5. Evidence for God's existence - The Cosmological Argument

Don't be put off by the technical-sounding name: "cosmological" comes from the Greek word cosmos, which means "world" or "universe." That is, the Cosmological Argument is the argument from the beginning of the universe. In logical form, the argument goes like this:

For an argument to be true it has to be logically valid, and its premises must be true. This is a valid argument, but are the premises true? Let's take a look at the premises.

Premise 1-Everything that had a beginning had a cause-is the Law of Causality, which is the fundamental principle of science. Without the Law of Causality, science is impossible. In fact, Francis Bacon (the father of modern science) said, "True knowledge is knowledge by causes." In other words, science is a search for causes. That's what scientists do they try to discover what caused what. If there's one thing we've observed about the universe, it's that things don't happen without a cause. Even the great skeptic David Hume could not deny the Law of Causality. He wrote, "I never asserted so absurd a proposition as that something could arise without a cause." In fact, to deny the Law of Causality is to deny rationality. The very process of rational thinking requires us to put together thoughts (the causes) that result in conclusions (the effects). So, if anyone ever tells you he doesn't believe in the Law of Causality, simply ask that person, "What caused you to come to that conclusion?" Since the Law of Causality is well established and undeniable, premise 1 is true.

What about premise 2? Did the universe have a beginning? If not, then no cause was needed. If so, then the universe must have had a cause. Until about the time of Einstein, atheists could comfort themselves with the belief that the universe is eternal, and thus did not need a cause. But since then, five lines of scientific evidence have been discovered that prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the universe did indeed have a beginning. And that beginning was what scientists now call "The Big Bang.” The Big Bang evidence can be easily remembered by the acronym SURGE.

S - The Second Law of Thermodynamics

U - The Universe is expanding

R - Radiations from the Big Bang

G - Great Galaxy Seeds

E - Einstein's Theory of General Relativity

Proving the Universe had a beginning (for detailed study)

S: The Second Law of Thermodynamics is the S in our SURGE acronym. Thermodynamics is the study of matter and energy, and the Second Law states, among other things, that the universe is running out of usable energy. With each passing moment, the amount of usable energy in the universe grows smaller, leading scientists to the obvious conclusion that one day all the energy will be gone and the universe will die. Like a running car, the universe will ultimately run out of gas. You say, "So what? How does that prove that the universe had a beginning?" Well, look at it this way: the First Law of Thermodynamics states that the total amount of energy in the universe is constant. In other words, the universe has only a finite amount of energy (much as your car has only a finite amount of gas). Now, if your car has only a finite amount of gas (the First Law), and whenever it's running it continually consumes gas (the Second Law), would your car be running right now if you had started it up an infinitely long time ago? No, of course not. It would be out of gas by now. In the same way, the universe would be out of energy by now if it had been running from all eternity. But here we are the lights are still on, so the universe must have begun sometime in the finite past. That is, the universe is not eternal-it had a beginning. A flashlight is another way to think about the universe. If you leave a flashlight on overnight, what's the intensity of the light in the morning? It is dim, because the batteries have used up most of their energy.

U: Good scientific theories are those that are able to predict phenomena that have not yet been observed. As we have seen, General Relativity predicted an expanding universe. But it wasn't until legendary astronomer Edwin Hubble looked through his telescope more than a decade later that scientists finally confirmed that the universe is expanding and that it's expanding from a single point. (Astronomer Vesto Melvin Slipher was hot on the trail of this expanding universe as early as 1913, but it was Hubble who put all the pieces together, in the late 20s.) This expanding universe is the second line of scientific evidence that the universe had a beginning. How does the expanding universe prove a beginning? Think about it this way: if we could watch a video recording of the history of the universe in reverse, we would see all matter in the universe collapse back to a point, not the size of a basketball, not the size of a golf ball, not even the size of a pinhead, but mathematically and logically to a point that is actually nothing (i.e., no space, no time, and no matter). In other words, once there was nothing, and then, BANG, there was something -the entire universe exploded into being! This, of course, is what is commonly called "the Big Bang." It's important to understand that the universe is not expanding into empty space, but space itself is expanding-there was no space before the Big Bang. It's also important to understand that the universe did not emerge from existing material but from nothing -there was no matter before the Big Bang. Infact, chronologically, there was no "before" the Big Bang because there are no "befores" without time, and there was no time until the Big Bang. Time, space, and matter came into existence at the Big Bang. And the concept of “everything” coming out of “nothing”, it is absurd. What is nothing? Aristotle had a good definition: he said that, nothing is what rocks dream about!

R: The third line of scientific evidence that the universe had a beginning was discovered by accident in 1965. That's when Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson detected strange radiation on their antenna at Bell Labs in Holmdel, New Jersey. No matter where they turned their antenna, this mysterious radiation remained. They initially thought it might be the result of bird droppings deposited on the antenna by nesting Jersey Shore pigeons, so they had the birds and the droppings removed. But when they got back inside, they found that the radiation was still there, and it was still coming from all directions. What Penzias and Wilson had detected turned out to be one of the most incredible discoveries of the last century-one that would win them Nobel Prizes. These two Bell Lab scientists had discovered the afterglow from the Big Bang fireball explosion! Technically known as the cosmic background radiation, this after glow is actually light and heat from the initial explosion. This light is no longer visible because its wavelength has been stretched by the expanding universe to wavelengths slightly shorter than those produced by a microwave oven. But the heat can still be detected. As early as 1948, three scientists predicted that this radiation would be out there if the Big Bang did really occur. But for some reason no one attempted to detect it before Penzias and Wilson stumbled upon it by accident nearly twenty years later. When the discovery was confirmed, it laid to rest any lingering suggestion that the universe is in an eternal steady state. In effect, the discovery of the fireball radiation burned up any hope in the Steady State. But that wasn't the end of the discoveries. More Big Bang evidence would follow.

G: After finding the predicted expanding universe and radiation afterglow, scientists turned their attention to another prediction that would confirm the Big Bang. If the Big Bang actually occurred, scientists believed that we should see slight variations (or ripples) in the temperature of the cosmic background radiation that Penzias and Wilson had discovered. These temperature ripples enabled matter to congregate by gravitational attraction into galaxies. If found, they would comprise the fourth line of scientific evidence that the universe had a beginning. In 1989 the search for these ripples was intensified when NASA launched the $200 million satellite aptly called COBE for Cosmic Background Explorer. Carrying extremely sensitive instruments, COBE was able to see whether or not these ripples actually existed in the back ground radiation and how precise they were. When the project leader, astronomer George Smoot, announced COBE's findings in 1992, his shocking characterization was quoted in newspapers all over the world. He said, "If you're religious, it's like looking at God." University of Chicago astrophysicist Michael Turner was no less enthusiastic, claiming, "The significance of this (discovery) cannot be overstated. They have found the Holy Grail of Cosmology." Cambridge astronomer Stephen Hawking also agreed, calling the findings "the most important discovery of the century, if not of all time." What did COBE find to merit such momentous descriptions? COBE not only found the ripples, but scientists were amazed at their precision. The ripples show that the explosion and expansion of the universe was precisely tweaked to cause just enough matter to congregate to allow galaxy formation, but not enough to cause the universe to collapse back on itself. Any slight variation one way or the other, and none of us would be here to talk about it. In fact, the ripples are so exact (down to one part in one hundred thousand) that Smoot called them the "machining marks from the creation of the universe" and the "finger prints of the maker." But these temperature ripples are not just dots on a scientist's graph somewhere. COBE actually took infrared pictures of the ripples. Now keep in mind that space observations are actually observations of the past because of the long time it takes light from distant objects to reach us. So COBE's pictures are actually pictures of the past. That is, the infrared pictures taken by COBE point to the existence of matter from the very early universe that would ultimately form into galaxies and clusters of galaxies. Smoot called this matter "seeds" of the galaxies as they exist today. These "seeds" are the largest structures ever detected, with the biggest extending across one-third of the known universe. That's 10 billion light years or 60 billion trillion (60 followed by 21 zeros) miles. Now you can see why some scientists were so grandiose in their description of the discovery. Something predicted by the Big Bang was again found, and that something was so big and so precise that it made a big bang with scientists!

E: The E in SURGE is for Einstein. His theory of General Relativity is the fifth line of scientific evidence that the universe had a beginning, and its discovery was the beginning of the end for the idea that the universe is eternal. The theory itself, which has been verified to five decimal places, demands an absolute beginning for time, space, and matter. It shows that time, space, and matter are co-relative. That is, they are interdependent-you can't have one without the others. Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity means that the universe had a beginning and was not eternal as he had previously believed (Einstein was originally a pantheist). His theory proved that the universe is not a cause, but instead one big effect—something brought it into existence. Einstein disliked his end result so much that he introduced a “fudge factor” into his theory that allowed for an eternal universe. But there was only one problem. His fudge factor required a division by zero in his calculations— a mathematical error any good math student knows not to make. When discovered by other mathematicians, Einstein admitted his error calling it “the greatest blunder of my life.” After his acknowledgment, and upon confirming further research that showed the universe expanding just as his theory of relativity predicted, Einstein bowed to the fact that the universe is not eternal and said that he wanted “to know how God created the world.”