Astrophysics

GOD AND MODERN PHYSICS – THE FACT SHEET
Astrophysics – Can science show God created the universe?

In the last few years, implications of transcendence in physics, philosophy of mathematics, and metaphysics have become more pronounced. Indeed, no other decade in history has revealed more or better evidence for God. So what is this evidence?

In astrophysics, several major discoveries pointing to a beginning and creation of the universe have been made. Three discoveries are very significant here:

1) The likelihood that our universe is inflationary (expanding) and will
continue to expand forever.
2) The strong implication that inflationary universes have a beginning of
time. This is critical, because anything with a beginning requires a cause for its beginning. Otherwise matter would have to come into being out of nothing, which defies logic.
3) The extremely high improbability that our universe would be able to sustain any form of life without extraordinarily complex fine-tuning.

Fred Hoyle, one of the world’s most prominent astrophysists and an ardent atheist, completely changed his mind when he examined some of this evidence. According to Hoyle:

Would you not say to yourself, “Some super-calculating intellect must have designed the properties of the carbon atom, otherwise the chance of my finding such an atom through the blind forces of nature would be utterly miniscule?” Of course you would… A common sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a superintellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as with chemistry and biology, and that there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature. The numbers one calculates from the facts seem to me so overwhelming as to put this conclusion almost beyond question.”

(Fred Hoyle. “The Universe: Past and Present Reflections.” Engineering and Science, November, 1981.)

While this information is readily available to those who know where to look, very few people are aware of these breakthroughs in our ability to understand Creation scientifically.

This fact sheet provides a brief overview of the argument for a Creator combining physics and basic logic through a series of notes.

Can science show God created the universe?

Scientific theories and conclusions are subject to modification because of the possibility of new discoveries. Nevertheless, certain theories and conclusions are considered well-grounded and highly probable because they rest on multiple, distinct, bases of evidence which mutually corroborate one another. There are three mutually corroborative bases of evidence that indicate the existence of a superintellectual creator (God) from the vantage point of modern physics:

• Evidence of a beginning of the universe from the law of entropy;
• Evidence of a beginning of the universe (or any multiverse in which it might be situated) from the vantage point of space-time geometry; and
• Evidence of supernatural design from our low-entropy universe and the anthropic values of cosmological constants.

When all three are seen in their mutually corroborative relationship, the conclusion of Balor Institute Scholar in Residence Bruce Gordon is quite reasonable: “When the logical and metaphysical necessity of an efficient cause, the demonstrable absence of a material one, and the proof that there was an absolute beginning to any universe or multiverse are all conjoined with the fact that our universe exists and its conditions are finetuned immeasurably beyond the capacity of any mindless process, the scientific evidence points inexorably toward transcendent intelligent agency as the most plausible, if not the only reasonable explanation.”

(to be continued…)