The Cosmological Argument
Have you ever wondered why there is something rather than nothing? While I cannot pretend to provide a complete answer to that question, we can answer the question in relation to why the cosmos and we as humanity are here. The Cosmological Argument, or as it is also known, the Kalam Cosmological Argument (Kalam is an Arabic word meaning eternal), is generally stated as a logical syllogism.
- Everything that began to exist had a cause.
- The Universe began to exist.
- Therefore, the universe had a cause.
The obvious implication is that the source of the universe was uncaused and since space, time and matter came into being with the creation of the universe the cause must be timeless, spaceless and non-material. Another word for this description is of course God. We see this in the following scriptures.
1 In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Genesis 1:1 (NKJV)
28 Have you not known? Have you not heard? The everlasting God, the Lord, The Creator of the ends of the earth, Neither faints nor is weary. His understanding is unsearchable. Isaiah 40:28 (NKJV)
3 All things were made through Him, and without Him nothing was made that was made.
John 1:3 (NKJV)
We have in the first four words of scripture an anchor point for everything else we believe. Scripture doesn’t try to prove Yahweh’s existence, it assumes it. While the Cosmological Argument doesn’t get us to Yahweh, it does get us to a supernatural being creating the universe. Scripturally we know that Being is Yahweh.
Currently there are various ideas that seek to avoid the beginning of the universe and the resulting implications. The Steady State theory (an eternal universe) was believed by many scientists in the 20th century, including Einstein. He built a fudge factor into his theory of relativity to accommodate his belief and when it was scientifically established that the universe was expanding, and thus had a beginning, he acknowledged it as his greatest scientific blunder.
We also have the non-scientific idea of a continually expanding and contracting universe that ignores science. The Second Law of Thermodynamics notes that things tend to move toward a disordered state. Entropy is scientifically well established and our universe is using up energy and heading toward heat death without outside intervention (taking us back to God). Thus, it cannot have been forever expanding and contracting. This idea also has inherent in it the idea of infinite regress. The problem of course is that if we have no starting point it is impossible to ever arrive at today! Another idea is the multiverse theory that posits multiple universes, in spite of the fact that the only one we know of is our current one and ignores the science that any universe that came into existence would be subject to the same fine-tuning parameters as the one we do know exists.
Perhaps Einstein was right when he said, “Science without religion is lame; religion without science is blind.” More pointedly, James Tour, one of the top chemists in the world and a believer, said, “Only a rookie who knows nothing about science would say science takes away from faith. If you really study science, it will bring you closer to God.”
Thus, in coming closer to God we come back to an uncaused first cause, a being not measured in terms of infinite regress but one who has always been, eternal. In their book, I Don’t Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist, Geisler and Turek provide the characteristics of this uncaused first cause. They say it must be,
self-existent, timeless, non-spatial, and immaterial (since the First Cause created time, space, and matter, the First Cause must be outside of time, space, and matter). In other words, he is without limits, or infinite; unimaginably powerful, to create the entire universe out of nothing; supremely intelligent, to design the universe with such incredible precision (we’ll see more of this in the next chapter); personal, in order to choose to convert a state of nothingness into the time-space-material universe (an impersonal force has no ability to make choices). These characteristics of the First Cause are exactly the characteristics theists ascribe to God.
A scientist who was an agnostic, but who recognized the implications of his research was astrophysicist Robert Jastrow. A famous quote from his book God and the Astronomers, is below and provides a fitting conclusion to our look at the Cosmological Argument.
At this moment it seems as though science will never be able to raise the curtain on the mystery of creation. For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.
Let’s join them on this highest of peaks.
