There are a variety of subjects that theologians use to show the existence of God and defend their position. In this article, look at two of the ones I believe to be among the strongest and easiest to follow: Cosmology and Fine Tuning.
If you read my previous Hard Questions article on Am I Saved, you will be familiar with the 5 questions each religion and philosophy addresses and attempts to answer.
This article on the existence of God will address, in part, the question of "Where did I come from".
Cosmology
Greek philosopher, Heraclitus (540BC to 480BC) held a primary concern with the world around him. He held a belief in a unity of opposites which states that opposites have an underlying connection that define each other. For example the opposites of health and disease, good and evil, hot and cold, light and darkness, etc. each had correlation with its opposite. In many applications the more of one you have the less you have of the other. To understand or experience one, you had to understand or experience the other. How would one understand hot if one didn't understand cold. Or to use C.S. Lewis' example: How could you understand what a straight line is if you don't have a concept of what a crooked line is?
Against common believe that nature was chaotic and divergent, Heraclitus believed it was coherent and change in one direction was balanced by corresponding change in the other. Hidden between all things was a connection that they were either tending apart or being brought together. He understood nature to be in a constant state of flux, and stated "All things are in motion like a stream." and "You cannot step into the same river twice."
Later, Aristotle (384BC to 322BC) disagreed with Heraclitus on many viewpoints. He claimed that Heraclitus' views didn't conform to the law of non-contradiction which states that something can't be true and false at the same time. But Aristotle agreed with Heraclitus' ideas about motion (or change) and being.
If you consider an event, it had a causal event. Looking at that causal event, that one itself had a causal event. And so on into the past. To avoid the impossibility of infinite-regression, Aristotle reasoned that there must be a "prime mover" (or "final mover" in a retrospective perspective) which was an uncaused cause of the first cause of all motion/change in the universe.
It is clear then from what has been said that there is a substance which is eternal and unmovable and separate from sensible things. It has been shown also that this substance cannot have any magnitude, but is without parts and indivisible (for it produces movement through infinite time, but nothing finite has infinite power; and, while every magnitude is either infinite or finite, it cannot, for the above reason, have finite magnitude, and it cannot have infinite magnitude because there is no infinite magnitude at all). But it has also been shown that it is impassive and unalterable; for all the other changes are posterior to change of place.- Aristotle, Metaphysics, Book XII (source: https://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/metaphysics.12.xii.html)
Thomas Aquinas (? to 1274AD), Italian theologian, used Aristotle's "prime mover" concept and applied it to the existence of the biblical God.
During that same time frame (8th to 11th century), the Kalam cosmological argument was also being developed among Islamic theologians. It consists of two premises followed by a logical conclusion:
1) Everything that began to exist has a cause.
2) The universe began to exist.
3) Therefore the universe had a cause.
Here is a simplified and brief explanation.
Premise 1, it is experiential that nothing pops into existence with out a cause. No one has ever experienced a self-causal event. This is the principle of cause-and-effect.
Premise 2, science has established that the universe began at a finite point in history commonly referred to as the "Big Bang". At that moment, all space, time, and matter came into existence.
Conclusion, if everything that begins to exist has a cause, and the universe began to exist, then logically the universe had a cause.
For all of existence to come into being, there must be an uncaused First Cause that must be:
Spaceless (there was no space - the cause of space must be spaceless)
Timeless (there was no time - the cause of time must be timeless)
Immaterial (there was no matter - the cause of material must be immaterial )
From those three necessary attributes, modern theologians logically conclude that First Cause must also be:
Personal (The cause must have a will to cause that creation from a state of timeless stasis)
Powerful (The cause must be powerful in order to create the entire universe)
Intelligent (The cause must be intelligent to know how to create everything in the universe)
Wise (The cause must be wise to know how to make the universe precise and sustainable)
Creative (The cause must be creative to produce so staggering a variety of differences of traits within a staggering variety of different things)
Based on those definitive attributes I and many others would call that First Cause which is spaceless, timeless, immaterial, personal, powerful, intelligent, wise, and creative - God.
The different ideas that propose natural causes as the beginning of the universe each come with various problems. Because science has proven that the universe had a beginning in the finite past, the long-held concept of its eternal and static existence has been disproven. The concept of its eternal expansion into a "cold death" leaving the universe with both a finite past and a finite future is a bleak outlook. In response, many scientists have come up with other theories that also are accompanied with their own unique problems.
One example is the multi-verse theory in which many universes are simultaneously in existence. A major issue with this theory is that it is not falsifiable. Meaning, there is no way to view or detect anything outside of our universe to disprove much less prove its validity. Aside from that major problem, a second major problem comes attached to it: it simply doesn't address the issue at all. What would be generating all of those universes in the first place, and where did that "universe generator" come from?
Another example is the oscillating universe which states that the internal mass of the universe's matter is so great that its gravitational pull will eventually stop the universe's expansion and begin to pull itself back into the singularity it started as at the Big Bang. At that point, the Big Bang event would happen again and once again expand outward. At a point in that universe's future, the gravitational pull of its mass would slow the universe's expansion and retract the universe back onto itself, and the cycle would continue bouncing back and forth infinitely.
We'll look at just how precise critical measurements within physics, referred to as "fine tuning of the universe", is required for life to be sustainable shortly. Those that hold to an oscillating universe reason that even though the odds of life appearing by chance in this universe are so incredibly impossible that it just happened that this particular occurrence of the universe, out of an innumerable number of previous occurrences of the universe, had all the critically precise "Goldilocks" requirements for life to arise. Again, the same question remains: what caused it to begin in the first place?
This cosmological argument alone does not identify the biblical God, but it does point to an eternal, personal, entity as outlined above. If you haven't considered learning about this personal creator, perhaps now is the time to consider learning who it is and what it wants.
Obviously, I believe this identifies the biblical God. For more on this, look for my future post on "Did Jesus Claim to be God?".
Also see my article on Solar Eclipses and God for more on the the problem of infinite regression and more on the cosmological argument history.
Universal Fine-Tuning
In conjunction with the cosmological argument is one of the incomprehensible precision of the fine tuning of the universe from even its immediate and atomic beginnings. There are dozens of factors that if the values of these principles, laws, or measurements were off by even the smallest amount, chemistry and life itself would be utterly impossible.
The fine-tuning of the universe is so undeniable so that religious and secular scientists agree that the fine-tuning exists and we wouldn't exist if they weren't so precisely fixed. They naturally disagree on how they came to be so mind-bogglingly precise all at the same time. The variances in these constants are so miniscule, the allowance of changes are often in the 1050 range (that's 10 followed by fifty 0's) or smaller.
Take the strong nuclear force for example. The strong nuclear force is what holds quarks (subatomic particles) together that make up protons and neutrons of an atom's nucleus. It needs to be stronger than the electromagnetic force in order to over power the repulsion of like-charged protons from one another. If it was reduced slightly, it would prevent the creation of elements with higher numbers of protons making up the nucleus by allowing the like-charged protons repel each other. If it were increased slightly, then the lighter elements (such as hydrogen) would immediately be converted into heavier elements. Without hydrogen, there would be no water and there would be no long-term fuel for stars causing their longevity to significantly decrease.
Consider also gravity. If at the Big Bang event (or moment of Creation), gravity was slightly stronger, it would have quickly overcome the force of the expansion of the universe. Stars and galaxies would not have formed, and the universe would have crunched back in on itself shortly after its emergence. If gravity was slightly weaker, matter would have been rapidly dispersed so that planets, stars, and galaxies would not have formed.
The same is with the cosmological constant which represents a constant energy density that causes the universe's expansion. If that value was off by 1 in 1090 in either direction, the universe would have either collapsed into a giant black hole or ended in a "heat death" which is an equilibrium of energy across the universe so that no more energy exchange is possible and the universe effectively dies.
There is also the location of the earth in relation to our sun. The distance between the two is 93 million miles. The earth is located in an orbital distance that is referred to as the circumstellar habitable zone or the "Goldilocks zone". If the earth was only 5% closer to the sun, it would be uninhabitable. It would become extremely heated and lead to a run-away greenhouse effect and the oceans would evaporate off. If it was located around 20% further from the sun, it would also be uninhabitable as a nearly completely frozen ice-sphere.
But our solar system also has a "Goldilocks zone". It is accepted that galactic centers commonly hold super massive black holes. The center of galaxies are filled with harmful radiation. Solar systems close to it would face high levels of gamma rays, X-rays, and cosmic rays, any of which which would prevent life existing on any nearby planets. Likewise, the spiral arms pass through the galactic habitable zone. This is were most supernovae explode and where explosive star formation regions are located. Our solar system is located safely between two spiral arms located around 26,000 light-years (26,000 x 5.8 trillion miles) or about half-way between the galaxy's center and its outer edge. It is believed that the outer edges of spiral galaxies have a lower abundance of heavy elements which would prevent the creation of earth-sized planets that would support life.
Here are some other samples of the precise settings and the ramifications if they were only a hair's difference more or less.
If the earth was slightly smaller, it's smaller iron core would have a weaker electromagnetic field. The earth would lose the protection of that electromagnetic field exposing the planet to harmful solar radiation and the solar winds would strip away the atmosphere. Gravity would be weaker with a thinner atmosphere as atmospheric gases were lost into space and potentially leading to extreme temperature fluctuations. If the earth was slightly larger, gravity would be increased. Everything would be heavier potentially affecting size and shape of life forms. It could also lead to more volcanic activity and potentially change the climate due to changes in the internal dynamics of the planet.
These are only a few of the 20+ or 30+ "fine tuning" issues. Each of them must be within its precise value range and all of them at the same time. It they are not all fixed within their ranges, the universe either fails to exist or fails to sustain life. As with the creation of proteins, the odds are staggeringly against them all coming together simultaneously with so narrow a window of success that it is mathematically beyond accepted improbability.
This is why secular science looks to theories like the aforementioned Multiverse and Oscillating Universe theories for support of the universe's fine-tuning, but we've seen what sort of problems those can bring to the table.
In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.And God saw everything that He had made, and behold, it was very good.- Genesis 1:1, 31a
Long ago, at many times and in many ways, God spoke to our fathers by the prophets, but in these last days He has spoken to us by His Son, whom He appointed the heir of all things, through whom also He created the world. He is the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of His nature, and He upholds the universe by the word of His power. After making purification for sins, He sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high- Hebrews 1:1-3
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