Divinity of Doubt

THERE ARE TWO PRINCIPAL ARGUMENTS that are made to support the conclusion that a God created the universe. One, the teleological argument or argument of intelligent design in the universe,¹ is impressive at first sight, and most Christian theologians rely on it as their main argument for the existence of God. But I think we shall see that this argument cannot withstand scrutiny because it falls of its own weight. The other argument is the cosmological, or first cause argument, which is strong and seems very difficult to get around.²

With respect to the argument of intelligent design,³ it is maintained that the predictability of spatial occurrences (e.g., eclipses of the sun by the moon many years in advance can be predicted down to the second), ^h and, most importantly, the operation of the universe in perfect order and synchrony make it obvious that an intelligent supernatural being must have created it,⁴ and indeed, God’s transcendent intelligence is a central, irreplaceable tenet not just of the intelligent design theory but also of Christianity’s entire conception of God. Let me quote to you from the book I Don’t Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist, by Christian theologians Norman L. Geisler and Frank Turek, which argues that the Christian God created the universe:

It was William Paley [English theologian, 1743–1805] who made the argument famous that every watch requires a watchmaker. Imagine you are walking along in the woods and you find a diamond-studded Rolex on the ground. What do you conclude is the cause of that watch: the wind and the rain? erosion? some combination of natural forces? Of course not. There’s absolutely no question in your mind that some intelligent being made that watch, and that some unfortunate individual must have accidentally dropped it there. Scientists are now finding that the universe in which we live is like that diamond-studded Rolex, except the universe is even more precisely designed than the watch. In fact, the universe is specifically tweaked to enable life on earth—a planet with scores of improbable and interdependent life-supporting conditions that make it a tiny oasis in a vast hostile universe.

Geisler and Turek proceed to give many examples of how extremely finely tuned the universe is “to support human life here on earth.” For the first and only time in the faith-versus-science arguments about the existence of God, the creationists, who constantly forswear scientific explanations for what they maintain is God’s work, suddenly find that they can’t get their fill of science, feeding lustily from its lactating breasts. For instance, Geisler and Turek point out, “On earth, oxygen comprises twenty-one percent of the atmosphere. . . . If oxygen were twenty-five percent, fires would erupt spontaneously. If it were fifteen percent, humans would suffocate.” Another example they give is “the gravitational interaction that the earth has with the moon. If the interaction were greater than it currently is, tidal effects on the oceans, atmosphere, and rotational period would be too severe. If it were less, orbital changes would cause climatic instabilities. In either event, life would be impossible.”

Yet another example of the “constants” we first met in our earlier discussion of Richard Dawkins: “If the carbon dioxide level were higher than it is now, a runaway greenhouse effect would develop (we’d all burn up). If the level were lower than it is now, plants would not be able to maintain sufficient photosynthesis (we’d all suffocate).” The authors also point out that, although the strength of gravity is “terrifying, it couldn’t be any different for life to exist here on earth. If the gravitational force were altered by 0.00000000000000000000000000000000000001 percent, our sun would not exist, and therefore, neither would we. Talk about precision.”

In addition to the four constants already mentioned, they then provide ten more:

(1) If the centrifugal force of planetary movements did not precisely balance the gravitational forces, nothing could be held in orbit around the sun. (2) If the universe had expanded at a rate one-millionth more slowly than it did, expansion would have stopped, and the universe would have collapsed on itself before any stars had formed. If it had expanded faster, then no galaxies would have formed. (3) Any of the laws of physics can be described as a function of the velocity of light, now defined to be 299,792,458 meters per second [186,000 miles per second]. Even a slight variation in the speed of light would alter the other constants and preclude the possibility of life on earth. (4) If water vapors in the atmosphere were greater than they are now, a runaway greenhouse effect would cause temperatures to rise too high for human life; if they were less, an insufficient greenhouse effect would make the earth too cold to support human life. (5) If Jupiter were not in its current orbit, the earth would be bombarded with space material. Jupiter’s gravitational field acts as a cosmic vacuum cleaner, attracting asteroids and comets that might otherwise strike earth. (6) If the thickness of the earth’s crust were greater, too much oxygen would be transferred to the crust to support life. If it were thinner, volcanic and tectonic activity would make life impossible. (7) If the rotation of the earth took longer than twenty-four hours, temperature differences would be too great between night and day. If the rotation period were shorter, atmospheric wind velocities would be too great. (8) The twenty-three degree axil tilt of the earth is just right. If the tilt were altered slightly, surface temperatures would be too extreme on earth. (9) If the atmospheric discharge (lightning) rate were greater, there would be too much fire destruction; if it were less, there would be too little nitrogen fixing in the soil. (10) If there were more seismic activity, much more life would be lost; if there were less, nutrients on the ocean floors and in river runoff would not be cycled back to the continents through tectonic uplift. Yes, even earthquakes are necessary to sustain life as we know it!” (Norman L. Geisler and Frank Turek, I Don’t Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist [Wheaton, Illinois: Crossway Books, 2004], 95–96, 105–106)

Let me tell you why, although I haven’t the slightest idea why the universe proceeds with such incredible precision (maybe it’s due to God, or maybe it’s due to laws of nature and physics such as laws of motion, gravitation, thermodynamics, centrifugal and centripetal forces, and other laws most humans know nothing about),ⁱ the intelligent design theory, as articulated by Christianity, is self-defeating on its very face. How modern Christianity can hang its supposedly intellectual, logical, and reasoned hat on it is beyond me, and it has nothing to do with the fact that it is not a scientifically testable hypothesis. It has everything to do with common sense.

In the first place, if God, per Christianity, is all-powerful and all-intelligent and can bring about whatever he pleases, why in the world would he create this incredibly complex system of 122 constants to provide life on earth? You mean that he couldn’t create an earth that was self-sustaining and relied on none of these things? That to do so would be beyond his power? That he’s not, after all, all-powerful and without limitation? Remember, supposedly he can do anything and nothing is beyond him. (“Nothing is impossible with God” [Luke 1:37].) The fact that there are 122 constants out there (any of which, if deviated from in the smallest way, would cause our life on earth to cease) is, to me, very powerful circumstantial evidence not that it was God who created all these constants, but of just the opposite, that not one of them has anything to do with the Christian God of people’s imagination.

But perhaps an even more important point that negates intelligent design is the watch example itself that Christians give to support their theory, an example they would be wise to never give. Every single component of the watch that the watchmaker puts into the watch is necessary to the operation of the watch, whereas 99.99999 (and many more nines) percent of the universe has nothing to do with life on earth. There are hundreds of billions of galaxies other than our Milky Way which collectively contain trillions of stars millions of light years away (a light year is close to 5.9 trillion miles), and the Christian authors Geisler and Turek say that even in the earth’s galaxy of the Milky Way alone, “There are one-hundred billion stars” (actually, 200 billion). Obviously, these billions and billions of stars in our Milky Way are not all necessary to life on earth. Even if they were, are we to believe that the trillions of stars in galaxies outside our Milky Way are also necessary to life on earth, which is not even a small anthill in the universe?

Phillip E. Johnson, professor of law at the University of California at Berkeley, is one of the nation’s leading intelligent design creationists. He writes in his book Darwin on Trial, “A creationist is simply a person who believes that the world (and especially mankind) was designed, and exists for a purpose.” Let’s stop to think about this for a moment. Though science does not know, it has found no evidence that intelligent life exists anywhere in the universe other than on planet earth. But what they have found over and over again are enormous celestial bodies like Saturn (nearly one hundred times larger than earth—some stars are thousands of times larger than earth) that are utterly barren, cold masses of matter floating in space, 99.99999 percent and more of which are completely outside (I repeat, outside) the earth’s galaxy, the Milky Way.

I would ask Johnson and all creationists, if God is intelligent, as the Christian God is supposed to be, what conceivable reason could he possibly have had for creating prodigiously large, dead bodies floating in space throughout eternity? The answer has to be “no reason.” An intelligent being, by definition, would not create anything, particularly something of incomprehensible size, much less hundreds of billions of them, that are lifeless and serve no purpose (including, obviously, no earthly purpose), their arid surfaces being mere wastelands of rocks and dirt. If God created all of this dead matter in the universe, is there something seriously wrong with him? He’s certainly not the “intelligent” designer whom creationists trumpet as their God. And if he didn’t, doesn’t that necessarily mean that even if there is a God, he did not create the universe?

And if Christianity wants to get more ludicrous than it already is and say that the trillions of stars and planets in the universe are necessary to life on earth, as indicated, since God is all-powerful and can do whatever he pleases, just as he would not make life on earth dependent on 122 constants, why would he make life on earth dependent on trillions of celestial bodies in the universe? (By analogy, since we know the earth, at only 8,000 miles in diameter, is but a speck in the universe, bearing the proportion of a tiny drop of water to the ocean, would God create the entire ocean to sustain this drop of water?) Why not just make earth dependent on nothing? If he could create the universe, as Christians believe, by the wave of a hand or the utterance of a command, certainly he would have done this. Surely they don’t want us to believe that God could not figure out a way to sustain life on earth without the 122 constants and without trillions of stars, trillions of miles away to support it. Remember, as I pointed out earlier in this book, Christianity is bound by its own concept of intelligence, reason, and common sense in answering this question.

FOR ME, THE ARGUMENT THAT IS THE STRONGEST for the existence of God, one that for centuries was the principal argument of Christian theologians but, though still firmly embraced, takes a back seat to intelligent design among most Christian thinkers today, is the cosmological, or first cause argument. It was first set forth by the great Dominican teacher and Catholic theologian Thomas Aquinas in four very short (a total of just four pages) “articles” in volume one of his erudite and equally abstruse two-volume classic Summa Theologica (1267–1273). (His third and final volume was aborted by his death in 1274.) That argument starts with a premise that can’t be disputed—that every effect (i.e., everything in existence, be it a book, a loaf of bread, a chair, a peach on a tree, a car, a human, a teaspoon, a stick on the street) has a cause. A “thing,” Aquinas said, “cannot be without being caused.” Hence, cause and effect. In other words, we know from our human experience that nothing in existence can give itself existence because if it did, then it would have to have preceded itself, an impossibility.

This book you are reading was printed and bound, as we all know, at a factory on machines that were themselves manufactured elsewhere. The galleys from which the book was published got to the factory by some mode of transportation that itself was manufactured. The galleys resulted from a manuscript I submitted which was typed by my secretary from handwritten pages of mine I gave her. The pencil and paper I used to write the manuscript came from manufacturing companies whose machines (which had their own chain of causation) used the raw material of graphite and wood, which likewise had their own chain of causation, to make the paper and pencil. And so forth.

But although everything has to be caused by something else, and that thing, in turn, by something else, this regression in the chain of causation logically cannot extend backward into infinity. (Although such a “logical” conclusion would not seem to admit of empirical proof.) At some point the chain of causation goes back to something that was not dependent for its existence on something else but is independent , “a being uncaused,” Aquinas said. An uncaused cause, if you will. This independent thing is the uncaused first cause, the cause that set everything else in motion.^j And Christians as well as great numbers of non-Christians believe this first cause is God (“the first cause of all things,” Aquinas says), the only being who could create the first particle or organism and/or the universe because only God, Aquinas says later in his volume one, “brings things into being from nothing.” To atheists who reject the first cause hypothesis, Catholic philosopher William Lane Craig responds, “The idea that anything, especially the whole universe, could pop into existence uncaused is repugnant to most thinkers.... A proponent of such a theory, if he is an atheist, must believe that the matter of the universe came from nothing and by nothing. Now this is a pretty hard pill to swallow.” What cannot be denied is that the first cause theory, which may not automatically dispose of the issue, certainly has logic on its side. How does one get around it?

The easy way, of course, is to say that although the first cause argument necessarily implies a beginning, that is, a first moment in time, maybe the universe never had a beginning. It just is. Therefore, there is no need for a creator. But most find this premise just as difficult to believe as the notion of God creating the universe, and it has few adherents among the scientific and intellectual gentry.⁵ One adherent was Aristotle. Another was the English poet and philosopher Percy Bysshe Shelley, who felt it was “easier to suppose that the universe has existed from all eternity, than to conceive an external being capable of creating it.”

The way that science gets around the first cause argument is with the “big bang” theory, which has reached the level of accepted science, the vast majority of today’s scientists subscribing to it. The theory, first enunciated in 1927 (the term “big bang,” and what is believed to be the supporting evidence for it, came years later) by French physicist Georges Lemaitre, who, ironically, was a Roman Catholic priest, holds that the universe exploded into existence^k in a flash of energy, mass, and light from a single point in space and time about 13.7 billion years ago, and has been expanding outward ever since. In this theory of the origin of the universe, God, if there is a God (many scientists are atheists), had nothing to do with it.

But apart from science, I have problems with the big bang theory. For one thing, I simply cannot even begin to imagine how at some tiny point in time and space, some microorganism, or what have you, self-exploded and created the universe, though I obviously am in no position to challenge this theory. (Indeed, I find many of the claims of science in the area of evolution and the universe, e.g., bacteria into Mozart, and this claim that the universe exploded from something smaller than the point of a needle, just as improbable as the most fanciful of religious beliefs I poke fun at in this book.) It also makes no sense to me that a spontaneous, prodigious explosion of matter into space, which could be expected to produce chaos, could somehow result in a universe of perfect harmony and order. (Eighteenth-century Irish satirist Jonathan Swift, long before the big bang theory, said, “That the universe was formed by a fortuitous concourse of atoms, I will no more believe than that the accidental jumbling of the alphabet would fall into a most ingenious treatise on philosophy.”)

But when we get out of the realm of science and apply the simplest of logic to this same scientific phenomenon, I am in a position to warrant being heard. And my biggest problem by far with the big bang theory, at least insofar as it purportedly invalidates the first cause, God-created-the-universe theory, is the following. When I went to the library to take out a few books on the big bang theory, it wasn’t to read them cover to cover since, as I indicated, I couldn’t understand them, but to search for one thing and one thing only: What was it that exploded into the universe?

Remarkably, one 400-page book on the big bang actually managed, in the author’s terrible incompetence, to avoid even mentioning this issue. None of them paid more than a very passing reference to it. But from books and articles, here is what a few of the writers say. One said it was “subatomic particles” that exploded in a zillionth of a second into the universe. Another said it was “packets of energy.” Another defined the energy as “negative energy in the form of radiation and exotic fields.” Another said it was “a primeval atom.” Yet another said it was “a swirling dust of mathematical points.” I have no idea what any of these things are. But I do know that whatever they are, they are something, and that is the big problem. It would seem that no one can actually believe that the big bang exploded out of nothing, completely empty space, which would be an impossibility.^l It had to have exploded out of something. And no matter how small or subatomic that something is, the question is, Who put that something there? If it wasn’t the creator, then how did it come into existence? Remember, nothing can create itself because if it did, it would precede itself, an impossibility.

Of course, this question presupposes that God would have had to be created. That he wasn’t always there and had a beginning. When people are trying to find out something in dispute, or the origins of something hazy, we all know the old expression, “Let’s go to the source” or “the horse’s mouth.” In the literature I have read in which theologians, over many centuries, have grappled with this issue, I don’t personally recall any of them—not even Aquinas in his Summa Theologica , in which he quoted Aristotle, Plato, St. Augustine, Gilson, Pegis, and others on the matter—ever specifically doing that on this precise point. And when we do that here, we see that Jesus (God, under the doctrine of the holy trinity) said, “I am the one who is, who always was, and who is still to come, the Almighty One” (Revelation 1:8). See also John 17:5, where Jesus said, “And now, Father, bring me into the glory we shared before the world began.” Of course, all of this presupposes that there was a man named Jesus, and that he knew whereof he spoke. But since most scholars believe Jesus did exist (see later discussion), and hundreds of millions of people have believed and still do that he was, and is, the Son of God, don’t you think it only makes sense that the voice of Jesus saying that he wasn’t created but “always was” be heard on this issue?

About the question, if God created the universe, then who created God?, I truthfully am somewhat surprised that great minds can so quickly and blithely dismiss the first cause theory by this one question. But many of them have. For instance, British philosopher Bertrand Russell, one of the most celebrated thinkers and logicians of our time, dismissed the first cause argument thusly: “Who made God? That very simple question showed me the fallacy in the argument of the first cause. If everything must have a cause, then God must have a cause.” And leading British theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking says that if the universe needs a creator, then “who created Him?” (Richard Dawkins, rejecting the intelligent design theory of the universe, asks, “Who designed the designer?” Christopher Hitchens, calling it an “unanswerable question,” asks, “Who created the creator?”)⁶

Robert Ingersoll (1833–1899), widely considered to be one of the greatest thinkers and logicians of the nineteenth century, did so in seeking to counter the first cause argument for God. Although I don’t agree with his premise that every cause must have itself been an earlier effect because this premise, by implication, precludes the existence of God, which Ingersoll was in no position to do, at least he wasn’t flippant like those mentioned, and made a yeoman’s effort to address himself to this extraordinarily mystifying issue. Ingersoll wrote, “Every cause must produce an effect, because until it does produce an effect, it is not a cause. Therefore, in the nature of things, there cannot be a last cause, for the reason that a so-called last cause would necessarily become a cause. The converse of these propositions must be true. Every effect must have had a cause, and every cause must have been an effect. Therefore, there could have been no first cause. A first cause is just as impossible as a last effect.”

For my own part, somehow I just have the sense, a sense I immediately had the very first time I heard this question being asked years ago, that the question, Who created God? is not necessarily a valid question. Yet remarkably, I’d say astonishingly in view of its great importance, in all of Christian literature down through the many years, I know of no thoroughly persuasive and satisfying response (assuming such a response is even possible) to this question. Instead, what one normally gets are the equally flippant and conclusionary words to the effect that God, being supernatural and all-powerful, didn’t need to be created. That he always was, and the law of cause and effect doesn’t apply to him.

I have said from time to time that if a person cannot really explain something, it’s probably because he doesn’t really and truly understand it himself, although I realize some people are simply hopelessly bereft of any communication skills. I’m going to attempt to explain why I feel this question may possibly not be a valid one. I can tell you in advance that my effort definitely falls short. The reason is either that, although I may be right (by chance), I don’t have a sufficient grasp of what I’m saying to adequately explain it, or that I’m wrong and I’m trying to make sense of an erroneous thought.

Here’s my effort: If we go back and back and back to the point where we have a single particle of matter (or dust or energy) in the otherwise nothingness of space, and if atheists say that we know no God created that particle (and/or the universe) because if he did, who created him, then I ask them who, in their mind, did create the first particle? If they agree, as it would seem everyone must, that everything in existence that can be seen by the human eye or scientifically measured was created or induced by something else, they cannot exclude from this immutable principle of existence the first particle. If they want to do so, what is their reasoning? I can’t imagine what it would be. And if their position is “Yes, someone or something must have created this first particle,” my response is that this acknowledgment of theirs precludes them from asking their follow-up question (then who created God?) because whoever (or whatever) created the particle has demonstrated that we cannot ask a question of him (or it) that could logically be asked of every other human, entity, or thing that ever existed. The reason is that inasmuch as what he (or it) has done in creating the particle out of nothing—something that no person, entity, or thing we know of in history has done or ever will do—is transcendent and otherworldly, it thereby exempts him (or it)^m and makes him (or it) immune from the follow-up question, Then who created God?

To state it in another way: To say that the first cause theory is invalid because of the rhetorical question, Who created God? (i.e., no one; therefore God himself must not exist), is to simultaneously say that even before we get to the last effect (the particle), we have in effect necessarily rejected the law of causation that led back to the last effect. This is so because if we accept the law of causation that regressed to the last effect, how do we conclude that that effect had no cause? Because we cannot logically do that, are we not forced to conclude that the first corporeal thing that ever existed (e.g., the particle) was created by God or some other entity? In arguing that God does not exist because no one created him (if someone did, who created that someone, and so on ad infinitum?), are we not thereby rejecting God or some other supernatural first cause by paradoxically also rejecting the very principle that we are forced to admit does exist, the provable law of cause and effect?

Turning to a more nonexplanatory level of analysis, there are only two options here—that there was or was not a first cause. And although it is almost impossibly hard for the human mind to imagine an uncaused first cause, it is not too much more so than to imagine that there was no such first cause. That, as alluded to earlier, there is no point where cause and effect ceased, the process extending backward without end. If one rejects this latter possibility, is he not then forced to acknowledge the only option remaining—that there was an uncaused first cause? And this can only mean, it would seem, God or some other entity.

Also, if, indeed, there is a God, no one perceives him to be corporeal (physical, measurable), as all objects in the chain that regressed back to the first particle were. Therefore, it does not automatically follow that God, being noncorporeal, would have had to come into existence in the same way that all corporeal objects leading backward to the particle were, that same way being the utilization of an antecedent cause. What I am saying is that maybe only things that are corporeal need to be created or caused. God could be an effect without a cause in a nonmaterial world about which man knows nothing.

Yet another way of reaching the same conclusion is that if we conceive of a God (although that would not mean, in the ontological reasoning of the theologian Anselm and French philosopher and physicist René Descartes, that he must exist—since God can be conceived, he must exist—an embarrassing proposition for supposedly great minds), we conceive him to be supernatural, and as such, as the previously mentioned conventional reasoning of theists goes, he is an entity outside the laws of causality,⁷ time, and space and therefore not subject to them. But that begs the question. Meaning what? That he always existed ? Or that he created himself? Or that he is not a form of existence that can be defined, and hence no intelligent question can even be asked about “him”? Or is it ________?