Everything from Nothing?
I read this definition of an atheist on the internet and it made me start to think about what it is saying.
"Atheism may be defined as the belief that there was nothing and nothing happened to nothing and then nothing magically exploded for no reason, creating everything, and then a bunch of everything magically rearranged itself into self-replicating bits which then turned into dinosaurs. Makes perfect sense" .
This was credited to an anonymous donor but it raises a serious question about how everything began.
The Bible says that the universe began by God calling it into being with a spoken word. Science describes the process as a result of the “Big Bang” in which an unimaginable amount of energy was suddenly created from the emptiness of space and became the “stuff” the universe came from. Who provided the energy?
Scientists today will all agree that matter can be created from nothing in a device that causes high energy particles to collide into one another. When this happens other particles are created that eventually decay into pure energy. The process can be reversed by injecting pure energy into a system and two particles can be created from the emptiness of space that exist for a short time before re-combining in a burst of energy that destroys both particles. They call this creating matter from nothing.
What they are leaving out is that for matter to form from empty space, there must be an “action” that inserts energy into a system for it to begin. The “nothing” they begin with is really a burst of energy supplied by the operators of the system.
Who supplied the energy for the Big Bang?
In other words, the universe must have had some “action” in order to start the process. Science can go back no further than the first few billionths of a second of the creation event. They have no explanation for what began the explosion. Are we to believe that it just “magically” happened for no reason as atheism suggests?
In many discussions with atheists one of their favorite phrases whenever God was mentioned, was that religion was the superstitious belief that God was like a “magic fairy” that used his magic to make things happen. Yet, to believe that everything was created from nothing when nothing happened to cause it, is like saying “it was magic”.
If you ask an atheist where man came from the response will usually be “evolution”. Ask them where evolution came from and they will take you back to the origin of life as an accidental chemical process. Continue this line of questioning and they eventually arrive back at the Big Bang. Their argument stops because there can be no “cause and effect” they can call on to explain it. If the “cause” was God then the rest of the argument falls apart.
I like the following C. S. Lewis argument:
“Suppose there was no intelligence behind the universe, …. In that case, nobody designed my brain for the purpose of thinking. … when the atoms inside my skull happen for physical or chemical reasons to arrange themselves in a certain way, this gives me, as a by-product, the sensation I call 'thought'. But if so, how can I trust my own thinking to be true ? It's like upsetting a glass of milk and hoping that the way the splash arranges itself will give you a map of London. But if I can't trust my own thinking, of course I can't trust the arguments leading to atheism; therefore I have no reason to be an atheist, or anything else. Unless I believe in God, I can't believe in thought, so I can never use thought to disbelieve in God” - C.S. Lewis in The Case for Christianity
Gerry.