Atheists hold various theories as to how the universe can exist without God. Some postulate the Big Bang or a “bouncing” universe. Other suggest that an infinite number of universes have always existed. Still others claim that it all came about from nothing.
In this series, we will present some of the more simple evidence that points to God’s existence and show why it’s more reasonable to believe in God than the alternative. None of these articles on their own will be “absolute proof” but evidence for God.
I often ask atheists: “If you do not believe in God, then where do you think everything came from, just out of curiosity? You are so certain God does not exist, you must know how we got here and have the evidence to back it up. So, where did everything come from and what was the very first thing in the beginning? Or is there just an infinite amount of universes that have always existed, no explanation?” Recently an atheist answered, “Well the Big Bang. It’s science. See, God doesn’t exist!” Believe it or not, this was a grown man who said this.
Really? The Big Bang? You mean the same Big Bang that was discovered and outlined by a Catholic priest? Father George Lemaître in 1929 didn’t seem to think it contradicted God.
At the moment of the Big Bang all matter, time, space, and energy came into existence at a singularity from nothing. Many scientists do not like the ramifications of this and propose that the big Bang could be older than 13.7 billion years and could have been expanding and contracting for eternity?
However, this still does not answer the question. Was it from nothing? Or did purely potential matter somehow exist from all eternity? If from eternity, how did it all just exist? How was it “just there?” Atheists demand believers to answer this question but cannot even begin to answer it themselves. And if everything came from nothing, how did we suddenly get something from nothing? In this first article, we will focus on the latter question: the impossibility of getting something from nothing.
Saying something arose from nothing means everything came about by nothing, from nothing, because of nothing, and for no reason whatsoever. It was all a big accident, or rather, trillions and trillions of random and meaningless accidents that just happened.
The fact is, you cannot get something from nothing. It’s impossible. If there was only nothing in the beginning, there would still be nothing now because something does not and cannot originate from nothing. For example, take the number zero. Zero represents nothing. 0+0=0. Add another zero to it and what would you get? Zero. More nothing. What if you add 100 more zeros to zero, or a million trillion trillion zeros to zero? It is still zero, still total nothingingness. You can add as many zeros to zero as you wish, and it always comes out to exactly zero. You will never get 320. or 510, or 75,0913.
0+0 = 0 and 0 + 0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 still = 0.
Nothing + nothing = nothing. Nothing + a lot more nothing still = nothing. Not something. If there was only nothing in the beginning, there would not be anything existing today. There would still be total and complete nothingness.
Nothing = no thing. No existence. Nothing in existence.
If there was only nothing, then it is impossible to suddenly have existence, something. Put another way, nothing cannot give what it does not have. For example; imagine there are 50 people all crammed into a small room. These 50 people all have to read the the same book. They begin asking if anyone present has a copy of the book. Upon realizing that no one possesses a copy, it becomes evident that nobody can read the book because no one has a copy of it.
In other words, you can’t give what you don’t have. Apply this to creation. Nothing (no-thing, no existence), does not have any existence of its own and therefore existence cannot suddenly be given from nothing out of nowhere. There had to be someone or something who possessed existence by its very nature and therefore is able to share that existence.
Some people will object saying that in the quantum realm things come in and out of existence all the time from nothing!” However, that’s not really accurate because we know in the quantum realm, it is a sea of fluctuating energy within a vacuum. A vacuum is not nothing and a sea of fluctuating energy is not nothing. Those are both something. We are talking about literal nothingness, no-existence.
The truth is that nothing does nothing. Nothing is nothing. Nothing makes nothing. It’s nothing. You can’t get existence, some-thing, from nothing, no-thing. It’s impossible. This is where some people may interject; “How do you know it’s God? It could be anything. It could be aliens, it could be the Flying Spaghetti Monster!”
No, it cannot be and here is why. Aliens are material beings, and matter came into existence with the Big Bang 13.7 billion years ago. Therefore, aliens would have beginning and would not transcend creation itself. The same thing is true for the Flying Spaghetti Monster, also made out of matter. It would had to have come into existence and itself cannot be the transcendent Source.
Any matter which has come into existence has to have a cause, a reason for its existence. There is cause and effect, and the things we see throughout the universe are the effects, of which there must be a Cause. Matter and created materials cannot be this cause as they themselves were created. They have no actualizing power to do so, and they cannot keep themselves in existence by any power or non-power of their own.
Thus, the Creator cannot and is not made out of matter, which means it has to be immaterial or spiritual. The Creator cannot exist in space or time making this Being space-less and timeless (or eternal). So, what we have is an immaterial, spiritual, and eternal being of pure existence, and we can begin to see a picture of God forming here.
This is what we mean by God. God is pure Being. He is existence itself. He is the one who by His very nature possesses existence. If nothing possessed existence at all by its own nature, then there would be no existence at all. In other words, nothing.
We will see this more in a future article on evidence for God from the argument of contingency. However, since there is a being of pure existence, that Being is able to give existence to everything else, people, trees, planets, solar systems, stars, matter, etc. through the Big Bang or any other means He chooses. One thing is for sure, the Big Bang could not have created itself, nor could it be the cause of itself. Even if something preceded the Big Bang and caused it, this only pushes the question back one more notch – what caused that?
God is the uncaused Cause of all things, which we shall see later. It is a universe of cause and effect and of one thing that leads to another. Similar to the game Dominos that you set up around the room and then watch them all fall in a line. Dominos are dead and cannot move themselves. Thus, there had to be someone who pushes the first Domino and causes the rest of them to begin falling. There has to be a cause for the effect. The uncaused God and first Pusher of all things is God. The universe cannot begin pushing itself just as dominos cannot. More on that in future articles.
