Welcome to Anchored by Truth brought to you by Crystal Sea Books. In John 14:6, Jesus said, “I am the way, the truth, and the life.” The goal of Anchored by Truth is to encourage everyone to grow in the Christian faith by anchoring themselves to the secure truth found in the inspired, inerrant, and infallible word of God.

Script:

Then God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. And God saw that the light was good. Then he separated the light from the darkness. 5God called the light “day” and the darkness “night.

Genesis, Chapter 1, verses 3 and 4, New Living Translation

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Hello! I’m Victoria K. Welcome to Anchored by Truth brought to you by Crystal Sea Books. We’re excited to be with you as we continue our series we’ve called “Truth and Proof.” This series is all about the truth that there is a God and that God is the God of the Bible. Furthermore, as we go along we are offering the proof that supports the truth. This series on Anchored by Truth was inspired by a Sunday School lesson series that was prepared and delivered by Dr. Gregg Alexander. Today we’re fortunate to have Dr. Gregg Alexander back on the show with us. He’s going to help us explore one of the best known lines of reasoning that demonstrates God’s existence: the cosmological argument. But before we get into the meat of the show, GREGG would you like to take a couple of minutes and tell us a little about why you decided you wanted to do your “Truth and Proof” series for your Sunday School class?

GREGG: - Introductory comments -

VK: So, I’d like to remind everyone that the reason we have undertaken this series is to help listeners know how to defend the Christian faith. This defense is often termed “apologetics.” Lay people will sometimes think that apologetics as an area of study is beyond the reach of regular Christians. But we certainly don’t believe that it is. Any reasonably mature, thinking Christian can readily understand the lines of reasoning that demonstrates that the existence of God is a logical necessity to have a coherent world view. And when we speak of defending the Christian faith we’re not thinking of people going out and debating on a stage somewhere. The first place we must defend our faith is in our own hearts. The second place that we must defend it is in our own homes. If all we ever did with apologetics was do those two things any efforts we made would be well worth while.

GREGG: I agree. 10, 20, or 30 years ago we lived in a culture that readily accepted Christianity even if some individuals did not. 50 years ago you would even find some support for the Christian world view taught in grade schools and high schools because the truth of Christianity was widely accepted. But those days are long behind us. Our broader culture is no longer not only not acquiescent to Christianity but it is outright hostile to it. And some elements of our society are vehemently hostile. We have entered one of those periods of history where Christians can no longer be complacent that we just worship in our churches and things will be all right. The opposition to Christianity enters every home, every day if in no other way through the internet and the so-called mainstream media outlets. Arguments against the validity of Christianity are all around us. If we do not actively prepare to counter them the fabric of our society will continue to erode.

VK: But the good news is that it does not have to be that way, does it? We have the truth on our side but we must equip ourselves to be able to present that truth. It is not up to us to change anyone’s heart. That’s God’s job. Our job is just to be able to witness to the truth in gentle and respectful ways.

GREGG: As I said last time I was on Anchored by Truth, that there is nothing more important than our faith in God and not just any God but the God of the Bible. A correct understanding of God is the difference between an eternity in heaven or an eternity in hell. Those are pretty high stakes..

VK: But the good news is that it does not have to be that way, does it? We have the truth on our side but we must equip ourselves to be able to present that truth. It is not up to us to change anyone’s heart. That’s God’s job. Our job is just to be able to witness to the truth in gentle and respectful ways. Well, let’s do a very brief review of one of the major points that we discussed last time – a proof for God’s existence that you call the “metaphysical proof.” The metaphysical proof for God’s existence begins quite simply with the observation that we exist. And we know that we exist as contingent, dependent creatures.

GREGG: And because we are dependent creatures we know we must depend on someone or something outside ourselves for our origin and for our continued existence. But that chain of dependency cannot go on forever. Somewhere there must be a Being that caused the origin of contingent beings and provides the resources or elements upon which they are dependent. We call that Being a Necessary Being. The Necessary Being must be uncaused and independent and therefore must be infinite because He existed before anything else. As such, there was nothing and no one who could place limits on him. And, when we look more closely we see that we possess the attributes of personality, rationality, and morality. The only possible reason we can possess such attribute is if the Necessary Being possessed them first.

VK: The irresistible conclusion from this line of reasoning is that the Necessary Being satisfies all the qualities of a theistic God. He is self-existent, infinite, uncaused, personal, rational, and moral. So, the metaphysical proof for God is one way of demonstrating that God is – for lack of a better term – “necessary” to explain the universe we see around us. But, Dr. Alexander, you said that today you wanted to offer another line or argumentation that also demonstrates this same point.

GREGG: Yes. Today, I want to move on to a look at the cosmological proof for God’s existence. The cosmological argument for the existence of God is probably the best known of all the many arguments that are used. The Cosmological Argument is an argument from consideration of the beginning of the universe – it comes from the Greek word cosmos meaning “universe, world.” There are two forms of the argument. The first says that the cosmos or universe needed a cause at its beginning, the second form argues that it needs a cause to continue existing. The first form is called the horizontal argument because it proceeds along the time line from the beginning. It is also called the kalam (Arabic: “eternal”) cosmological argument: the universe is not eternal, so it must have had a Cause. That Cause must be considered God. This argument has a long and venerable history even outside Christianity. For instance, there are Islamic philosophers such as Alfarabi and Avicenna who have been strong advocates for it. So, today I want to take a look at some of the scientific evidence that supports this form of the cosmological argument, i.e., it is evidence that reasons back to a Cause of the beginning of the universe.

VK: Well, just to be sure that we are being clear for the listeners the Cosmological Argument for the existence of God goes like this:

1. The universe had a beginning.

2. Anything that had a beginning must have been caused by something else.

3. Therefore the universe was caused by something else - a Creator.

GREGG: Yes. And to help us keep organized as we go through a discussion of some of the scientific evidence I want to use the 5 letter acronym “SURGE” to make these categories of evidence easier to remember. The “S” is Newton’s Second Law of Thermodynamics. The “U” is for the universe which is expanding. The “R” is for the radiation echo from space, more technically known as “microwave background radiation.” The “G” is for Great Galaxy Seeds. The “E” is for Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity. Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity was the beginning of the end for the idea that the universe is eternal. The theory has been verified to five decimal places, and it demands an absolute beginning for time, space, and matter. From General Relativity came the discoveries of the expanding universe, the radiation echo, and the great galaxy seeds.

GREGG: I agree. But just to illustrate your point let’s look at a scenario. Suppose someone were to say to you, “there’s no such thing – or person – as God; the universe has always been here; why does there need to be a ‘creator’?” Carl Sagan once said, ‘the cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be.’

VK: Then I might reply “what about the Big Bang? What about all the scientists who have accepted it as a fact, and have gone from that point to trying to figure out the age of the earth? Afterall, the mere fact that scientists are trying to establish the age of the universe tells us they don’t think it eternal.”

GREGG: Then our hypothetical atheist might say, “But I just can’t accept all that Bible stuff – especially the Genesis stuff that says the universe is only six or seven thousand years old – that’s ridiculous – everyone knows there were dinosaurs on earth from about 120 million years ago to about sixty million years ago; where’s all that in your Bible? – isn’t that proof that the Bible is nothing more than a story – probably a myth – maybe a hoax?”

VK: Then after reading your Sunday School notes I might reply, “That brings up some interesting questions. For instance, when it comes to dating the age of the earth many people are familiar with the process of using uranium and plutonium degradation to assign a date to the earth’s age. Many people may also have heard about potassium-argon dating or carbon-14 dating. All of these have been used extensively. But what most people don’t know is that when they have been used they come up with variable and inconsistent conclusions. Yet, there is another method - helium diffusion dating – that has its foundation in research from the 1970’s and was the work of a group of very reputable scientists. And helium diffusion dating shows the universe to be about six thousand years old.

GREGG: And that is the whole reason I write those notes – to help people understand that some of the issues that people see as being settled are, in fact, very much still in doubt. To my knowledge helium diffusion dating has never been proven wrong. Furthermore, there was a leg bone of Tyrannosaurus Rex unearthed in 1990 and studied at the University of Montana. This particular leg bone was not only found to not be fully fossilized, but had blood cells and hemoglobin fragments remaining in it! How a bone that is supposed to be 60 million years old still has visible blood cells and hemoglobin is a complete mystery to scientists. But it is not a mystery if the bone is thousands of years old and not millions. The point of this scenario is to illustrate that many of the issues that people point to that they believe invalidate the Bible do not do so at all. But these are really peripheral questions that we can discuss some other time. The main question is whether or not the universe had a beginning, and the argument against there being a beginning is not only with the Bible, but with virtually all secular scientists.

VK: And that’s an important point. The most widely accepted theory of the origin of the universe today is undoubtedly the so-called “Big Bang” theory. The Big Bang theory hypothesizes that about 14 to 16 billion years ago there was a truly cosmic explosion – the Big Bang – that created all the structures that we currently see around us in the universe. Now not all scientists agree with the Big Bang theory as the best explanation for the origin of the cosmos but it is the dominant theory today. So, what we are going to do next is proceed with an analysis of how even the Big Bang theory points to the fact that, if it were true, the universe had a beginning in space and time. This does not mean that we are agreeing with the validity of the theory. We are merely demonstrating that even by secular science’s most accepted hypothesis it is inescapable that the universe is not eternal. Now, when many secular scientists are asked what caused the Big Bang they just sort of shrug their shoulders or they dismiss the question as being irrelevant. But, of course, the question is not irrelevant at all.

GREGG: No. It is not. But for today we’re going to confine ourselves to demonstrating that even if we were to accept the Big Bang theory we still find out that the universe cannot be eternal. In our last episode of Anchored by Truth we introduced the acronym SURGE to organize five categories of evidence that show that the universe had a start in space and time. So let’s look again at the S-U-R-G-E acronym for evidence of a beginning of the universe.

VK: The “S” in SURGE stands for Newton’s Second Law of Thermodynamics. According to the second law of thermodynamics - in a closed, isolated system, such as the universe is - the amount of usable energy is constantly decreasing. Or, simply put, the universe is running out of power. Therefore, it cannot be eternal. Otherwise, it would have run out of usable energy long ago.

GREGG: Exactly right. Things left to themselves, without outside intervention, tend toward disorder because of the decline in energy – the law of “entropy” [symbol S in physics, appropriately] which is a measure of the unavailability to do work, i.e., the tendency of a closed system toward disorder. Since the universe has not reached a state of total disorder, then this process has not been going on forever. The fact that the universe still has an abundance of usable energy tells us that the universe cannot be eternally old.

VK: The “U” in SURGE is for the universe which is expanding.

GREGG: Right. In 1916 Albert Einstein didn’t like where his theory of General Relativity was taking him. He was “irritated” that his calculations were indeed revealing that the universe was not eternal but had a beginning, i.e., all time, all space, and all matter had a starting point. History records how he tried to “fudge” his numbers by introducing a “constant” in order to show that the universe is static and to avoid the issue of a beginning. But in 1929 he looked through Edwin Hubble’s telescope and he could no longer avoid the obvious: the universe was indeed expanding.

VK: And I believe that the evidence that the universe is indeed expanding is often referred to as the “redshift.”

GREGG: Yes. The so-called redshift is an apparent displacement of the light waves coming from distant galaxies toward the longer wavelengths, i.e., toward the red end of the visible spectrum. This is usually interpreted as a “Doppler effect” resulting from the recession of the galaxies along the line of sight. The Doppler effect is the apparent change in the observed frequency of a wave as a result of relative motion between a source and an observer, e.g., the sound made by a low-flying aircraft as it approaches an observer is different from the sound made as it passes and flies away because of “compression” of the sound waves as it approaches, and “expansion” of the sound waves as it moves away. The redshift indicates that the distance between the galaxies is continuously increasing, i.e., the universe is continuously expanding.

VK: Does the “redshift” tell us anything else?

GREGG: Well, it told Einstein that his General Theory of Relativity was correct – much to his own disappointment. Dutch astronomer Willem de Sitter discovered that Einstein’s theory of General Relativity, if correct, required the universe to be expanding which meant it couldn’t be eternal. The rate at which the velocity of recession of the galaxies increases with distance as determined by the redshift is expressed as the Hubble constant. The reciprocal of the Hubble constant, the Hubble time, is a measure of the age of the universe, assuming that the rate of expansion has remained constant. The rate of expansion of the universe, whether speeding up or slowing down, is not fully agreed upon, but it seems likely that the gravitational attraction between the galaxies would result in slowing down the rate of expansion with time. So, there are some unknowns associated with an expanding universe but the one element that is not in debate is that it points to a universe that is not eternal.

VK: And, again after reviewing your Sunday School series, the “R” in SURGE is for the radiation echo from space, more technically known as “microwave background radiation.” By 1948 three scientists had predicted that this radiation would be in space if the so-called Big Bang actually occurred. And in 1965 two scientists at Bell Labs, Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson, detected cosmic radiation that was coming at them from all directions. This discovery was huge because it confirmed the presence of heat and light radiation that would be the expected afterglow from the fireball of the gigantic Big Bang explosion.

GREGG: Right. The light waves from the Big Bang are no longer visible because the wavelengths have been stretched by the expanding universe to wavelengths slightly shorter than those produced by a microwave oven. This was the nail in the coffin for any lingering hope that the universe is in an eternal steady state. Astronomer Robert Jastrow said this: “The discovery of the remnant of the primordial fireball radiation made a deep impression on astronomers. After this discovery, support for the Steady State theory weakened although some astronomers still favored it. The clincher, which has convinced all but a few doubting Thomases, is that the radiation discovered by Penzias and Wilson shows the characteristic pattern of intensities at different wavelengths and frequencies of radiation that matches the pattern of the radiation produced in an explosion … The idea of a universe that came into being abruptly is distasteful to the scientific mind. Yet the evidence for the expanding universe is too clear to be ignored.”

VK: And, the “G” is for Great Galaxy Seeds. If the Big Bang actually occurred, scientists believed that we should see slight variations, or “ripples” in the temperature of the cosmic background radiation. These ripples would allow matter to congregate by gravitational attraction into galaxies. In 1989 the search for these ripples was initiated by the satellite called COBE for Cosmic Background Explorer.

GREGG: Yes. The findings from COBE were announced in 1992 and were so incredible that Stephen Hawking called them “the most important discovery of the century, if not of all time.” What were the findings? Not only were the ripples discovered, but the ripples show that the explosion and expansion of the universe was so precise as to cause just enough matter to congregate as to allow for galaxy formation, i.e., to form “seeds,” but not enough to cause the universe to collapse back on itself. Any slight variation either way and biological life as we know it would not have been possible. The lead astronomer of the project, George Smoot, called the findings the “fingerprints of the maker.” COBE documented the presence of incredible energy seeds, the largest of which extends across one-third of the known universe.

VK: And the “E” in SURG

E is for Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity. This was the beginning of the end for the idea that the universe is eternal. The theory has been verified to five decimal places, and it demands an absolute beginning for time, space, and matter. From General Relativity came the discoveries of the expanding universe, the radiation echo, and the great galaxy seeds.

GREGG: Right. Astronomer Robert Jastrow said this in an interview with Christianity Today: “Astronomers now find they have painted themselves into a corner because they have proven, by their own methods, that the world began abruptly in an act of creation to which you can trace the seeds of every star, every planet, every living thing in this cosmos and on the earth. And they have found that this happened as a product of forces they cannot hope to discover . . . That there are what I or anyone would call supernatural forces at work is now, I think, a scientifically proven fact.”

VK: Now I would like to clarify something for the benefit of our audience. Today we have been speaking of the origin of the universe using the conventions that are most commonly used in scientific circles today such as “Big Bang.” But we would like to point out that there are competent scientists, both Christian and non-Christian, who would disagree with idea of a “Big Bang.” They would not disagree that empirical observations point to a beginning for the universe. But they look at the same evidence that used to support the Big Bang theory and interpret it differently.

GREGG: Right. That’s a very important note. The scientific evidence for the Cosmological Argument addresses the first premise in the argument, i.e., “The universe had a beginning.” We’ve used the SURGE acronym to make it easy to organize five categories of evidence from secular science that can be used to prove there was a beginning – usually called the “Big Bang” by the secular scientists. But as you’ve noted, not all astrophysicists are so secular, and some have postulated theories based on sound science that sound very biblical, using terms like “the deep” (Genesis 1:2), “the expanse” (1:6), and the six days of Creation. In our last episode I mentioned two books that provide alternate interpretations. The conclusions of the authors on the major question are the same. The universe had a beginning. But their understanding of the mechanics are different. The books I would direct you to are Starlight and Time by D. Russell Humphreys (Master Books, 1994), and the follow-up by the same author entitled Thousands, not Billions.

VK: When we began this discussion of the cosmological argument we said there are two forms of the cosmological argument. Thus far we have only looked at the first of the two. The first says that the cosmos or universe needed a cause at its beginning. The second form argues that it needs a cause to continue existing. The first form is called the horizontal argument because it proceeds along the time line from the beginning. The second form of the cosmological argument is called the vertical cosmological argument, and it doesn’t reason from a beginning but from the being of the universe as it now exists. But whichever form of the argument is used, the scientific evidence that we have been talking about supports the cosmological argument. It is evidence that reasons back to a Cause of the beginning of the universe.

VK: Well, we hope everyone will join us next time as we continue this fascinating discussion about the arguments and evidence that demonstrates that there is a firm basis in logic and reason for our Christian faith. This sounds like a great time to go to God in prayer. Today let’s listen to a prayer for our friends. Good friends are a blessing from God and we should all take time regularly to pray for God’s mercy and favor to be with them.

---- PRAYER FOR FRIENDS

VK: We’d like to remind our audience that a lot of our radio episodes are linked together in series of topics so if they missed any episodes or if they just want to hear one again, all of these episodes are available on your favorite podcast app. To find them just search on “Anchored by Truth by Crystal Sea Books.”

If you’d like to hear more, try out crystalseabooks.com where “We’re not famous but our Boss is!”

(Bible Quote from the New Living Translation)

Genesis, Chapter 1, verses 3 and 4, New Living Translation