I Don't Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist (13 page)

The Second Law is also known as the Law of Entropy, which is a fancy way of saying that nature tends to bring things to disorder. That is, with time, things naturally fall apart. Your car falls apart; your house falls apart; your body falls apart. (In fact, the Second Law is the reason many of us get “dresser disease” when we get older—our chest falls into our drawers!) But if the universe is becoming less ordered, then where did the original order come from? Astronomer Robert Jastrow likens the universe to a wound-up clock.
⁷
If a wind-up clock is running down, then someone must have wound it up.

This aspect of the Second Law also tells us that the universe had a beginning. Since we still have some order left—just like we still have some usable energy left—the universe cannot be eternal, because if it were, we would have reached complete disorder (entropy) by now.

A number of years ago, a student from a Christian ministry on an Ivy League campus invited me (Norm) to speak there on a related topic. During the lecture, I basically told the students what we’ve written here but in a lot more detail. After the lecture, the student who had invited me there asked me to have lunch with him and his physics professor.

As we sat down to eat, the professor made it clear that he was skeptical of my argument that the Second Law requires a beginning for the universe. In fact, he said he was a materialist who believed that only material exists and that it has existed from all eternity.

“If matter is eternal, what do you do with the Second Law?” I asked him.

He replied, “Every law has an exception. This is my exception.”

I could have countered by asking him if it’s really good science to assume that every law has an exception. That doesn’t seem very scientific and may even be self-defeating. It may be self-defeating when you ask, “Does the law that ‘every law has an exception’ have an exception?” If it does, maybe the Second Law is the exception to the law that every law must have an exception.

I didn’t go down that road, because I thought he would take excep- tion. Instead, I backed off the Second Law for a moment and decided to question him about materialism.

“If everything is material,” I asked, “then what is a scientific theory? After all, the theory about everything being material isn’t material;

it’s not made out of molecules.”

Without a moment’s hesitation he quipped, “A theory is magic.”

“Magic?” I repeated, not really believing what I was hearing.

“What’s your basis for saying that?”

“Faith,” he quickly replied.

“Faith in magic?” I thought to myself. “I can’t believe what I’m hearing! If faith in magic is the best the materialists have to offer, then
I
don’t have enough faith to be a materialist!”

In retrospect, it seemed to me that this professor had a brief moment of complete candor. He knew he couldn’t answer the overwhelming evidence in support of the Second Law, so he admitted that his position had no basis in evidence or good reason. In doing so, he provided another example of the will refusing to believe what the mind knows to be true, and how the atheists’ view is based on sheer faith.

The professor was right about one thing: having faith. In fact, he needed a
leap
of faith to willingly ignore the most established law in all of nature. That’s how Arthur Eddington characterized the Second Law more than eighty years ago:

The Law that entropy increases—the Second Law of Thermodynamics—holds, I think, the supreme position among the laws of Nature. If someone points out to you that your pet theory of the universe is in disagreement with Maxwell’s equations—then so much for Maxwell’s equations. If it is found to be contradicted by observation—well, these experiments do bungle things sometimes. But
if your theory
is found to be against the Second Law of Thermodynamics I can
give you no hope; there is nothing for it but to collapse in deepest
humiliation.
⁸

Since I could see that the professor was not really interested in accepting the truth, I didn’t ask him any more potentially humiliating questions. But since we couldn’t ignore the power of the Second Law on our own bodies, we both ordered dessert. Neither of us was willing to deny that we needed to replace the energy we had just used up!

U—The Universe Is Expanding

Good scientific theories are those that are able to predict phenomena that have not yet been observed. As we have seen, General Relativity predicted an expanding universe. But it wasn’t until legendary astronomer Edwin Hubble looked through his telescope more than a decade later that scientists finally confirmed that the universe is expanding and that it’s expanding from a single point. (Astronomer Vesto Melvin Slipher was hot on the trail of this expanding universe as early as 1913, but it was Hubble who put all the pieces together, in the late 20s.) This expanding universe is the second line of scientific evidence that the universe had a beginning.

How does the expanding universe prove a beginning? Think about it this way: if we could watch a video recording of the history of the universe in reverse, we would see all matter in the universe collapse back to a point, not the size of a basketball, not the size of a golf ball, not even the size of a pinhead, but mathematically and logically to a point that is actually nothing (i.e., no space, no time, and no matter). In other words, once there was nothing, and then, BANG, there was something—the entire universe exploded into being! This, of course, is what is commonly called “the Big Bang.”

It’s important to understand that the universe is not expanding into empty space, but space itself is expanding—there was no space before the Big Bang. It’s also important to understand that the universe did not emerge from existing material but from nothing—there was no matter before the Big Bang. In fact, chronologically, there was no “before” the Big Bang because there are no “befores” without time, and there was no time until the Big Bang.
⁹
Time, space, and matter came into existence at the Big Bang.

These facts give atheists a lot of trouble, as they did on a rainy night in Georgia in April of 1998. That night I (Frank) attended a debate in Atlanta on the question, “Does God exist?” William Lane Craig took the affirmative position, and Peter Atkins took the negative position. The debate was highly spirited and even humorous at times, partially due to the moderator, William F. Buckley, Jr. (Buckley did not hide his favoritism for Craig’s pro-God position: after introducing Craig and his impressive credentials, Buckley began to introduce Atkins by cracking, “On the side of the Devil is Dr. Peter Atkins!”)

One of Craig’s five arguments for the existence of God was the Cosmological Argument as supported by the Big Bang evidence we’ve been discussing here. He pointed out that the universe—all time, all matter, and all space—exploded out of nothing, a fact that Atkins had conceded in his book and reaffirmed later in the debate that night.

Since Craig spoke first, he informed the audience how Atkins attempts to explain the universe from an atheistic perspective: “In his book
The Creation Revisited,
Dr. Atkins struggles mightily to explain how the universe could come into existence, uncaused out of nothing. But in the end he finds himself trapped in self-contradiction. He [writes], ‘Now we go back in time beyond the moment of creation to when there was no time, and to where there was no space.’ At this time before time, he imagines a swirling dust of mathematical points which recombine again and again and again and finally come by trial and error to form our space time universe.”
¹⁰

Craig went on to point out that Atkins’s position is not a scientific theory but is actually self-contradictory pop-metaphysics. It is pop-metaphysics because it’s a made-up explanation—there’s absolutely no scientific evidence supporting it. And it’s self-contradictory because it assumes time and space before there was time and space.

Since Craig did not get a chance to dialogue with Atkins directly on this point, Ravi Zacharias and I stood in the question line near the end of the debate to ask Atkins about his position. Unfortunately, time expired before either of us could ask a question, so we approached Atkins backstage afterwards.

“Dr. Atkins,” Ravi started, “you admit that the universe exploded out of nothing, but your explanation for the beginning equivocates on what ‘nothing’ is. Swirling mathematical points are not nothing. Even they are something. How do you justify this?”

Instead of addressing the issue, Atkins verbally succumbed to the Second Law of Thermodynamics. He said, “Look, gentlemen, I am very tired. I can’t answer any more questions now.” In other words, his decrease of energy proved the Second Law was at work. Atkins literally had nothing to say!

Well, according to the modern cosmological evidence, the universe literally had nothing from which to emerge. Yet when it came to giving an atheistic explanation for this, Atkins didn’t really begin with nothing but with mathematical points and time. Of course, one can’t imagine how mere mathematical points and time could actually cause the universe anyway. Nevertheless, we wanted to press the fact that atheists like Atkins must be able to explain how the universe began from absolutely nothing.

What is nothing? Aristotle had a good definition: he said that
nothing
is what rocks dream about!
The nothing from which the universe emerged is not “mathematical points” as Atkins suggested or “positive and negative energy” as Isaac Asimov, who is also an atheist, once wrote.
¹¹
Nothing is literally
no thing
—what rocks dream about.

British author Anthony Kenny honestly described his own predicament as an atheist in light of evidence for the Big Bang. He wrote, “According to the Big Bang Theory, the whole matter of the universe began to exist at a particular time in the remote past. A proponent of such a theory, at least if he is an atheist, must believe that the matter of the universe came from nothing and by nothing.”
¹²

R—Radiation from the Big Bang

The third line of scientific evidence that the universe had a beginning was discovered by accident in 1965. That’s when Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson detected strange radiation on their antenna at Bell Labs in Holmdel, New Jersey. No matter where they turned their antenna, this mysterious radiation remained. They initially thought it might be the result of bird droppings deposited on the antenna by nesting Jersey Shore pigeons, so they had the birds and the droppings removed. But when they got back inside, they found that the radiation was still there, and it was still coming from all directions.

What Penzias and Wilson had detected turned out to be one of the most incredible discoveries of the last century—one that would win them Nobel Prizes. These two Bell Lab scientists had discovered the afterglow from the Big Bang fireball explosion!

Technically known as the cosmic background radiation, this afterglow is actually light and heat from the initial explosion. This light is no longer visible because its wavelength has been stretched by the expanding universe to wavelengths slightly shorter than those produced by a microwave oven. But the heat can still be detected.

As early as 1948, three scientists predicted that this radiation would be out there if the Big Bang did really occur. But for some reason no one attempted to detect it before Penzias and Wilson stumbled upon it by accident nearly twenty years later. When the discovery was confirmed, it laid to rest any lingering suggestion that the universe is in an eternal steady state. Agnostic astronomer Robert Jastrow put it this way:

No explanation other than the Big Bang has been found for the fireball radiation. The clincher, which has convinced almost the last Doubting Thomas, is that the radiation discovered by Penzias and Wilson has exactly the pattern of wavelengths expected for the light and heat produced in a great explosion. Supporters of the steady state theory have tried desperately to find an alternative explanation, but they have failed. At the present time, the Big Bang theory has no competitors.
¹³

In effect, the discovery of the fireball radiation burned up any hope in the Steady State. But that wasn’t the end of the discoveries. More Big Bang evidence would follow. In fact, if cosmology were a football game, believers in the Big Bang would be called for “piling on” with this next discovery.

G—Great Galaxy Seeds

After finding the predicted expanding universe and radiation afterglow, scientists turned their attention to another prediction that would confirm the Big Bang. If the Big Bang actually occurred, scientists believed that we should see slight variations (or ripples) in the temperature of the cosmic background radiation that Penzias and Wilson had discovered. These temperature ripples enabled matter to congregate by gravitational attraction into galaxies. If found, they would comprise the fourth line of scientific evidence that the universe had a beginning.

In 1989 the search for these ripples was intensified when NASA launched the $200 million satellite aptly called COBE for Cosmic Background Explorer. Carrying extremely sensitive instruments, COBE was able to see whether or not these ripples actually existed in the background radiation and how precise they were.

When the project leader, astronomer George Smoot, announced COBE’s findings in 1992, his shocking characterization was quoted in newspapers all over the world. He said, “If you’re religious, it’s like looking at God.” University of Chicago astrophysicist Michael Turner was no less enthusiastic, claiming, “The significance of this [discovery] cannot be overstated. They have found the Holy Grail of Cosmology.” Cambridge astronomer Stephen Hawking also agreed, calling the findings “the most important discovery of the century, if not of all time.”
¹⁴
What did COBE find to merit such momentous descriptions?

COBE not only found the ripples, but scientists were amazed at their precision. The ripples show that the explosion and expansion of the universe was precisely tweaked to cause just enough matter to congregate to allow galaxy formation, but not enough to cause the universe to collapse back on itself. Any slight variation one way or the other, and none of us would be here to tell about it. In fact, the ripples are so exact (down to one part in one hundred thousand) that Smoot called them the “machining marks from the creation of the universe” and the “fingerprints of the maker.”
¹⁵