Ok ...
What the universe says about the qualities of God
In the early 1900s, the dominant view of cosmology was that the universe always existed in a state similar to that in which it is today. That suited naturalists just fine -- it gave a virtually infinite amount of time for the origins of life and evolution.
Of course, Einstein, Hubble, and others discovered an inconvenient truth: The universe has been expanding. Observations combined with general relativity made us conclude that the universe started as a singularity, the Big Bang.
Through relativity we also conclude that time and space dimensions themselves came into existence at the very same moment as all the matter and energy in the universe. String theory adds (if true) that there may be about 6 more spacial dimensions tightly curled up around the three we are familiar with. These also would have come into existence at the Big Bang.
Of course given the law of cause and effect, it is irrational to believe the Big Bang could have happened unless something caused it. The question is *what* caused it -- a major area where atheistic and Christian worldviews diverge.
If there is no God, then some kind of "stuff" would have had to cause it. Of course, even the wildest theoretical physics would have a hard time explaining something like that.
If there is a God, then obviously He must be the cause of the Big Bang. Furthermore, any God who can truly be the omnipotent God of all creation would have had responsibility for creating the universe. This says that
God must have the property of existing completely outside of all space and time dimensions and must have the ability to create them at will.
At this point, one would be reasonable in saying "we simply don't know", and it would simply be a preference as to where to put your faith. After all, it doesn't really make sense that
anything should exist, whether it be a God or some "quantum foam" or whatever. But let's continue to build on both the atheistic and theistic foundations and see what happens.
We also see in cosmology, and this is pretty much universally agreed upon, that the universe is incredibly fine-tuned. If any of the fundamental constants were different by the tiniest margin, no life of any kind would be possible at any time or place in the universe. All these constants (gravitation constant, electromagnetic constant, strong and weak nuclear forces, the amount of mass of the universe, and other things) control the expansion rate of the universe. If the expansion rate had been faster by one part in ten to the 50th, metal-rich stars would not have formed. Slower by one part in ten to the 50th, and the universe would have collapsed on itself. Either way, no life of any kind is possible.
This fine-tuning was compounded in the late 1990s when the Boomerang experiment in Antarctica showed that the space energy density had to be fine tuned to one part in ten to the 120th for there to be any life. (Ok, to be honest, I don't fully understand all that as I'm not a physicist, so be gentle with the questions.
) This number does not come from a creationist source, but
The Astrophysical Journal. (I don't have a link handy, but I know it's on the web and could possibly find it again.)
The greatest instrument man has devised has an accuracy of somewhere around one in ten to the 25th. And that is only a measurement instrument, not a creation tool. This gives us another important attribute of God: He is at least (120 - 25 =) 95
orders of magnitude more precise than our best scientists and engineers!
In my next post I will show that the Bible says that about God. In the meantime, here is a chance to put YOUR religious worldview to the test. Is YOUR God able to create space and time dimensions at will, and is He intelligent, creative, and precise beyond our wildest ability to imagine?
