The Only Explanation is that God Created the Universe

Are there any good alternatives to the idea that the universe had a creator? The short of it is that there are no good alternatives. The universe could not have come about without a creator. Alternatives have been proposed but they are far from being "good" because they fail miserably. Such alternatives have staying power more for emotional reasons than anything else. The idea that God exists is repugnant to some people and cannot be accepted, no matter how good the evidence. I hope you, who are reading this now, are not one of those people. Please keep an open mind as we analyze the alternatives and discover why they fail to refute the idea that God created the universe.

The Universe Came Into Existence From Nothing
This is a popular attempt to get around the idea of a creator for the universe. It attempts to take God out of the picture by making the universe a self-caused or self-created thing. Certainly "nothing" cannot create or cause, so the universe must have created itself. There are several problems with this idea, the biggest being that it breaks the law of noncontradiction. This law basically says that if A is, then non-A cannot be. So, if the universe does not exist, it cannot also exist. The universe creating itself requires that it existed enough to create itself before it existed. The acceptance of such a notion is clearly illogical and is a result of extremely sloppy thinking.

The Universe Came Into Existence By Chance
This argument is totally meaningless. It is endowing "chance" with some creative power or some ability to act. Chance is nothing more than a mathematical prediction of the outcome of an event given certain conditions. For example, if one tossed a coin into the air under certain conditions, the coin would have 50% chance of coming up heads when it landed (assuming it could not land on its edge). Chance does not cause the coin to come up heads half the time. It describes a probability given certain conditions. If the universe had a chance to come into existence, there must have been certain conditions that existed "before" the universe to give it that chance. If nothing existed "before" the universe, we are left with the first argument - that the universe came into existence from nothing - which I have already shown to fail.

The Universe Is One Of Many Universes That Exist
This argument fails for many reasons. The first is that there is no reason to believe it. The only evidence of other universes one might give is that the universe we live in is so fine-tuned for life on earth that if it is the only one, one must conclude that God exists (as if that would be a bad thing). As an argument against the existence of God, this one proves to be circular. It basically says that God does not exist because many universes exist because God does not exist.

This argument also fails because if many universes exist, one must ask how those universes came to be, on and on forever. It simply pushes the question back without ever answering it.

The Universe Has Always Existed
This is the only argument against the existence of God that doesn't immediately destroy itself. It takes a few minutes for it to destroy itself. I am assuming that one does not still believe in the Steady State theory since the Big Bang theory (I call it Genesis 1:1) has been proven to a high degree of probability. So when one says that the universe has always existed, he or she must mean that it may have existed as a singularity for quite awhile before Big Bang. The oscillating universe idea will not be discussed because it is not very probable considering that the universe does not appear that it will ever contract. And even if it did, it could not expand and contract more than a few times.[1] So, if the universe always existed, one must explain the following: Why is the Space-Time Theorem of General Relativity incorrect? Why there is something rather than nothing? Why is the universe designed for life? How and why did the universe begin?

The Space-Time Theorem of General Relativity (Hawking, Penrose) states that everything (matter, space, time) in the universe began to exist at the Big Bang. To refute this bona fide theory, one would have to show that it is false. No one has done so, nor is it likely that anyone will do so very soon. If one cannot refute it, it would be odd to argue against it.

If the universe always existed, one would have to explain why anything exists at all and why that anything that does exist is designed for life. This question plagued Allan Sandage, a great cosmologist and a one-time atheist, so much so that he concluded that God must exist.[2] There are too many things in the universe that cannot be explained otherwise. If the constants and/or laws of the universe were different in the least, the universe would not only not support life but it may not exist for even a microsecond after the Big Bang.[3]

Lastly, if the universe always existed as a singularity, how and why did it suddenly blow up? How did the singularity suddenly change states? It couldn't have been changing forever and suddenly got to the exploding point because one cannot get to any single point in an infinite series. If the singularity determined that it must explode, the result would be designed for life and that it would happen 15 or so billion years ago, the singularity is God for all intents and purposes.

Notes

1. Astronomical Evidences for the God of the Bible by Dr. High Ross
2. Sharon Begley, "Science Finds God," Newsweek (July 20, 1998), p. 46
3. Evidence for Design of the Cosmos by Dr. Hugh Ross

Return to the Argument Index