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I remember how visibly shocked an atheist friend of mine was when I told him that the core message of Christianity was NOT a moral one. Perhaps you are shocked and are sure that Christianity’s chief concern is our morality. Perhaps you are well past personal moral striving (self-righteousness) and into justification by faith but still sure that the whole point is our moral dilemma before God and that Jesus is the solution for our guilt as a result of our immorality. I hope to offer a glimmer of a much bigger plan which Jesus announced and is still being unveiled.
Ken Samples asks the poignant question:
Is it more reasonable to believe that the universe came into existence from nothing by nothing or that, as the Bible says, ‘In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth’?
I would think the answer is obvious and the supposed reasons for rejecting this conclusion are:
- Who created God?
- Which God supposedly did it?
Before I address these questions I think we must make clear that the probability of a universe popping into existence from nothing and by nothing is exactly 0. Not, some-small-number which over eons of time made the improbable probable but zero and at heart we all know this, as do all scientists. Things have causes, even if we can’t find them.
This means, however improbable we think He might be (usually based on the misguided assumption that God evolved or was created by something even more complex) God is infinitely more probable than the fat zero probability we have for a causeless universe.
The question “Who made God” is perhaps an honest one coming from a child but anyone who has bothered to consider what is meant by “God” will quickly realise that the question is nonsense – on par with “who made Tuesday” or “how many cabbages make a sunset?”. These questions exhibit a fundamental ignorance of what the concept of God is supposed to represent. Among other things, God is eternal. This means having no beginning or end and thus no prior cause. This does not prove that God exists but it does mean that the question “Who made the eternal” is nonsensical.
The question “is anything eternal” is universally answered “Yes” by atheists and theist thinkers for the simple reason that from nothing comes nothing. While atheists have always maintained the natural universe is this eternal recent cosmological discoveries have rendered this untenable – our universe is finite in age and began with the Big Bang which science can describe but not explain because of the breakdown of physical laws at the singularity.
It therefore appears reasonable and natural to conclude that the “something” which is eternal cannot be natural since nature cannot cause itself if it does not yet exist to do it.
We simply cannot avoid a transcendent reality in order to explain our universe. However this argument alone does not necessarily point to one God or another except to indicate that God must be outside of time and space, transcendent and eternal. Any creator God not matching this description must be rejected.
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The idea of a “multiverse” was proposed in order to explain why our universe is so intricately balanced and tuned for life. In answer to the Teleological Argument, naturalists said: “Well, our universe is just one of a multitude of universes and because there are so many, one of them at least had this great setup required to produced life by chance”.
The problem with this sort of argument is that it makes anything possible. Imagine you’re playing poker and your opponent wins 20 times in a row with 4 aces. You accuse him of cheating but he says “Hey, we just happen to live in a universe in which I got 4 aces 20 times in a row”. According to the multiverse theory, this is a reasonable response because with lots of universes the improbable becomes probable in one of those universes.
This however would put an end to all scientific enquiry as Jeff Zweerink argues. Whenever something did not make sense or when something needed explaining, a multiverse proponent could say: that’s just the way things are in our universe. Anything and everything becomes “possible”, even a universe exploding from nothing and producing human life by chance.
There are 3 factors which could explain our universe chance, law and design. Atheists cannot accept design and are reduced to claiming the laws arose by chance. John Piper once said he does not want to be in the room when an atheist explains this to God because: “He’s gonna laugh so hard it’s gonna hurt your ears!”.
Naturalism must be false because it leads to contradictions:
- The universe is all that exists (naturalist’s premise)
- The universe is just the sum of it’s parts
- The parts were all caused
- The universe is therefore caused (2 & 3)
- The cause cannot be one of it’s parts (illogical)
- But only it’s parts exist (1 & 2)
- The cause cannot exist (5 & 6)
But 7 contradicts 4!
Now, to resolve this problem you’d have to deny one of the premises but this leads to more contradictions and conflicts with science and knowledge of the universe. Try denying and you get:
- You are not a naturalist
- You are not a scientist
- Special pleading – some special part was uncaused
- Illogical, irrational
- Illogical, something cannot bring itself into existence if it does not yet exist in order to do so.
- Illogical, irrational
- Illogical, irrational
Typically atheists will either conclude:
- There is no cause!
This is special pleading, question begging and contrary to the axiom of science known as Causality. It also implies the universe is eternal which science tells us it is not. One would also have to be all-knowing in order to assert that something has no cause. - We don’t know the answer…yet
This is a common response with the implication that science will one day discover a way in which things can cause themselves, pop into existence or be eternal. It is therefore the assumption that one day science will triumph over logic without realising that this will topple science as it is the foundation on which science stands.
Because there is no way out and the statement “nature is all there is, was or ever will be” is manifestly false a rational being must conclude that something transcending nature exists. Either nature is all there is or there is something else with nothing in between.
