Can a Train Ride Explain God’s

Eternal Nature?

By Brian D. Wilson

Perhaps the biggest problem that the atheist has with God is that He is eternal. The picture of an alpha and omega standing like Atlas defiantly astride the Universe outside the chain of cause and effect deeply troubles him, and usually elicits that most common of objections, “Who made God?”

The demand appears reasonable at first glance. The believer even seems to be in a logical dilemma; (1) Everything that exists requires a cause, (2) God exists, (3) Therefore God requires a cause. When the believer inevitably refuses to relinquish God’s eternality it merely reaffirms the atheist’s conviction that the believer is being intellectually dishonest.

Yet hasn’t the atheist said all along that the Universe itself is eternal, that there is no need for a God-cause because the Universe never had a beginning. The atheist’s syllogism is after all unyielding. The Universe is something that exists. Therefore, it requires a cause. And if it requires a cause then it could not be eternal.

If the Universe has always existed then the syllogism is false. Consequently, even if God’s existence were false, it could not be so because of the eternal. Neither will saying another Universe created this one solve anything. It only delays the inevitable, for the first premise of the syllogism declares that what ever exists requires a cause.

The real problem is not over the eternal, which even the atheist concedes is, at least in principle, reasonable. The real question is whether God, or the Universe, is the best candidate for being that necessary and eternal object.

I do not think the Universe is that eternal necessary something, a conclusion I came to some years ago while waiting for my train to leave the station in southern California. By now I am sure you are asking what a train ride has to do with Cosmology and the question of origins. To explain let’s look at an uncontested fact of Astronomy.

Neither the theist nor atheist denies that the Universe is expanding since Edwin Hubble made that discovery in 1929. The important thing about this observation is that each particular material thing in the expanding Universe, right down to the smallest atom, is causally dependent upon some cause that preceded it, in order to explain the motion or change that that thing is exhibiting.

No doubt some will get caught up in the debate as to whether or not Hubble’s expanding Universe proves that the Universe was the product of a tiny singular point which exploded into being, or as Fred Hoyle said in 1948, that the Universe has always been expanding, and never exploded into anything.

However we must not miss the force and necessity of the premise being offered. Neither an expanding Cosmos, nor a Cosmos with a definite beginning, is free from the principle that each and every phenomena (growth, expansion, motion, etc.) in the Cosmos is dependent upon some set of material causes which preceded it. This is especially true for someone who supposes that the only real substance underlying the Universe is matter. This fact is important for our next step.

Suppose that our Universe were a pair of train tracks that extend in each direction for eternity. Suppose further that a train sat on these tracks which represented the expanding matter of the Universe. As I waited for my train in San Diego to depart I asked myself a question, “If I were waiting for this train 30 miles down the tracks how long would it take to reach me?” I figured that if the train were going 30 MPH it would take one hour. Obviously no matter what variables you plugged in, if the train were moving at all it would have to traverse a certain distance in a certain amount of time.

Then it suddenly struck me, “Our tracks are eternal, and our train has been traveling forever.” Therefore, “How long would it take the train to reach me if it began its journey infinite time ago, and was an infinite distance away?” It would never reach me, because between the station and the moving train there exists an infinite distance.

An infinite Universe suffers the same logical death. The existence of everything precisely at this moment depends upon a whole set of material causes which preceded them. So if the Universe has been causally expanding at (X) speed for eternity, and began doing so an infinite time ago, it would take an infinite amount of time for those causes to create what exists at this moment.

Nothing can traverse an infinite distance. The very fact that we are here right now proves the Universe could not have begun an infinite time ago. Thus the Universe had to have had both a beginning and a beginner, a fact that rules out the Universe as its own cause. For how could the Universe be the cause of itself before it existed?

No, I think God seems the better candidate for our eternal cause. However we still must escape the logical trap set by the syllogism at the outset. The Christian has never said that the idea of the eternal is irrational. If we did how could we believe in God? There is no governing rule of logic which excludes the possibility of an eternal object. The laws of Identification, Non-Contradiction, and Excluded Middle certainly have nothing to say about the matter.

The Christian’s formulation (called the cosmological argument) even before the Middle Ages said; (1) What ever begins to exist requires a cause, (2) The Universe began to exist, (3) Therefore the Universe requires a cause. Notice the syllogism proceeds from the idea that something may in principle be eternal so long as it does not begin to exist. If however, something can be shown to have begun, as our Universe, then it is logically excluded from the eternal.

We showed that the Universe itself could not be the necessary eternal cause, because it is impossible for there to be an actually infinite series of finite material causes which, when lined up can reach eternity. Yet can the assertion of a God-based cause fare better? Our detractors will say we are dredging up the infamous God of the gaps rational. We are Medievalists using God as a stop gap measure to fill in the voids of ignorance which our superstitious theories cannot explain. That Christian laymen have used such foolish reasoning both in the past and the present is undeniable, though what matters is if this is true in our case.

The fact that something caused the Universe is certainly no baseless assertion, for nothing which begins to exist can do so without a cause. As we already showed the Universe began, so a cause of some kind is necessary. This something’s existence is also logically necessary, because I have never heard of non-existing things causing material things to come into being. Good then, no God of the gaps so far.

We also know that our something is timeless. Albert Einstein proved, and later Stephen Hawking and Roger Penrose agreed, that time is literally part of the fabric of the Universe, not a separate entity from it. Time is connected to space as well. Space and time are literally one Space-Time, woven into each detail of the Cosmos. This means that before the Universe came into being there was no time. However, for our something to cause the Universe it had to have existed prior to the Universe. Since time came only when the Universe began, our something had to have been without time or time-less.

Furthermore our something also had to be changeless. Physicists discovered long ago that all matter must remain in a state of motion. The problem is that motion is a kind of change, and change is inseparable from the concept of time. In fact some physicists express time as change marked by duration.

If nothing ever changed we would not recognize time’s passing. Since our something is outside of time it must also, by logical necessity, be changeless. This would have to be the case because if our something ever did change, such a change would reveal that the object were within space-time. Just imagine, if you ever did observe any change in our something, it would demonstrate that a certain increment of time had elapsed between the time you first observed the object changing, and after the change occurred. If time is elapsing around our somehting, how could it be eternal?

This means, if we are to obey any reasonable physics, our something must also be immaterial. As we stated earlier no material thing can be motionless because no object can reach absolute (0). This is known as the Third law of Thermal Dynamics, details of which you do not need in order to get the basic point.

We already stated that our something was both timeless and changeless because by logical necessity it had to be temporally and dimensionally outside the beginning of the Universe. Matter cannot display either timelessness or changelessness since it must remain in motion. Furthermore, our something could not be eternally comprised of matter, for it could not in-itself complete and infinite set of material causes and effects in order to produce the beginning of the Universe.

Lastly our something must be all powerful, or at least unimaginably powerful. This is because any cause of the Universe has to be sufficiently powerful enough to bring about the effect in question. Fire crackers do not produce super-novas.

We have thus far then identified a striking amount of attributes that by all appearances resemble only the God of the Judeo-Christian tradition. So with respect to my atheist friends, you must forgive me if I assume that this existing, timeless, changeless, immaterial, unimaginably powerful something is beginning to look an awful lot like God. Neither does it appear that arriving at the existence of such a being is the least bit irrational.

You will note of course that none of these things tell us anything about the character or purpose of this God. It is a theistic God to be sure, one that is alone standing outside of space and time and which brings the universe into being. This certainly eliminates the gods of many religions such as the Taoist and Buddhist conceptions. Yet more would have to be done in order to establish that this were the God of the Jewish or Christian Bible.

Christian Philosopher William Lane Craig in fact says that based on this cosmological argument alone we couldn't know anything about this God's morality or character. He could be a real stinker for all we know. But we are not trying to sell anyone the whole show. The move from polytheism, pantheism, or atheism, to theism is a big enough jump as it is. What we have shown is that theism rather than atheism is the starting point for any discussion about Cosmology and human meaning.