Set aside the many competing explanations of the Big Bang; something
made an entire cosmos out of nothing. It is this realization—that something
transcendent started it all—which has hard-science types . . . using terms like
‘miracle.’ Journalist Gregg Easterbrook
Perhaps the best argument . . . that the Big Bang supports theism is
the obvious unease with which it is greeted by some atheist physicists. At
times this has led to scientific ideas . . . being advanced with a tenacity
which so exceeds their intrinsic worth that one can only suspect the operation
of psychological forces lying very much deeper than the usual academic desire
of a theorist to support his or her theory. Astrophysicist C. J. Isham
Where Did Everything Come From?
Thousands of years ago, the Hebrews believed they had the
answer: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth,” opens the
Bible. Everything began, they claimed,
with the primordial fiat lux—the voice of God commanding light into existence.
But is that a simplistic superstition or a divinely inspired insight? What do
the cosmologists—scientists who devote their lives to studying the origin of
the universe—have to say about the issue?
“In the beginning there was an explosion,” explained Nobel
Prize–winning physicist Steven Weinberg in his book The First Three Minutes.
“In three minutes,” wrote Bill Bryson in A Short History of Nearly
Everything, “ninety-eight percent of all the matter there is or will ever be
has been produced. We have a universe. It is a place of the most wondrous and
gratifying possibility, and beautiful, too. And it was all done in about the
time it takes to make a sandwich.”
KALAM COSMOLOGICAL
ARGUMENT
“In ancient Greece, Aristotle believed that God isn’t the
Creator of the universe but that he simply imbues order into it. In his view,
both God and the universe are eternal. Of course, that contradicted the Hebrew
notion that God created the world out of nothing. So Christians later sought to
refute Aristotle. One prominent Christian philosopher on the topic was John
Philoponus of Alexandria, Egypt, who lived in the fourth century. He argued
that the universe had a beginning. “When Islam took over North Africa, Muslim
theologians picked up these arguments, because they also believed in creation.
So while this tradition was lost to the Christian West, it began to be highly
developed within Islamic medieval theology. One of the most famous Muslim
proponents was al-Ghazali, who lived from 1058 to 1111. “These arguments
eventually got passed back into Latin-speaking Christendom through the
mediation of Jewish thinkers, who lived side-by-side with Muslim theologians,
particularly in Spain, which at that time had been conquered by the Muslims. They
became hotly debated.
“One of the most remarkable features of the kalam argument is that it
gives us more than just a transcendent cause of the universe. It also implies a
personal Creator.”
“How do you frame the kalam argument?”
“As formulated by al-Ghazali, the argument has three simple
steps: ‘Whatever begins to exist has a cause. The universe began to exist.
Therefore, the universe has a cause.’ Then you can do a conceptual analysis of
what it means to be a cause of the universe, and a striking number of divine
attributes can be identified.”
Here Dr. William Lane Craig explaining the
Kalam argument.The 1st is part one, and the 2nd is part 2
“How do we really
know that the universe started at some point in the past?”
There are two pathways toward establishing it. One could be
called either mathematical or philosophical, while the other is scientific.
Mathematical
The early Christian and Muslim scholars used mathematical
reasoning to demonstrate that it was impossible to have an infinite past. Their
conclusion, therefore, was that the universe’s age must be finite—that is, it
must have had a beginning. Here is an explanation of this:
“Imagine I had an infinite number of marbles in my
possession, and that I wanted to give you some. In fact, suppose I wanted to
give you an infinite number of marbles. One way I could do that would be to
give you the entire pile of marbles. In that case I would have zero marbles
left for myself. “However, another way to do it would be to give you all of the
odd numbered marbles. Then I would still have an infinity left over for myself,
and you would have an infinity too. You’d have just as many as I would—and, in
fact, each of us would have just as many as I originally had before we divided
into odd and even! Or another approach would be for me to give you all of the
marbles numbered four and higher. That way, you would have an infinity of
marbles, but I would have only three marbles left. “What these illustrations
demonstrate is that the notion of an actual infinite number of things leads to
contradictory results. In the first case in which I gave you all the marbles,
infinity minus infinity is zero; in the second case in which I gave you all the
odd-numbered marbles, infinity minus infinity is infinity; and in the third
case in which I gave you all the marbles numbered four and greater, infinity
minus infinity is three. In each case, we have subtracted the identical number
from the identical number, but we have come up with nonidentical results"
Scientific
Albert Einstein developed his general theory of relativity
in 1915 and started applying it to the universe as a whole, he was shocked to
discover it didn’t allow for a static universe. According to his equations, the
universe should either be exploding or imploding. 1929, the American astronomer
Edwin Hubble discovered that the light coming to us from distant galaxies
appears to be redder than it should be, and that this is a universal feature of
galaxies in all parts of the sky. Hubble explained this red shift as being due
to the fact that the galaxies are moving away from us. He concluded that the
universe is literally flying apart at enormous velocities.
If you believe in Creation or the Big Bang the evidence is
clear that the universe had a beginning. The problem the scientists have with Big
Bang is where did it all come from?
Have an Intelligent Faith!!
-Nelis
No comments:
Post a Comment