Monthly Archives: May 2017

Creation

Science, ,

Why does the universe exist? Have time and space and matter/energy always existed, back to an infinite past, or were they created by some process or being? In the last century science has begun to shed light on these age-old questions.

For thousands of years most people thought the universe had always existed. That was the view of Aristotle, Copernicus, and Isaac Newton. It was also the initial view of Albert Einstein. When it was pointed out that his theory of General Relativity required a universe in motion, either expanding or contracting, he added a fudge factor, a “cosmological constant,” to keep the universe in balance.

In 1914 it was discovered that light from certain fuzzy spots in the sky was “red-shifted,” which meant they were moving away from us at hundreds of miles per second. In the 1920’s Edwin Hubble, using the then-new 100-inch telescope at Mt. Palomar, discovered those fuzzy spots were entire galaxies. Using a variety of techniques, Hubble began to estimate their distance. In 1929 he announced that the distance away from us was generally proportional to the redshift, the speed away from us. In other words, galaxies twice as far away as others are moving away from us about twice as fast, galaxies four times further away are moving away about four times as fast, and so on. This astonishing relationship between distance and receding velocity is generally true throughout the entire universe. It is now called Hubble’s Law.

Hubble’s law begs a beginning. If you play the movie of time backwards so the galaxies are all coming together, it suggests a moment of creation. The religious implications of a beginning were violently opposed by hundreds of scientists, who cobbled together a competing theory, called the “steady state theory,” that required the constant creation of new matter in the voids of space (a violation of the first law of thermodynamics), to continually build new galaxies. The steady state theory died suddenly in 1965, when two physicists accidently discovered proof of creation – faint background radiation from the birth of the universe. Today the evidence of a beginning – called the “Big Bang” by some – is overwhelming, from the details of the faint background radiation to the relative amounts of the atomic elements. The Big Bang created the entire universe in one miraculous event. It created space, time, and all matter/energy. It did not occur in a specific part of the universe, it occurred simultaneously everywhere in the universe.

What caused the Big Bang? The cause has to be outside of space and time. One theory is that the universe arose as a fluctuation in the quantum field. But the quantum field is a high energy field within our universe. Prior to the Big Bang, space and time did not exist, and there was no quantum field. Also, if you try to imagine an eternal quantum field outside our universe then our universe would have “popped out” an infinitely long time ago. And, what caused that quantum field to exist?

A second theory is that the universe expands and contracts in an infinite series of big bangs. But that violates the second law of thermodynamics – the universe would run out of usable energy.

A third theory is that our universe popped out of another universe, and so on and so, in an infinite regress of turtles all the way down. But infinity is a monstrous mathematical concept that has never been tamed in the real world. If you imagine an infinite regress, then you have to start with an entire infinity of causes, because, no matter how far back you go, you are no closer to the beginning. Another problem is that this theory of infinite regress does not agree with modern science. In 2003 three scientists proved the universe cannot have an infinite past. As one said – “all the evidence we have says that the universe had a beginning.”

Could that beginning be evidence of God? Skeptics are quick to counter – what caused God? But that question reveals a problem of definition. The Bible describes God as the uncaused cause of existence, the “I am who I am” who created the heavens and the Earth. It makes no sense to ask what created something that exists without cause.

Many find it hard to believe that anything could exist without cause. Yet that is the conclusion of modern science. Something has to just be, has to exist without cause. That something has to be outside of space and time, and immensely powerful. That something fits the Biblical description of God.

Thanks for reading.

Fine-Tuning

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The fine-tuning of the universe may be, for many, the most persuasive evidence for God. Fine-tuning is accepted by almost all top scientists, and you don’t have to deal with the fanatics of Darwinism. In this post I return to fine-tuning and why God is the only plausible explanation. If you want to challenge an Atheist or Agnostic with science, you might start with the fine-tuning of the universe.

Embedded in the laws of physics are dozens of fixed numbers—“constants”—that have been measured by experiment. Examples include the ratio of the weight of the electron to the weight of the proton, the energy density of space, and the strength of the gravitational force. These numbers create the structure of our universe.

Scientists have found that these and many other constants of physics are set with fantastic precision to allow life to exist. If they were just slightly different, by the tiniest bit, there would be no life.

Gravity is a good example. If gravity were slightly weaker, the universe would have expanded too fast, and stars and planets would not have formed. If gravity were slightly stronger, the universe would have collapsed, and again no life. It turns out that the permitted variation is less than one part in 1060—less than one part in a number with 60 zeros. If you had a ball of 1060 marbles, it would be 600 trillion miles in diameter. You put in it one million trillion balls the size of our solar system. What are the odds that you could blindly reach in and pick out the one special marble that would allow life to exist?

Lists vary, but at least 30 constants of physics are “fine-tuned” for life, some to even more fantastic precision. It has been compared to walking into a control room for the universe and finding that all the dials had been set exactly for life. You would not think it was a lucky accident. The most likely explanation would be that some intelligent being had adjusted the dials.

Fine-tuning is accepted by almost all top scientists. Here’s Atheist Stephen Hawking:

The laws of science, as we know them at present, contain many fundamental numbers, like the size of electric charge of the electron and the ratio of the masses of the proton and the electron … The remarkable fact is that the values of these numbers seem to have been finely adjusted to make possible the development of life.

Physicist Freeman Dyson writes:

The more I examine the universe and the details of its architecture, the more evidence I find that the universe in some sense must have known we were coming.

How do we explain fine-tuning? These constants can only be measured by experiment; they are independent and not derived from a formula. Does fine-tuning reveal a designer God, a magnificent Creator, or did we just get very lucky?

Those who deny God usually claim the latter. They imagine an infinite number of universes, each with different constants of physics. If that is true, they say, then in some of those universes the constants are set to allow life, and since we are life, in our universe the constants of physics are set just right. They call this unwieldy collection of universes the “multiverse”.

Although scientists write articles about the multiverse, this theory of a multiverse is not scientific in any way. It cannot be proven, measured, or observed. There is no scientific evidence the multiverse exists, and there never will be. By definition, we can only measure and observe things in our universe.

The multiverse theory has other problems. In 2003, three leading scientists proved that, even if it exists, the multiverse cannot be infinite. That makes it hard to ignore fine-tuning, and leads to a second question— if there must be a first universe, who but God could have caused the first universe to exist?

Another problem is that multiverse fans imagine some sort of universe-generating machine that creates new universes. But any machine or mechanism capable of building universes would itself have to be impossibly fine-tuned. A bakery is more complex than a loaf of bread. So the multiverse actually doesn’t eliminate the need for fine-tuning, it just pushes it back one level to an imaginary mechanism that creates new universes.

Scientists have found that the laws of physics themselves, and the properties of space, are also set precisely to allow life to exist. Why does the force of gravity exist so that matter will gather into clumps? Why is there an electrical force to power the reactions and machines in our body? Why are there nuclear forces so that atoms can form? Why do we have three directions of space? In a universe with two space dimensions (like an endless sheet of paper), the necessary connections of life could not be made, and in a universe with four or more space dimensions (don’t even try to imagine this!) gravity and electromagnetism would not follow the inverse square law (the force is weaker in proportion to the square of the distance), and planets and electrons would not have stable orbits. Are we supposed to imagine a universe-generating machine powerful enough to change the laws of physics and the dimensions of space?

Fine-tuning is a scientific fact. The only plausible explanation is God. Here’s a cute video:

Thanks for reading.