Rampant Intelligence: Why The Universe Requires A Cause

It is often stated you can't prove God exists. However, it can be proved that a higher power must exist based on the properties of our universe. I believe the existence of the Bible's God can be deduced from the historical record and other facts, but I'm still learning about that area and don't know how to do that just yet.

This post deals with proving a 'higher power'. We aren't discussing the God of the Bible, but I'm going to eventually post on that. We are making room for the possibility of a god right now. It is necessary to start at base zero: starting with facts everybody, regardless of their theistic presuppositions, accept.

This was adapted from a lecture I gave to my Sunday school class on Oct 21, 2012.

In our era, as opposed to previous generations, it is more common to have to first establish the possibility of a god—not capital G God, but merely the concept of a god—before we can discuss the idea of a personal savior. Atheism isn't a new idea; it dates to ancient times [1], but has only been popular for the last few centuries with the last century being quite accepting of atheism's views. In 1927, Bertrand Russell stated in a lecture,

“There is no reason why the world could not have come into being without a cause; nor, on the other hand, is there any reason why it should not have always existed. There is no reason to suppose that the world had a beginning at all. The idea that things must have a beginning is really due to the poverty of our imagination.”

— From Why I Am Not A Christian [2]

Russell’s viewpoint is not widely held anymore, but there are a few who still espouse the notion of the universe having no beginning. While tutoring math at college, my colleagues and I got into an intense debate with a student who believed “matter is eternal”. As far I could tell, I was the only Christian; the others were simply trying to show the student his faulty logic.

In Why I Am Not A Christian, Russell argues “the question, ‘Who made me?’…immediately suggests the further question ‘Who made god?” By his reasoning, “[i]f everything must have a cause, then God must have a cause.” However, a cause implies a change of some sort, and change implies time. Since God exists outside of time (for if he were bound by time, he wouldn't be the Almighty Creator, and we would also have to explain what created time), there is no reason to think God would need a cause.

If we could describe God as a mathematical function, $G$, we can immediately see that the time derivative has no meaning because time simply doesn't exist in God’s realm. At the very least, $\frac{dG}{dt}=0$. Jonathan Sarfati sums it up succinctly, “God, as creator of time, is outside of time. Since therefore He has no beginning in time, He has always existed, so doesn't need a cause.” [3]

Endless Timeline

Ah, but what if the universe had always existed because it had no beginning in time? Eternally existing, one could say. If a higher power didn't cause our universe to pop into existence, if the universe has simply been here all along, we would have an infinite timeline.

Yet, the idea of an infinite timeline doesn't make much sense, argues William Lane Craig. Craig starts with actual infinities, how they can be a mathematical construct, but not exist in reality. He then discusses counting to infinity (why anybody would think successive addition would ever produce infinity is beyond me). [4]

Additionally, an infinite timeline means today would never get here. I’m not sure if Craig put this argument forth in his article, I can’t seem to find it if it is in there. In any case, I’m not the original author of this argument. Let me know if you know of a source.

Consider a line stretching from $-\infty$ to $\infty$, representing the universe’s timeline. Now let us choose two arbitrary points, $N$ and $M$. $N$ representing our present time, and $M$ representing an arbitrary point in history an infinite distance from $N$.

With $M$ and $N$ being an infinite distance apart, it doesn't matter how much time passes, $N$ will never be reached. In fact, no matter how many years go by, the distance never decreases! With an infinite timeline, now never gets here. Therefore, our timeline cannot be infinite.

Thermodynamics

The second law of thermodynamics tells us entropy of closed systems will tend to a maximum. The universe is a closed system since no energy can be put into it and no energy can escape it—if energy existed outside the universe, it would be part of the universe; if energy escaped the universe, where ever it went would now be part of the universe. If an infinite time has passed, why hasn't the universe entered into heat death yet? [3]

Some advocate a cyclic nature to the universe—a Big Bang, then a Big Crunch, then a Big Bang, and so forth. The question arises: how is there a cycle that doesn't lose energy? Even more, once we are in a Big Crunch, how does matter leave what is essentially a super black hole? There is no known physical mechanism to go from a Big Crunch to a Big Bang. Indeed, cosmologists still struggle to explain how the Big Bang expanded, leaving some to question the entire theory [5].

Expansion of the Universe

We know the universe is expanding at an ever-increasing rate, which is why the Big Bang was postulated. If we consider this expansion in reverse, we arrive at a singularity. Obviously, we cannot have both an infinite timeline and an ever-increasing universe—the two are mutually exclusive. An ever-increasing universe implies there was a point in time when all matter was at the same place. That would be something that would obviously be an issue if the universe were supposed to have existed for all of infinity since we would now have to explain how matter went from being in a singularity state to being in a non-singularity state. Nobody has the faintest idea on how that was supposed to happen. We are back to explaining in terms of something outside of our universe—God.

Now, I’m thoroughly against the Big Bang in all forms except “God said, and BANG it happened”, but this article is on how it is necessary for the universe to have a cause, not on debunking the Big Bang, which Dr. Hartnett and Alex Williams have done wonderfully in their book Dismantling the Big Bang: God’s Universe Rediscovered. I plan to write about the Big Bang at a later point in time.

Conclusion

The universe requires something else to be out there, outside of the realm of our universe. It is not that we want something else to be out there, but there must be something else to get the universe started, for we have already demonstrated it cannot have been here forever. I firmly believe this something else is God, but that conversation is for another time.

“If your theory is found to be against the second law of thermodynamics I can give you no hope; there is nothing for it but to collapse in deepest humiliation.”

— Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington