Several days ago, I received the following email from an Evangelical man:
So where did it all come from. The known universe before the bang?
Over the past seventeen years, I have received scores of emails from Evangelicals posing this very question or something similar. Evangelicals think that this question is some sort of “gotcha” question atheists can’t answer; that by being unable to answer this question, atheists show the bankruptcy of atheism.
I am going to surprise the man who wrote this email by answering his question: I DON’T KNOW! No one knows where “it” came from; where the universe came from before the Big Bang. Atheists can’t answer this question, but neither can Christians. Saying GOD DID IT! is a faith claim, as is quoting verses from Genesis 1-3. To quote the great intellectual and scholar Ken “Hambo” Ham, “Were you there?” Ham loves to use this line of illogic when challenging evolutionists and other scientists. Since these learned men and women didn’t observe firsthand the beginning of the universe (and what became before the Big Bang), they can’t possibly “know” what happened. However, what’s good for the proverbial goose is good for the gander. When Evangelicals say GOD DID IT! it is fair for scientists to ask, “Were you there?” If not, then Christians cannot possibly know whether the Christian God created the universe or exists outside of space and time. These are faith claims, not science.
Of course, Ham and other creationists resort to special pleading to defend and justify their beliefs. The Bible is different from any other book, Evangelicals say. Written by God through human instrumentality, the Bible is inspired, inerrant, and infallible. Thus, we can KNOW who created the universe and when and how he did it by reading the Bible! The problem with this argument is that there is no evidence for the claim that the Christian God wrote the Bible. There’s a plethora of evidence, however, that suggests the Bible is the work of fallible men. Believing the Bible was written by God and is somehow, in some way, a one-of-a-kind divine text requires faith. Deep down, creationists know this, and that’s why Answers in Genesis, Creation Research Society, Institute for Creation Research, and dozens of other groups, spend countless hours trying to make science “fit” the creationist narrative. Faith is not enough for these zealots. They desperately want respectability and are willing to lie, distort scientific facts, and misrepresent science to get it. Yet, despite all their “scientific” work, creationism remains a matter of faith, not science.
Creationists can no more answer the aforementioned questions than atheists can. The difference between Evangelicals and evolutionists (a derogatory term often used by Evangelicals as a label for science in general) however, is that scientists continue to work towards answering the question of how the universe began and explaining what existed before the Big Bang. Science may never satisfactorily and completely answer these questions, and I am fine with that. Not every question — presently — is answerable. Evangelicals, armed with arrogance and certainty, think the Bible reveals to them everything they need to know about life. “The Bible says” becomes the answer to countless complex, difficult science questions. The underlying issue is that Evangelicals need to be right; to have “Biblical” answers for every question. Evangelicals have become the insufferable man at a party who dominates the discussion and has answers for every question. Or at least he thinks he does, anyway.
Let me conclude this post with this: atheism and evolution are not the same, any more than atheism and liberalism are the same. Atheism is defined this way: disbelief or lack of belief in the existence of God or gods. While it is certainly true that many atheists are evolutionists and political liberals, that cannot be said of all atheists. Atheism is a singular statement about the existence of deities. From there, atheists go in all sorts of ways.
Bruce Gerencser, 67, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 46 years. He and his wife have six grown children and sixteen grandchildren. Bruce pastored Evangelical churches for twenty-five years in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. Bruce left the ministry in 2005, and in 2008 he left Christianity. Bruce is now a humanist and an atheist.
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‘How did everything come into being?’ is the fundamental reason that gods were invented in the first place. My grandmother (I’m actually not sure if she believed in a god, I rather think not, though she was into spiritualism) used to tell me that thinking about the matter frightened her, and I can well understand it. Why is there something rather than nothing? I’d tell myself that if there was ‘nothing’ then I’d not be here pondering it, but the trouble is I am and I do!
The problem is, as you point out, every solution involving god throws up countless problems of its own. God supposedly creates everything, yet the philosophical gymnastics involved in explaining why everything about us gives the appearance of being natural in origin occupy every last minute of apologists. In any event, no thought is given to how god created matter from nothing, what it even means to be outside of the universe and time, nor why it created a universe so vast that it’s impossible to contemplate.
God as a solution is a hang on from the dawn of civilisation, when primitive man first started asking questions of this kind. I am, personally, convinced that everything about the world and the universe is completely natural, albeit in ways we can’t presently hope to comprehend. To people even just a couple of hundred years ago atomic physics, relativity, and quantum theory would themselves have appeared ‘supernatural’. We now know that life came from non-life, in the sense that we have been able to discern and rationalise the likely processes. After all, even if a god did it then it had to somehow bring it about: the fact that life shares every one of its constituent parts, especially carbon and oxygen, with non-life shows this to be probable. Nobody has ever been able to provide a coherent definition of what is meant by ‘nothing’ and certainly has not ever demonstrated that there’s any such physical state. Has the universe, in some form or another, always existed? I think the answer is probably yes, but I think it’s likely to be a very complex answer and almost certainly will involve us having a much better understanding of the nature of time.
If smug arrogant certainty characterizes evangelists, skepticism and uncertainty characterizes us agnostics, we being by definition, the not knowing. I socialized with a casual group of atheists some years ago. To a person they were educated, intelligent, intellectual, thoughtful. interesting, and great company. With some of them, however, you avoided the subject of spirituality. That subject tended to get some of them proselytizing and evangelizing about atheism as if it were a religion itself. Their certainty that they knew the un-knowable, struck me as a mirror image of the irrationally rigid certainty that caused me to question and reject religion. Many atheists, like devout Christians, seem dead sure their beliefs are true, while being an agnostic, I’m only sure I don’t know what I can’t know. When, and if, updates come out, I’m open to download and install.
I heard that all the time. For years I debated in the Christian Forums website. It didn’t matter what the topic of discussion was. Without fail, somebody wanted to know what caused the Big Bang. And, “I don’t know” was never accepted as an answer.
Most likely, there was indeed something ( a “multiverse”) before the Big Bang that led to the Big Bang.
And they will ask where did that which was before the Big Bang come from if originally there was nothing? The “nothing” they postulate is not exactly nothing, for it is a state that contains the law that everything has to come from something. If they say that law had to exist in the starting state of the ultimate cause of our reality, then they are not referring to a true “nothing”. They are referring to a state near-nothing in which certain laws such as the laws of thermodynamics exist. But how do they know that the laws of thermodynamics would exist in this original state?
If they are going to claim that some such laws always exist, how do they know it was there laws? Why can it not be that, in some circumstances, things such as causes of universes come into existence without being caused?
For me, the only intellectually tenable position is to seek answers knowing that I may not find them. In other words, I try (but don’t always succeed) in keeping a balance of curiosity and humility. The opposite of that is arrogance and certainty, which leads people to the “gotcha” game.