A Lighthearted Discussion on the Necessity of a Divine Creator - Part Two

This is part two in our lighthearted discussion on the necessity of a divine creator. For part one, click here.

So, we’re going with ‘nothing exploded, which brought everything (the sum total of mass and energy within our universe) into existence.’ Alright, if you say so.

Let’s assume that for a moment.

I’ll ask the question again, what do we understand about explosions?

The most obvious answer – aside from ‘cool guys don’t look at them’ – in my opinion, is that they are destructive. That word, destructive, is interesting in light of our current conversation, because what we’re trying to do is decide whether the most obvious answer to the question of ‘where did our universe come from,’ is a huge explosion. What we need is for the cause of our universe to be constructive, but our working explanation right now is most definitely the largest explosion ever, and being the largest would likely also mean it is the most destructive.

Again, we need a constructive cause, not a destructive cause. In searching for a proper hypothesis, applying the most basic rules of science, we should be looking for repeatability, consistency of results within experimentation. With that in mind, to our best knowledge, has humanity ever observed a constructive explosion?

For instance, has anyone anywhere ever piled a bunch of metal, plastic, and glass scraps on top of a stick of dynamite, pushed down that plunger at a safe distance of course, and observed a television being constructed within the explosion?

How about just attaching some plastic explosives to a large block of marble and pushing that little red button on your cool, spy-movie-villain remote control and observing a statue of a member of the Greek Pantheon emerge?

How about tossing a grenade into a production studio in Hollywood and getting a Summer Blockbuster?

No, Michael Bay movies don’t count.

I trust you see my point by now. No time in recorded history has humanity witnessed an explosion doing anything other than reduce coherent information, specified complexity, and usable energy, and yet everywhere we look in our universe we see coherent information, specified complexity, and usable energy DEPLETING – DETERIORATING – DRAINING.

My apologies for that unnecessary alliteration.

Entropy is a fact. The amount of usable energy in our universe is ever-reducing. The ultimate outcome will be what some depressed brainiac once deemed ‘Heat Death.’ Our planet, solar system, universe, and yes, our species, is rocketing toward equilibrium, which means the entire universe will reach a state of absolute zero. No life can exist. No stars can shine. All is gray and dead. And, despite our best efforts, there is absolutely nothing we can do about it. It is a universal law. All matter and energy tends towards disorder, chaos.

And within this whole abysmally bleak, destructive reality, the theory we are supposed to believe about the origin of our universe is that a universally-accepted fact, namely, that explosions are destructive one-hundred percent of the time, one time was not true, and that one time an incalculably-large explosion created our incredibly-ordered and intricately-complex universe, and that everything has been getting less ordered and less complex ever since. And the one difference, which I suppose is supposed to make us see it as a special case, is that that one time the explosion came from nothing.

Riiiight.

I’m sorry, but Ockham’s Razor is going to chop all of that horsecrap right off and cause the thinking person to look for a simpler explanation. In this situation, as crazy as it might seem to some folks, the simpler explanation is that an eternal, timeless, incorporeal, infinitely intelligent and powerful, uncaused agent caused the universe to exist, tweaking it in all the right ways in order that it would not implode upon itself or expand so fast that nothing could exist, and to allow for life to flourish on at least one planet in one solar system in one galaxy in all of the universe.

Listen, we know with near certainty that the universe is not eternal. For one thing, an infinite regress in time is a factual impossibility. It cannot exist, and, like nothing, does not exist. Therefore, our universe had to begin to exist. That includes time. Space, matter, and time all began to exist simultaneously, because before it existed nothing existed, and again, nothing is – say it with me – no-thing. There was no matter or energy, but there was also no space to put matter and energy, and there was also no time to facilitate the sequential order of events.

I understand that this is an incredibly dense paragraph I have just penned, so I will follow this post up with as many more as I deem necessary to unpack it adequately. But for now, can we all just agree, even if you happen to believe that a non-divinely-originated Big Bang created our universe, that it is ridiculous in the highest degree and that you should just stop believing it right now?

Okay, maybe that was a bit too much to ask. For a person to change their paradigm is often more difficult than squeezing a star-sized camel through the eye of a quark-sized needle. Which is to say, it is sometimes nigh on impossible.

So, hopefully I’ve given you something to think about. A stone in your shoe, figuratively – as Greg Koukl would say.

Until next time, peace, love, and a third thing.