I Don't Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist (15 page)

BOOK: I Don't Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist

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Traumatized or not, scientists must come to grips with the implications of the Big Bang evidence. They may not like the evidence or its implications, but that won’t change the facts. Since the evidence shows that time, space, and matter were created at the Big Bang, the most probable scientific conclusion is that the universe was caused by something
outside
of time, space, and matter (i.e., an Eternal Cause). When scientists stop short of that conclusion by papering it over with “meaningless phrases” or by “refusing to speculate,” it seems that they are simply refusing to accept the facts and the most reasonable conclusions that come from them. This is a matter of the will, not the mind. The evidence is objective; it’s the disbelieving scientists who are not.

W
HAT
I
F THE
B
IG
B
ANG
T
HEORY
I
S
W
RONG
?

So far we’ve given solid scientific evidence (SURGE) for the fact that the universe had a beginning. But suppose scientists wake up one day and find out that all of their calculations have been wrong—there was no Big Bang. Given the wide scope of the evidence and the ability of the theory to correctly predict so much observable phenomena, a total abandonment of the Big Bang would be extremely unlikely.

This is admitted even by atheists. Victor Stenger, a physicist who taught at the University of Hawaii, once wrote that “the universe exploded out of nothingness.”
³⁴Stenger recently acknowledged that the Big Bang is looking more probable all the time. “We have to leave open the possibility that [the Big Bang] could be wrong,” he said, “but . . . every year that goes by, and more astronomical data comes in, it’s more and more consistent with at least the general Big Bang picture.”
³⁵

Indeed, in 2003 more evidence came forth that the Big Bang is correct. NASA’s WMAP satellite (Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe) confirmed the findings of its predecessor COBE and returned pictures thirty-five times sharper than COBE’s of the background radiation ripples.
³⁶In fact, space observations are becoming so supportive of the theistic worldview that George Will muses, “Soon the American Civil Liberties Union, or People for the American Way, or some similar faction of litigious secularism will file suit against NASA, charging that the Hubble Space Telescope unconstitutionally gives comfort to the religiously inclined.”
³⁷

Nevertheless, let’s play skeptic’s advocate for a second. Let’s suppose that at some point in the future the Big Bang Theory is deemed wrong. Would that mean that the universe is eternal? No, for a number of reasons.

First, the Second Law of Thermodynamics (the S in SURGE) supports the Big Bang but is not dependent on it. The fact that the universe is running out of usable energy and heading toward disorder is not even up for debate. In Eddington’s words, the Second Law “holds the supreme position among the laws of nature.” It is true even if the Big Bang is not.

Second, the same can be said for Einstein’s theory of General Relativity (the E in SURGE). This theory, well verified by observation, requires a beginning to space, matter, and time whether or not it all began with a bang.

Third, there’s also scientific evidence from geology that the universe had a beginning. As many of us learned in high school chemistry, radioactive elements decay over time into other elements. For example, radioactive uranium eventually turns into lead. This means that if all uranium atoms were infinitely old, they would all be lead by now, but they’re not. So the earth cannot be infinitely old.

Finally, there’s a philosophical line of evidence for the beginning of the universe. This line of evidence is so rationally inescapable that some consider it the strongest argument of all. It’s called the
Kalam
(from the Arabic word for “eternal”) Cosmological Argument, and it goes like this:

1. An infinite number of days has no end.

2. But today is the end day of history (history being a collection of all days).

3. Therefore, there were not an infinite number of days before today (i.e., time had a beginning).

To grasp this argument, see the timeline below, marked in segments of days (fig. 3.1). The further left you go, the further back in history you go. Now, assume for a moment that this line extends to the left indefinitely, so that you can’t see if or where it begins. But as you look to the right you can see the end of the line because the last segment of the line represents today. Tomorrow isn’t here yet, but when it gets here we’ll add one more segment (i.e., a day) to the right end of the line.

Now, here’s how this proves that time had a beginning: since the line certainly ends on the right, the timeline cannot be infinite because something that is infinite has no end. Moreover, you can’t add anything to something that is infinite, but tomorrow we will add another day to our timeline. So our timeline is undeniably finite.

Let’s consider this argument from a different angle. If there were an infinite number of days before today, then today would never have arrived. But here we are! So there must have been only a
finite
number of days before today. In other words, even though we may not be able to see, as we look to the left, where the line begins, we know it had to begin at some point because only a finite amount of time could be passed for today to arrive. You can’t traverse an infinite number of days. Thus time must have had a beginning.

Some may say that infinite numbers can exist, so why can’t infinite days? Because there’s a difference between an abstract infinite series and a concrete one. The one is purely theoretical, the other is actual. Mathematically, we can conceive of an infinite number of days, but actually we could never count or live an infinite number of days. You can conceive of an infinite number of mathematical points between two bookends on a shelf, but you could not fit an infinite number of books between them. That’s the difference between an abstract and a concrete. Numbers are abstract. Days are concrete. (By the way, this amplifies our answer above as to why there could not have been an infinite number of bangs in the cosmological history of the universe. An infinite number of actual events is impossible.)

What we are saying here is that the universe, Big Bang or not, had a beginning. That is, the Cosmological Argument is true because both premises of the argument are true: everything that comes to be has a cause, and the universe came to be. Since the universe had a beginning, it must have had a Beginner.

W
HO
M
ADE
G
OD
?

In light of all the evidence for a beginning of the space-time universe, the Beginner must be outside the space-time universe. When God is suggested as the Beginner, atheists are quick to ask the age-old question, “Then who made God? If everything needs a cause, then God needs a cause too!”

As we have seen, the Law of Causality is the very foundation of science. Science is a search for causes, and that search is based on our consistent observation that everything that has a beginning has a cause. In fact, the question “Who made God?” points out how seriously we take the Law of Causality. It’s taken for granted that virtually everything needs a cause.

So why then doesn’t God need a cause? Because the atheist’s contention misunderstands the Law of Causality. The Law of Causality does not say that
everything
needs a cause. It says that everything
that comes
to be
needs a cause. God did not come to be. No one made God. He is unmade. As an eternal being, God did not have a beginning, so he didn’t need a cause.

“But wait,” the atheist will protest, “if you can have an eternal God, then I can have an eternal universe! After all, if the universe is eternal, then it did not have a cause.” Yes, it is logically possible that the universe is eternal and therefore didn’t have a cause. In fact, it is one of only two possi-bilities: either the universe, or something outside the universe, is eternal. (Since something undeniably exists today, then something must have always existed; we have only two choices: the universe, or something that caused the universe.) The problem for the atheist is that while it is
logically
possible that the universe is eternal, it does not seem to be
actually
possible. For all the scientific and philosophical evidence (SURGE, radioactive decay, and the
Kalam
Cosmological Argument) tells us the universe cannot be eternal. So by ruling out one of the two options, we are left with the only other option—something outside the universe is eternal.

When you get right down to it, there are only two possibilities for anything that exists: either 1) it has always existed and is therefore uncaused, or 2) it had a beginning and was caused by something else (it can’t be self-caused, because it would have had to exist already in order to cause anything). According to the overwhelming evidence, the universe had a beginning, so it must be caused by something else—by something outside itself. Notice that this conclusion is consistent with theistic religions, but it is not based on those religions—it is based on good reason and evidence.

So what is this First Cause like? One might think you need to rely on a Bible or some other so-called religious revelation to answer that question, but, again, we don’t need anyone’s scripture to figure that out. Einstein was right when he said, “Science without religion is lame; religion without science is blind.”
³⁸Religion can be informed and confirmed by science, as it is by the Cosmological Argument. Namely, we can discover some characteristics of the First Cause just from the evidence we’ve discussed in this chapter. From that evidence alone, we know the First Cause must be:

self-existent, timeless, nonspatial, 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;