MEDIA
Check out the FREE 22-part SmartFaith video and podcast series entitled, Evidence for Belief, with new episodes coming online each week from October 2024. The first 3 episodes deal with cosmological evidence for the existence of God. Featuring expert testimony from scientists at the top of their fields as well as stunning images (in the video series), Evidence for Belief will challenge sceptics and strengthen the faith of believers. Click the links below:
VIDEOS FOR COSMOLOGICAL EVIDENCE:
Evidence for Belief, Episode 1: The Origin of the Universe
Evidence for Belief, Episode 2: Big Bang in Trouble
Evidence for Belief, Episode 3: The Impossibility of Infinity
Evidence for Belief, Episode 8: Our Finely Tuned Universe
Evidence for Belief, Episode 10: Our Unique Planet
Evidence for Belief, Episode 11: The Sun and the Moon
Evidence for Belief, Episode 12: Do Aliens Exist?
(NOTE: You can watch ALL video episodes in this series on my YouTube channel)
AUDIO PODCASTS FOR COSMOLOGICAL EVIDENCE:
Evidence for Belief, Episode 1: The Origin of the Universe
Evidence for Belief, Episode 2: Big Bang in Trouble
Evidence for Belief, Episode 3: The Impossibility of Infinity
Evidence for Belief, Episode 8: Our Finely Tuned Universe
Evidence for Belief, Episode 10: Our Unique Planet
Evidence for Belief, Episode 11: The Sun and the Moon
………………………………………..
ARTICLE:
In this paper, we are going to examine Cosmological evidence for God’s existence. In particular, we are going to discuss the question of the ORIGIN of the universe. This is the ultimate issue that atheists and sceptics must address: If there is NO God, as some people claim, then how did the universe come into existence? By what means did it BEGIN to exist?
Thousands of years ago, King David wrote, “The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands.” (Psalm 19:1). According to the Bible, the physical existence of the universe, in all its splendour, shouts to us that there is a God who created it all. But, of course, not everyone is convinced of that. There are many who reject a supernatural origin of the universe; people who, when they look up at the night sky, simply see a universe brought about by an amazing series of coincidences, natural processes and blind chance.
But I put it to you that there is a major problem with that view – a fundamental flaw in that philosophical position. It revolves around the question of ultimate cause. For thousands of years, sceptics and atheists avoided this issue by proposing that the universe had no origin – no beginning – that the physical universe has existed simply forever. Aristotle first proposed this view in 350BC, the idea that matter is eternal, and atheists have been holding to that viewpoint ever since.
Even as late as the mid-20thcentury, many philosophers and scientists were still clinging to this view. For instance, Bertrand Russell once said, “The universe is just there; and that’s all!” In other words, it didn’t have a beginning, it has always existed, hence there is no need for an explanation.
But in throughout the 20th century a series of remarkable cosmological discoveries and developments completely overturned this viewpoint.
I. Firstly, there was Einstein’s Theories of General and Special Relativity which he published in 1915. His calculations strongly implied that the universe must have had a beginning. Einstein’s calculations pointed inexorably and indisputably to the universe not having existed eternally.
2. Then in 1927, a team of scientists led by Alexander Friedman published further research proving that Einstein’s Theories of General and Special Relativity do, indeed, necessitate a finite beginning to the universe. While this made many atheist scientists rather uncomfortable, it remained somewhat speculative and theoretical until three further stunning developments in the years that followed:
3. In 1929, using the best available telescopes at the time, Edwin Hubble noted the Doppler Red Shift of almost all visible galaxies, indicating conclusively that the universe is expanding outwards. Extrapolating backward from that evidence it became apparent that the universe had originated from a single locus in space-time at some point in the distance past. In other words, here was physical evidence that Einstein’s theory was correct and that the universe had been birthed at some point, possibly with a BIG BANG.
4. Then, in 1964, two American scientists, Drs Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson, discovered and measured residual Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation – a residual level of radiation that pervades the entire universe; a fading but still detectable echo that is left over from a proposed super-hot explosive creative event at the beginning of space-time. This discovery eventually earned those two scientists the Nobel prize for science in 1978.
5. Finally, over several years, while these stunning cosmological discoveries were still being analysed and unpacked, other scientists were extrapolating from the Second Law of Thermodynamics and deducing that the universe can’t possibly have existed forever, because it is clearly winding down, and that process can’t have been going on eternally. The Second Law of Thermodynamics posits that in any closed system (and our physical universe is such a system) entropy increases, moving that system from order to disorder. This law points out that our universe is moving inexorably toward a point of eventual thermal equilibrium.
To put this in simple terms, the stars in our universe are gradually exhausting their fuel and dissipating their heat into the vastness of the inter-stellar cosmos. If the universe has always existed from eternity in the past, the universe would have completely extinguished itself by now. The stars would have used up all their fuel and completely burnt out, and there would be nothing left now but infinite uniform coldness and infinite blackness. There would be no light, no heat; the universe would be a cold, dead, dark place. The fact that the stars are still burning strongly, even though they are slowly exhausting their available fuel, tells us that universe has NOT existed forever – that it HAD to have had a finite beginning at some point in the past.
By the end of the 20th century, these FIVE discoveries and scientific considerations – Einstein’s initial equations, Alexander Friedman’s extrapolations of those equations, Edwin Hubble’s discovery of the expanding universe, Penzias & Wilson’s discovery of Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation indicating a cooling universe, and, finally, extrapolations from the Second Law of Thermodynamics – all resulted in cosmologists reaching a stunning and inescapable conclusion – that the physical universe actually had a beginning! This was a surprising and very confronting discovery.
For example, the late great Stephen Hawking commented, “We have made tremendous progress in cosmology in the last hundred years … All the evidence now seems to indicate, that the universe has not existed forever, but that it had a beginning. This is probably the most remarkable discovery of modern cosmology.”
He’s right! It IS the most remarkable discovery of modern cosmology, because it means that atheists can no longer hide behind the concept of an eternally existing universe. They must now confront the question: Where did matter, the very stuff of the universe, come from in the very beginning?
One of the fundamental principles of science is that everything that begins to exist has a cause. SOMETHING can’t come from NOTHING! Cows and chickens and bicycles don’t pop into existence by themselves. Neither do universes! And logically, whatever caused the universe to begin, must exist outside of the physical universe. The physical universe couldn’t have brought itself into existence from nothing – something outside of it, something BEYOND nature – something SUPERNATURAL had to create it. It’s simple logic!
Significantly, in recent years a growing number of cosmologists have conceded that the only explanation of the origin of the natural universe is something SUPERnatural. For example:
Dr Robert Jastrow, Astronomer, physicist and founder of NASA’s Goddard Institute of Space Studies, (and author of the book, “God and the Astronomers”) wrote in that book, “Astronomers now find they have painted themselves into a corner because they have proven, by their own methods, that the world began abruptly in an act of creation to which you can trace the seeds of every star, every planet, every living thing in this cosmos and on the earth. And they have found that all this happened as a product of forces they cannot hope to discover…. That there are what I or anyone would call supernatural forces at work is now, I think, a scientifically proven fact.”
Dr James Clerk Maxwell – a Physicist who is considered by many in the scientific world to be equal in importance to Einstein, “Science is incompetent to reason upon the creation of matter itself out of nothing. We have reached the utmost limit of our thinking faculties when we have admitted that because matter cannot be eternal and self-existent it must have been created.”
Astrophysicist, Dr Hugh Ross, who was Director of Observations at Royal Astronomical Society, Vancouver, wrote, “Astronomers who do not draw theistic conclusions are becoming rare, and even the few dissenters hint that the tide is against them. Geoffrey Burbidge, of the University of California at San Diego, complains that his fellow astronomers are rushing off to join ‘the First Church of Christ of the Big Bang.’”
Despite all this, there remains a resolute group of atheist scientists who refuse to consider a supernatural cause for the universe, and who have proposed a number of extraordinarily fanciful theories such as bubble universes expanding from pre-existing universes, an explosion in a pre-existing quantum realm, or pre-existing black holes creating universes.
Some scientists, such as Richard Dawkins and Stephen Hawking have even speculated that maybe pre-existing aliens created this universe. And other scientists have made the bizzarre suggestion that maybe our future selves travelled back in time and created our universe.
These theories are examined in Episode 2 of my video and podcast series, Evidence For Belief, but for now I simply point out that none of these ideas are scientific theories, because scientific theories are based upon examination of evidence that is observable, measurable and repeatable. None of these fanciful ideas are based on even the slightest shred of hard evidence: they arise solely from the imaginations of scientists who are desperate to avoid a supernatural explanation for the universe. And of course none of these speculations solve the question of ultimate cause – they simply move that question one step further back, because they all use the term “pre-existing”.
Christopher J. Isham, Britain’s leading cosmologist, and an astrophysicist at Imperial College of London, wrote: “The idea that the question of ultimate origin supports theism is greeted with obvious unease by atheist physicists. At times this has led to wild scientific theories being advanced with a tenacity which so exceeds their intrinsic worth that one can only suspect the operation of psychological forces lying very much deeper than the usual academic desire of a theorist to support his or her theory.”
He’s absolutely right. These are bizzarre and fanciful imaginings that arise from a desperate desire to avoid a supernatural cause for the universe.
In 2014 Bill Nye “The Science Guy”, a world-renowned spokesperson for the atheist movement, had a debate with Ken Ham, a Christian scientist, and Ken Ham asked him the question, “Where did matter come from in the beginning?”. Bill Nye responded, “We don’t know. This is the great mystery – you’ve hit the nail on the head!”
Well actually, I don’t think it’s a mystery at all. Genesis 1:1 says, “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” You see, the reason why science has not been able to find a natural cause for the origin of the universe, is that there isn’t one! The universe had to have been caused supernaturally by something outside of nature! Because something can’t create itself! It’s just common sense.
I might also point out that the theory of evolution offers no answer to the conundrum of the origin of the universe, because the theory of evolution begins with a soup of chemicals in a primordial swamp on an already existing planet earth in an already existing universe. Even if evolution is true, and there are now very serious problems with the theory, it provides NO ANSWER to the question of how the universe got here in the first place. The issue of ultimate origin remains a huge unanswered conundrum for the evolutionist.
So, there is a very brief introduction to the cosmological evidence for the existence of God – evidence which centres around the question of ultimate causation – the need to explain the origin of the universe. In my opinion, this evidence alone is OVERWHELMING. The origin of the physical universe CRIES OUT that there is a God! I think it takes much more faith to NOT believe in a Creator, because if you reject that idea, the only other option you’re left with is the idea that the universe created itself from nothing – and that defies all laws of causality and common sense. It’s just nonsense.
FURTHER FREE RESOURCES:
ARTICLE: The Impossibility of Infinity
POWER POINT PRESENTATION: AP2 Cosmological Evidence (.ppx)
Instructions For Downloading PowerPoint Presentations: Click the PowerPoint link, then click the “Open” drop down box at the top right of the screen and select “Open in PowerPoint Online” or “Open In PowerPoint”. When the presentation is opened, click the “Notes” tab at the bottom right of screen. This will open the Presenter Notes, which provide a detailed explanation of each slide. Some slides also have embedded video content, which can be viewed via the standard “play” button or by clicking the image.
Essential reading for anyone who is serious about defending their faith!
