TodayChristian’s 7th “unanswerable” question is probably supposed to be a real poser.
7. Where did the universe come from?
This one’s a favorite among certain believers because they think they have an answer and atheists don’t. Unfortunately, the answer that they have is not just superstitious, it’s unquestionably wrong.
William Lane Craig, among other Christian apologists, has attempted to make the Big Bang into an apologetic argument for God.
The standard Big Bang model thus describes a universe which is not eternal in the past, but which came into being a finite time ago. Moreover,–and this deserves underscoring–the origin it posits is an absolute origin ex nihilo. For not only all matter and energy, but space and time themselves come into being at the initial cosmological singularity.
Unfortunately for Craig, and for all Christian apologists who attempt to turn the Big Bang into Divine Creation, this argument contradicts the possibility that any sort of supernatural power could have created the universe. Read it again. What Craig is telling us (and he’s being strictly accurate here) is that the past is finite. It does not extend infinitely far back into the past. Space and time and matter and energy are all co-existent all the way back to the earliest possible moment.
That phrase “earliest possible moment” is key. “Earliest possible moment” means there was no earlier moment during which the universe failed to exist. Nor was there any earlier moment during which any deity could have decided He/She/It/They would like to create a universe ex nihilo. There was not even any earlier moment during which “nothing” could exist! There never was a nihilo (since there was never a time during which it could have existed) and therefore this universe cannot have come ex nihilo.
The fact that the past is finite means that the physical scientist has a much easier job than she would have if it were infinitely long. There are all kinds of problems with an infinite past, and Dr. Craig will be more than happy to list them for you. But they’re moot, because the past is not infinite. The phrase “all of time” only extends back as far as the Big Bang, and beyond that, there is nowhere left to go, and thus nothing left to explain.
The universe did not “come from” anywhere, since there was never a time when the universe did not already exist. No god has ever had any opportunity to create the universe, because there was never a time when the universe did not exist. The universe has certainly changed over time, and different individual features like stars and galaxies and planets began to exist at certain points in time, but the universe itself has existed for all of time. Indeed, time is one of the inherent properties of the universe, so it’s not surprising that time and the universe go all the way back together.
The mistake shared by William Lane Craig, TodayChristian, and all the others who fall into this trap is that it’s difficult for us, in our time-bound experience, to conceive of what it really means for there to be an earliest possible moment. If we’re not careful, we can easily fall into the mistake of imagining “the beginning of time” as just some arbitrary date on some divine calendar, with God waking up one morning and saying, “Oops, looks like the beginning of time is next week, better get planning on that whole laws of physics thing today”—totally forgetting that “morning” and “today” and “next week” are all moments or periods in time.
And that’s what believers are doing here. They’re nodding their heads and saying, “Yes, time has a beginning, we agree that there’s a certain point in time that is the earliest possible moment in time. But before that point in time, at some earlier moment, we believe God existed all by Himself and decided to create the universe.” They say there is an earliest possible moment, and then say that there were other moments even earlier, during which God did His creating, and completely fail to notice that they’re contradicting themselves.
But that’s what happens when you believe something that’s not true.
On to Question #8, which makes up for in words what it lacks in clarity.
8. What about miracles? What all the people who claim to have a connection with Jesus? What about those who claim to have seen saints or angels?
Yeah? What about ’em?
My response to this is usually “I don’t know.” There is nothing wrong with not knowing, it does not preclude the possibility that we will know someday… we just haven’t uncovered the answer at this point in time. We’ll work at it, and maybe we’ll discover it some time during my life, but there is no deadline, no reason to think ‘if we don’t have it by now, we never will’ which seems to be the (odd) attitude many apologists have to scientific discovery.
Most likely because it dovetails into their next gambit nicely: “science doesn’t know because it can’t know. For that, you need God” dun dun dunnnnnnnnnnn! Standard god-of-the-gaps routine ensues.
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I would agree with this reasoning, except that the usual apologist response to what you say will simply be that god predates time itself. Not because it makes any sense at all, but more because there is the feeling of an obligation, that they have to say ridiculous crap like that, because otherwise god would run into the problem you describe: god would necessarily have a beginning, and hence not be infinite. Since the apologist doesn’t want to abandon the ludicrous claims of ‘god is infinity everything’ because that would mean abandoning the concept of god they have invented, so, the answer is to give nonsensical answers that ignore logic.
Another problem that this then brings up is the concept of counting down from infinity. If the start of the universe is time t=0, then counting backwards from 0 to minus infinity never reaches a start point. Which the apologist will agree with, smugly, declaring “hah! So even your mathematics argument reaches the same conclusion in the Bible: he has always existed!” or words to that effect.
But counting from zero to minus infinity isn’t the problem. The problem is that time doesn’t count backwards. Time has a definite direction: forwards, or towards positive. In order to count at all, there must be a start point. But counting forwards, from the start point towards the present day from the negative side, means there is also an end point. It doesn’t matter how unimaginably far back the start point is, the fact that there is both a start point and an end point means the number that has been counted out is not infinite.
Or to put it another way, if god had a beginning, he is not infinite. If god had no beginning, he has never existed at all.
But the standard response to those problems, and in fact pretty much any logical problem, is to simply declare god immune to the usual requirements of logic. God exists, and the God hypothesis declares that he cannot be logicked away, therefore he cannot be disproven.
At some point, virtually all apologetics arguments boil down to this declaration of immunity to logic, at which point you can pose the question as to why they bother attempting logical explanation in the first place. If there are logical reasons for belief in god, let’s hear them. If there are no logical reasons for belief in god, then the apologist has just stated, in plain english, that there is no logical reason to believe in god.
This is usually a conversation ender!
I would just shrug and say, “Doesn’t matter, there still has never been a time when the universe did not already exist, and therefore no god could have created it.”
I first heard something like that from a philosophy professor. I’d written a clever paper about God, and he dismissed it by saying that God existed outside of time. According to him, “eternal” *means* outside of time, and everybody knows that.
So “something comes from nothing” to involve god, god would have to be nothing. I agree with the christians that god does not ‘exist’ (in the sense of being nothing – literally ‘no thing’) but I don’t agree that a supreme all-powerful being would just poof itself into existence and then hide.
Not surprisingly, Craig’s understanding of the Big Bang model is both physically naive and wildly out of date (even in 1999).
Of course, he’d be able to spin inflationary models to match his theology, too (“darkness was over the surface of the deep” means pre-Big Bang inflationary space!), showing how empty the argument is.
There is no definitive theory of what the universe was like, prior to the end of the inflationary era. There are many theories, some with infinite past, some with finite past, and some with no past. No-boundary universe (referenced above), multiverse, big bounce, colliding brains, eternal inflation, chaotic inflation, and many others, are all proposed without a way to select among them. Selecting between these theories requires evidence from the earliest times in the universe. There is no evidence currently, and there is not likely to ever be any evidence (because the process of inflation itself wipes away all traces of what came before). So the discussion really is moot.
One thing you can say, with certainty: whatever kind of “god” could possibly have created the early universe is not remotely like the god of the bible. The earliest moments in the universe were nothing like the description in Genesis. Instead of creating heavens, oceans, land, plants and animals, the only thing left for “god” to create is a 4-sphere, smaller than a centimeter, composed of fundamental particles without any hint of atomic structure. The subsequent history of the universe proceeded without intervention from “god” following natural laws that have nothing to do with the bible. As science explains more and more of the natural world using natural explanations, the only possible “god” that could fit in the remaining gaps is small, inactive, and distant from human affairs.
Further advances in science will likely continue to narrow the gaps, and chip away at the supposed majesty of “god.” We will never reach a point where nothing is left, but we have long since passed the point at which any “god” (consistent with evidence) was too unimportant to be of real interest.
oops… colliding branes. Amusing typo.
Naked Bunny@#3:
Not surprisingly, Craig’s understanding of the Big Bang model is both physically naive and wildly out of date (even in 1999).
Craig’s not ignorant. His understanding is pretty good – he’s had it explained to him often enough and he’s literate – he just prefers to lie.
The folks who say that the universe couldn’t have come from nothing, well, they don’t seem to realize that it’s still pretty much nothing. Inside each atom is practically empty space, and on average, there’s less than one atom per cubic foot throughout the universe. That’s undetectably empty by any earthly standard.
That average atom, when you find it, is probably hydrogen. The other atoms, distributed as they are, fit exactly the ratios predicted by the Big Bang and exploding stars.
The temperature of the atoms, as detected from the long-ago, fits a curve predicted by science and explained by science. Nowhere is a god involved or needed.
A god isn’t even possible, except that some folks believe, and keep changing their definition of their god. A good look around would show there is nothing.
It is not clear that time is even properly basic. You can imagine a universe for example with a single photon, which would not have time, since photons do not experience time.
When I was a child being raised in a liberal, but devout, Christian household, my concept of Creation was somewhat different. I never thought that time necessarily began with the beginning of the universe. God could therefore have existed for eons, or forever, before creating our cosmos.
This avoids the difficulties with “God doing something before time began”. It doesn’t solve the problem of something having existed forever (in this case, God), but then some of the scientific concepts (like the multiverse) have the same problem.
I’m not at all sure that there is a problem with something having existed forever. Maybe it’s that human brains (or branes) just can’t deal with the concept of infinity very well. Or maybe it’s just me.
Anyhow, my answer to this question would probably go something like this: “Nobody knows for sure, but there’s some evidence that the universe began as a quantum fluctuation that got way out of control.”