Episode Transcript
Are you ready to discover if science actually points to God? Today, we're unpacking the Calem cosmological argument, one of the most powerful reasons to believe the universe had a beginning and a creator. Let's explore how modern science and the Bible together reveal that everything that begins to exist must have a cause. Welcome to Faith and Science. I'm Kaysie Vokurka. Joining me to discuss these questions is Dr. John Ashton. Welcome to the program, Dr. John. SPEAKER 2 Hello, Kaysie. SPEAKER 1 Dr. John has written a book, the Big Does God Exist? And in today's program, we'll be drawing insights from this book. Now we're talking about the Calem cosmological argument. I'm just going to read a little bit from this book to give us a refresher of this argument. It says proponents use the Calem cosmological argument and its supporting reasons to show three claims with respect to the universe and its cause. The first claim is that the universe has a beginning and hence has not always existed. The second claim is that the beginning of the universe existence is not an uncaused random event of some kind. The universe had a determinate cause. And the third claim is that the cause of the universe existence is a personal one, not an impersonal natural one. Thus, the Calum cosmological argument and its reasoning explore three pairs of possibilities for the existence of the universe. Beginning versus no beginning, caused versus uncaused, and personal versus impersonal. So, Dr. Ashton, tell us a little bit more about this. You know, some. This idea of everything with a beginning must have a cause. And why is this causal principle foundational to science and logic? SPEAKER 2 Right. Yes. So this, of course, the chapter, that particular chapter in the book was written by Kenneth E. Hemmer, and he does a very good job in explaining this. I think one of the things that we look at, we have to look at there are two possibilities, that the universe was eternal, always here. Now, the evidence against that's one possibility, or else it had a beginning and had a cause. And most scientific observations point to the fact that the university had a beginning because we see it, in effect, running down. So we see, you know, stars burning up and so forth. So there's a whole lot of processes there. And if we look at some of the observations that we make, it would certainly sense that while the universe is finally balanced, that it had a beginning. And this also is intuitive, that most things that we've just about, well, everything we know of, we can think of it as having a start. One of the examples would be erosion that we see on our beaches and this sort of thing. So we see things changing over time and we say, okay, earlier on it was different and had a beginning. And just about everything that we can think of that had a beginning had a cause. There was something that made it, that put it there to start with. So it's basically intuitive because if we look at not having a beginning, we run into, you know, a whole lot of problems. And of course, the popular scientific theory, the Big Bang theory, you know, postulates a beginning. The real issue becomes what is this cause? What caused the thing? How did the universe begin? I think that was really the title of Dr. Hema's chapter was what is the. You know, how did the universe begin? Where did the universe come from? This is the real essence of this. And the Kalem argument essentially says is, well, if we can establish it has a beginning, it must have had a cause. And you know, what was that cause? And some of the issues that science itself faces, okay, well, if you have some sort of Big Bang scenario, for example, rather than creation, what was the cause there? Where, where did it all come from? SPEAKER 1 Trigger like that. Yeah, happened. SPEAKER 2 Yeah, yeah. And you know, some people talk about the quantum mechanical view and this sort of thing. There is some argument, not everybody believes it, that quarks can sort of, you know, suddenly appear and then disappear. Some of these notions, I guess it's hard to sort of demonstrate without a board. But say you were in a classroom with a wave tank and a wave generator, right? And as you walk into the classroom, you can see this little flat tray of water sitting there and it's perfectly smooth on top. And then suddenly a wave rises out of it and waves continue. Now what can happen is that you can have a wave generators at either end, right? And this is generating a wave coming along like that. And at this end, a wave coming along like that. Now, if they are at exactly the same frequency, occurring the same number of cycles per second and the same amplitude, the same height, if a peak on this wave happens to meet a peak, a trough on that wave, they will cancel one another out. Now, as the waves pass, right? Because in a wave tank it can't generate absolutely perfectly, but theoretically perfectly, they would cancel one another out. So if you came and looked at that particular situation, right, Then it appeared to be just flat, or if it's photons, nothing. And then suddenly it appears, right? We know that according to quantum mechanics, every object has a wave function. So for real life physical objects that we can see, the wave function is irrelevant. But for very, very Tiny objects like electrons and protons and these sort of things, these very tiny particles. The way they behave as both waves and particles we currently understand. SPEAKER 1 Right. SPEAKER 2 Because we can observe both phenomena. SPEAKER 1 Yes. SPEAKER 2 So one of the, you know, the singularity is that somehow there was this. There was something existed before, it somehow cancelled itself out and then reappeared again. Right. And this is how it comes out. And I think Roger Penrose, who's professor of theoretical physics at Oxford or mathematical physics there, he won the Nobel Prize in physics in 2020, actually. And he has views along these lines. So the idea to get around that is you've got to have a multiverse and all these things. But one of the limitations of all these theories is time. And really, when we have the true cosmological principle is that you create time as well. Time, matter and space. Right. Because theoretically you can't have time unless you have matter or gravity. And so we get into all these really fancy funny physics explanations of things. What it boils down to is the argument that most people come up with and they say, okay, well, if you have God creating the universe, who created God? Because everything has a. If we assume everything that has a beginning has a cause, we say, okay, well, there seems to be overwhelming evidence from thermodynamics and different other aspects that. And Roger Penrose, for example, did a lot of probability looking at the entropy requirements. That's the state of disorder in the universe balance, you might say, of battery and energy in the US the precision of that is to some figure. And again, I'm just talking in general terms because I'm trying to remember, but it's 10 to the power. 10 to 10, 10, something like this, which is essentially what it's saying is that if you went to write this number with zeros and every atom in the universe could be written as a zero, you wouldn't have enough zeros to write the number. Right. So the probability of the universe existing is so finely tuned that it's smaller than that. SPEAKER 1 As in existing from natural, like, well. SPEAKER 2 Just to exist by itself somehow by known laws of physics, yes. The probability of that happening is so, so enormously small, to use counter terms, it's just so unimaginably small that the probability of being one in so many sort of thousand chance of it happening. As I said, even if you had a zero for every atom in the known universe, you wouldn't have enough zeros to write the number. The probability is so small. And so when we look at these scenarios, so the overwhelming evidence of some supernatural event to create the universe is there, but the argument still comes, well, who created God? Now it's interesting, the Bible actually talks about God, says I am a self existent one, right? In other words, the Bible says God is an entity, a spiritual entity and outside space and time. Remember the creation, whatever created the universe has to be outside the universe. SPEAKER 1 Yes. SPEAKER 2 It has to be some functional order outside the universe. Now people following, you know, scientism don't like that. They want an explanation from where they want the universe somehow creating itself. But we've got major problems with that, insurmountable problems with that, right? It so heavily points to the existence of God. And the amazing thing is that the God of the Bible describes right, as he revealed himself and gave thoughts to men to write down about God as a self existent one outside space and time. So he's non material, he's not governed by time, by being non material, he his outside time. So the way we think is in terms of a beginning, you know, because we're time out, that's the way we're created, that's the system that our minds operated in. But the Bible describes this amazing infinite creator who is outside space and time, who is non material. And really that's the only satisfactory explanation for our existence. Fine tuning of gravitational constants and all these sort of strong and weak forces, all these sort of things so finely tuned that we know that it can't arise in probabilistic terms. And the laws that govern gravity, the nature of particles, neutrons and so forth, even just the law of baron number isn't followed in the universe. That is that if you create matter out of energy, you must create equal amounts of matter and antimatter. There's mostly matter in the universe, not antimatter, all these sort of things. So the calum argument essentially is saying because we have overwhelming evidence that the universe had a beginning, it must have had a cause, that cause must lie outside the universe itself. And so then we have to decide is that cause a personal cause or is it some material cause? And that's a decision that we have to make on the basis of faith because we can't determine that, right? But again we have the evidence from the Bible of supernatural revelation. In the Bible, multiple prophecies that came true, historical evidence for angels, supernatural events, the multiple witnesses of Jesus resurrection and his ascension with the angels. So we have these supernatural events, plus we also have the testimony of people that have chosen to accept this philosophy, this belief in this amazing loving supernatural God. And we've seen the transformation in their lives as a result of that faith. And so we have overwhelming, very strong evidence that would support a personal creator God as well over a non material creator God. That evidence isn't absolutely conclusive and that's why people have to have a certain amount of faith. But I think the Kalem argument for the existence of the universe is a very strong one. And I think Dr. Kenneth Hemmer does a brilliant job in fleshing out those arguments which are very deep philosophically in that chapter. SPEAKER 1 Yeah, and I really liked how you brought up about the idea of a creator being someone outside space and time, because time in and of itself, I guess we naturally sense that there has to be a start point because infinite time just doesn't really, like, we can't really get our head around that as does that even exist? You know what I mean? Like it, it has to have a start point and, and, and continue from there. So the idea of an infinite being outside of that, to create that logically makes sense. And then you point out, of course, the, the need for that, that, that being to also be personal. And the evidence that we have for that is, yeah, very, very interesting explanation for like, I guess, logical explanation for why a creator would be the most plausible option. Yeah. So thank you so much for sharing that and explaining more about the Kalem argument. Have you ever struggled with doubts about God's existence or who or known someone who has what helped you through it? Share your thoughts and stories in the comments as your journey could inspire someone else who's searching for answers. Thanks for joining us.
