Then Who Made God? Part II of III


Why the Universe Cannot be Eternal: The Physical Evidence

By Brian D. Wilson


I want to thank my readers who have hung in there with me thus far. I apologize for the length of this three part series of essays addressing the popular "Who Made God?" argument put forward by atheists in opposition to Christian Theism. Soon I will return to a shorter essay format. I must warn you though, the essay you are about to read will be fairly challenging. Nevertheless, I beg you to work your way through its content. It is going to be of great help in your quest to be a thoughtful and prepared ambassadors for Christ in the public square.

In part one of our investigation we examined why the claim “Who made God?” was disingenuous on the part of the atheist.We noted how he implied God’s existence was irrational because the very idea that something can be beginning-less was incoherent. However, he went on to argue, just as the Christian does with God, that the universe is eternal, has no beginning, and therefore requires no cause.In part two we are going to survey the scientific evidence that confirms why the universe cannot be eternal.

The picture above shows a skeptical Albert Einstein looking into what was at the time the largest telescope in the world located at Mt. Wilson observatory outside of Los Angeles CA. In 1929 Edwin Hubble, to the right, invited Einstein to see for himself the evidence of his famous Red Shift, a key piece of evidence establishing the soundness of big bang cosmology. The Red Shift also forever threw a wrench into the theory that the universe had always been here.

Before we move on I can't stress enough the importance of rebutting the claim by the atheist of an eternal universe. You must not forget that he uses the eternal universe argument in both an offensive and a defensive way. Defensively he argues that he is not required to provide a response to the Christians claim that the universe needs a cause, because the universe has always been here. Offensively, the atheist is saying the Christian’s claim for God’s existence based on a necessary need for the universe to have a cause is pointless. Since the universe has always been here a pre-existing God becomes unnecessary and unconvincing.

I want to provide you with the tools to counter this argument. The following is an examination of the scientific reasons for why the universe had to have begun a finite time ago, and therefore rebuts the atheist's claims both offensively and defensively. Then stay tuned for part three where I will offer a philosophic argument for why the universe can not be eternal.

The most devastating set of scientific evidences against the idea of an eternal universe came from multiple discoveries made by astronomers spanning nearly the entire 20Th Century. However the key discovery which put these astronomical pieces together came in 1929. British astronomer Edwin Hubble was surveying the night sky when he noticed something odd. The stars and galaxies were silhouetted in red, and upon further investigation he learned why. The galaxies were flying away from Earth at unimaginable speeds. The red color came from the way the telescope took in the Hydrogen that the stars were giving off as they were racing away from Earth (called the Red Shift). Then Hubble dug even deeper.

He soon discovered that this was no isolated phenomenon. Literally every ware he looked in the night sky galaxies were flying away from each other. Hubble thought about this problem for many months, and in the end he came to a shocking conclusion.

“Something had to have propelled these Galaxies,” he reasoned, “but what?” And why were they all doing the same thing? He knew for sure that things don’t just start moving for no reason. And isn’t that also true in our every-day lives? Suppose you entered a room that had a pool table, and just as you opened the door you saw the 8 ball moving across the table’s surface.

What if no one was in the room when you saw this event? Would you say to yourself, “Since no body was in the room there is no cause for why the ball was moving”? That would make no sense to you, and it made no sense to Hubble when his contemporaries tried to say to him that the galaxies had always been flying through space from time immemorial.

Hubble's conclusion was that the only thing that would explain why galaxies would be racing away from each other at unimaginable speeds is if they were the product of a massive explosion. After all, it fit the facts. Why else would they be moving away in that manner? Here is how Hubble arrived at his conclusion.


The Hand Grenade

Imagine that you had never seen a hand grenade before, and you didn’t know what it was used for. What if someone started filming the explosion of this grenade, capturing the explosion from the time that the pin was pulled all the way to the end?

Suppose this film was lost, but then rediscovered by a team that you were personally going to lead. Your job would be to explain the film. You begin your investigation by slowing down the film. What you discover are dozens of chunks of metal debris flying through the air away from a center point in all directions at hundreds of feet per second. You also learn that all the chunks have the same basic chemical characteristics. Here is the question, How do explain why they are moving, and why they appear to have a common origin?

It would not take you long to discover that these pieces were at one point packed into a dense ball resembling a metallic pineapple. This would be intuitive to you because as you ran the film backward you would observe that the pieces of metal converged closer and closer together, the spaces between them becoming smaller and smaller, as the film was run backward frame by frame.

This is precisely what Hubble discovered in his investigation. He learned that if you kept tracing the galaxies trajectories backward to their origin the universe became denser and denser until all matter, energy, and space collapsed into an infinitely dense point before which all space, time, mass, energy did not exist. This dense ball is known as the Singularity and the theory itself is known as the Big Bang theory.

This conclusion, proven and confirmed hundreds of times over since 1929 by astrophysicists, has serious consequences for the atheist. To use the words of Christian apologist Greg Koukle, “A big bang needs a big banger.” Physicist Richard Gott describes the event this way:

"The universe began from a state of infinite density… Space and time were created in that event and so was all the matter in the universe. It is not meaningful to ask what happened before the Big Bang took place; it is like asking what is north of the North Pole."1

I am sure this seems odd to people. Our natural tendency is to imagine time as an entity that is eternal. Remember though time has no meaning or existence apart from the space and matter it interacts with. Imagine that all things in the universe froze and no motion occurred. Would it be meaningful to ask how much time had elapsed? Time is change marked by duration. Motion is an expression of change. No change, no time.

Furthermore, motion is only possible in space. In a dense singularity waiting to explode there is no space in which motion can occur. In fact space itself was not created yet. And again if you have no motion, you have no time. British physicist P.C.W. Davies describes it this way:

"If we extrapolate this prediction to its extreme, we reach a point when all distances in the universe have shrunk to zero. An initial cosmological singularity therefore forms a past temporal extremity to the universe. We cannot continue physical reasoning, or even the concept of spacetime, through such an extremity. For this reason most cosmologists think of the initial singularity as the beginning of the universe. On this view the big bang represents the creation event; the creation not only of all the matter and energy in the universe, but also of spacetime itself."[2]

Now this conclusion has frustrated many physicists over the years because no one who honestly considers the implication that everything had a beginning can escape making metaphysical as well as theological conclusions. Those committed to an atheistic philosophy and program are goint to be especially uncomfortable. Many examples of this metaphysical discomfort have been expressed by the comments of scientists as the evidence for a big bang has done nothing but grow exponentially since 1929.

Consider the comments of the imminent British scientist Sir Arthur Eddington, “I have no axe to grind in this discussion, but the notion of a beginning is repugnant to me…I simply do not believe that the present order of things started off with a bang…The expanding universe is preposterous…incredible…It leaves me cold.” How about the words of the famous German Chemist Walter Nernst, “To deny the infinite duration of time would be to betray the very foundations of science.” Finally Philip Morrison of M.I.T commented, “I would like to reject it (the big bang), but I have to face the facts” (parenthetical note added).


The Steady State Model

One of the most famous attempts to avoid a beginning of the universe, as the evidence has increasingly suggested since the end of World War II, came from British physicist Fred Hoyle. In 1948 he proposed the Steady State Model as an attempt to escape the implications of a beginning of the Cosmos. This model claims that the Cosmos has always existed in a steady state. Yes, the galaxies are receding, but as they recede new matter comes into existence in the voids left by the retreating galaxies. This process is pictured as going on forever.

While imaginative, this model was full of problems from the start, and no one really took it seriously except for the popular press. In fact philosopher and historian of science Stanly Jaki said that the theory never secured, “a single piece of experimental verification.” Actually the proponents of the theory always seemed to be trying to explain away the facts rather than explaining them. According to Jaki its proponents were clearly motivated by, “openly anti-theological, or rather anti-Christian motivations.”3

Beyond this Hoyle never seemed to explain how the new matter popping up in the voids could work when such an idea directly violated the first law of thermodynamics. Later investigations also revealed that a count of galaxies emitting radio waves indicated that there were once more radio sources than there are today. This means that the universe could not have always been in a steady state. Rather multiple radio sources indicate a big bang event.4

The biggest blow to the theory however came in 1965 when two physicists working for the Bell Telephone Laboratory, A.A. Penzias and R.W. Wilson, discovered that the entire universe is completely blanketed in a background of microwave radiation. What this discovery proved was that the universe was once in a very hot, dense, state, pointing directly to a big bang event which occurred a finite time ago.


The Thanks Giving Turkey

Here is an illustration to help those of you unfamiliar with the physics to understand the significance of background radiation. Imagine you were cooking a Thanks Giving turkey in your kitchen. Now in your kitchen we hang hundreds of thermometers from the ceiling, they are literally everywhere. Some are right next to the oven door, others are higher near the ceiling, and others are far away from the oven. Then we turn the oven on full blast. The heat becomes so strong that it sets the turkey on fire!

Just at this moment we throw open the oven door and heat and smoke come pouring out. The temperature in the kitchen just before we threw open the doors was 55 degrees Fahrenheit. It is winter and your heater is turned off. Given this scenario what would the thermometers read?

As you probably guessed, they would all read very different heat temperatures in the beginning, as radiation and super-heated air came pouring into the cooler kitchen space. The thermometers nearest to the oven would be very high. Others would be lower, and those furthest away from the oven would be even lower than these. As more time passed the pockets of heat would mix in the room, and eventually the temperature would reach a state of equilibrium.

Now suppose each individual thermometer was taking readings in the room every .5 seconds from the time we opened the doors until 5 hours after the oven cooled off. When we then collected all the data we would see a whole range of temperatures.

What if we gave all the thermometer data to someone who was not told about the details of the experiment, and asked him or her to develope a theory that would explain the heat readings in the kitchen? We gave them two possible scenarios. In scenario one the kitchen had been pre-heated to a temperature of 80 degrees Farenheit for 2 hours then the thermometers were hung in place to take readings. In the second scenario we explain exactly what we did with the actual experiment. Which scenario would fit the data collected by the thermometers?

It is obviously the second scenario. The first scenario makes no sense because if we hung the thermometers in a pre-heated kitchen we would expect all the heat readings to be almost exactly the same, but they are not.

The discovery of background radiation showed that our universe is more like our super heated oven door being thrown open representing a once hot dense universe. If the steady state model were true it should resemble our example of a pre-heated kitchen, because the universe would have an infinite amount of time to radiate, and as a result the heat would even out. What we should not see is the background radiation. Therefore the steady state model does not accurately predict its own results.

This is really no different than when physicists goes to a site with Geiger counters after a nuclear explosion has occurred. Even if the physicists are not there to see the explosion, they still know from the radiation bathing the site that an intense, hot explosion recently happened.


The Oscillating Model

This evidence did not stop atheists though from trying to escape a beginning of the universe and the theological implications that came with it. The next gigantic failure of a theory to try and escape a beginning of the universe was called the oscillating model.

This model is currently the most famous of the alternate explanations to the big bang, and the popular-press love it! Popularized by Carl Sagan, this model’s proponents say it is true that the observational evidence rightly shows that an initial big bang event occurred, but it does not mean that everything had an initial beginning. This is because the universe has been exploding and collapsing into a singularity over and over again for an infinite amount of time.

Some physicists have referred to this as the accordion theory. Like an accordion, the universe during part of its existence expands from an initial singularity, then after a period of time it suffers from a catastrophic big crunch, everything collapsing back into a singularity again. This goes on over and over forever.

While this model has captured the popular imagination it does not work for a least two reasons. The first is that there are just no physical laws which would explain how the universe could oscillate to begin with. In other words it is impossible. Physicists have drafted such models on paper but have been unable to produce the experimental and observational evidence needed to support it.

As the famous Professor Tinsely of Yale explained, “even though the mathematics says that the universe oscillates, there is no known physics to reverse the collapse and bounce back to a new expansion. The physics seems to say that those models start from the Big Bang, expand, collapse, then end.”5 This fact was even admitted by four scientists who were strong advocates of the oscillating model in the Scientific American some time after the late Professor Tinsley passed away, “there is no understanding of how a bounce can take place… We have nothing to contribute to the question of whether and/or how the universe bounces.”6

Furthermore the observational evidence is contrary to the oscillating model. The problem is that the matter in the universe is currently evenly distributed. However, in any oscillating scenario when the universe contracts the receding matter gets sucked up by black holes as the matter recedes. Thus when the universe once again goes through an expansion the result would be that great pockets of uneven matter would permeate to universe.7

Notice then, if the oscillating model were true our present universe would have occurred on the heels of a contraction that happened before it. In such a case we should expect to see an uneven distribution of matter. But the universe as it stands is even. Therefore the oscillating model fails to account for the present even distribution of matter.

Lastly, there is doubt as to whether the universe will expand and contract as the oscillating model suggest or simply expand, as it currently is doing, then die off as it suffers heat death while the dead matter continues to expand forever. The way to find out which scenario is true is by adding gravity to the discussion.

If you want a universe to expand and then contract, what you need is a universe in which the force of gravity is greater than the force of the expansion of the universe. If, on the other hand, the force of the expansion is greater than that of gravity, the universe will continue expanding forever and suffer heat death.

Professor Craig provides a wonderful way to picture this. Imagine that we are wondering if the rocket we have built has the ability to escape earth’s field of gravity. We know that if the power of the rockets, the fuel, etc., together provide a force that is greater than the earth’s gravity then the ship will escape, if not the rocket will come crashing down to earth.8

The way we apply this to the universe is to ascertain what the density of the universe is, because the density of matter determines the force of gravity on that object. Sadly evidence here does not bode well for the atheist. If you take all of the luminous matter, the variety from which all galaxies are composed, the universe reaches only 1% of the density needed for there to be a contraction. An attempt to get this percentage up has been to include measurements of dark matter. But even taking the dark matter into account the number reaches only 10% of the density needed for a contraction to occur.9

Much more evidence could be sited. The point is that the evidence just does not support the oscillating model contrary to the way it is thrown about in the popular press. It has not secured a single piece of observational evidence. In fact two of the most presteigous physicists in the field Allan Sandage and Gustav Tammann, who have been working on the cosmological origins question over 30 years, have noted that the observational evidence rather points to a low density model of the universe. As a result they conclude, “Hence we are forced to decide that… it seems inevitable that the Universe will expand forever.”10

I have chosen to focus my attention on the oscillating and steady state models. There are others including the vacuum fluctuation, quantum gravity, and plasma models just to name a few. However they ultimately suffer from failing to account for much of the same pieces of observational evidence already cited. Either the radiation cannot be accounted for, the density of the universe is incorrect, or black holes fail to allow the observational evidence to match up with the math. There are many more unique problems which these theories have as well which are too long and technical to get into. I have tried really hard to keep all of the informaton accessible.

So to return to our question as to whether it is even possible for the universe to be eternal; the answer is a definite no, at least with regard to the scientific evidence. That leaves the atheist with his initial problem, a universe for which he cannot explain its beginning. This ends part two of our investigation of the “Who Made God?” challenge.

Stay tuned for part three where I will move into our final phase of the series to offer the most direct and most effective argument for why the atheist’s claim that the universe is eternal is impossible. In fact, as you will see when we meet again the philosophic problem I will be posing makes it literally impossibe, and more importantly incoherent and inconceivable, for the universe to have always existed.


1 J. Richard Gott, et al., “Will the Universe Expand Forever?” Scientific American (March 1976): 65
[2] P.C.W. Davies “Spacetime Singularities in Cosmology,” in The Study of Time III, eds. J.T. Fraser, N. Lawrence, and D. Park (Berlin: Springer, 1978, pp. 78-79.
3 Stanley L. Jaki, Science and Creation (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1974), p. 347.
4 William L. Craig Reasonable Faith (Wheaton IL: Crossway books, 1994), p.102.
5 Beatrice Tinsley, personal letter.
6 Duane Dicus, et. al., ‘The Future of the Universe,” Scientific American (March 1983): 101
7 Dicus, “Effects of Proton Decay on the Cosmological Future,” Astrophysical Journal (1982) p.8
8 William L. Craig Reasonable Faith (Wheaton IL: Crossway books. 1994): p. 103
9 See Allan Sandage and G.A. Tammann, “The Dynamical Paramaters of the Universe,” in The Large Scale Structure of the Universe, Cosmology and Fundamental Physics, ed. G. Setti and L. Van Hove. Fisrt ESO/CERN Symposium. Geneva Switzerland 1984.
10 Allan Sandage and G. Tammann, “Steps Toward the Hubble Constant. VII.” P.23.