Christian historian Dr. Wallace Marshall and I are debating whether or not enough evidence points to the existence of a god. For background and format, and Dr. Wallace’s opening statement, see entry one. For subsequent entries, see index.


That the Evidence Points to God (II)

by Wallace Marshall, Ph.D.

Say with yourself, ‘Somewhat now is, therefore somewhat hath ever been.’

—John Howe, 1675 [1]

Let all the earth fear the LORD: for he spoke, and it was.

—Psalm 33, c. 1000 B.C.

In our opening entries, Dr. Carrier and I presented outlines of our respective cases. I’ll use this entry to develop the Kalam Cosmological Argument:

  1. If the universe began to exist, the universe has a cause.
  2. The universe began to exist.
  3. Therefore, the universe has a cause.
  4. The cause of the universe is most plausibly God.

Premise 1 is primarily derived from the causal principle, “Whatever begins to exist has a cause,” which is a corollary of the ancient philosophical maxim, Ex nihilo, nihil fit (from nothing, nothing comes). If it ever were the case that nothing whatever existed—no matter, no energy, no spirit, no God—then nothing could ever exist. Likewise, from the fact that something now exists, we can reach the simple yet profound truth that something has always existed; and that something is either the universe, God, or both.

I consider Ex nihilo, nihil fit to be a self-evident axiom of metaphysics. “Nothing” is simply non-being. “It” has no powers, properties, or potentialities: nothing that could turn into something or bring something else into being. To deny this would be “absurd,” as the atheist skeptic David Hume remarked. The causal principle, he said, is “a proposition, which indeed a Man must have lost all common Sense to doubt of.” [2]

There are three additional reasons to believe in the causal principle:

  1. It is a universally verified, and never falsified, principle of experience.
  2. If something can come from nothing, it’s inexplicable why just everything and anything doesn’t pop into existence out of nothing. Why is “nothing” so discriminatory about what it “turns into” and when it does so?
  3. As the late philosopher of science Bernulf Kanitscheider pointed out, a denial of the causal principle would put us “in head-on collision with the most successful ontological commitment” in the history of science, “a metaphysical hypothesis which has proved so fruitful in every corner of science.” [3]

At the very least, we should conclude that the causal principle is more likely than its contrary.

So did the universe begin to exist? (Premise 2). We now have compelling scientific evidence that the cosmos—time, space, matter and energy—is not past-eternal but came into being in the finite past at an absolute singularity or boundary. Although some cosmological models posit a multiverse or a succession of Big Bang’s or a future-eternal inflation, none of these models has been successfully extended to past eternity. [4]

As the eminent cosmologist Alexander Vilenkin stated at Stephen Hawking’s 70th birthday party, “All the evidence we have says the universe had a beginning.” [5] Hawking calls this “the most remarkable discovery of modern cosmology.” [6] Even Lawrence Krauss, an atheist physicist who has gone through all kinds of contortions to avoid this conclusion, has conceded, “I agree all the evidence says the universe had a beginning.” [7]

In addition to the scientific evidence, there are two philosophical reasons to believe the universe has not always existed. First, mathematicians have long understood that you run into all kinds of contradictions if you try to suppose the actual existence of an infinite number of things. As David Hilbert, perhaps the greatest mathematician of the twentieth century, declared: “The infinite is nowhere to be found in reality…. [Its role] is solely that of an idea.” [8]

Herb Silverman, an atheist mathematician I debated at the College of Charleston, recounts of his early education, “The most important lesson I learned was that … the number ‘infinity’ does not exist in reality.” [9] But that implies that the number of past events in the history of the universe cannot be infinite, and therefore that the universe had an absolute beginning.

The second philosophical reason to believe the universe has a finite past is the impossibility of forming an infinite series by adding one member after another. That may sound complicated, but it’s actually not difficult to understand. If you were immortal and began counting today, it’s easy to see that you could never get to infinity, because there would always be one more number you could recite. The same logic applies to counting down backwards from negative infinity. If you were counting down the negative numbers from eternity past, you would have finished your countdown long ago—indeed, infinitely long ago—since at any point you would have already been counting for an infinite amount of time; which means that it could never be ‘now’ now—which is absurd, since obviously it is ‘now’ at this very moment.

So we have good philosophical reasons as well as scientific evidence to believe that the universe began to exist (P2). At the very least, the universe having an absolute beginning is more plausible than its existing from past eternity; from which, it follows from P1 that the universe had a cause for its coming into existence.

But are there good reasons to suppose that this cause is God? Yes. First, it cannot be a prior or early (quantum) state of the universe, because the above philosophical arguments would apply equally to that early/prior state. And as for the scientific evidence, there is currently no commonly accepted theory for how a multiverse or quantum vacuum could extend to past eternity. It is the origin of the whole matter-space-time manifold that we are trying to explain, not a mere iteration of it.

So what possible causes remain? In the nature of the case, the cause would have to be spaceless, timeless and immaterial, since whatever it is brought matter, space and time into existence. It would also have to be immensely powerful in order to have brought the universe into being. Surprisingly, only two options fitting this fourfold description have been proposed: an abstract object (say, a mathematical entity) or an unembodied, transcendent, timeless mind, which is how monotheism conceives God.

It cannot be an abstract object, because abstract objects are by definition causally effete. That leaves a divine Mind as the only alternative. In addition to abstract objects lacking causal powers, there is another reason for choosing divine Mind over abstract object as the cause of the universe. If the cause of the universal were an impersonal entity (in the philosophical sense of lacking will or intelligence)—as an abstract object obviously is—we would expect the effect (the universe) to be eternally co-existent with the cause, since there would in that case be no will to bring the universe into being at a definite point/boundary in the finite past.

-:-

Such is Dr. Marshall’s first response.

Continue on to Dr. Carrier’s reply here.

-:-

Endnotes

[1] John Howe, The Living Temple, in The Works of the Rev. John Howe, 3 vols. (London: William Tegg, 1848), 1:203-204; first published in 1675.

[2] David Hume, 1754 letter to John Stewart, and Letter #22, as quoted in Galen Strawson, “David Hume: Objects and Power,” in Reading Hume on Human Understanding, ed. Peter Millican (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 233. Atheist philosopher Peter Slezack similarly comments: “Only academics could be so ridiculous [as to suppose something could come into existence out of nothing]. If made seriously outside the seminar room, such claims would be evidence of clinical derangement.” Peter Slezack, as quoted by William Lane Craig in his August 27, 2002 debate with Peter at the Sydney Town Hall in Sydney, Australia. See Plato, Timaeus, 27-28, for a classic articulation of the principle that whatever begins to exist has a cause.

[3] Bernulf Kanitscheider, “Does Physical Cosmology Transcend the Limits of Naturalistic Reasoning?” in Studies on Mario Bunge’s “Treatise”, eds. P. Weingartner and G. J. W. Doen (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1990), 344.

[4] “We have no viable models of an eternal universe. The BGV theorem gives reason to believe that such models simply cannot be constructed,” Alexander Vilenkin, “The Beginning of the Universe,” Inference: International Review of Science, Vol. 1, Issue 4 (23 October 2015), accessed 4/16/2017. On the common misunderstanding of eternal-inflationary cosmologies being past eternal, here is Alan Guth, the father of inflationary cosmology: “We refer to it as eternal inflation, but the word ‘eternal’ is being used slightly loosely. Semi-eternal might be more accurate. It’s eternal into the future. We do not think it’s eternal into the past…. We’ve been able to prove, mathematically, that it’s in fact not possible to extrapolate arbitrarily far into the past.” Alan Guth, Interview with Robert Lawrence Kuhn on Closer to Truth (PBS program), starting at about the 3:15 mark (accessed 1/6/2015).

[5] This is from a talk Vilenkin delivered on January 8th at Cambridge University to a group of scientists gathered to honor Stephen Hawking’s 70th birthday, as quoted in Lisa Grossman, “Why Physicists Can’t Avoid a Creation Event,” New Scientist (Issue 2846) 11 January 2012. The gathering was entitled, “The State of the Universe.” Grossman opens her article with the quip, “You could call them the worst birthday presents ever” (as Stephen Hawking was on record at that meeting commenting that one of his concerns about the universe having an absolute beginning was that it had theistic implications. “A point of creation,” he said, “would be a place where science broke down. One would have to appeal to religion and the hand of God”). Also see, in the following day’s issue (2847), “The Genesis Problem.”

[6] Stephen Hawking, “The Beginning of Time,” 1996 lecture (accessed April 21, 2019).

[7] Lawrence Krauss, commenting on Alexander Vilenkin’s remark, “All the evidence we have says the universe had a beginning,” made at Stephen Hawking’s 70th birthday party. “Life, the Universe and Nothing: Is it reasonable to believe there is a God?” Dialogue with William Lane Craig at Melbourne Town Hall, Melbourne, Australia, 16 August 2013, at the 53:46 mark (accessed September 20, 2013). “But,” Krauss added, “we don’t know that”—by which, as he made clear throughout this dialogue, he means “know with certainty,” which is quite irrelevant, as no one is claiming that level of epistemic confidence.

[8] David Hilbert, “On the Infinite,” in Philosophy of Mathematics, ed. with an Introduction by Paul Benacerraf and Hillary Putnam (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1964), pp. 139, 141.

[9] Laura Paull, “South Carolina’s Secular Crusader,” Tablet Magazine, 21 June 2012 (accessed 9/18/2012).

Discover more from Richard Carrier Blogs

Subscribe now to keep reading and get access to the full archive.

Continue reading