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Velociraptor
Have a long hard read of this, then drink a glass of milk.
A discussion about God’s existence should start with the acknowledgement that the burden of proof lies with the theists, that is, with those who believe in God. There are some questions that puzzle most reflective people: How did the laws of nature come to be? How did the universe come into existence? And how did life as a phenomenon originate from non-life? The Kalam cosmological argu-ment for the existence of God is a method of argument developed by medieval Muslim logicians and it was popularised in the West by philosopher William Craig. This philosophy entails the following; given that an observable universe exists, there are three possibilities: First, the universe always existed. Second, the universe created itself. Third, an all-powerful and all-knowing transcendent being, which we call God, created it. Let us examine each of these possibilities separately.
Eternal Universe
Consider the possibility of an eternal universe, a universe that existed forever. But the Second of the Law of Thermodynamics and the theory of entropy preclude this possibility. If the universe really had existed for an infinitely long period of time, its entropy and the measure of its molecular disorder, would have reached its maximal value; that is, the universe would have suffered a ‘heat death’. The fact that the universe has not yet died in this fashion implies that it cannot have endured for all eternity.
Origin of the Universe
As long as the universe could be conveniently thought of without an end and without a beginning, it remained easy to see its existence as a self-explanatory brute fact and perhaps there was not much need to postulate something else that produced it. But the Big Bang theory radically changed the situation.
The Big Bang is a widely-accepted theory of the origin of the universe. According to this theory, more than fourteen billions years ago, the universe emerged from a highly compressed and extremely hot state and then it rapidly cooled down and expanded. The Big Bang theory is considered a cornerstone of modern cos-mology. It provides a moment at the origin of the universe when creation could have occurred. At the origin, we encounter a point that physicists call a singularity, at which neither space nor time exists – and at that point the laws of physics breakdown.
If the universe had a beginning, it became entirely sensible, almost inevitable, to ask what produced this beginning. Therefore the idea of the origin of the universe with a singularity implying a role of God in its creation did not sit well with many atheistic scientists.
Bondi and Hoyle came up with a steady state theory in an attempt to explain the expansion of the universe in a way that would not require the universe to have had a beginning. But this theory was readily discarded, as it did not correspond to the observational data.
Stephen Hawking, professor of mathematics at Cambridge University, and James Hartle, proposed a theory where the universe has no boundary either in space or in time, that is, it has neither a beginning nor an end. In his book A Brief History of Time, Hawking then asked if there was any place for a creator in this scheme.
There are several problems with Hawking’s theory. Hawking’s solution uses imaginary time, invoked to stipulate imaginary universes. It remains an extre-mely speculative theory with little chance of experimental verification.
Fine Tuning of the
Universe The universe with all its laws appears to be delicately balanced and fine-tuned to produce human life. Physicists call this finding the anthropic principle. Many of the basic features of the universe are, in essence, determined by the values that are assigned to the fundamental constants and the initial conditions at the beginning of the universe.
Hawking wrote that if the rate of expansion one second after the Big Bang had been smaller by even one part in a hundred thousand trillion, the universe would have re-collapsed before it reached its present size. If the rate of expansion had been slightly higher, then the galaxies would have never formed. Astronomer Martin Rees, in Just Six Numbers, argues that six numbers underlie the fundamental physical properties of the universe, and that each is an exact value required for life to exist. If any one of the six (say the gravitational constant, or the strong nuclear force) were different even to the tiniest degree, there would be no stars, no complex elements and no life. Although Rees disavows the religious implications, he does not hesitate to call the values attached to the six numbers ‘providential’.
In the anthropic principle, the theist sees a purposeful design, the handiwork of God. The atheist looks upon it as a very lucky coincidence where humans exist in a universe with the right parameters to ponder over the mystery of their existence. But the odds of life appearing in the universe are so infinitesimal, so incredibly small that we need a rational explanation of how something this unlikely could take place.
Not to mention this dude would have probably been sent to a gulag like the rest of the non Slavic minorities were.
