The Creator

Last week the first essential Christian doctrine I listed was belief in a theistic God.

Some of you may be wondering why it must be a theistic God. Some of you may be wondering what a theistic God is. There are essentially three views on God:

1) Atheism - there is no God
2) Pantheism - the universe is God
3) Theism - God created the universe

Some of my readers may not be familiar with the term theism, but it is not hard to understand. Even if you did not know what a theistic God was prior to reading this blog, if you profess to be a Christian, chances are you believe in a theistic God. That is, you believe that God created all things visible and invisible, and God transcends and is separate from His creation. This is the clear teaching of the Bible from the start.

In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.
~Genesis 1:1, ESV

Not only should you believe in a theistic Creator God if you are a Christian, but you ought to believe in a theistic God on the basis of evidence. As we observe the natural world around us, we might naturally wonder how it all got here. We might even ask ourselves,

Why should there be something rather than nothing?

~Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz

This is just the sort of question that naturally occurs to children, but which we suppress as adults. I think this is unfortunate. However, if we free our minds to question and wonder in awe at the universe, as we did when we were children, we might find the answers that so many people have told us are not really there. This may be part of the reason Jesus said, "Truly, I say to you, unless you turn and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven" (Matthew 18:3, ESV).

One thing we've observed about the universe is that things have a beginning and an end, and don't begin to exist without a cause. We have good evidence that the universe itself had a definite beginning in the finite past, and therefore something must have caused it to spring into existence. As William Lane Craig pointed out in his debate with Alexander Krauss,

There are good reasons, both philosophically and scientifically, to doubt that the universe is beginningless. Philosophically, the idea of an eternal past seems absurd. Just think about it! If the universe never had a beginning, that means that the series of past events goes back to infinity, that the number of events in the history of the universe is infinite. But mathematicians recognize that the existence of an actually infinite number of things leads to self-contradictions. For example, what is infinity minus infinity? Well, mathematically, you get self-contradictory answers. This shows that infinity is just an idea in your mind, not something that exists in reality. But that entails that since past events are not just ideas, but are real, the number of past events must be finite. Therefore, the series of past events can’t go back forever; rather the universe must have begun to exist.

This philosophical conclusion has been confirmed by remarkable discoveries in astronomy and astrophysics. We now have pretty strong evidence that the universe is not eternal in the past but had an absolute beginning a finite time ago. In 2003 Arvin Borde, Alan Guth, and Alexander Vilenkin were able to prove that any universe which has, on average, been expanding throughout its history cannot be infinite in the past but must have a past space-time boundary. What makes their proof so powerful is that it holds regardless of the physical description of the very early universe. Because we can’t yet provide a physical description of the first split-second of the universe, this brief moment has been fertile ground for speculations. But the Borde-Guth-Vilenkin theorem is independent of any physical description of that moment. Their theorem implies that the quantum vacuum state out of which our universe may have evolved—which some scientific popularizations have misleadingly and inaccurately referred to as “nothing”—cannot be eternal in the past but must have had a beginning. Even if our universe is just a tiny part of a much grander “multiverse” composed of many universes, their theorem requires that the multiverse itself must have a beginning.

Speculative theories, such as Pre-Big Bang Inflationary scenarios, have been crafted to try to avoid this absolute beginning. But none of these theories has succeeded in restoring an eternal past. At most they just push the beginning back a step. But then the question inevitable arises: Why did the universe come into being? What brought the vacuum state into existence?

Well, unless you’re willing to say the universe just popped into being uncaused out of absolute non-being, there must be a transcendent cause beyond space and time which created the universe. Clearly, then, God’s existence is more probable given the beginning of the universe than it would have been without it.

For quite a while, we've had philosophical and mathematical reasons to doubt that the universe is eternal. Now that we have the scientific evidence for the Big Bang origin of the universe, the idea that the universe began to exist in the past is practically indisputable.

Since the universe is clearly not eternal, we must conclude that it either popped into being out of nothing, or something outside the universe--outside space, time, and matter--caused it to exist. According to the Standard Big Bang Theory, before the universe exploded into being nothing physical existed. By nothing I mean no thing. There was no space, time, or matter at all. As Dr. Craig pointed out, "...unless you’re willing to say the universe just popped into being uncaused out of absolute non-being, there must be a transcendent cause beyond space and time which created the universe." Surprisingly, I have encountered some atheists who are willing to bite the bullet and say that the universe came uncaused from nothing.

If you are the sort of person that is willing to believe such an absurd notion, just stop reading this blog now because now amount of persuasion or logic can convince you.

For the rest of you that are open-minded seekers of truth, allow me to explain what the cause of the universe must be like.

It must be spaceless, because it created space.

It must be timeless, because it created time.

It must be immaterial, because it created matter.

It must be powerful, because it created from nothing.

It must be personal, because it chose to create the universe and impersonal forces cannot choose anything.

It must be intelligent, because the universe is precisely fine-tuned.

 Remember, this description is based on what we know about the origin of the universe by scientific observation. It is not a "God of the gaps" argument, because it is not an argument from ignorance. A supernatural, intelligent, powerful, personal being sounds an awful lot like the God of the Bible to me--although, it could also pass as the God of Qur'an. We will have to turn to other lines of evidence to arrive at the existence of the Christian God, but this is a good start. As far as we can tell, the evidence points to a theistic God. That means that God exists, so atheism cannot be true. It also shows that the universe is something He transcends and created. He is not identical with the universe so pantheism cannot be true. This leaves us with the theistic Abrahamic faiths of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. The evidence does not end here, and in its totality points to Christianity, but that is for other arguments in other posts to demonstrate.

In conclusion, anyone who bases their belief in God on the evidence will also believe in a theistic God.. In addition, anyone identifying themselves as followers of Jesus Christ should believe in a theistic God who created the universe because the that is what the Bible clearly teaches, and the Bible is the ultimate source of Christian doctrine. In this area, evidence is clearly on the side of the Bible, which is what we should expect if the same God who created the univserse inspired the Scripture.

Has Science Destroyed the Need for God?

In most of my blog posts, I usually think an issue through fairly thoroughly, and study hard the ideas I blog about before even publishing a post. This will not be one of those posts. This post will most likely be a somewhat discombobulated collection of thoughts on the relationship between science, science fiction, and religion. It may have the inkling of some conclusion, but my main purpose at this point is to simply get these thoughts out of my system.

I have been watching reruns of the sci-fi cult classic Firefly today. Firefly is set in a distant future universe in which humans have used a process called terraforming to colonize formerly uninhabitable planets and moons. As I enjoyed the science fiction of the show, I began to wonder how plausible terra forming might be in science fact.

This lead further to a Google search of terraforming, and then a search on Amazon for books on the subject. As it turns out, some serious thinking has been done on the concept of terraforming Mars and Venus (and probably the moon, but I didn't find any literature about terraforming that particular celestial body). On a more terrestrial scale, a strong movement in favor of seasteading has emerged in recent years to colonize the earth's oceans.

The primary motivation for seasteading is freedom from the taxes and laws of strong, centralized governments (the Serenity, spaceship of Capt. Malcolm Reynolds and crew on Firefly, serves much the same purpose). The primary motivation for terraforming is the fear that one day humans will exhaust the resources of our home planet. Whatever the motivation for making the inhabitable habitable, new worlds and the possibility of new rules and new ways of living is exciting. This is one of the things that made Firefly so entertaining.

Science has given modern humanity access to myriad new worlds and ideas. This has led some to reject old ways of living and seeing the world. The Christian worldview that gave rise to modern science is now mocked as arising from tribal, bronze age myths. But is this justified? Have we evolved beyond the need for a supernatural God, Christian or heathen? Has science proven religion to be an outmoded superstition? Has scientific fact shown that the supernatural is only mythical? Can we actually burst the bonds of faith, or cast away the chords of a transcendent Creator and Lawgiver?

I think not. Not even close.

If the natural world is all there is, there is no reason to think that any one thing is greater than any other thing. Yet, everyone persists that somethings are important, and some actions are better than others. Oh, there are certainly some who give lip service to nihilism, but none if those people actually live as if there were no good or bad, right or wrong. For the seasteaders, is freedom really better, or is it just their personal preference? If there is no inherent worth in the continuing survival of the human race, why bother with terraforming?

If we have causes or moral standards they are real or they or not. Unless, and until, humans are prepared to give up completely on any notion of moral duties (right and wrong) or moral values (good and bad), then we can never be rid of God.

I do not believe this will ever happen. We know intuitively that some things are true, and some are not--even if we cannot agree on what is true. We know intuitively that some things are beautiful, and some things are ugly--even if we disagree on what is beautiful. We know intuitively that some things are good and some things are bad--even if we disagree on the value of things. We know intuitively that some things are right and some things are wrong--even if we disagree about the details of a moral standard. We know intuitively that freedom is greater than tyranny. We know intuitively that life is better than death.

1. If God does not exist, then moral duties and values do not exist.
2. Moral duties and values do exist.
3. Therefore, God exists.

Contrary to what some scientists and sci-fi authors have concluded, we cannot evolve beyond our need for God. Science needs truth, and truth must transcend us. We cannot run far enough to escape from God in the ocean, or on Mars, or in the science lab. Nor do most people really want to, if it means abandoning truth, beauty, meaning, or morality. As I warned at the top of the post, these are just some random musings, but I hope I've got my readers thinking. At the very least I've gotten these thoughts out of my system.