Truth
Six Arguments for God, and the Big Bang
Abstract
As the island of our knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance.John Wheeler
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Thursday, 28 November 2002
Monday, 12 March 2007
The Big Bang
In the last few decades cosmologists have got together a lot of evidence that the universe started in what is now called the Big Bang. The Big Bang model predicts the formation of nuclei, the relative abundances of certain elements and the existence and exact temperature of the microwave background—the glow of radiation left over from the initial explosion, which permeates the universe. The 1965 observation of the microwave background radiation by Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson, of the Bell Telephone Laboratories, for the first time gave direct evidence of the Big Bang. The COBE observations in 1992 virtually proved the Big Bang theory for cosmologists. The universe began about 13.8 billion years ago. From the cosmological argument, Christians are saying it is scientific proof of God!
The Big Bang idea was put forward by a Christian priest called the Abbé Georges Lemaître, a Belgian physicist in 1927, and was popularized by the Russian, George Gamow. Previously, it was far from certain that there had been anything that could be called a creation. Arthur Eddington brought Lemaître’s paper to the attention of the scientific world, which otherwise had ignored it. Eddington, a life-long Quaker, who experimentally confirmed Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity in 1919, did not like the idea of a beginning. Despite that, in 1933, he published his popular work, The Expanding Universe, which introduced many small boys, later to become astronomers, to the discipline for the first time.
Einstein, who was Jewish but educated by Catholics, preferred the idea of a static universe, stable and unchanging, and introduced the cosmological constant into his equations to give it. When it was shown to be expanding, Einstein thought he had blundered, but it is now proving to be a useful factor to account for the universe expanding faster than thought.
Einstein discovered that space and time are closely linked—space-time. Space has three dimensions, and time has one, so space-time is four-dimensional, but the four components are discrete. The universe must have had a beginning if Einstein’s general theory of relativity is correct, the energy density is positive, and the universe contains the amount of matter we observe now. By extrapolating Einstein’s theory of general relativity back in time, scientists deduced that the universe emerged from a single, small, unbelievably dense, hot region. Conventional cosmology explains what happened since then, including the formation of matter, and its coalescence into galaxies, stars, planets and chemical systems.
Thomas Gold, the Austrian astonomer, Fred Hoyle, the British astrophysicist, and Jeffrey Burbidge, a US astrophysicist, had argued for a steady-state model of the universe, and naturally this was diametrically opposed to the Big Bang model. They were unwillingly to yield without a fight, but the Big Bang has been the one supported by the evidence so far.
The Cosmological Argument or God
Dishonest Christian propagandists claim that these physicists, whom they label as agnostic or atheistic scientists, did not like the idea of a creator God because of the cosmological argument, that can perhaps be seen most clearly in the syllogism:
- Everything that begins has a cause.
- The universe began in the Big Bang.
- The universe therefore must have a cause.
The obvious fallacy of this is that the First Cause, God, is not caused but exists forever. If the theologian can conceive of an uncaused God, then why cannot the universe itself be uncaused? Either the universe is eternal or it just happens without a cause. Christians think scientists did not like the conclusion that the cause was God, but as noted above there are faults with the entire argument that Christians merrily ignore, and honest scientists do not. So, they are not worried in the least. Christians should note that it is scientists who are making the discoveries they think are so devastating for unbelief. Some of these scientists are Christians, but, if the people doing the work were all Christians, then the scientific world would want it checking by scientists with no supernatural cosmic eggs to hatch.
Unfortunately scientists, whether they believe in super Henny-Penny in the sky or not, cannot resist making theatrical asides about God, especially in contexts like this. It gets them publicity, something that many of them crave. George Smoot, the team leader of COBE, said:
It’s like looking at God.
It made sure he got the headlines of almost every newspaper in the world. It was important work, and deserved headlines, but it shows how biased the press are to the supernatural. Without his eye-catching comment, the reports would have probably been in inside page science columns, and hardly been noticed. Still NASA are good at getting publicity for reasons of funding, and it had probably all been carefully worked out.
What Christians do not consider in this is that the Big Bang was the start of time as well as space. If there was no time and there was no space, then nothing existed before the Big Bang. That means that the Big Bang itself must have been the First Cause, because no God could have preceded it. This is not proof that there is no God, but it is evidence that any God there is is the universe itself. It is an argument for pantheism. Needless to say, the supposed Christian “scientists”, demonstrating their dishonesty as scientists and their mendacity as Christians, say the Big Bang is proof God is not the same as the universe and God is not contained within the universe. Christians say God must have existed before time and space showing He is transcendent.
What can be said is that these Christian “scientists” are not being scientific. They are therefore lousy scientists. Stephen Hawking writes, “the actual point of creation lies outside the scope of presently known laws of physics”, and Professor Alan Guth of MIT says “the instant of creation remains unexplained”. Physicist, Leon Lederman, a Nobel Prize winner, wrote in The God Particle, a book about the Higgs boson that had nothing to do with God:
The sign of pseudoscience is that it can always find explanations of everything that its believers need to explain. That is what the supposed scientists who try to argue a scientific case for Christianity do. As Popper showed, pseudosciences cannot be falsified, and so cannot be tested. Christians will not accept that Christianity can be wrong, so it cannot be tested. You take it or leave it on trust—or faith!
A story logically begins at the beginning, but this story is about the universe and unfortunately there are no data for the very beginnings—none, zero. We don’t know anything about the universe until it reaches the mature age of a billion of a trillionth of a second. That is, some very short time after creation in the Big Bang. When you read or hear anything about the birth of the universe, someone is making it up…
For Christians, that is all right. It is all made up. No one, so far, can see before the Big Bang except Christians. Lederman, tongue in cheek, concludes: “Only God knows what happened at the very beginning”. Christians, and publicity seeking scientists, can always see God wherever they want Him to be!
In fact, the universe might be unbounded and therefore never began and never ends. Stephen Hawking says:
So long as the universe had a beginning, we could suppose it had a creator. But if the universe is really completely self-contained, having no boundary or edge, it would have neither beginning nor end: it would simply be. What place, then, for a creator?
Six Arguments for God
The Cosmological Argument for God is only one that Christians use. There are several others, and they are summarized here. All have been refuted, though not for dishonest Christians. Even if they still impress them, they ought to acknowledge that the arguments are not sound, but they do not. They still offer them to gullible potential converts, knowing they can capture someone else’s life and purse.
• 1. The cosmological argument—The universe exists and so must have been caused. Everything is caused by some cause and eventually these causes lead back to the beginning of them all, the start of the universe. The universe must have had a cause, and it must therefore have been caused by God.
The obvious stupidity of this is that the First Cause, God, is not caused but must exist forever. If the theologian can conceive of an uncaused God, then why cannot the universe itself be uncaused? Either the universe is eternal or it just happens without a cause. J Richard Gott and Li-Xin Li, Princeton physicists, think Big Bangs happen but the universe exists forever.
• 2. The teleological argument—The content of the universe often seems designed, implying a designer.
Evolution by natural selection explains the complexity in the natural kingdom that is taken by believers to be evidence of design. Moreover, the designer could not have been God because he was not a perfect designer as a perfectly good being ought to be. Some of the designs in Nature are not the best ones, such as the vertebrate eye, and nor is Nature free of what seems to be unnecessary cruelty, if the designer is supposed perfectly good. Christian Fundamentalists always like to cite the human eye as being so complicated it could never have evolved so it must have been designed. It is a “God of the Gaps” argument, but helped in this case by Darwin actually picking it out as apparently absurd and needing the evidence of eyes of intermediate complexity, to show possible evolutionary pathways.
A “Designer” is not obliged to stick to any particular prototype, and so eyes could have been designed in quite different ways, and the apparent marked differences between vertebrates eyes, insects eyes and molluscs eyes, say, are proof of Gods creativity, Fundamentalists argue. At one time Darwinists agreed that there were many different varieties of eyes which must have evolved on no less than 65 different occasions. Of course, the whole basis of evolution is now known in the genetic theory made possible by Watson and Crick proposing the correct structure of DNA, the vehicle for genes. Geneticists have now discovered that eye development, whatever the form of the eye, depends on a single gene labeled pax6, which shows that all eyes evolved from some proto-eye coded for by this gene. The proto-eye could have been nothing more than a pair of photosensitive cells. It was not much of an eye but, in the land of the blind, he who has even imperfect vision is king, and plainly this very simple light detector evolved subsequently into all the forms of eyes in animals we now see because it gave a great advantage to those animals that had it.
One of those was a cubozoan or box jellyfish (Tripedalia cystophora) which has twenty four eyes in clusters on the four sides of its box-shaped body. In each cluster, two pairs have remained as very simple organs, simply an indentation lined by light sensitive cells, able to respond to changes in lightness and dark. The other pair in the cluster of six is, however, remarkably sophisticated compared with its four neighbours. Though they are only a tenth of a millimeter across, they have a lens, an iris, a cornea and a retina, and so have all of the elements of much more sophisticated eyes, though these throw an imperfect image on to the retina, much out of focus, because the focus is behind the retina not on it. The effect of this blurred image in sea water full of small drifting particles of debris and tiny swimming creatures is to put these small objects so out of focus they are effectively invisible. Any large object that is more or less stationary within the jellyfishs field of view casts a discernable image, albeit with fuzzy edges. So, here in a single creature are two types of eye, a primitive one, and a more sophisticated one, close to the complex eyes of vertebrates and molluscs but still in an incomplete form. The transition forms of eyes, Darwin hoped to see are illustrated perfectly in one lowly jellyfish.
• 3. The rational argument—The universe, being subject to order, natural law and the Anthropic Principle, implies an intelligence. Charles Townes, a Christian who shared the 1964 Nobel Prize in Physics for discovering the maser and the laser:
Many have a feeling that somehow intelligence must have been involved in the laws of the universe.
This is a variant of the design argument. Believers argue that the world as it exists is so unlikely that it requires a Primal Intelligence to have designed it—but that is even more unlikely. The emergence of intelligence in the universe that we experience has come as a result of evolution. It took a long time, and implies that intelligence is unlikely. Yet the assumption of the rational argument is that a supreme intelligence existed at the outset. It is vanishingly unlikely that intelligence could evolve in zero time.
• 4. The ontological argument—To conceive of God implies that He exists to put such a vast conception into the human mind.
If God does not exist, humanity would conceive of whatever was the greatest thing it could conceive of. That would be considered to be God. In practice the human concept of God grows just like this. Recently the idea of parallel universes has been proposed. Christians therefore propose a God that is not just bigger than our universe, but bigger than all universes that exist.
• 5. The moral argument—humanity’s sense of right and wrong requires a moral God to be able to implant it in the human mind. Moreover life is often unjust and justice can only be done by a moral God sitting in judgement over everyone post mortem.
Right and wrong are socially conditioned traits, and historically are arbitrarily applied irrespective of a person’s beliefs. The European world was most cruel and unjust when Christianity was most powerful, so the historical evidence does not favour a Christian just God influencing His worshippers. Post mortem justice is merely a human wish which requires something impossible—the personality to survive death.
• 6. The argument from human experience—People claim to have experienced the very presence of God.
No one doubts that they have had an experience, but it is their assumption that it is God. Nothing suggests that these experiences of “God” are not natural, even if they are abnormal experiences. Alien abduction is distressingly real to those apparently normal people who experience it. Shadowy aliens carry out by night semi-medical procedures that leave vaguely sexual sensations. Women believe they have had eggs taken from them to create a hybrid new race, and men sperm. The experience is real, but not the alien.
With electrodes, Dr Michael Persinger, Professor of Neuroscience at the Laurentian University in Canada, stimulates part of the brain of an ordinary woman with no history of hallucinations, inducing visions of grey beings, a face speeding towards her, a sense of extraordinary wellbeing and a vaguely sexual sensation—common experiences of those who believe they have been visited by aliens, spirits, ghosts, angels or gods.
Oxygen deprivation under laboratory conditions, similarly reproduce out-of-body and near death experiences where the dying think they have glimpsed heaven—a long dark tunnel, ending in a bright light, with angelic creatures accompanied by a reassuring euphoria. Those who indulge in sexual perversions with near-hanging and asphyxia seek the same pleasure.
Epilepsy caused by brain lesions was once considered the sacred disease because people claimed visions and hallucinations similar to mystics when having epileptic fits. Biblical miracles, such as Jacob’s ladder of angels, or Paul’s conversion, reflect some of these natural phenomena of the brain. This God is a brain disorder.
