Is God real or is this all there is?

The famous atheist Richard Dawkins once said, "The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference." Dr. Dawkins is quite right if everything we see around us developed by natural phenomena and chance. Their worldview is grounded in ‘naturalism’, meaning that they believe everything can be understood through science and empirical evidence. Yes, most of what we see around us can be described by science—be it biology, chemistry, physics, and so on. The world, the universe, and our Earth are orderly and follow mathematical equations extraordinarily well in many cases.

Dawkins even stated in his book The Blind Watchmaker that:

“Biology is the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose."[2]

As an example, the universe is orderly, and we observe this in planetary motion. The Ancient Babylonians were among the first to observe and describe celestial events as far back as 1800 BCE. In the 17th century, Johannes Kepler developed the laws of planetary motion, which are still relevant today and used for orbital mechanics and predicting planetary positions. We base our calendar year on the Earth’s orbit around the Sun. Mathematics and information allow us to predict future events (e.g., comets, solar eclipses, meteor showers, etc.) and go back in history to infer historical dates based on astronomical events. All of this wonderful science has been possible even though these planets have been in motion like this since the beginning of our solar system before humans were ever in the picture.

Farmland with circular pivot irrigation – public domain

So, where did this information and mathematics that describe our well-ordered universe come from? Or maybe a better question is: did we invent mathematics or did we discover it? It seems odd that such a powerful origin of the universe, with no intelligence behind it, would expand in all directions simultaneously and yet have such orderly physics that follow precise mathematics.

From experience, when we see something in nature that is man-made (e.g., circular pivot irrigation plots), we can distinguish it right away, especially if the information it conveys is clear intelligent origin rather than mere chance. Using deductive reasoning we can infer that information, then comes from some intelligent source. Taking what we see in nature and our reasoning one step further, we can investigate the Kalam Cosmological Argument[3].

The Kalam argument is as follows:

·         Premise One: Everything that begins to exist has a cause.

·         Premise Two: The universe began to exist.

·         Conclusion: Therefore, the universe has a cause.

Premise One seems to be true when we consider common experiences (e.g., things do not appear out of nowhere or from nothing, not even in quantum mechanics). The universe had to have a beginning, otherwise we would face a never-ending chain of events that would never arrive at what we would call ‘today’. The idea that if every cause requires another cause, we could never reach a starting point. If every event needs a prior cause, we'd be stuck in an endless loop, unable to explain the existence of anything currently. An interesting thought experiment for this is ‘Hilbert’s Hotel,’ for which plenty of resources can be found on the internet. So, if this is true, then Premise One is valid.

Premise Two is also a widely accepted scientific explanation for the origin of the universe—the Big Bang. There is a substantial amount of data to support it, such as the Second Law of Thermodynamics (energy moves from order to disorder: over time, everything must cool down to room temperature, like a hot cup of coffee). If the universe were eternal and static, it would have reached thermal equilibrium by now, but it has not. The redshift in stars indicates that the universe is expanding and accelerating, which suggests it has not run out of energy from the initial Big Bang.

Hubble Cosmological Red Shift - NASA

Logically, if both Premise One and Premise Two are true, then the conclusion must also be true: the universe had a cause. If all time, space, and matter began at this point, then, as Dr. William Lane Craig explains, the cause must be at least timeless, immaterial, and uncaused. We must then consider what this potential cause could be. Could we be an existence inside a brain (e.g., Boltzmann’s Brain Paradox), live in a computer program similar to the movie The Matrix, or perhaps exist because of an uncaused, all-powerful, timeless, spaceless, intelligent, all-knowing, and personal being that created all we see? What seems more reasonable to you?

[1] Richard Dawkins, River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life (New York: Basic Books, 1995), 133.

[2] Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design (New York: W.W. Norton, 1996), 1.

[3] William Lane Craig, The Kalām Cosmological Argument (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock Publishers, 1979).