This came to me by email this morning, and there are good questions here. The sender agreed that it would be good to answer here on the blog. I’ve changed her name here, as we also agreed.
Hi, I’m a Christian, but I’m having some problems. I was thinking that maybe some naturalists believe what they believe because naturally the universe just has to “be”, I guess, in the way that a circle and a square can’t be the same thing at the same time. And you can’t really create the fact that a circle and square can’t be the same thing because it just has to be so, which is the height of logic, isn’t it?
Also, I think, like Tom Clark said, a supernatural God, upon further investigation, wouldn’t actually be supernatural because that really wouldn’t be possible, again, in the same way that a square and circle can’t be at the same time. There always has to be a way and means for anything to happen, right? I mean, nothing could just simply happen with no way for it to happen. It seems like this would sort of answer the reason why for everything, maybe, in the way that, if there is anything at all than there simply can’t not be anything. So, because it just has to be, that’s why it is, like it’s impossible for it not to be.
Do you understand what I mean? Also, it wouldn’t matter if you had evidence for evolution or not because this fact would have to be so, anyway. I’ve been obsessing almost every waking moment over the past few days about science and psychology and I’m not sure I can really think of a way out of this argument. Please let me know what you think. Thanks. Heather.
Does the Universe Exist Necessarily?
There’s more than one question there, obviously. We’ll start by considering whether it’s possible that the universe exists just because it’s one of those things that had to be. Is the universe something that exists necessarily? Actually Heather wrote a significant piece of the answer to this herself, in the second paragraph of her email. She may not have intended it to be used in this connection, but it’s an insight that’s important for this issue:
There always has to be a way and means for anything to happen, right? I mean, nothing could just simply happen with no way for it to happen.
That’s exactly right. I would word it this way: everything that begins to exist must have a cause, or every event must have a cause. God is not an event, and his existence does not have a beginning, so his existence does not require a cause; he is eternal.
There was a time when scientists and other thinkers thought the universe might be eternal and beginningless. That was before Edwin Hubble discovered that the universe was expanding outward at great speed. Astronomers modeled what this must have meant going backward in time. It led to the rather surprising conclusion that billions of years ago, the entire universe must have been compressed into an almost infinitely small volume. That in turn implied that the universe began in a huge explosion, which astronomer Fred Hoyle derisively called a “Big Bang.” As you know, the name stuck.
This was rather upsetting to some scientists: they knew all too well what it implied, which I’ll come back to in a moment. There was hot debate over the Big Bang vs. Steady State theories until a couple of scientists at Bell Labs noticed a “cosmic microwave background radiation”—you could think of it as a small degree of heat—distributed everywhere throughout the cosmos. It was exactly what had been predicted by the Big Bang theory. That and some further research confirmed the Big Bang theory.
This means the universe began to exist. And remember, whatever begins to exist must have a cause. The universe could not have caused itself. You can’t even coherently describe what it would mean for something to cause its own beginning. It would have to exist before it existed if it were to do that! Since then the question has been what or who caused the Big Bang.
Is it possible, then, for the universe not to be? Certainly. Go back 15 billion or so years, and there was no universe. The universe’s non-existence is surely possible, since it did not exist more than about 15 billion years ago.*
Is God Part of Nature?
It will come as no surprise that I think the cause of the universe was God. I had been convinced on other grounds that God was the Creator, long before I became aware of things like I just discussed. But the Big Bang suggests a very powerful and personal God as the “beginner” (the one who begins) the universe. Whatever caused the Big Bang had to be immensely powerful, since the effect of his or its work was to create all the hundred billion galaxies that exist. The cause also had to be personal, though. If it were something impersonal, with no ability to choose, and yet it had the ability to cause the Big Bang, it would not have been able to choose to exercise that ability, or choose not to exercise it, or choose when to exercise it. This impersonal cause could not have existed without immediately causing the Big Bang, for where there is a cause capable of producing an effect, the effect necessarily happens immediately (taking all factors into account, obviously). The cause of the universe and the universe itself would be the same age, about 15 billion years old. This seems strange and highly unlikely; and it leads to further questions about what caused the cause.
This impersonal cause almost sounds like the picture of God Heather is wrestling with in the second paragraph, actually. It’s a being that’s part of the machine. A personal God who created the universe, not as part of himself but as a separate thing from himself, is not part of the machine.
But then how does God insert himself into the actions of the machine? He does it by his own spiritual power, which he first exercised through creation and continues to employ up until now.
Is That Really An Answer?
Is that a satisfactory answer? Not to some people: they want that “how” answer to be a lot more descriptive than that. Here’s the problem, though. When God works in nature, it involves an interface between his spiritual essence and the natural world we live in, which are two entirely different things. Part of the transaction has to take place on the spiritual side of that interface. People who press for a more descriptive “how” are asking for something that looks like a natural description, but if we gave a natural description, then we wouldn’t be talking about God, we would be changing the subject. The one who asks “how could God do this?” must expect and allow that the answer not be entirely in the form of a physical description. This is as logically necessary as that a square cannot be a circle.
To say otherwise would be analogous to asking how a magnet attracts iron, and adding “but you cannot answer in terms of the properties of a magnet.” If we want to know how God does something, part of the answer has to be given in terms of who and what God is. Thus it is simply wrong to expect the explanation to work entirely as we’re accustomed to scientific explanations working.
The next objection I’ve heard, following this, has often been, “But then you have no explanation!” To which I say, “God is the explanation! Do you insist that explanations involving God be just like physical explanations? Then you’re demanding that the way God the creator works must be just like the way his creation works. It’s saying that you’ll consider God as an explanation, as long as this God isn’t God. That doesn’t quite seem logical, does it?“
God is not one of us. To accept that is to be appropriately humble before him.
The Evolution Question
Your third question, Heather, was whether evolution itself might have been a necessity. I don’t think there’s anyone, even among highly committed evolutionists, who would say that the origin of life was inevitable in a universe that’s only natural. It happened (they say), and we’re, shall we say, the lucky beneficiaries, but it didn’t have to happen that way. If the origin wasn’t inevitable or necessary, then the whole rest of it could not have been either.
For this (and also to some extent for the first question) I would refer you here to read about the incredible odds against our universe being suitable for any complexity at all, much less the complexity of life.
The Other Big Question
You also asked, “Do you understand what I mean?” I hope I do. It’s always possible that I missed it completely, and that none of this is much help for what’s really on your mind. If so, please let me know and I’ll take another shot at it.
*Some think there might have been a different universe before the Big Bang. Rather than taking space to address that here I will refer you to these articles by William Lane Craig, especially The Existence of God and the Beginning of the Universe.
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