Christian Apologetics Part 2 - How do we know there is a creator?

Instinct and Direct Revelation

Psa 14:1a

The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God. (KJV)

Rom 1:18-20

The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of men who suppress the truth by their wickedness, since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them.   For since the creation of the world God's invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse. (NIV)

It is clear by instinct and from observation of creation that there is a God.

The eighteenth century theologian William Paley wrote a book called Natural Theology – or evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity Collected from the Appearances of Nature.  The following is an excerpt:

In crossing a heath, suppose I pitched my foot against a stone, and were asked how the stone came to be there, I might possibly answer, that, for any thing I knew to the contrary, it had lain there for ever; nor would it, perhaps, be very easy to show the absurdity of this answer.

But suppose I had found a watch upon the ground, and it should be inquired how the watch happened to be in that place, I should hardly think of the answer which I had before given, that, for any thing I knew, the watch might have always been there. Yet why should not this answer serve for the watch as well as for the stone? Why is it not as admissible in the second case as in the first? For this reason, and for no other, viz., that, when we come to inspect the watch, we perceive (what we could not discover in the stone) that its several parts are framed and put together for a purpose, … This mechanism being observed, (it requires indeed an examination of the instrument, and perhaps some previous knowledge of the subject, to perceive and understand it ; but, being once, as we have said, observed and understood,) the inference, we think, is inevitable, that the watch must have had a maker: that there must have existed, at some time, and at some place or other, an artificer or artificers who formed it for the purpose which we find it actually to answer; who comprehended its construction, and designed its use.[1]

Paley expounds on Paul’s statement that it is self-evident that nature was created and that such obvious evidence mandates the existence of a creator.

For those who reject human instinct and God’s revelation, science provides convincing evidence.

The Kalam Cosmological Argument

Gen 1:1-5

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.  Now the earth was  formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.  And God said, "Let there be light," and there was light.

God saw that the light was good, and He separated the light from the darkness.  God called the light "day," and the darkness he called "night." And there was evening, and there was morning—the first day. (NIV)

A fourth century Christian philosopher named John Philoponus formulated the Kalam Cosmological Argument to refute the teachings of Aristotle that the universe and God co-exist without beginning or end, and that God did not create the universe, He simply brings order to it.

It has since been promoted by various individuals in both the Christian and Muslim world.  It is as follows:

Whatever begins to exist has a cause,

The universe began to exist,

Therefore, the universe has a cause.

It does not expound on the nature of what exists or does not exist, but its logic is strong from an age before modern science could add any teeth to it.

The first statement (Whatever begins to exist has a cause) cannot be mathematically proven as such, but has never been disproven (by exhibition of some item which began to exist without a cause) and most people accept it as a strong scientific principle.

If the universe has a cause, then that cause must exist outside of the universe.  Since the universe is the boundary of time and space, whatever caused the universe to exist must exist outside of our time and space.

The obvious question is then, if everything which began to exist has a cause, then who caused God to come into existence.  The obvious answer is, God always existed, He never began to exist, therefore, does not need a cause.

The Big Bang

The second bit of scientific evidence is a bit more controversial, but is nevertheless also widely accepted as the truth.  The conclusion is supported by Hubble’s Law, Einstein’s theory of relativity, and the calculations of other scientists including Dr. Stephen Hawking.  While this conclusion was made based on mathematical calculations, there has also been observed evidence.

In 1929, American astronomer Edwin Hubble discovered that the light coming from distant galaxies was redder than it should be.

If you have ever stood by a road and listened to the sound of a car passing, you will notice a change in sound as the car passes.  This is known as the Doppler Effect and is a result of the sound moving first toward you and then away from you.  Light behaves in a similar fashion and its color will change depending on whether its source is moving toward you or away from you.

This observation led Hubble to conclude that all of the galaxies he observed were moving away from us.

Here we apply a little physics.  Newton’s second law of motion states “An object in motion will stay in motion unless it is acted upon by an outside force.  An object at rest will stay at rest unless acted upon by an outside force.”

Hubble (and other scientists using other tests) determined that the universe is expanding.  By reversing time like a movie running backward, the approximate time can be calculated at which the entire universe would have been encapsulated in a single, extremely dense ball of mass called a singularity.[2]  This singularity contained all of the mass which ever existed or will ever exist in the universe.[3]   

The most basic question is then, where did the matter which makes up the universe come from?  If everything which had a beginning had a cause, then what was the “causer”?  Scientist Dr. Steven Hawking makes the statement in his book The Grand Design that the universe doesn’t need a “causer”, that the universe just spontaneously came into existence with no cause.  This assumption, however, fails the reasonable test.  Unless it can be shown that something can come into existence from nothing, this hypothesis carries no weight.

Also, at the point of its origin, the singularity would have had to be stationary.  Since Newton’s second law of motion tells us that an object at rest stays at rest unless acted upon by an outside force[4], some entity had to have existed outside of our known universe and thus outside of our space and time to place the object into motion.  Further, it had to be an entity of intelligence and great power which could cause the intense heat (billions of degrees) needed to begin the expansion known as the Big Bang.  An intelligent and powerful being which exists outside our space and time is a good definition for God.

 To overcome the need for a causer, many have postulated alternate hypotheses for the origin of the universe which include the expansion contraction hypothesis - the universe expands and contracts in perpetuity and never had a beginning, it has just been bouncing back and forth forever.  There is absolutely no scientific evidence for such a hypothesis and it cannot be tested.  It comes from the notion that there cannot be a god, thus there must be some alternate explanation for the origin of the universe, that makes this hypothesis more philosophy than science.

Some would argue that whatever caused the universe to come into existence need not be intelligent. The problem with this objection is that a creator cannot create something more complex than itself and the universe is extremely complex.  Since God was never created, there need not be anything more complex than God.

The next section talks a bit more about complexity and design.

The Anthropic Principle

There are several different definitions for the Anthropic Principle, but the essential idea is that the universe has been finely tuned for the existence of mankind.  It was first defined in the early 1960’s when cosmologists found that if certain constants in the universe were even a tiny bit different than they are, the universe would not exist.  Today, the number of finely-tuned attributes stands at thirty eight.[5]

As an example, the universe is expanding at a measurable rate.  If that rate of expansion was different by as much as one part in 10¹²⁰  the universe as we know it today would not exist.  If the rate of expansion was too slow the universe would collapse back in on itself and if it were too great, it would fly apart into nothingness.

Further, the odds that any given planet in the universe would be suitable to support life are just one in 10¹⁷³ and recent estimates are that the entire universe contains something like 10²⁴ planets.[8]

In addition to the rate of expansion of the universe, there are other aspects which must be the way they are to support life.  These include, the size and distance of the moon from the earth, the size and distance of the sun from the earth, the 23^o tilt of the earth on its axis, the location of the earth between too gaseous giants to protect it from comets, meteorites, and asteroids, the makeup of the planet’s core and additional layers, the age of the universe, and others.

According to Dr. Hugh Ross:

Today, no physicist or astronomer who has researched the question denies that the universe, the Milky Way galaxy, and the solar system possess compelling hallmarks of intentional design for human life. Many researchers have commented over the past twenty years that it seems the universe "knew" humans were coming.[7]

As we learn more about the earth, the evidence gets about a million times stronger every month that a supernatural, super intelligent creator designed the universe, the galaxy, the solar system, and our planet to make human life possible here on planet earth.[6]

Simply put, there are so many things which have to be so perfectly tuned for life to exist on this planet, the chances of them all occurring in our universe without some kind of intelligent guidance is so slim as to be impossible and, once again, defies reason.

We see, then, that the scientific evidence for a creator is strong and getting stronger by the day.  Remembering that science does not prove anything, but constantly attempts to ascertain the probability that something is true, we find that the more we learn about science the more the probability that a creator exists increases.[9]

This tells us nothing, however, about the nature of God.  We know that some entity must exist outside our known universe and thus outside our laws of nature including that of space and time.  We know that some such entity must have caused the Big Bang which brought our universe into existence, but do we know if that entity actually created life on planet earth or if that was mere chance?

For those answers we look to the world of molecular biology.  We will pick up with that in the next post.

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[1] Natural Theology: Or, Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity Collected from the Appearances of Nature, William Paley, 1839, pg 5.

[2] Some say the singularity would have had no mass and be infinitely dense.  Others have calculated that the singularity would be about the size of a dime.  Since the singularity cannot be observed, any such ideas are merely conjecture.

[3] Newton’s first law of thermodynamics (the law of conservation of mass and energy) tells us that in an isolated/closed system (like our universe), all of the energy exists that will ever exist.  Energy cannot be created nor destroyed. Einstein’s theory of relativity equates energy with mass.  E=mc² says that energy is mass (or weight) times the speed of light (299,792,458 meters per second), squared).  Therefore, all of the mass/energy that will ever exist in the universe currently exists.

[4] Some will argue that Newton’s second law of motion does not apply since the needed outside force would exist outside the system and thus is not bound by the physical laws of the system.  Such a statement just goes to further prove the point.  The laws inside the singularity are known.  It could not have spontaneously erupted without intervention by some intelligent and powerful force existing outside our universe.

[5] http://www.reasons.org/scientists/anthropic-principle-precise-plan-humanity

[6] From the podcast: “Science News Flash”, by Dr. Hugh Ross, 04/08/2001.  http://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/c450913.r13.cf2.rackcdn.com/snf20110408hr.mp3.

[7] http://www.reasons.org/scientists/anthropic-principle-precise-plan-humanity
[8] http://scienceblogs.com/startswithabang/2013/01/05/how-many-planets-are-in-the-universe/ 
[9] For a much more in depth study on this subject I highly recommend Dr. Hugh Ross' book "More Than a Theory".  It is a relatively short read and summarizes a multi-disciplined creation model including evidence from such sciences as astronomy, physics, genealogy, microbiology, and many others.  Another excellent resource supporting this information is Lee Strobel's "The Case for a Creator".