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Arno Penzias, Nobel laureate in physics who is credited with one of the foundational discoveries for the Big Bang theory said this:
“The best data we have (concerning the Big Bang) are exactly what I would have predicted had I had nothing to go on but the five books of Moses, the Psalms and the Bible as a whole.”
His colleague, Robert Wilson said:
“Certainly there was something that set it all off. I can’t think of a better theory of the origin of the universe to match with Genesis.”
Another gentleman, George Smoot, who taught at UC Berkeley said:
“There is no doubt that a parallel exists between the big bang as an event and the Christian notion of creation from nothing.”
So, if the universe had a beginning, then it must have had a Beginner. The evidence leads us to one of the following two options: No one created something out of nothing (the atheistic view); or Someone created something out of nothing (the theistic view).
Now, this all leads to the question: Which of these two options are more reasonable?
If we consider the theistic point of view, we have a miracle, indeed. But we also have a miracle worker. But, according to the atheistic view, there is a miracle but no miracle worker. That is absurd. To say that things can pop into existence out of nothing by nothing is completely absurd.
In fact, you’d have to give up all science if you were to hold to this, since scientists try to discover what particular cause caused particular effects. If you’re going to say that the law of causality does not apply to the universe, then why does it apply to everything within the universe?
Now, the law of causality does not say that EVERYTHING has a cause. It says that EVERYTHING THAT COMES TO BE has a cause. If there is an eternal being out there, then obviously that Being doesn’t need a cause. And consider this: there is not a person among us who is worried that while they are away from home, a hippopotamus spontaneously materializes in your living room and defecates one your carpet. We simply don’t worry about such a thing because we all know that things don’t pop into existence without a cause.
It’s in this context that I often ask atheists:
If there is no God, then why is there something rather than nothing at all?
They will often respond with something like, “Well, the universe has always been here, therefore it doesn’t need a cause.” I then point out that the scientific evidence shows that the universe has actually NOT always been here. Therefore, it needs a cause outside of itself. It seems to me that if space, matter, and time had a beginning, the cause must be spaceless, timeless and immaterial. (By the way, if someone is timeless, they are without a beginning. They are eternal, so they don’t have a cause). There has to be an “uncaused first cause”. It’s either the universe or something outside the universe. All of the evidence points to the universe having a beginning, so the cause must be outside of the universe.
Then there’s the design argument.
Not only did the universe explode into being out of nothing, it turns out that it did so with extreme precision. This is called the Fine Tuning of the Universe or Anthropic Principle. The initial conditions of the universe were highly fine-tuned. Regarding this, Stephen Hawking said:
“If the expansion rate of the universe was different by one part in a thousand, million, million a second after the big bang, the universe would have collapsed back on itself or never developed galaxies.”
In other words, if you change the expansion rate that infinitesimal amount from the very beginning, we wouldn’t be here. That’s how precisely fine-tuned the universe is. Notice these are initial conditions. Somebody put these conditions in at the beginning. This is not some kind of evolutionary thing that later on these conditions developed.
The same thing is true regarding the gravitational force.
If the gravitational force were altered by more than one part in 1040, then we wouldn’t be here. That’s one part in 10 duodecillions!
As an illustration, take a tape measure and stretch it across the entire known universe (which, if you didn’t know, is a very, very long way!). Set the gravitational force at a particular inch mark on the tape measure. If you were to move the strength of the gravitational force one inch in either direction across that scale, we wouldn’t be here.
Now, there are only three possibilities for this kind of fine-tuning: 1) It happened by chance; 2) It happened by physical necessity; or 3) It happened by design.
I don’t have enough faith to say that it happened by chance.