As I prepared for the night in the two weeks leading up to it, I studied Krauss’s proposed explanation for the origin of the universe. I also pored over a key technical paper and book written by a Russian physicist, Alexander Vilenkin, whose ideas Krauss had popularized in his book A Universe from Nothing. I was stunned by what I found. Krauss used the work of Vilenkin in effect to refute what is called the cosmological, or “first-cause,” argument for the existence of God—an argument that posits God as the cause of the beginning of the material universe.
