Academics love the reputation of being “objective.” Many fancy themselves wholly logical and “scientific,” and gifted with unadulterated reason. They aren’t any of these, but that doesn’t mean that they don’t try and definitely doesn’t mean that they don’t love the reputation.[1] It was the quest of more than a few philosophers, therefore, to establish some unassailable truth from which they could move forward rationally to establish more truths—An anchor to unassailable truth, so to speak. The one example that almost everyone knows is Decartes’ philosophical foundation, “I think, therefore I am.”[2]
Now, believers conduct a similar exercise. This one, however, begins with the existence of a Creator, a first cause for all that exists.[3]
For this conviction, I could list a host of natural wonders that exhibit what I deem clear evidence of a mind behind the system.[4] Even ancient pagans, who believed in a panoply of gods, saw a singular mind in creation—a unifying principle that ordered everything, including the “gods,” who were bound by space and time and limited in power—a Meta-divine. Here, Sir Isaac Newton’s accredited claim reigns supreme: “In the absence of any other proof, the thumb alone would convince me of God’s existence.”[5]
We could discuss the mathematical near impossibility of an alignment of all the things required to sustain life on our planet. Decades ago the scientific list of “necessities” was small and the math suggested a potential for many such accidental alignments. As the list of necessities has lengthened, however, the mathematical prospects have disappeared. We are not an accident.
We could discuss Pascal’s wager.[6] It might be summarized: If I’m wrong about God, I wasted my life, which in that reality has no meaning. If you’re wrong about God, you wasted your eternity, which in that reality is ultimate meaning. I find this less impacting on belief, than it is threatening or rewarding to a gambler’s sense of self-preservation. It reminds me of the scene in Brendon Frasier’s The Mummy, where Benny, confronted by the Mummy, pulls out a necklace full of religious symbols and starts rattling his way through them, hoping one of the them will do the trick.
In the end, while all these impact my beliefs, the idea that holds deepest sway over me is the consideration of my existence—I think, therefore I am—in space and time in the midst of eternity and infinity. My blue-collar-rearing restates this as the mind-melting perception of time without beginning and space without end.
I can imagine not ceasing to be, but an eternity behind me always boasting a moment before the moment without start short circuits my head.
Just so, I exist in a point in space that is spinning at 1,000 mph on a planet that is circling at 67,000 mph in a solar system churning at 450,000 mph and traveling from its point of origin at 1.3 million mph. From this perch, I could travel at a billion times the speed of light in any direction for a billion years and be no closer to reaching the end of space than when I began. So much for “To infinity and beyond!” You never reach the beyond part.
This has been a soul anchor for me since my teens even before I began reading Christian apologists.[7] If you seriously turn your mind to it, I can hardly imagine any less an outcome than madness or worship.
In my description of my soul anchor, I have been chastened by more scientifically precise friends who insist that I must distinguish time from eternity and space from infinity. Time and space are, they say, defined by physics. So if there is no physical there is no physics. If there is no physics then there is no time and space because they are elements of physics. Time and space, they say, begin and end with creation. Got a headache yet?
Some, like William Lane Craig, have tied my soul anchoring musings on time, space, eternity and infinity into scientifically measurable realities in what is called the The Kalām Cosmological Argument.[8] Here’s the skinny.
1. Whatever begins to exist has a cause. Every aspect of human experience and scientific investigation preaches this fact. For every effect there is a cause. One would be better off believing in magic than denying this. For every chicken there is an egg, for every egg a chicken. Oooooo… this just got real!!!
2. The universe began to exist. Many atheists, of necessity, declared that the universe has always been, that it simply is. The second law of thermodynamics, however, declares that all energy is slowing winding down, which negates an eternal universe.[9] The culminating works of Albert Einstein,[10] Alexander Friedman[11] and George Lemaitre[12] further concluded that the universe is expanding. Edwin Hubble’s contributions measuring “Red shift”[13] in distant light both confirmed the idea of an expanding universe and determined that it sprang into existence at a specific point in time. Arvid Borde, Alan Guth, and Alexander Vilenkin[14] have established that an expanding universe cannot have an eternal past, but must have a point of beginning. Vilenkin has declared “Scientists can no longer hide behind a past-eternal universe; there is no escape; they have to face the problem of a cosmic beginning.”[15] This leads logically to the Kalām theory’s third proposition.
3. Therefore, the universe has a cause. That cause MUST be, however mind-bending to conceive, “uncaused, beginningless, changeless, immaterial, timeless, spaceless, powerful, and personal.”[16]
As with “I think therefore I am,” the absolute necessity of an uncaused cause, whatever the timetable involved, is a soul anchor for the existence of God. Lane began a list of necessities for this uncaused cause, infinite, eternal, immaterial, immutable, self-existing, omnipotent. This book will lengthen the tether and explore yet more attributes, some logical, others revealed in the nature of creation and still others through validated revelations from the biblical Yahweh (i.e. The Creator).
~Andrew D. Sargent, Ph.D.
[1] In their honor, I’m going to put in a crazy amount of footnotes. Only read them if you dare… because they kind of defeat the purpose of a devotional.
[2] “Cogito, ergo sum,” René Descartes, Discourse on the Method, 1637.
[3] Once that is secured, we build upon that conviction, establishing the reasonableness of God as revealed in Scripture.
[4] Romans 1:18-20.
[5] Isaac Newton a treatise on palmistry: d’Arpentigny, Stanislas (1856). “IV: Le pouce” (in French). La science de la main (2nd ed.). Paris, France: Coulon-Pineau. p. 53.
[6] Blaise Pascal, Pensées, 1670.
[7] Apologists are a sorry lot (sorry, I had to pun it) who spend their whole lives defending any given belief system from the assaults of those who reject it.
[8] I mean that he used the same ideas, not, of course, that he borrowed anything from me; William Lane Craig, The Kalām Cosmological Argument (New York: Barnes and Noble Books, 1979); “The First Cause is Uncaused, Beginningless, Changeless, Immaterial, Timeless, Powerful, Personal,” Reasonable Faith with William Lane Craig Podcast (12/20/2010) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YqzqEFw5_1c (6/21/2023).
[9] The Second Law of Thermodynamics: Here is a cool video (no pun intended) of what this means. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mGDJO2M7RBg&t=205s.
[10] In an April 1931 report to the Prussian Academy of Sciences, Einstein finally adopted a model of an expanding universe. Harry Nussbaumer tells the story in “Einstein’s Conversion from His Static to and Expanding Universe,” European Physics Journal—History, 39, 37-62 (2014).
[11] Tom Siegfried tells Alexander Friedman’s story in “A Century Ago, Alexander Friedmann envisioned the universe’s Expansion,” Science News, May 20, 2022.
[12] The American Museum of Natural History gives an excerpt of George Lemaitre’s work in “George Lemaitre, Father of the Big Bang,” (https://www.amnh.org/learn-teach/curriculum-collections/cosmic-horizons-book/georges-lemaitre-big-bang) from Cosmic Horizons: Astronomy at the Cutting Edge, edited by Steven Soter and Neil deGrasse Tyson, a publication of the New Press. © 2000 American Museum of Natural History.
[13] Neta A. Bahcall tells Edwin Hubble’s story in “Hubble’s Law and the Expanding Universe,” PNAS 112 (11) 03/17/2015, (https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1424299112#:~:text=In%20one%20of%20the%20most,our% 20understanding%20of%20the%20cosmos.)
[14] Arvind Borde, Alan Guth, Alexander Vilenkin created the Borde-Guth-Vilenkin Theorem. Alexander Vilenkin, “The Beginning of the Universe” in The Kalam Cosmological Argument: Volume 2, Bloomsbury, 2017, pp. 150–158; Alexander Vilenkin, “Arrows of time and the beginning of the universe”. Physical Review D. 88 (4): 043516.
[15] Alexander Vilenkin, Many Worlds in One (New York: Hill and Wang, 2006), pg. 176.
[16] William Lane Craig, Reasonable Faith Podcast, 12/20/2010. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YqzqEFw5_1c&t=748s (9/27/2023).
