Something from Nothing

Intelligent design proponents often argue that it is impossible to get something from nothing.  They argue that something must have caused the formation of the universe and that God is that cause, himself being uncaused.  To them, this is the only reasonable explanation.  When asked where, then, God came from they claim he always was.  Let’s have a look at that claim and the explanation they give about God.

So, God is the cause for everything.  It is impossible for anything to exist unless something caused it to exist.  But God, being outside of and greater than our universe, is exempt from this rule.  Once again a perfect example of what I like to call, “The absolute and the exception” where a claim of absolute “truth” is made and an exception is made for God.  Technically in this case it is called “special pleading”.  So, does it hold up?

First, special pleading is a well known logical fallacy.  You can’t claim something is “always true” then add, “except for this one case” because then it isn’t “always true” at all.  If you allow for a single exception to a rule then you must allow for other exceptions as well.  You can never claim that there is only one, single possible exception.  Why?  How do you know?  We’ll get into this in more detail in a little bit.

So, either the rule applies to BOTH the universe AND God or it’s not a rule at all.  The rule is, “You can’t get something from nothing.”  So, what is God?  Is he something or is he nothing?  He can’t be nothing because the claim is that he created everything and the rule is that you can’t get something from nothing.  The claim and the rule are mutually exclusive.  So he must be something.  If he is something and he created everything then neither the claim nor the rule are violated, but it means that God must have had a creator, and that creator must have also had a creator back into infinity.  I’ve never heard a Christian admit that their God may have, himself, been created by an even more powerful and wondrous God.  To even suggest it seems offensive to many.  But the rule is that you can’t get something from nothing, God is something, so he could not have come from nothing.

This is where the “He always was” argument comes in.  Okay.  We can use that.  The universe DID come from “something”.  Scientists call it a “singularity”.  And the singularity always was.  This argument is not only as valid as the argument for a creator, it’s actually MORE valid as it is backed by scientific observation, an idea born of the mathematics which define the universe as we know it, a theory based on the evidence at hand and cold, unbiased mathematical calculations.  It is based on facts.  Or maybe you don’t like that.  Okay, the singularity didn’t always exist.  It was created when two 11^th dimension membranes collided.  The 11^th dimension always was.  Why are either of these explanations any less acceptable than the explanation that a giant fairy in space created everything?  For no reason other than that ID proponents believe in fairies, but they don’t believe in science.

Now we’ll get back to that “How do you know that you can never claim that there is only one, single possible exception” thing I mentioned earlier.  As I said, no Christian I have ever talked to has ever been willing to even consider the notion that God was, himself, created.  Let’s say, for argument’s sake, that the universe does require a “cause” and that God is that cause.  The Jehovah’s Witnesses who try relentlessly to convert me call him the “uncaused cause”.  How do they know that?  How can they possibly be certain that there is nothing greater than their God, so far above him that he could not possibly understand it?  Perhaps God, himself, is an atheist simply denying the reality of his own creation.  And really, even if you were to assume he really existed, what reason would you have to believe that he is who he says he is?  When you get right down to it you only have the word of men who have interpreted the word of other men who wrote down the word of still other men as it was passed down to them through the word of other men who claimed it was the word of God.  By my count that’s at least a 5^th person account, and that’s just the New Testament.  Much of the Old Testament is known to have been oral tradition generations before it was ever written down.  When it all comes down to it the reason to believe is nothing more than “…because I say so because he told me it’s so because someone told him it’s so…on back nearly 2,000 years…because the writers of some scrolls told him it was so because (best case) Jesus told him it was so because God told him it was so.”  No wonder so many Christians have trouble accepting science.  It’s backed by facts, which are certainly not as trustworthy as hearsay.

The truth is you can’t possibly “know” anything about this being.  In fact, many Christians are quick to point that out the very moment you bring up something their God did which they cannot rationalize as being not evil.  But they know him very well when they claim he would never lie, that he is the greatest being in all of everything and that there is no possible way he, himself, had a creator.  Well, how can something come from nothing?  God isn’t nothing, so he must be something and it takes something to create something.

The “first cause argument” states that everything that has a beginning has a cause.   The universe had a beginning.  It goes on to state that at some point there must have been an “uncaused” first cause and that cause was God.  So, let’s look at that logically.

Everything that has a beginning has a cause.  This seems logical enough.  We live in a universe governed by cause and effect.  It is a fundamental law of the very nature of all we know within our universe.  So it seems reasonable to assume that the beginnings of the universe must have a cause.  However, you can’t make such an assumption.  The law of cause and effect are laws WITHIN OUR UNIVERSE.  For them to apply to the origin of the universe the universe would have to be within itself, which, itself, violates a law of physics or two.  The laws of physics are the laws ONLY within our universe.  They DO NOT apply to an event outside of our universe which may have created our universe.  What laws apply then?  Any answer you are given is a wild guess since we have never had a single observation or data point from outside of our own universe, thus any answer is pure speculation.  The beginning of the universe MAY HAVE had a cause, but we cannot say for sure that the laws of cause and effect even applied before our universe existed.

The very first part of this argument is true only as we have observed within our own universe.  To apply the laws which govern our universe to a pre-universe which may very well be governed by completely different laws is making an assumption that the laws of physics predate our universe.  There is no evidence to back this up.

The second part of the argument is also an assumption.  Yes, scientific evidence would suggest that the universe had a beginning, but that is not an absolute fact.  It is possible the universe existed for an eternity as a singularity and, at some point, it exploded.  Why, we cannot say.  That this explosion had a cause, we cannot assume.  But it is very possible for the singularity to have existed for an eternity if time was created by the explosion just like it appears space, energy and matter were.  This is a complex idea, so let me explain.  Imagine you have a time machine and you go back in time to the instant of the big bang, the moment at which time was created (assuming time was created by the big bang for the sake of this thought experiment).  Now try to go back further.  You can’t.  If time did not exist before the bang you could set your machine to keep going back for all eternity and it will never go back before the explosion, no matter how far back you try to travel.  This could be interpreted as the singularity existing for an eternity since traveling back for an eternity would not be able to take you to a time when it did not exist.

The final part of the argument before the conclusion states that there must have, at some point, been an uncaused cause.  Again, it seems reasonable.  I certainly can’t imagine an infinity of creators, each one created by another by another by another with no first “creator”.  That doesn’t mean it’s not possible.  Yes, it sounds absurd, but I haven’t really met many gods, so I really can’t speak to their nature.  It is possible there is an infinity of created creators.  But what’s really important here is the claim that this “first cause” or “uncaused cause” is God.  Based on what?  The word of the people who interpreted the word of the people who wrote down the word of other men who professed to deliver the word of God?  HOW DO YOU KNOW that God was the “first” cause?  Maybe he was the second; the tenth; the billionth.  Maybe there are a thousand gods above him who look down on him like we look down on a bacterium with a microscope.  Or maybe that cause was 11^th dimensional membranes which, themselves, have always existed.  Even if we concede that there MUST have been a cause in no way does that prove that cause was supernatural.

The purpose of this argument, of course, is to use science “when convenient” to give credibility to the notion of fairies and magic (Christians usually hate when you call “God’s power” magic, but really there is no difference between magic and miracles).  But science and logic is only applied when it’s convenient.  When it’s no longer convenient science and logic are thrown out and completely ignored.  Either something IS scientific and you can explain it solely with science or it IS NOT scientific and you don’t get to pretend science is explaining it.  It’s pretty straight forward.  It’s scientific or it’s not.  If it is then you must explain it using only science.  You must be able to explain scientifically how it is impossible that God has a creator who has a creator who has a creator named Reginald, who is the first and uncaused cause.  If that can’t be done using only science then there is no absolute rule which cannot be broken EXCEPT when it’s convenient.  Science doesn’t pander to explanations which are convenient to our beliefs.  Science is about facts and evidence that leads to conclusions, not conclusions for which evidence is found.