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By offering others Christ’s hand to hold, his shoulder to cry on, and his words to soothe, Christians spread God’s love and give an answer to suffering. We remember that we can “do all things in Christ who strengthens us.”
We can point out that even if God did not exist, suffering would still exist. We can show that it is better to live in a world where God is apparently silent but there is future redemption than in a world where God is actually absent and in the end evil
and injustice are never vanquished. Even better than a bland deistic god, the Christian God understands suffering and has come to Earth to redeem man from that suffering.
C. S. Lewis recognized this: “God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks
to us in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: It is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world.”139 But why, God?
Nick writes in his book Life without Limits: Sometimes, of course, our prayers are not answered. Tragedies occur despite our prayers and our faith. Even the best people with the purest hearts sometimes suffer horrible losses and grief. . . . Even in the worst situations that seem beyond our capacities, God knows how much our hearts can bear. I hold on to the belief that our life here is temporary, as we are being prepared for eternity. Whether our lives here are good or bad, the promise of heaven awaits. I always have hope in the most difficult times that God will give me strength to endure
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that better days await, if not on this earth then for certain in heaven. One of the best ways I’ve found
The contingency argument claims that the universe’s existence seems to be dependent on something that is not dependent upon anything else in order to exist. Its existence depends on a “necessary” being like God.
“The universe either has no explanation, explains itself, or is explained by God.
This illustrates something philosophers call the “principle of sufficient reason” (or PSR). According to this principle, anything that exists must have an explanation for its existence.
Classical theists such as Aquinas did not consider God to be one being among many (like a special star floating far away “out there”). They instead considered him to be “being” or “existence” itself. If God is the “ground of being” or the reason anything has existence, then it’s no surprise that God must exist. I have chosen to not talk about God as simply “being” itself because this is easily misunderstood as pantheism or the belief that God is identical to anything that exists, such as the book you are reading at this moment. However, when I say God is a being who explains his own existence,
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being that can exist as a result of his own nature.160
If aliens made us and put us on earth for an experiment , then who made the aliens?
An infinite series of contingent universes is no real explanation, either—we just have an endless set of universes that exist as a brute, unexplained fact. This explanation is like saying a boxcar on a train moves because it is pulled by the boxcar in front of it, which in turn is pulled by an infinite set of boxcars. But boxcars depend on something else in order to move, and therefore even an infinite number of boxcars could not move one
inch. Instead, the boxcars must be moved by something which moves itself,...
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Likewise, an infinite series of universes that didn’t have to exist cannot explain their own existence without reference to a necessary being that has to exist. These individual universes would still need a being who cannot fail to exist that sustains the whole collection of universes. This being could not be a mere force or universe, because it is the reason space and time exist and thus could not be bound by those things. Because ...
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P1. Whatever begins to exist must have a cause for its existence. P2. The universe began to exist. C. Therefore, the universe has a cause for its existence.
ex nihilo, nihil fit or “Out of nothing, nothing comes.”
philosophical argument for the universe’s beginning Imagine a calendar stretching back in time forever. Time moves through the calendar one day at a time (it’s more precise to say one event at a time, but days will suffice for our discussion). If the universe had existed forever, then there would have been an infinite number of days before today. But how could time have reached this present moment if it had to traverse
infinite number of previous days to get here?172 If there were an infinite number of days before today, then there would always be “one more day” in history for time to move through, and today could never happen. Here’s another example that illustrates this concept. Let’s say your Aunt Mildred owns a flower shop. Each day Mildred counts all her flowers, and only after she counts each one will she open her flower shop for business. Now, if Mildred has only a dozen flowers to count, she will open up the shop pretty quickly. But if she has a million or a billion flowers to count, then it will
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the shop will open after Mildred finished counting them (that is, if Mildred has enough coffee to keep her awake!). But imagine that Mildred has an infinite number of flowers she needs to count. Remember, she still has to count all of them before she can open the shop. How long will it take before she’s able to open the shop? Well, because there would always be at least one more flower to count, Mildred could never finish her task. This means that the shop could never open. But if you went to the shop and saw an “OPEN” sign on the door, then that w...
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being open. Neither could happen if an infinite number of days (or flowers being counted) had to occur first. Therefore, the past is not infi...
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One piece of scientific evidence comes from the second law of thermodynamics, which states that matter and energy always tend toward disorder (or what scientists call entropy). The second law explains why striking billiard balls with a pool cue never results in the balls rearranging themselves into the standard rack formation. Such behavior would violate the universe’s tendency to always move toward disorder and decay.180
But if the universe were eternal, heat death should have already occurred. According to the physicist P.C.W. Davies, “[T]he universe cannot have existed forever, otherwise it would have reached its equilibrium
end state an infinite time ago. Conclusion: the universe did not always exist.”
In the early twentieth century, the Belgian priest and physicist Georges LemaÎtre concluded that Einstein’s new theory of gravity, called general relativity, would cause a static eternal universe to collapse into nothingness. Since Einstein’s theory was sound, this only meant one thing: The universe was growing, and had a beginning in the finite past. Fr. LemaÎtre and Einstein would discuss the cosmic consequences of the theory while
walking around the campus of Cal Tech, and although Einstein was skeptical at first, in 1933 he proclaimed that LemaÎtre’s theory of an expanding universe was one of the most “beautiful theories he had ever heard.”186
The empirical support for a big bang ten to fifteen billion years ago is as compelling as the evidence that geologists offer on our earth’s history.”
Some atheists think they can refute the kalām argument by asking, “If everything needs a cause, then what caused God?”193 The argument, however, never says that everything requires a cause. It only claims that everything that begins to exist requires a cause for its existence. Since we have good reasons to believe that the universe began to exist (Big Bang cosmology, impossibility of infinite days before today, lack of maximum entropy), then the universe requires an explanation for why it exists. God, on the other hand, never began to exist because he is eternal (he created time itself), and
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If the universe began to exist, what was God doing during the eternity before the world began? St. Augustine confronted this question in the fifth century. His joking response was that for all eternity God was making hell for people who ask questions like that.194 His more serious response was that prior to the creation of the world there was no time. It makes no sense to ask what God was doing prior to the creation of the world, because the creation of the world also included the first moment of time. Time can be a difficult thing to understand, but one common-sense view is to think of time
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Did the universe begin to exist? Atheist: Maybe the universe is eternal and doesn’t need an explanation for why it exists. It’s just always existed. What’s wrong with that? Theist: Well, I think my last argument showed that there would need to be a reason to explain that an eternally old universe exists instead of just an eternity of nothing. But the other problem I have is I think there is good evidence the universe is not eternal but that it began to exist. A: Like what? T: Well, according to the second law of thermodynamics all physical systems move toward disorder and decay. If the
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before the Big Bang, like another universe that we came from that has been around for all eternity? T: Well, I also think philosophy could show that the past can’t be eternal, even if there was another universe that existed before the Big Bang. For example, if there were an infinite number of days before today, then time could never reach the present moment. But since today did happen, this shows that time must be finite and so the universe had a beginning. A: Wait. I’m not sure I understand how you get to the universe having a beginning. T: Let’s try this. Let’s pretend that the present
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The claim that the universe caused itself to exist is as nonsensical as saying that Mark Zuckerberg caused Facebook to exist after he received a Facebook message giving him the idea to create Facebook.
Instead of saying that God existed before the universe existed (since there was no before), we say only that God existed timelessly without the universe. He then caused the universe to exist at the same moment time began to exist.
For example, since the first cause of the universe was responsible for the existence of space and time, this cause must also be immune to the restrictions of space and time (that is, be immaterial and eternal). This means the first cause could not be a mere material object (like an alien).
In the eighteenth century, William Paley offered one of the most famous illustrations of the argument from design: the watchmaker analogy.211 Paley argued that if we walked through a field and found a rock, we would not assume the rock was designed by anyone. We would just think that it was a result of natural causes. But if we found a watch in the same field, even if we did not know what watches were, we would know that someone designed it, for we recognize design when a thing has a complicated set of parts that function in order to accomplish a specific end or purpose. According to Paley,
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Paley argued that if we walked through a field and found a rock, we would not assume the rock was designed by anyone. We would just think that it was a result of natural causes. But if we found a watch in the same field, even if we did not know what watches were, we would know that someone designed it, for we recognize design when a thing has a complicated set of parts that function in order to accomplish a specific end or purpose. According to Paley, the natural world is full of living things that are much more complex than watches, and so he concluded that these things must be designed, and
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Constants: These are letters in scientific equations that represent unchanging numbers. For example, in the formula E=MC2, C is a constant referring to the speed of light (or approximately 186,000 miles per second). No matter what formula it is added to, the number C never changes. Hence, it is called a constant. The fine-tuning argument asks why some of these constants are at the precise levels
required to allow intelligent life to evolve.
Conditions: This is the amount of matter and energy that was present at the beginning of the universe. Th...
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these conditions were at such an optimal level to allow the evolution...
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Weak gravitational force: Although gravity may seem like a very strong force because of its
ability to hold all of us on the earth, in comparison to the other forces in nature, it is extremely weak. According to Rees, gravity is 1036 times weaker than competing forces within atoms.220 As a 2009 article in New Scientist Magazine put it, “The feebleness of gravity is something we should be grateful for. If it were a tiny bit stronger, none of us would be here to scoff at its puny nature.”221 According to Rees, if gravity were stronger, stars would burn out very quickly and the planets that orbited them would be tiny. Any life form on those
would be crushed if it were larger than an insect, thus making the evolution of intelligent life almost impossible. New Scientist Magazine goes so far as to assert, “Only the middle ground, where the expansion and the gravitational strength balance to within one part in 1015 (or one part in a quadrillion) at one second after the big bang, allows life to form.”222 Strong nuclear force: The strong nuclear force is what contains the protons inside atoms...
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to get them to touch. Much the same way, the protons in an atom have a positive charge, so we would expect them to fly away from each other. B...
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So why does this force need to be fine-tuned? If the strong force was two percent weaker, then hydrogen atoms would repel one another, and there would only be hydrogen atoms in the universe. But if the strong force was two percent stronger, then all of the hydrogen atoms would quickly attach to one another, and there would just be helium. Without free hydrogen you can’t make...
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atoms like H20, or water. This would make life’s existence highly unlike...
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The density of matter in the universe: In the first seconds of the universe’s existence, matter could not have differed in density by more than one part in one quadrillion. If matter were more dense (or if the matter were more “crowded together”), there would have been a “big crunch” that collapsed the universe. If matter were less dense (or more spread out), it would have kept the galaxies from forming as the universe rapidly expanded. Without galaxies there would not be stars or planets and presumably there would not be any life.224 The expansion rate of the universe: The cosmological
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zeros and a one. In other words, the constant could have been 10120 times larger than a life-permitting value, and so there needs to be an explanation for the constant’s incredibly small, yet non-zero
Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, calculated the odds against the formulation of our universe. His exact computation was 10,000,000,000 to the 124th power, a number so large that to call it “astronomical” would be to engage in a wild understatement.
Fine-tuning only means that out of all the possible universes (or “houses”) it is much more likely that there should be no life at all (or not even a single “atom” of life in the “house”). The fact that our universe does accommodate life (regardless of how little) against such incredible odds requires an explanation.
