t what we see in the universe.
Logical
So it seems, logically, that a beginningless and infinite sequence of physical events is logically impossible. It is possible to imagine events continuing on from now forever, but not from forever past until now – we never reach the infinitely distant future, and so an infinitely distant past can’t exist either.
But could theoretical physics change in the future?
Science is always in a state of flux. Perhaps new models and new understandings will make an infinite universe more likely? Perhaps different concepts of non-linear time will make infinite time meaningless and replace it with something more possible?
This changes the question slightly, but doesn’t solve the mystery. Instead of asking “How did the universe start?”, we may ask “Why is there something rather than nothing?”.
We still have to choose between a universe that has no explanation and one that does have an explanation – a creater God. And a hypothesis that has no explanatory power is inferior to one that does explain the facts.
Sometimes my brain aches!
This is all so difficult to get our heads around. But it seems to me overwhelmingly likely that the universe was caused by something …. something non-material and outside our time.
The problem of God
Of course, belief in a creator God also has its difficulties.
Who created God?
This is the most basic objection to God as creator. If the universe must have a cause, so must God. And if God doesn’t need a cause, why does the universe?
But God and the universe are completely different to each other. The universe is composed of matter and exists in time. Those things, as we have seen, make it difficult to believe it is infinite because an infinite series of events stetching back in time seems impossible. But a non-material eternal being’s existence doesn’t stretch back in time, but exists (supposedly) timelessly.
Can a timeless God make changes?
If God exists outside of time, then how can she change anything? Change surely requires a time before the change and a time afterwards.
This is a complex question with many different views among philosophers (see e.g. Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy and WL Craig).
Some think God is outside time, others that she exists at every time. Some think that God exists outside our time but in his own time. Still others that God was timeless until she created the universe, but became temporal with the creation.
God’s being timeless doesn’t make creation impossible because presumably God’s permanent intention is/was to create.
So philosop0hically, God not being bound by time makes it reasonable that he could be the cause of the universe.
What I find impossible to disbelieve
So I find that the objections or alternatives to God creating the universe aren’t convincing to me.
If we start with nothing, we will end up with nothing. The universe demands an explanation and without God, there can be no explanation.
But a non-material timeless or eternal being which we call God provides a sufficient explanation for the universe.
Of course none of this is certain. But it does seem to be overpoweringly more likely than that the universe just is, without reason or cause..
But wait, there’s more!
These thoughts only take us so far. We can’t infer much about God from the universe’s existence. Yet we’d like to know is she close and personal or distant and aloof? Loving like a mother or strict like a headmaster? And so many other questions.
In my next post, we’ll look at what we can learn about God from the universe, and from the human race.
Photo by CaptainFrank
