CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 4
WHY DID THE UNIVERSE BEGIN?
The heavens are telling the glory of God; and the firmament proclaims his handiwork. (Ps. 19:1 RSV)
As a boy I not only wondered at the existence of the cosmos, I also wondered about how it began. I remember lying in bed at night trying to think of a beginningless universe. Every event would be preceded by another event, back and back into the past, with no stopping point—or, more accurately, no starting point! An infinite past, with no beginning. My mind reeled at the prospect. It just seemed inconceivable to me. There must have been a beginning at some point, I thought, in order for everything to get started.
Again, little did I suspect that for centuries—millennia, really—men had grappled with the idea of an infinite past and the question of whether there was an absolute beginning. Ancient Greek philosophers believed that matter was necessary and uncreated and therefore eternal. God may be responsible for introducing order into the cosmos, but He did not create the universe itself.
This Greek view was in contrast to even more ancient Jewish thought about the subject. Hebrew writers held that the universe has not always existed but was created by God at some point in the past. As the first verse of the Hebrew Holy Scriptures states: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth” (Gen. 1:1 RSV).
Eventually these two competing traditions began to interact. There arose within Western philosophy an ongoing debate that lasted for well over a thousand years about whether or not the universe had a beginning. This debate played itself out among Jews and Muslims as well as Christians, both Catholic and Protestant. It finally sputtered to something of an inconclusive finale in the thought of the great eighteenth-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant. He held, ironically, that there are rationally compelling arguments for both sides, thereby exposing the bankruptcy of reason itself!
Al-Ghazali was born sometime between AD 1055 and 1058 in Persia. By his midthirties his learnedness had come to the attention of the grand vizier of the Seljuks, who appointed him to teach at a prestigious madrassa in Baghdad. He became influential at court and a confidante of the sultan. But his study of Sufi literature led him to conclude that it was impossible to live by the high ethics of his religion while enjoying the riches of powerful men, because he was supporting their corrupt rule. So in 1095 he left Baghdad to lead a simpler life. He taught in minor schools until 1106, when he returned to a prominent madrassa to, he said, correct theological confusion among the public. He died in his hometown in 1111.
Al-Ghazali’s Argument
What is the argument that had caused such controversy? Let’s allow one of its greatest medieval champions to speak for himself. Al-Ghazali was a twelfth-century Muslim theologian from Persia, or modern-day Iran. He was concerned that Muslim philosophers of his day were being influenced by ancient Greek philosophy to deny God’s creation of the universe. They held that the universe flows necessarily out of God and therefore is beginningless.
After thoroughly studying the teachings of these philosophers, Ghazali wrote a withering critique of their views entitled The Incoherence of the Philosophers. In this fascinating book, he argues that the idea of a beginningless universe is absurd. The universe must have a beginning, and since nothing begins to exist without a cause, there must be a transcendent Creator of the universe.
Ghazali frames his argument simply: “Every being which begins has a cause for its beginning; now the world is a being which begins; therefore, it possesses a cause for its beginning.”[1]
Once again, we can summarize Ghazali’s reasoning in three simple steps:
1. Whatever begins to exist has a cause.
2. The universe began to exist.
3. Therefore, the universe has a cause.
This argument is so marvelously simple that it’s easy to memorize and share with another person. It’s also a logically airtight argument. If the two premises are true, then the conclusion necessarily follows. So anybody who wants to deny the conclusion must regard either premise 1 or premise 2 as false. So the whole question is: Is it more probable that these statements are true or that they are false? Let’s examine each premise in turn.
Premise 1
Whatever begins to exist has a cause.
I think that the first premise, that whatever begins to exist has a cause, is virtually undeniable for any sincere seeker after truth. For something to come into being without any cause whatsoever would be to come into being from nothing. That is surely impossible. Let me give three reasons in support of this premise:
1. Something cannot come from nothing. To claim that something can come into being from nothing is worse than magic. When a magician pulls a rabbit out of a hat, at least you’ve got the magician, not to mention the hat! But if you deny premise 1, you’ve got to think that the whole universe just appeared at some point in the past for no reason whatsoever. But nobody sincerely believes that things, say, a horse or an Eskimo village, can just pop into being without a cause.
This isn’t rocket science. In The Sound of Music, when Captain Von Trapp and Maria reveal their love for each other, what does Maria say? “Nothing comes from nothing; nothing ever could.” We don’t normally think of philosophical principles as romantic, but Maria was here expressing a fundamental principle of classical metaphysics. (No doubt she had been well trained in philosophy at the convent school!)
Sometimes skeptics will respond to this point by saying that in physics subatomic particles (so-called “virtual particles”) come into being from nothing. Or certain theories of the origin of the universe are sometimes described in popular magazines as getting something from nothing, so that the universe is the exception to the proverb “There ain’t no free lunch.”
This skeptical response represents a deliberate abuse of science. The theories in question have to do with particles originating as a fluctuation of the energy contained in the vacuum. The vacuum in modern physics is not what the layman understands by “vacuum,” namely, nothing. Rather in physics the vacuum is a sea of fluctuating energy governed by physical laws and having a physical structure. To tell laymen that on such theories something comes from nothing is a distortion of those theories.
Properly understood, “nothing” does not mean just empty space. Nothing is the absence of anything whatsoever, even space itself. As such, nothingness has literally no properties at all, since there isn’t anything to have any properties! How silly, then, when popularizers say things like “Nothingness is unstable” or “The universe tunneled into being out of nothing”!
When I first published my work on the kalam cosmological argument back in 1979, I figured that atheists would attack premise 2 of the argument, that the universe began to exist. But I didn’t think they’d go after premise 1. For that would expose them as people not sincerely seeking after truth but just looking for an academic refutation of the argument.
What a surprise, then, to hear atheists denying premise 1 in order to escape the argument! For example, Quentin Smith of Western Michigan University responded that the most rational position to hold is that the universe came “from nothing, by nothing, and for nothing”[2]—a nice close to a Gettysburg Address of atheism, perhaps!
This is simply the faith of an atheist. In fact, I think this represents a greater leap of faith than belief in the existence of God. For it is, I repeat, literally worse than magic. If this is the alternative to belief in God, then unbelievers can never accuse believers of irrationality, for what could be more evidently irrational than this?
2. If something can come into being from nothing, then it becomes inexplicable why just anything or everything doesn’t come into being from nothing. Think about it: Why don’t bicycles and Beethoven and root beer just pop into being from nothing? Why is it only universes that can come into being from nothing? What makes nothingness so discriminatory? There can’t be anything about nothingness that favors universes, for nothingness doesn’t have any properties. Nor can anything constrain nothingness, for there isn’t anything to be constrained!
TALK ABOUT IT
Why do you suppose so many smart people think it makes sense that the universe may have popped into being from nothing, without a cause?
I’ve heard atheists respond to this argument by saying that premise 1 is true of everything in the universe but not of the universe. But this is just the old taxicab fallacy that we encountered in chapter 3. You can’t dismiss the causal principle like a cab once you get to the universe! Premise 1 is not merely a law of nature, like the law of gravity, which only applies in the universe. Rather it’s a metaphysical principle that governs all being, all reality.
TALK ABOUT IT
What would you say to someone who says that nothing ever begins to exist, since everything is made of prior material constituents?
At this point the atheist is likely to retort, “All right, if everything has a cause, what is God’s cause?” I’m amazed at the self-congratulatory attitude of students who pose this question. They imagine that they’ve said something very important or profound, when all they’ve done is misunderstand the premise. Premise 1 does not say that everything has a cause. Rather it says that everything that begins to exist has a cause. Something that is eternal wouldn’t need a cause, since it never came into being.
Ghazali would therefore respond that God is eternal and uncaused. This is not special pleading for God, since this is exactly what the atheist has traditionally said about the universe: It is eternal and uncaused. The problem is that we have good evidence that the universe is not eternal but had a beginning, and so the atheist is backed into the corner of saying the universe sprang into being without a cause, which is absurd.
3. Common experience and scientific evidence confirm the truth of premise 1. Premise 1 is constantly verified and never falsified. It’s hard to understand how anyone committed to modern science could deny that premise 1 is more plausibly true than false in light of the evidence.
So I think that the first premise of the kalam cosmological argument is clearly true. If the price of denying the argument’s conclusion is denying premise 1, then atheism is philosophically bankrupt.
Premise 2
The universe began to exist.
The more controversial premise in the argument is premise 2, that the universe began to exist. Let me present two philosophical arguments and two scientific arguments in defense of this premise.
First Philosophical Argument: An Actually Infinite Number of Things Cannot Exist
Ghazali argued that if the universe never began to exist, then there have been an infinite number of past events prior to today. But, he argued, an infinite number of things cannot exist. This claim needs to be carefully nuanced. Ghazali recognized that a potentially infinite number of things could exist, but he denied that an actually infinite number of things could exist. Let me explain the difference.
Potential vs. Actual Infinity
When we say that something is potentially infinite, infinity serves merely as an ideal limit that is never reached. For example, you could divide any finite distance in half, and then into fourths, and then into eighths, and then into sixteenths, and so on to infinity. The number of divisions is potentially infinite, in the sense that you could go on dividing endlessly. But you’d never arrive at an “infinitieth” division. You’d never have an actually infinite number of parts or divisions.
Now Ghazali had no problem with the existence of merely potential infinites, for these are just ideal limits. But when we come to an actual infinite, we’re dealing with a collection that is not growing toward infinity as a limit but is already complete: The number of members already in the collection is greater than any finite number. Ghazali argued that if an actually infinite number of things could exist, then various absurdities would result. If we’re to avoid these absurdities, then we must deny that an actually infinite number of things exist. That means that the number of past events cannot be actually infinite. Therefore, the universe cannot be beginningless; rather the universe began to exist.
An Objection from Modern Math
It’s very frequently alleged that this kind of argument has been invalidated by developments in modern mathematics. In modern set theory the use of actually infinite sets is commonplace. For example, the set of the natural numbers {0, 1, 2, …} has an actually infinite number of members in it. The number of members in this set is not merely potentially infinite, according to modern set theory; rather the number of members is actually infinite. Many people have mistakenly inferred that these developments undermine Ghazali’s argument.
Answer to Objection: Reality vs. Fiction
These developments in modern mathematics merely show that if you adopt certain axioms and rules, then you can talk about actually infinite collections in a consistent way, without contradicting yourself. All this accomplishes is showing how to set up a certain universe of discourse for talking consistently about actual infinites. But it does absolutely nothing to show that such mathematical entities really exist or that an actually infinite number of things can really exist. If Ghazali is right, then this universe of discourse may be regarded as just a fictional realm, like the world of Sherlock Holmes, or something that exists only in your mind.
Moreover, Ghazali’s claim is not that the existence of an actually infinite number of things involves a logical contradiction but that it is really impossible. To give an analogy, the claim that something came into existence from nothing isn’t logically contradictory, but nonetheless it’s really impossible. These modern mathematical developments, far from undermining Ghazali’s argument, can actually strengthen it by providing us insight into the strange nature of the actual infinite.
Hilbert’s Hotel
The way in which Ghazali brings out the real impossibility of an actually infinite number of things is by imagining what it would be like if such a collection could exist and then drawing out the absurd consequences. Let me share one of my favorite illustrations, called “Hilbert’s Hotel,” the brainchild of the great German mathematician David Hilbert.
Hilbert first invites us to imagine an ordinary hotel with a finite number of rooms. Suppose, furthermore, that all the rooms are full. If a new guest shows up at the desk asking for a room, the manager says, “Sorry, all the rooms are full,” and that’s the end of the story.
But now, says Hilbert, let’s imagine a hotel with an infinite number of rooms, and let’s suppose once again that all the rooms are full. This fact must be clearly appreciated. There isn’t a single vacancy throughout the entire infinite hotel; every room already has somebody in it. Now suppose a new guest shows up at the front desk, asking for a room. “No problem,” says the manager. He moves the person who was staying in room #1 into room #2, the person who was staying in room #2 into room #3, the person who was staying in room #3 into room #4, and so on to infinity. As a result of these room changes, room #1 now becomes vacant, and the new guest gratefully checks in. But before he arrived, all the rooms were already full!
It gets worse! Let’s now suppose, Hilbert says, that an infinity of new guests shows up at the front desk, asking for rooms. “No problem, no problem!” says the manager. He moves the person who was staying in room #1 into room #2, the person who was staying in room #2 into room #4, the person who was staying in room #3 into room #6, each time moving the person into the room number twice his own. Since any number multiplied by two is an even number, all the guests wind up in even-numbered rooms. As a result, all the odd-numbered rooms become vacant, and the infinity of new guests is easily accommodated. In fact, the manager could do this an infinite number of times and always accommodate infinitely more guests. And yet, before they arrived, all the rooms were already full!
As a student once remarked to me, Hilbert’s Hotel, if it could exist, would have to have a sign posted outside: “No Vacancy (Guests Welcome).”
But Hilbert’s Hotel is even stranger than the great German mathematician made it out to be. For just ask yourself the question: What would happen if some of the guests start to check out? Suppose all the guests in the odd-numbered rooms check out. In this case an infinite number of people has left the hotel—indeed, as many as remained behind. And yet, there are no fewer people in the hotel. The number is just infinite! Now suppose the manager doesn’t like having a half-empty hotel (it looks bad for business). No matter! By moving the guests as before, only this time in reverse order, he converts his half-empty hotel into one that is bursting at the seams!
Now you might think that by these maneuvers the manager could always keep his strange hotel fully occupied. But you’d be wrong. For suppose the guests in rooms # 4, 5, 6, … check out. At a single stroke the hotel would be virtually emptied, the guest register reduced to just three names, and the infinite converted to finitude. And yet it would be true that the same number of guests checked out this time as when all the guests in the odd-numbered rooms checked out! Can such a hotel exist in reality?
Hilbert’s Hotel is absurd. Since nothing hangs on the illustration’s involving a hotel, the argument can be generalized to show that the existence of an actually infinite number of things is absurd.
Nothing in our universe can be actually infinite. But what about God—who is beyond our universe? In what sense(s) is God infinite? Why does this matter?
Responses to Hilbert’s Hotel
Sometimes people react to Hilbert’s Hotel by saying that these absurdities result because the concept of infinity is beyond us and we can’t understand it. But this reaction is mistaken and naive. As I said, infinite set theory is a highly developed and well-understood branch of modern mathematics. The absurdities result because we do understand the nature of the actual infinite. Hilbert was a smart guy, and he knew well how to illustrate the bizarre consequences of the existence of an actually infinite number of things.
Really, the only thing the critic can do at this point is just bite the bullet and say that a Hilbert’s Hotel is not absurd. Sometimes critics will try to justify this move by saying that if an actual infinite could exist, then such situations are exactly what we should expect. But this justification is inadequate. Hilbert would, of course, agree that if an actual infinite could exist, the situation with his imaginary hotel is what we should expect. Otherwise, it wouldn’t be a good illustration! But the question is whether such a hotel is really possible.
TALK ABOUT IT
Al-Ghazali shows that an infinite number of past events is impossible. What about the future? Is it actually or merely potentially infinite? How is eternity different from an infinite number of moments in time?
Moreover, the critics can’t just bite the bullet when it comes to situations like the guests’ checking out of the hotel. For here we have a logical contradiction: We subtract identical quantities from identical quantities and come up with nonidentical results. That’s why subtraction of infinity from infinity is mathematically prohibited. But while we may slap the hand of the mathematician who tries to break the rules, we can’t stop real people from checking out of a real hotel!
So I think Ghazali’s first argument is a good one. It shows that the number of past events must be finite. Therefore, the universe must have had a beginning.
Second Philosophical Argument: You Can’t Pass Through an Infinite Number of Elements One at a Time
Ghazali has a second, independent argument for the beginning of the universe. So those who deny that the universe began to exist have to refute not only his first argument, but his second one as well, since it’s independent of the first one.
Counting to (or from) Infinity
The series of past events, Ghazali observes, has been formed by adding one event after another. The series of past events is like a sequence of dominoes falling one after another until the last domino, today, is reached. But, he argues, no series that is formed by adding one member after another can be actually infinite. For you cannot pass through an infinite number of elements one at a time.
This is easy to see in the case of trying to count to infinity. No matter how high you count, there’s always an infinity of numbers left to count.
But if you can’t count to infinity, how could you count down from infinity? This would be like trying to count down all the negative numbers, ending at zero: …, -3, -2, -1, 0. This seems crazy. For before you could count 0, you’d have to count -1, and before you could count -1, you’d have to count -2, and so on, back to infinity. Before any number could be counted an infinity of numbers will have to have been counted first. You just get driven back and back into the past, so that no number could ever be counted.
But then the final domino could never fall if an infinite number of dominoes had to fall first. So today could never be reached. But obviously here we are! This shows that the series of past events must be finite and have a beginning.
An Objection: From Every Past Point, We Can Reach the Present
Some critics have responded to this argument by pointing out that even in a beginningless past, every event in the past is only a finite distance from the present. Compare the series of negative numbers: …, -3, -2, -1, 0. It’s beginningless; nevertheless, any number you pick, say, -11 or -1,000,000 or whatever, is only finitely distant from zero. But the finite distance from any past event to the present is easily crossed, just as you can count down to zero from any negative number you pick.
Answer to Objection: The Fallacy of Composition
This objection commits a logical fallacy called the “fallacy of composition.” This is the fallacy of confusing a property of a part with a property of the whole. For example, every part of an elephant may be light in weight, but that doesn’t mean the whole elephant is light in weight!
In the case at hand, just because every finite part of a series can be crossed or counted down doesn’t mean the whole infinite series can be crossed or counted. The critics have committed an elementary fallacy. The question is not how any finite part of the past can be formed by adding one event after another, but how the whole, beginningless past could be completed by adding one event after another.
Two More Absurdities
Ghazali sought to heighten the impossibility of forming an infinite past by giving illustrations of the absurdities that would result if it could be done. For example, suppose that for every one orbit that Saturn completes around the sun, Jupiter completes two. The longer they orbit, the further Saturn falls behind. If they continue to orbit forever, they will approach a limit at which Saturn is infinitely far behind Jupiter. Of course, they will never actually arrive at this limit.
But now turn the story around: Suppose Jupiter and Saturn have been orbiting the sun from eternity past. Which will have completed the most orbits? The answer is that the number of their orbits is exactly the same: infinity! (Don’t let someone try to slip out of this argument by saying infinity is not a number. In modern mathematics it is a number, the number of elements in the set {0, 1, 2, 3,… }.) But that seems absurd, for the longer they orbit, the greater the disparity grows. So how does the number of orbits magically become equal by making them orbit from eternity past?
Another illustration: Suppose we meet someone who claims to have been counting down from eternity past and is now finishing: … -3, -2, -1, 0! Whew! Why, we may ask, is he just finishing his countdown today? Why didn’t he finish yesterday or the day before? After all, by then an infinite amount of time had already elapsed. So if the man were counting at a rate of one number per second, he’s already had an infinite number of seconds to finish his countdown. He should already be done! In fact, at any point in the past, he’s already had infinite time and so should already have finished. But then at no point in the past can we find the man finishing his countdown, which contradicts the hypothesis that he has been counting from eternity.
These illustrations only strengthen Ghazali’s claim that no series that is formed by adding one member after another can be actually infinite. Since the series of past events has been formed by adding one event after another, it can’t be actually infinite. It must have had a beginning. So we have a second good argument for premise 2 of the kalam cosmological argument, that the universe began to exist.
First Scientific Argument: The Expansion of the Universe
One of the most astonishing developments of modern astronomy, which Ghazali would never have anticipated, is that we now have strong scientific evidence for the beginning of the universe. Yes, science provides some of the most dramatic evidence for the second premise of the kalam cosmological argument. The first scientific confirmation of the universe’s beginning comes from the expansion of the universe.
The “Big Bang”
All throughout history men have assumed that the universe as a whole was unchanging. Of course, things in the universe were moving about and changing, but the universe itself was just there, so to speak. This was also Albert Einstein’s assumption when he first began to apply his new theory of gravity, called the general theory of relativity, to the universe in 1917.
But Einstein found there was something terribly amiss. His equations described a universe that was either blowing up like a balloon or else collapsing in upon itself. Perplexed, Einstein “solved” the problem by fudging his equations, adding a new term to enable the universe to walk the tightrope between exploding and imploding.
TALK ABOUT IT
Why do you suppose Einstein might have been uncomfortable with the idea that the universe wasn’t permanent and unchanging?
During the 1920s the Russian mathematician Alexander Friedman and the Belgian astronomer Georges Lemaître decided to take Einstein’s equations at face value, and as a result they came up independently with models of an expanding universe. In 1929 the American astronomer Edwin Hubble, through tireless observations at Mount Wilson Observatory, made a startling discovery that verified Friedman and Lemaître’s theory. He found that the light from distant galaxies appeared to be redder than expected. This “redshift” in the light was most plausibly due to the stretching of the light waves as the galaxies move away from us. Wherever Hubble trained his telescope in the night sky, he observed this same redshift in the light from the galaxies. It appeared that we are at the center of a cosmic explosion, and all of the other galaxies are flying away from us at fantastic speeds!
Now according to the Friedman-Lemaître model, we’re not really at the center of the universe. Rather an observer in any galaxy will look out and see the other galaxies moving away from him. There is no center to the universe. This is because, according to the theory, it’s really space itself that is expanding. The galaxies are actually at rest in space, but they recede from one another as space itself expands. To get a picture of this difficult idea, imagine a balloon with buttons glued to its surface (Fig. 1). The buttons are stuck to the surface of the balloon and so don’t move across the surface. But as you blow up the balloon, the buttons will grow farther and farther and farther apart because the balloon gets bigger and bigger. Notice that there’s no center of the balloon’s surface. (There is a center point inside the balloon, but we’re focusing just on the surface of the balloon.) But an observer on any button will feel as if he were at the center of the expansion because he’ll look out and see the other buttons all moving away from him.
Now the two-dimensional surface of the balloon serves as an illustration of our three-dimensional space, and the buttons represent the galaxies in space. The galaxies are actually at rest in space, but they recede from one another as space itself expands. Just as there is no center of the balloon’s surface, so there is no center of the universe.
The Friedman-Lemaître model eventually came to be known as the big bang theory. But that name can be misleading. Thinking of the expansion of the universe as a sort of explosion could mislead us into thinking that the galaxies are moving out into a preexisting, empty space from a central point. That would be a complete misunderstanding of the model. The big bang did not occur at some point in a preexisting, empty space.
TALK ABOUT IT
Given that the name “big bang” is misleading, why do you suppose it has caught on? What might be a better name for the theory?
(You might say, “But what about the central point in the interior of the balloon?” Ah, you’re forgetting that it’s the surface of the balloon that is the analogy to space! The balloon’s two-dimensional surface happens to exist in a three-dimensional world, into which it is expanding. But in the Friedman-Lemaître model, there is no higher, four-dimensional world into which our three-dimensional space is expanding. So there’s just nothing corresponding to the space outside or inside the balloon.)
So we mustn’t be misled into thinking of the big bang as the explosion of a superdense pellet of matter into empty space. The theory is much more radical than that.
The Beginning of Time
As you trace the expansion of the universe back in time, everything gets closer and closer together. If our balloon had no minimum size but could just keep shrinking and shrinking, eventually the distance between any two points on the balloon’s surface would shrink to zero. According to the Friedman-Lemaître model, that’s what happens to space as you go back in time. Eventually the distance between any two points in space becomes zero. You can’t get any closer than that! So at that point you’ve reached the boundary of space and time. Space and time can’t be extended any further back than that. It’s literally the beginning of space and time.
To get a picture of this we can portray our three-dimensional space as a two-dimensional surface that shrinks as you go back in time (Fig. 2).
Eventually, the distance between any two points in space becomes zero. So space-time can be represented geometrically as a cone. What’s significant about this is that while a cone can extend indefinitely in one direction, it has a boundary point in the other direction. Because this direction represents time and the boundary point lies in the past, the model implies that past time is finite and had a beginning. Because space-time is the arena in which all matter and energy exist, the beginning of space-time is also the beginning of all matter and energy. It’s the beginning of the universe.
Notice that there’s simply nothing prior to the initial boundary of space-time. Let’s not be misled by words, however. When I say, “There is nothing prior to the initial boundary,” I do not mean that there is some state of affairs prior to it, and that is a state of nothingness. That would be to treat nothing as though it were something! Rather I mean that at the boundary point, it is false that “There is something prior to this point.”
The standard big bang model thus predicts an absolute beginning of the universe. If this model is correct, then we have amazing scientific confirmation of the second premise of the kalam cosmological argument.
Is the Standard Model Correct?
So is the model correct, or, more importantly, is it correct in predicting a beginning of the universe? We’ve already seen that the redshift in the light from distant galaxies provides powerful evidence for the big bang. In addition, the best explanation for the abundance in the universe of certain light elements, such as helium, is that they were formed in the hot, dense big bang. Finally, the discovery in 1965 of a cosmic background of microwave radiation is best explained as a vestige of the big bang.
Nevertheless, the standard big bang model needs to be modified in various ways. The model is based, as we’ve seen, on Einstein’s general theory of relativity. But Einstein’s theory breaks down when space is shrunk down to subatomic proportions. We’ll need to introduce subatomic physics at that point, and no one is sure how this is to be done. Moreover, the expansion of the universe is probably not constant, as in the standard model. It’s probably accelerating and may have had a brief moment of super-rapid expansion in the past.
But none of these adjustments need affect the fundamental prediction of the absolute beginning of the universe. Indeed, physicists have proposed scores of alternative models over the decades since Friedman and Lemaître’s work, and those that do not have an absolute beginning have been repeatedly shown to be unworkable. Put more positively, the only viable nonstandard models are those that involve an absolute beginning to the universe. That beginning may or may not involve a beginning point. But theories (such as Stephen Hawking’s “no boundary” proposal) that do not have a pointlike beginning still have a finite past. The universe has not existed forever, according to such theories, but came into existence, even if it didn’t do so at a sharply defined point.
In a sense, the history of twentieth-century cosmology can be seen as a series of one failed attempt after another to avoid the absolute beginning predicted by the standard big bang model. Unfortunately, the impression arises in the minds of laymen that the field of cosmology is in constant turnover, with no lasting results. What the layman doesn’t understand is that this parade of failed theories only serves to confirm the prediction of the standard model that the universe began to exist. That prediction has now stood for over eighty years throughout a period of enormous advances in observational astronomy and creative theoretical work in astrophysics.
Indeed, something of a watershed appears to have been reached in 2003, when three leading scientists, Arvind Borde, Alan Guth, and Alexander Vilenkin, were able to prove that any universe that has, on average, been expanding throughout its history cannot be infinite in the past but must have a past space-time boundary.
What makes their proof so powerful is that it holds regardless of the physical description of the very early universe. Because we can’t yet provide a physical description of the very early universe, this brief moment has been fertile ground for speculations. One scientist has compared it to the regions on ancient maps labeled “Here there be dragons!”—it can be filled with all sorts of fantasies. But the Borde-Guth-Vilenkin theorem is independent of any physical description of that moment. Their theorem implies that even if our universe is just a tiny part of a so-called multiverse composed of many universes, the multiverse must have an absolute beginning. Vilenkin is blunt about the implications:
It is said that an argument is what convinces reasonable men and a proof is what it takes to convince even an unreasonable man. With the proof now in place, cosmologists can no longer hide behind the possibility of a past-eternal universe. There is no escape: they have to face the problem of a cosmic beginning.[4]
We can fully expect that new theories will be proposed, attempting to avoid the universe’s beginning. Such proposals are to be welcomed, and we have no reason to think that they’ll be any more successful than their failed predecessors. Of course, scientific results are always provisional. Nevertheless, it’s pretty clear which way the evidence points. Today the proponent of the kalam cosmological argument stands comfortably within the scientific mainstream in holding that the universe began to exist.
Second Scientific Argument: The Thermodynamics of the Universe
As if this weren’t enough, there’s actually a second scientific confirmation of the beginning of the universe, this one from the second law of thermodynamics. According to the second law, unless energy is being fed into a system, that system will become increasingly disorderly. For example, if you had a bottle that was a closed vacuum inside and you injected into it some molecules of gas, the gas would spread itself evenly throughout the bottle. The chances that the molecules would all huddle together in one corner of the bottle are practically nil. This is because there are many more ways in which the molecules could exist in a disorderly state than in an orderly state.
The End of the World
Already in the nineteenth century scientists realized that the second law implied a grim prediction for the future of the universe. Given enough time, all the energy in the universe will spread itself out evenly throughout the universe, just as the gas spreads itself out evenly throughout the bottle. The universe will become a featureless soup in which no life is possible. Once the universe reaches such a state, no significant further change is possible. It is a state of equilibrium, in which the temperature and pressure are the same everywhere. Scientists called this the “heat death” of the universe.
But this unwelcome prediction raised a further puzzle: If, given enough time, the universe will inevitably stagnate in a state of heat death, then why, if it has existed forever, is it not now in a state of heat death? If in a finite amount of time, the universe will reach equilibrium, then, given infinite past time, it should by now already be in a state of equilibrium. But it’s not. We’re in a state of disequilibrium, where energy is still available to be used and the universe has an orderly structure.
Boltzmann’s Many Worlds Hypothesis
The nineteenth-century German physicist Ludwig Boltzmann proposed a daring solution to this problem. Boltzmann suggested that perhaps the universe is, in fact, in a state of overall equilibrium. Nevertheless, by chance alone, there will arise more orderly pockets of disequilibrium here and there (Fig. 3). Boltzmann refers to these isolated regions of disequilibrium as “worlds.” Our universe just happens to be one of these worlds. Eventually, in accord with the second law, it will revert to the overall state of equilibrium.
Contemporary physicists have universally rejected Boltzmann’s daring many worlds hypothesis as an explanation of the observed disequilibrium of the universe. Its fatal flaw is that if our world is just a chance fluctuation from a state of overall equilibrium, then we ought to be observing a much smaller region of order. Why? Because a small fluctuation from equilibrium is vastly more probable than the huge, sustained fluctuation necessary to create the universe we see, and yet a small fluctuation would be sufficient for our existence. For example, a fluctuation that formed an orderly region no bigger than our solar system would be enough for us to be alive and would be incomprehensibly more likely to occur than a fluctuation that formed the whole orderly universe we see!
In fact, Boltzmann’s hypothesis, if consistently carried out, would lead to a strange sort of illusionism: In all probability we really do inhabit a smaller region of order, and the stars and the planets we observe are just illusions, mere images on the heavens. For that sort of world is much more probable than a universe that has, in defiance of the second law of thermodynamics, moved away from equilibrium for billions of years to form the universe we observe.
Contemporary End-of-the-World Scenarios
The discovery of the expansion of the universe in the 1920s modified the sort of heat death predicted on the basis of the second law, but it didn’t alter the fundamental question.
If the universe will expand forever, then it will never actually arrive at equilibrium. Because the volume of space is constantly growing, the matter and energy always have more room to spread out. Nevertheless, as the universe expands, its available energy is used up and it becomes increasingly cold, dark, dilute, and dead. It will eventually become a thin gas of subatomic particles endlessly expanding in absolute darkness.
By contrast, if the universe is not expanding fast enough, the expansion will slow down, come to a halt, and then gravity will begin to pull everything together again in a catastrophic big crunch. Eventually everything in the universe will coalesce into a gigantic black hole, from which the universe will never rebound.
Whether its end will be in fire or ice, the fundamental question remains the same: If, given sufficient time, the universe will reach such a state, why is it not now in such a condition, if it has existed forever?
As we enter the early decades of the twenty-first century, recent discoveries have indicated that the cosmic expansion is actually speeding up. Because the volume of space is increasing so rapidly, the universe actually moves farther and farther away from an equilibrium state in which matter and energy are evenly distributed. But the acceleration of the universe’s expansion only hastens its demise. For now the different regions of the universe become increasingly isolated from one another in space, and each marooned region becomes dark, cold, dilute, and dead. So again, why isn’t our region in such a state if the universe has already existed for infinite time?
The Beginning of the Universe and Attempts to Avoid It
The obvious implication of all this is that the question we’re asking is based on a false assumption, namely, that the universe has existed for infinite time. Today most physicists would say that the matter and energy were simply put into the universe as an initial condition, and the universe has been following the path plotted by the second law ever since its beginning a finite time ago.
Of course, attempts have been made to avoid the beginning of the universe predicted on the basis of the second law of thermodynamics. But none of them has been successful.
Oscillating Universes. During the 1960s some theorists tried to craft oscillating models of the universe, according to which the universe has been expanding and contracting, reexpanding and recontracting from eternity past (Fig. 4).
But the thermodynamic properties of such models implied the very beginning they were designed to avoid. For entropy accumulates from cycle to cycle, making each cycle larger and longer than the one before it (Fig. 5). What this means is that as you trace the cycles back in time, they get smaller and smaller until you come to a first cycle and the origin of the universe. In fact, astronomers have estimated on the basis of current radiation levels in the universe that the universe cannot have gone through more than about a hundred previous cycles.
Bubble Universes. More recently, other theorists have proposed that our universe is just a bubble in a much larger “multiverse” of bubble universes (Fig. 6). The claim is that the second law applies only to the bubbles, but not to the whole multiverse itself. Even if this claim were true, however, it wouldn’t matter. For we have already seen that the Borde-Guth-Vilenkin theorem applies to the multiverse and requires that it have an absolute beginning.
Baby Universes. Finally, there have been conjectures that maybe black holes are entrances to “wormholes” in space-time through which energy could travel to spawn baby universes (Fig. 7). If the “umbilical cord” tying the mother universe to its baby pinches shut, then the baby universe becomes an independent universe. Perhaps this scenario could be extended into the infinite past, so that we’re the offspring of an infinite line of ancestors?
Sorry, it won’t work. The second law still applies, so that this process cannot have gone on for infinite time. Not only that, but the scenario contradicts subatomic physics, which requires that the information that goes down a black hole remains in our universe. This was the subject of a bet between John Preskill and Stephen Hawking, which Hawking in 2004 finally admitted he had lost. Offering his apologies to science-fiction fans everywhere, Hawking admitted, “There is no baby universe branching off.”[5]
So once again the scientific evidence of thermodynamics confirms the truth of the second premise of the kalam cosmological argument. This evidence is especially impressive because thermodynamics is so well understood by physicists that it is practically a completed field of science. This makes it highly unlikely that these findings will be reversed.
Conclusion
On the basis, therefore, of both philosophical and scientific evidence, we have good grounds for believing that the universe began to exist. Since whatever begins to exist has a cause, it follows that the universe has a cause.
Is the Universe Self-Caused?
The prominent atheist philosopher Daniel Dennett agrees that the universe has a cause. But he thinks that the cause of the universe is: itself! Yes, he’s serious. In what he calls “the ultimate boot-strapping trick,”[6] he claims that the universe created itself.
Dennett’s view is nonsense. Notice that he’s not saying that the universe is self-caused in the sense that it has always existed. No, he’s saying that the universe brought itself into being. But this is impossible, for in order to create itself, the universe would have to already exist. It would have to exist before it existed. Dennett’s view is logically incoherent.
The Personal Creator of the Universe
The cause of the universe must therefore be a transcendent cause beyond the universe. This cause must be itself uncaused because we’ve seen that an infinite series of causes is impossible. It is therefore the Uncaused First Cause. It must transcend space and time, since it created space and time. Therefore, it must be immaterial and nonphysical. It must be unimaginably powerful, since it created all matter and energy.
Finally, it must be a personal being. We’ve already seen one reason for this conclusion in the previous chapter. Only a Mind could fit the above description of the First Cause.
But let me also share a reason given by Ghazali for why the First Cause must be personal: It’s the only way to explain how a timeless cause can produce a temporal effect with a beginning like the universe.
Here’s the problem: If a cause is sufficient to produce its effect, then if the cause is there, the effect must be there, too. For example, water freezes when the temperature is below 0 degrees centigrade; the cause of the freezing is the temperature’s falling to 0 degrees. If the temperature has always been below 0 degrees, then any water around would be frozen from eternity. It would be impossible for the water to begin to freeze just a finite time ago. Now the cause of the universe is permanently there, since it is timeless. So why isn’t the universe permanently there as well? Why did the universe come into being only 13.7 billion years ago? Why isn’t it as permanent as its cause?
Ghazali maintained that the answer to this problem must be that the cause is a personal being with freedom of the will. His creating the universe is a free act that is independent of any prior conditions. So his act of creating can be something spontaneous and new. Thus, we’re brought not merely to a transcendent cause of the universe but to its Personal Creator.
In my view, then, God existing alone without the universe is changeless and timeless. His free act of creation is simultaneous with the universe’s coming into being. Therefore, God enters into time when He creates the universe. God is timeless without the universe and in time with the universe.
Why do you think theologians apparently don’t know the kalam argument? Why do you think pastors aren’t taught these sorts of arguments in seminary?
The kalam cosmological argument thus gives us powerful grounds for believing in the existence of a beginningless, uncaused, timeless, spaceless, changeless, immaterial, enormously powerful Personal Creator of the universe.
When I finished my doctoral dissertation on the cosmological argument at the University of Birmingham, Professor Hick took it privately to one of the physicists on campus to have him check the scientific information. The physicist later reported back to Hick that everything I said was correct. When Professor Hick returned the dissertation to me, he looked at me quizzically and said, “Why don’t the theologians know about this?” Why, indeed!
[1] Al-Ghazali Kitab al-Iqtisad fi’l-I’tiqad, cited in S. de Beaurecueil, “Gazzali et S. Thomas d’Aquin: Essai sur la preuve de l’existence de Dieu proposée dans l’Iqtisad et sa comparaison avec les ‘voies’ Thomiste,” Bulletin de l’Institut Francais d’Archaeologie Orientale 46 (1947): 203.
[2] Quentin Smith, Theism, Atheism, and Big Bang Cosmology (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 135.
[3] J. M. Wersinger, “Genesis: The Origin of the Universe,” National Forum (Winter 1996), 11, 9, 12.
[4] Alexander Vilenkin, Many Worlds in One (New York: Hill and Wang, 2006), 176.
[5] S. W. Hawking, “Information Loss in Black Holes,” http://arXiv:hep-th/0507171v2 (September 15, 2005): 4.
[6] Daniel Dennett, Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon (New York: Viking, 2006), 244.