Who Made God? (Science, Creation, and the Universe)
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When I was a child I remember asking someone, “If I came from my mom and dad, and my mom and dad came from their mom and dad, who had the very very first mom and dad?” The person said, “Well, God made the first mom and dad.” So I thought a little bit and then I said, “But who made God?” They answered, “Well, no one made God. He just always was I guess.”
As a child this was mind boggling to me, but even as an adult this is still mind boggling to me! How do we know this is true? Is there real scientific evidence to support this idea? Yes. And that’s what we are going to talk about today.
If I set a ball in the middle of the room, how could I get the ball to move? (push it, blow it, throw a rock at it, etc etc etc).
In EVERY way we get the ball to move, it requires a chain reaction. The ball CAN’T move on its own.
Now, if we back this chain reaction up, we have to go back a long way. What moved the ball? I did. What caused me to move the ball? My body. What told my body to move? My mind. What told my mind it needed to move? Being convinced of information. How did I get a mind? It came together when I was formed in the womb. How did I form in the womb? My parents went through the reproductive process. How did my parent’s get on the earth? Their parents. How did their parents get on the earth? Their parents….and we can go back and back and back until we get to “how did the first humans get on the earth?” AND THEN YOU'RE STUCK WITH THE AGE OLD QUESTION: “HOW DID WE GET HERE?” AND "WHAT OR WHO CAUSED ALL THAT WE CAN SEE, TOUCH, AND KNOW?"
That's what scientists remain boggled about. Aristotle said that if the universe had a beginning then there HAS to be a very first “Unmoved Mover.” In other words, there has to be Something or Someone that did not have to have a mover before it and did not have to have a cause. There has to be a very first "Uncaused Cause" - which means any "Uncaused Cause" has to be something or someone eternal. Do you realize that the Big Bang Theory AND the theory of Evolution, both actually require a first cause? They don't explain that step in their theories adequately, although they both require that step in order to truly work. So regardless of what theory of creation or theory of how-we-got-here you hold, whether biblical or not, something has to be eternal and all-powerful in order to begin it all.
Scientists know these implications. For a long time, atheists and scientists who did not want to believe in God tried to fight for an ETERNAL UNIVERSE because if the universe is infinite and powerful then there’s no need to look for a first cause. The Universe can be god and be that first cause.
HOWEVER, today, there’s way too much evidence to show that the universe DID INDEED HAVE A BEGINNING.
We are going to run through how we know the universe had a beginning and what that means about Christianity. We will only touch on a couple of the many for the sake of brevity.
1--The study of THERMODYNAMICS shows us the universe is not eternal - what is the study of thermodynamics? It is the study of matter and energy. What is matter? (Physical substances…example: this table, this chair, my body). What is energy? (Let me give you an example of energy. A neon glow stick. You know what happens when we bend a glow stick. It will start to glow, right? BUT HOW?? The glow stick is actually made up of two tubes. There’s an outer plastic tube that we touch. And there’s another breakable tube inside. Between the outer tube and the inner breakable tube is dye (which will determine the color when it glows) and a chemical called “diphenyl oxalate.” The breakable tube in the center is filled with hydrogen peroxide. So when we bend it, we break the innermost tube and all of the ingredients start mixing together. When they mix, carbon dioxide and chemical ENERGY are released, which produces VISIBLE LIGHT. As long as the reaction is happening, the glow continues. When the reaction is finished, it no longer glows.[1]
This is a very elementary concept that the field of thermodynamics would study.
Here’s what the second law of thermodynamics says about the universe. Frank Turek and Norman Geisler describe it like this: “the universe is running out of usable energy…and one day all the energy will be gone and the universe will die.”[2]
So think about the universe like these glow sticks. As long as they are glowing, they are using usable energy. But eventually all the usable energy will be used up and the glow stick will stop glowing. One day the universe will be all used up, too.
We can see the second law of thermodynamics happening every year in our lives. It’s also called The Law of Entropy. NATURE TENDS TO BRING THINGS TO DISORDER RATHER THAN TO ORDER.[3] If we leave a banana on this table for three weeks, when we come back, what is it going to look like? It’s going to be black, all shriveled up, mushy….IT WILL HAVE STARTED THE DECAYING PROCESS. Nature brings things to disorder as a general law. If we let nature run its course, in the end, everything dies, decays, breaks apart. Think about your joints. As you age, these get worn out?
IF THE UNIVERSE WERE ETERNAL OR SELF-SUSTAINING, WE WOULDN’T HAVE DECAY AND WOULD NEVER RUN OUT OF RESOURCES. Scientists see this and realize the what it means about our universe. And as an interesting side note, scientists see that as the universe runs out of resources it will cause it to die a "heat death." It's fascinating to me that the Bible (what I believe to be the inspired Word of God) was written way before scientists realized the universe would die from a "heat death" and yet 2 Peter 3 explains that heaven and earth will be destroyed by fire in the end. Science keeps accidentally validating the Bible!
2—THE UNIVERSE IS EXPANDING. This is a scientifically documented fact. If you have the right equipment, you can observe this even today. But if the universe is steadily expanding even today, WHAT HAPPENS WHEN WE REWIND TIME?
It cant collapse back down infinitely. It would collapse back to nothing, meaning something or someone brought the universe into existence.
So now, the most prevalent theory for the beginning of the universe is the BIG BANG THEORY. An explosion from NOTHING MATERIAL into SOMETHING MATERIAL. Christians and the Bible say that IN THE BEGINNING THE IMMATERIAL GOD SAID ‘LET THERE BE’ AND BANG! THERE WAS A MATERIAL CREATION! And this accounts for what caused the BIG BANG.
Athiests don’t like this. What do athiests say about this? Everything they’ve tried to come up with can be refuted. Every explanation of theirs requires SOMETHING to have collided…so the question keeps going back to “Ok, well then who created those two things that collided?” They try to brush over it, but when they are directly asked, they cannot get around it.
So athiests that believe the Big Bang happened by chance or luck think that every well-designed thing we know today came together by “luck” or “accident” - That means galaxies, the very ordered solar systems, humans with complex organ systems, DNA, and animals and plants.
If you found a wristwatch laying on the ground, would you assume it spontaneously combusted or that it was designed by a watchmaker? We KNOW it was made by the expertise of a trained watchmaker.
We would NEVER assume that a wristwatch “accidentally” just popped into existence “by mere chance.” Watches are complex inside…they have gears and inner-workings and they have a fashionable outside. HOW MUCH MORE COMPLEX ARE PEOPLE INSIDE? Much, much more complex. So how much MORE ABSURD is it to assume humans randomly came into being in the beginning? A lot more absurd.
Atheists say everything that exists today came to be by “accident?” This is one of the many points where we see that IT TAKES MORE FAITH AND LESS LOGIC TO BELIEVE THAT rather than to just believe what the Bible has told us.
Here’s what we know of the known world: EVERYTHING THAT HAS A BEGINNING HAS A CAUSE.
Let’s go back to my question when I was a child, though. If my parent’s had me, and their parent’s had them…and God made the first parents? WHO MADE GOD?
I’m not the only one that has asked this. When Christians give God as the answer for the Big Bang, atheists say, “If everything needs a cause, then God needs a cause, too!”
But what Science says is that “Everything THAT HAS A BEGINNING has a cause.” If something is infinite…meaning it has existed forever…then it is EXEMPT from this law. THAT’S WHY ATHIESTS WANTED SO BADLY TO DISCOVER THAT THE UNIVERSE WAS INFINITE. But when they set out to prove this, they found that the universe is actually running down (using up its usable energy)….and that its expanding, which means if you rewind time, it goes back to nothing.
There are only two possibilities when scientists try to figure out where all of this around us came from in the beginning. 1) Either the universe is eternal; or 2) something outside of the universe is eternal. BY THEIR OWN METHODS THEY HAVE PROVEN THAT THE UNIVERSE IS NOT ETERNAL. So we are left with only one option: That something outside of the universe is eternal – and the Bible calls Him God.
[1] Guided Discoveries, Astrocamp School Programs, “Glow Stick Science,” https://astrocampschool.org/glowstick-science/ (accessed January 23, 2019).
[2] Geisler, Norman L and Frank Turek, I Don’t Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist, (Wheaton: Crossway, 2004), 76.
[3] Ibid., 77.
