God is the best explanation for the beginning of the universe (the kalam cosmological argument)
Welcome to the first of several posts on making the case for God’s existence and involvement in the world, and in our lives personally. In this series, I want to discuss human experience and observation from many different fields, and how God is the best explanation for it all. This is a more hard-science-themed post, and a few others will be as well, but others will focus on more personal and experience-based topics (such as free will, beauty, and suffering).
Of course, these will cover just some things that God best explains — namely, those that can be spelled out in words. Some of the best “arguments” for God’s existence are not neat syllogisms or collections of evidence, but the witness of the changed lives of believers, and experiences lived out in the community of God’s people. But, since no blog post can do justice to real experience, we must stick with what can be (at least to an extent) put into words.
The Big Bang theory
For decades, many Christians have shied away from the Big Bang theory, due to its association with long ages and evolution. This is unfortunate, because it actually provides one of the better arguments for God’s existence. In fact, the original formulator of the theory, astronomer Georges Lemaître, was a Catholic priest!
Before Lemaître presented the theory in 1927, most scientists thought the universe was eternal, uncreated, and largely unchanged from eternity past. What changed things was the discovery that the universe is expanding. Space is getting bigger. Lemaître was not the first to discover this, but he was the first to carry that point to its logical conclusion.
If the universe is getting bigger, that means that in the past it was smaller. If you continue to extrapolate backward in time, you come to a point where the universe was no larger than a singularity — a single point, infinitely small, infinitely hot, and infinitely dense. Somehow, the universe rapidly expanded outward from this point and has continued to increase in size up to the present day. Lemaître called this the “hypothesis of the primeval atom,” or by a much better name, the “Cosmic Egg.” Awesome as that name is, astronomer Fred Hoyle caricatured the theory as a “big bang,” and that’s the name that stuck.
Subsequent observations have confirmed the Big Bang with pretty high confidence. Today, we can even see the clear remnants of the Big Bang in what’s called the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), a faint background “noise” that exists everywhere in the universe, even in the emptiest regions. It’s radiation left over from when the universe first became transparent to light. You can actually see and hear it for yourself. Turn on an old analog TV to channel 98 or something, or turn on your car radio to FM 87.9 or a station your area doesn’t get. About 1% of that static and “snow” (on the TV) is from the CMB.
All this means there is very powerful evidence that the spacetime universe had an absolute beginning. At some point in the distant past (13.8 billion years ago), the universe suddenly and rapidly expanded from an original singularity. This expansion was the beginning of space and time, matter and energy. The universe, effectively, emerged ex nihilo (out of nothing). There must be an explanation for that. So what is the best explanation?
The kalam cosmological argument
This information helps form the basis for what is called the kalam cosmological argument for God’s existence. First put forth by the Muslim philosopher al-Ghazali in the 12th century, and popularized in the West about 40 years ago by Christian philosopher William Lane Craig, it is often summed up in the following three-statement syllogism.
1. Everything that begins to exist has a cause.
We know that nothing begins to exist without something causing it to come into existence. We may allow for the possibility of something existing eternally (like God), but we know that everything that begins to exist has a cause. Every living creature was brought forth by its ancestors. Every building was brought into existence by builders. Every rock, every lake, every planet and star, was brought into existence by the forces of nature acting on various materials and bringing them together into a structure. There is no reason to believe the universe itself is an exception to this rule. At the very least, we can say with confidence that this premise is more likely true than false.
2. The universe began to exist.
We’ve just discussed the evidence for the Big Bang theory, which is widely accepted by scientists today with little controversy.
This might be the appropriate place to point out that I know some of my readers may be young-earth creationists who reject the Big Bang theory. So this argument may not resonate with you. However, even without the evidence for the Big Bang, there is a strong case to be made that the universe cannot be eternal in the past. Al-Ghazali’s original formulation of the argument aims to do this based on the impossibility of an infinite regress (link is to a Muslim site summarizing al-Ghazali’s writing on the topic). Thomas Aquinas’s arguments for the “unmoved mover” and “first efficient cause” are very similar to the kalam, but don’t depend on the Big Bang theory or even a beginning of the universe.
But I think the evidence for the Big Bang is convincing, and that it’s strong enough to use as the primary basis for this premise.
3. Therefore, the universe has a cause.
That is, there is something that caused the universe to exist.
An important note about this syllogism. Craig, in his presentation of this argument, often notes this crucial point: The premises in a syllogism do not have to be proven true for an argument to be valid. They just have to be, in his words, “more plausibly true than false.” If the premises are more plausibly true than false, then the conclusion is also more plausibly true than false. And it’s reasonable to believe the conclusion that’s most plausible. So if we can agree that the three premises presented here are more plausibly true than their negations, then we have produced a strong and valid argument.
What is the cause of the universe?
We can rule out all causes originating from this universe right away. The universe can’t have caused itself. To find the cause of the universe, we must look outside the universe. That means we must also look outside the bounds of the physical sciences, because science isn’t able to detect or analyze anything outside the material universe. But as I wrote in my previous post, science isn’t the only way we can gain reliable knowledge. We must also turn to the field of philosophy, and to our own personal experience, which we are doing now.
So we must ask: What or who caused the universe to exist, creating it from nothing?
There is, I think, more we can deduce about the cause of the universe (often called the First Cause) than I will list here. For example, I think we can deduce that the First Cause is morally perfect, cares for the creatures he makes, and is interactive with creation. The reason for this will become clear in subsequent posts. But for now, I’ll stick with the bare basics. The First Cause must be:
A) Spaceless, being the creator of space;
B) Timeless, being the creator of time;
C) Immaterial, being the creator all matter;
D) More powerful than anything comprehensible.
These four characteristics are attributes of God, but they’re also true of many theoretical objects, such as a multiverse (more on that in a moment). If this is all we can deduce, then the kalam argument doesn’t succeed in leading us to conclude that God exists. But there is one more trait we can know about the First Cause of the universe.
E) The First Cause must be personal.
Anyone who buys the argument so far would readily agree with the first four items, but the fifth doesn’t seem to follow. Why does the First Cause have to be personal? Can’t the “creator” be some extremely powerful but impersonal force or law of nature that exists outside the measurable dimensions of spacetime and our understanding of the laws of physics?
Alternative explanations
If you look online, you will find no shortage of news articles and videos talking about some new alternative theory for the origin of the universe. But what many of them don’t make clear in their headlines is that all these potential explanations (at least all that I’ve heard) are purely theoretical, with no real-world evidence.
The multiverse and the quantum realm are not good explanations
Some have proposed that the universe could be part of an expanding higher-dimensional “multiverse” that spontaneously produces “baby universes,” of which ours is one. Some have illustrated the hypothetical multiverse as being like a foamy sea, with our universe being like a bubble that rises from it. This is a primary basis for the idea of parallel universes, because on this theory the number of other universes could be infinite. All possible outcomes of all events would be realized in some universe, and thus in some alternate universe you could defeat Donald Trump in 2016 and be President. This theory is known as “eternal inflation,” and is proposed by some to be the cause of the universe.
But there are two problems with saying the multiverse is a sufficient answer to the question of what caused the universe to exist: First, the multiverse is not a scientific concept. Even if a multiverse exists, it is outside the material universe, and so by definition it cannot be actually detected or evaluated by science. It remains only an unverifiable, probably unfalsifiable speculation. That puts it in the realm of philosophical belief, not science.
Secondly, as if that weren’t enough, it would seem that a multiverse also must have had a beginning, which brings us right back to the same argument.
At best, belief in a multiverse is no less metaphysical or philosophical than belief in God. But when looking at the big picture of human observation and experience, the multiverse is a far inferior explanation.
Similarly, some people have proposed that maybe occurrences at the quantum level — at the scales of atoms and subatomic particles — can explain the origin of the universe. Weird and paradoxical things happen at those scales. Some popular media claim, implicitly or explicitly, that quantum mechanics allows particles to arise out of nothing with no cause, breaking premise #1 of the syllogism.
But when you actually see descriptions of what “quantum vacuums” and such things are, they certainly don’t seem to be “nothing.” They are rippling with energy, they have properties that can be analyzed, and they can be described in physical ways. So for someone who claims some kind of quantum occurrence is responsible for the universe’s beginning, they must answer where the energy and other properties of the quantum vacuum came from.
Other possibilities
That leaves two other possibilities: 1) an abstract object, like a number, which may exist even in the absence of anything material; or 2) the decision of a personal being.
As for the first possibility, numbers and other similar things, even if they actually “exist” independently of our usage of them (a debate for mathematicians and philosophers), don’t actually cause anything.
That leaves the best explanation for the beginning of the universe: The decision of a personal being, one powerful enough to create something out of nothing.
The best explanation: A personal Creator
Before anyone tries to tell me I haven’t disproved all the alternative explanations to God — yes, I know. Nor did I cover every possible objection. But, although I know there are alternatives to God I didn’t address, I contend that they are poor ones. They all run into the same basic obstacles no matter how creative you get with them.
The best explanation for the beginning of the universe is that a personal being, outside of space and time, powerful enough to create something out of nothing, and intelligent and loving enough to create the kind of universe that could sustain living creatures who could personally know one another and Him — made the decision to create.
While this explanation is not without difficulties, it is clearly better, more plausible, and explains more of our overall observation and experience than the alternatives. Therefore, a person is most reasonable and justified in believing it.
What this means for the one who accepts this
Following the best explanation for the beginning of the universe leads us to the conclusion that we are not just accidental combinations of organic molecules on a pale blue dot in a dark and impersonal universe. Instead, we are personal beings reflecting the characteristics of our personal Creator. We can safely assume that our Creator engaged in this 13.8-billion-year process of creation knowing that part of the outcome would be you. He intended for you to be here, and gave you the capacities you possess so you could personally know him and other personal beings.
We are also accountable for how we use the personal capacities our Creator gave us. The Bible portrays God as an artist, craftsman, and minister who loves his creation, especially the one type of being he made to engage in personal relationships: human beings. We have the capability of fulfilling the highest purpose of creation by knowing God personally and knowing one another. We also have the capability of committing the highest betrayal by abusing the capacities God gave us, rejecting God, abusing each other, and abusing creation. If God made the decision and spent so much time creating a universe that could support living, relational creatures, we are responsible for what we do with it.
Questions for readers
- For Christians: Many Christian ministries have declared the Big Bang theory to be in opposition to biblical teaching. How were you taught to view the Big Bang theory growing up? Has your view of it changed since then?
- Why do you think some choose to believe in a multiverse rather than a Creator, even though neither can be scientifically verified?
- What do you think are the strengths and weaknesses of the kalam cosmological argument? Would you use it to help make the case for Christianity to a skeptical friend?
