I keep telling myself that I’ve said all I needed to say in my first two nonfiction books (Divine Evolution and Counterargument for God) but then I realize that the issue still hasn’t been resolved and so the debate isn’t over. It’s never going to be over, but that doesn’t mean I’ll be writing nonfiction books and articles rehashing the same points, over and over. When the spirit moves me (literally) I can’t let it go. I think there’s a third book in the works that will be titled God or Good Luck? Whether or not you understand that fact, those are really your only two choices.
Nobel Laureate Werner Heisenberg famously made the most honest and truthful statement about atheism I’ve ever read: “The first gulp from the glass of natural sciences will turn you into an atheist, but God is waiting for you at the bottom of the glass.”
What does that mean? It’s actually pretty simple. I can speak from experience, because it happened to me. I had graduated from a “Christian” high school that provided a quality education that was careful not to conflict with any biblical teachings. As a result, the first time I ever heard the term “The Big Bang” to describe the origin of the universe was in college. I had not been taught that science believed humans and apes shared a common primate ancestor and had “evolved” from more primitive species as an indisputable fact…it was merely what some biologists believed. I had been taught from the perspective of Young Earth Creationism, and so college became a complete culture shock when I found out “science” agreed with virtual unanimity that the universe was billions, not thousands of years old. My childish faith in God immediately evaporated into the same void that preceded the Big Bang and the origin of our universe, gone forever.
All of this has been explained in one of my two books on the subject, so I won’t beat the issue of our existential questions to death. I suppose it is important to admit that I never really became an atheist; I simply stopped believing what I had been taught by my religion. Interesting little trivia tidbit: ironically, the band I saw playing in a bar called Tyrone’s on my very first night in Athens to attend the University of Georgia later wrote a famous song called “Losing My Religion.” And yes, that was me in the corner…
Simply stated, during my first few days of college I was taught that everything I had been led to believe as a child in regard to our existential questions wasn’t true. However, my interest was not in natural science but computer science, and my goal was to become a professional software developer. Yet I never actually became an atheist in the sense of a formal declaration such as “There is no God!” I simply stopped going to church unless I went home to visit my mother and went with her.
The closest I ever came was something I now describe as apathetic agnosticism, which was for me a form of materialism that wasn’t too strict because I didn’t necessarily believe that God existed, but I remained convinced that ghosts are real (I grew up in Savannah, GA, allegedly one of the most haunted cities in America, and I can assure you after many personal experiences that ghosts absolutely exist, without a doubt.) I hadn’t experienced God, though, and I’d had that first big gulp from the glass of natural sciences. I believed in the Big Bang when I was taught to believe it had happened in college, just as I had believed in Young Earth Creationism as a child. I’ll never forget the exchange I had with my professor as he described the Big Bang as an incredibly rapid expansion of matter condensed into a point smaller than the tip of a pencil and from something that small, everything in our current universe eventually came to exist. For the record, the concept of literal nothingness is virtually impossible to conceive, because when our concept of “nothing” is quite inadequate. When humans say “nothing” we usually mean nothing we can see, touch, or feel. We don’t think of the word in the literal sense, as meaning no thing. Not even an atom, which is still something, even though we can’t touch or feel individual atoms–nor can we even see one without an electron microscope. Admittedly, it’s a very difficult concept to grasp.
Eventually logic and common sense caught up with me as I caught up on the contemporary knowledge-base regarding existential science. Most importantly, the presence of God solves all our sticky probability issues, or improbability problems, if you prefer.
The simple fact that our universe has not always existed actually causes huge, ultimately even unsurmountable problems for an atheistic worldview because if the universe had an origin, life must also have had an origin, and we must seriously consider what the physicists have said about the probability of our “anthropic” universe being created from virtually nothing and synthetic chemists have said about the probability of creating life out of some primordial, prebiotic soup.
Without going into all the gory details (that will require writing another book with a title like God or Good Luck? to do properly), for now you can either trust me on this, or do your own research. Simply look into the work of Sir Martin Rees and Roger Penrose regarding the probability that our (allegedly) fine-tuned universe might have come into existence as the result of random chance, and listen to this two-hour lecture at the link below by synthetic chemist Dr. James Tour on the origin of life.
Dr. Tour sort of apologizes for the nature of the material covered because it is very detailed and technical, but I found it fascinating and have watched it several times, without necessarily coming to a full and clear understanding of what purpose a lipid actually serves, but I do trust Dr. Tour knows and would tell me if I asked.
The bottom line is pretty simple. We only have two real choices as to what we might believe about the origin of the universe and the animation of matter: these two singular events either happened by accident or on purpose. Any attempt to create some sort of a contrived third option such as planned accident is an oxymoron and the ultimate exercise in futility born of a desperation to argue against elementary logic.
Not every dichotomy is a false one, however.
With rare exception we are born either male or female (hermaphrodites are the only true exception) but to the best of my knowledge a hermaphrodite may impregnate a woman OR become pregnant and give birth to a child, but not both. I’ve never heard of a human being born with fully functional male and female sex organs, and people born as biological males will never give birth could never give birth unless that happened. So for the vast majority of people, the concept of fluid gender identity is not a biological condition, but a psychological delusion. But before I take off on a tangent, instead I’ll bring this article to a conclusion.
Before I ever heard of Dr. William Lane Craig and the Kalam cosmological argument, I had reached that same conclusion by applying my own logic and reason to the problem of our existential questions. Ironically, it was an atheist on social media who first accused me of stealing Dr. Craig’s argument before I’d ever heard it.
The universe had a beginning. The hypothesis has now become a solid scientific theory. Strangely enough, the Bible made the exact same claim in ancient text written thousands of years ago. It would have been much easier to believe that the earth and universe had always existed, like Bertrand Russell famously argued in his essay Why I Am Not a Christian.
Unfortunately, Russell spoke on the subject long before redshift and CMB evidence for the Big Bang singularity became universally accepted, and the steady state (eternal) universe hypothesis completely discredited. Physicist Fred Hoyle was so skeptical about Big Bang cosmology that he actually invented the term “the Big Bang” in jest, mocking the idea. Hoyle later offered a brilliant apology of sorts when he said this:
“Some super-calculating intellect must have designed the properties of the carbon atom; otherwise the chance of my finding such an atom through the blind forces of nature would be utterly minuscule. A common sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a super-intellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as with chemistry and biology, and that there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature. The numbers one calculates from the facts seem to me so overwhelming as to put this conclusion almost beyond question.”
Hoyle, Fred, “The Universe: Past and Present Reflections.” Engineering and Science, November, 1981. pp. 8–12.
And where does that leave us? Right back where we started in our childhood, at Genesis 1:1 which reads: “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” Using Kalam’s terminology, God is the First Cause.
The Bible even tells us how the Big Bang occurred: God spoke, and said, “Let there be light.” And son-of-a-gun, what do you know?
There was light.
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