Christopher Hitchens - The Portable Atheist - Essential Readings for the Nonbeliever

Once again we have a result that might have turned out otherwise and provided strong scientific evidence for a creator. If the universe were not expanding but a firmament, as described in the Bible, then the second law would have required that the entropy of the universe was lower than its maximum allowed value in the past. Thus, if the universe had a beginning, it would have begun in a state of high order necessarily imposed from the outside. Even if the universe extended into the infinite past, it would be increasingly orderly in that direction, and the source of that order would defy natural description.

The empirical fact of the big bang has led some theists to argue that this, in itself, demonstrates the existence of a creator. In 1951 Pope Pius XII told the Pontifical Academy, “Creation took place in time, therefore there is a Creator, therefore God exists.” [40] 9. Pope Pius XII, “The Proofs for Existence of God in the Light of Modern Natural Science,” Address by Pope Pius XII to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, November 22, 1951, reprinted as “Modern Science and the Existence of God,” Catholic Mind 49 (1972): 182–192. The astronomer/priest Georges-Henri Lemaitre, who first proposed the idea of a big bang, wisely advised the pope not make this statement “infallible.”

Christian apologist William Lane Craig has made a number of sophisticated arguments that he claims show that the universe must have had a beginning and that beginning implies a personal creator. [41] 10. William Lane Craig and Quentin Smith, Theism, Atheism, and Big Bang Cosmology (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997). One such argument is based on general relativity, the modern theory of gravity that was published by Einstein in 1916 and that has, since then, passed many stringent empirical tests.” [42] 11. Clifford M. Will, Was Einstein Right? Putting General Relativity to the Test (New York: Basic Books, 1986).

In 1970 cosmologist Stephen Hawking and mathematician Roger Penrose, using a theorem derived earlier by Penrose, “proved” that a singularity exists at the beginning of the big bang. [43] 12. Stephen W. Hawking and Roger Penrose, “The Singularities of Gravitational Collapse and Cosmology,” Proceedings of the Royal Society of London , series A, 314 (1970): 529–548. Extrapolating general relativity back to zero time, the universe gets smaller and smaller while the density of the universe and the gravitational field increases. As the size of the universe goes to zero, the density and gravitational field, at least according to the mathematics of general relativity, become infinite. At that point, Craig claims, time must stop and, therefore, no prior time can exist.

However, Hawking has repudiated his own earlier proof. In his best seller A Brief History of Time, he avers, “There was in fact no singularity at the beginning of the universe.” [44] 13. Hawking, A Brief History of Time , p. 50. This revised conclusion, concurred with by Penrose, follows from quantum mechanics, the theory of atomic processes that was developed in the years following the introduction of Einstein’s theories of relativity. Quantum mechanics, which also is now confirmed to great precision, tells us that general relativity, at least as currently formulated, must break down at times less than the Planck time and at distances smaller than the Planck length, mentioned earlier. It follows that general relativity cannot be used to imply that a singularity occurred prior to the Planck time and that Craig’s use of the singularity theorem for a beginning of time is invalid.

Craig and other theists also make another, related argument that the universe had to have had a beginning at some point, because if it were infinitely old, it would have taken an infinite time to reach the present. However, as philosopher Keith Parsons has pointed out, “To say the universe is infinitely old is to say that it had no beginning—not a beginning that was infinitely long ago.” [45] 14. Keith Parsons, “Is There a Case for Christian Theism?” In Does God Exist? The Debate Between Theists & Atheists , J. P. Moreland and Kai Nielsen (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1993), p. 177. See also Wes Morriston, “Creation Ex Nihilo and the Big Bang,” Philo 5 , no. 1 (2002): 23–33.

Infinity is an abstract mathematical concept that was precisely formulated in the work of mathematician Georg Cantor in the late nineteenth century. However, the symbol for infinity, “©,” is used in physics simply as a shorthand for “a very big number.” Physics is counting. In physics, time is simply the count of ticks on a clock. You can count backward as well as forward. Counting forward you can get a very big but never mathematically infinite positive number and time “never ends.” Counting backward you can get a very big but never mathematically infinite negative number and time “never begins.” Just as we never reach positive infinity, we never reach negative infinity. Even if the universe does not have a mathematically infinite number of events in the future, it still need not have an end. Similarly, even if the universe does not have a mathematically infinite number of events in the past, it still need not have a beginning. We can always have one event follow another, and we can always have one event precede another.

Craig claims that if it can be shown that the universe had a beginning, this is sufficient to demonstrate the existence of a personal creator. He casts this in terms of the kalâm cosmological argument, which is drawn from Islamic theology. [46] 15. William Lane Craig, The Kalâm Cosmological Argument , Library of Philosophy and Religion (London: Macmillan, 1979); The Cosmological Argument from Plato to Leibniz , Library of Philosophy and Religion (London: Macmillan, 1980). The argument is posed as a syllogism:

1. Whatever begins to exist has a cause.

2. The universe began to exist.

3. Therefore, the universe has a cause.

The kalâm argument has been severely challenged by philosophers on logical grounds, [47] 16. Smith in Theism, Atheism, and Big Bang Cosmology , by Craig and Smith; Graham Oppy, “Arguing about the Kalâm Cosmological Argument,” Philo 5, no. 1 (Spring/Summer 2002): 34–61, and references therein; Arnold Guminski, “The Kalâm Cosmological Argument: The Questions of the Metaphysical Possibility of an Infinite Set of Real Entities,” Philo 5, no. 2 (Fall/Winter 2002): 196–215; Nicholas Everitt, The Non-Existence of God (London, New York: Routledge, 2004), pp. 68–72. which need not be repeated here since we are focusing on the science.

In his writings, Craig takes the first premise to be self-evident, with no justification other than common, everyday experience. That’s the type of experience that tells us the world is flat. In fact, physical events at the atomic and subatomic level are observed to have no evident cause. For example, when an atom in an excited energy level drops to a lower level and emits a photon, a particle of light, we find no cause of that event. Similarly, no cause is evident in the decay of a radioactive nucleus.

Craig has retorted that quantum events are still “caused,” just caused in a nonpredetermined manner—what he calls “probabilistic causality.” In effect, Craig is thereby admitting that the “cause” in his first premise could be an accidental one, something spontaneous—something not predetermined. By allowing probabilistic cause, he destroys his own case for a predetermined creation.

We have a highly successful theory of probabilistic causes—quantum mechanics. It does not predict when a given event will occur and, indeed, assumes that individual events are not predetermined. The one exception occurs in the interpretation of quantum mechanics given by David Bohm. [48] 17. David Bohm and B. J. Hiley, The Undivided Universe: An Ontological Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics (London: Routledge, 1993). This assumes the existence of yet-undetected subquantum forces. While this interpretation has some supporters, it is not generally accepted because it requires superluminal connections that violate the principles of special relativity. [49] 18. I discuss this in detail in Victor J. Stenger, The Unconscious Quantum: Metaphysics in Modern Physics and Cosmology (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1995). More important, no evidence for subquantum forces has been found.