Understanding the God

To help the reader comprehend the nature of God, I would like to borrow an analogy from the book Flatland by Edwin Abbott.^* Abbott was a mathematician and the model is geometric in nature. It was originally written in the 19th century for the purposes we are using it for here. Flatland is the story of a man who lives in a two dimensional world--like a sheet of paper. In the surface of the paper there is only length and width-there is no such thing as thickness. You and I are three-dimensional beings-we have length and width and frequently considerable thickness. You cannot get me, a three-dimensional being, into a two-dimensional sheet of paper. You can draw a front view of me (a portrait), but that is not the whole me. You can draw a top view of me which because I am bald, ends up being three concentric circles, but that is not the whole me. If you and I were to look at the man in Flatland, we would see him as a profile (see figure 1). He would be outlined but have no thickness.

Figure 1: The man in Flatland.

One day the man in Flatland is visited by a sphere. The sphere is a three-dimensional object just as we are, and it just so happens that it crosses Flatland right in the man's living room. Now if you will think about that for a moment, you will realize that for the man in Flatland a rather incredible thing has happened. A dot appears on the man's floor with no cause that the man in Flatland can understand. A dot in Flatland is matter! In figure 1, the man, himself, is made up of a series of dots. Just as a tennis ball dipped in paint and touched to a sheet of paper would produce a dot on the paper, so too has our dot which the man in Flatland calls matter appeared out of nothing (see figure 2). As the man in Flatland watches, the dot becomes a circle which continuously grows in size (see figure 3). You will see if a plane truncates (or slices) a sphere, it will produce a circle; and the deeper the sphere sinks into the plane, the larger the circle will become.

Figure 2: A sphere tangent to a plane produces a dot on the plane. The man in Flatland sees only the dot.

Figure 3: A plane truncating a sphere. The man in Flatland sees a circle.

The circle becomes so large it is about to fill the living room of the man in Flatland. He is terrified because he does not understand what is happening. All of the laws of science which state that matter cannot be created nor destroyed are being violated. What he sees is for him a true miracle. Just as he is about to run in panic from the room, the sphere reaches its equator, passes its equator, and gradually sinks out of the plane. So what happens to the circle in Flatland? It begins to shrink, and it becomes smaller and smaller until finally it is just a dot on his floor and then it is gone! Another violation of the laws of science! Matter cannot be destroyed and yet the man in Flatland has seen it happen. The man in Flatland is being confronted with miraculous and ghost-like events which violates his science and his common sense.

Let us suppose now that the man in Flatland begins talking to the sphere, and he says to the sphere: "What is it like to be a sphere? The sphere says, "I'll tell you what it's like; draw a circle on your floor." This is not easy for the man in Flatland to do. His perception of a circle is a constantly curving line that returns to its origin, but he cannot see all of the circle at once. He can only see the side of the circle facing him. The only way he could see a whole circle would be to be inside the circle, and if he got inside he could never get out. People in Flatland commit suicide by drawing circles around themselves that they can never get out of. Because of this it takes along time for him to draw the circle. The sphere is most impatient with all this because he could have done it instantly. Finally the circle is completed and the sphere says, "Now what I want you to do is to rotate the circle! What he has in mind is that the man in Flatland will rotate the circle about its diameter producing a sphere, but what the man in Flatland does is to rotate the circle about its circumference, spinning it like a record on a record player. "No, no--rotate it the third way,' says the sphere. "There is no third way you fool," cries out the man in Flatland, and for him this is true. There is no third way, no up and down in a thickness direction, and absolutely no way for him to comprehend what the sphere is talking about or what the sphere is. The only thing that he can understand is the world or dimension in which he lives.

Now the reason that I have told you this little story is to give you a foundation by which you can understand God. When you read, "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth" (Genesis 1:1), you are reading a description analogous to Flatland. The concept is that, a God, who is in a higher dimension than are we, a God who has the same kind of relationship to us which the sphere had to Flatland, that, this kind of being touched our little "Flatland," so to speak, and in violation of all of our laws of science created matter out of nothing. God is so superior to us, he exists in such a higher dimension than do we that what is natural and ordinary to him is miraculous to us. The Bible recognizes this concept and uses it in every single description of God.

The Practical Proof of God

The existence of God is a subject that has occupied schools of philosophy and theology for thousands of years.  Most of the time, these debates have revolved around all kinds of assumptions and definitions.  Philosophers will spend a lifetime arguing about the meaning of a word and never really get there.  One is reminded of the college student who was asked how his philosophy class was going.  He replied that they had not done much because when the teacher tried to call roll, the kids kept arguing about whether they existed or not.

    Most of us who live and work in the real world do not concern ourselves with such activities.  We realize that such discussions may have value and interest in the academic world, but the stress and pressure of day-to-day life forces us to deal with a very pragmatic way of making decisions.  If I ask you to prove to me that you have $2.00, you would show it to me.  Even in more abstract things we use common sense and practical reasoning.  If I ask you whether a certain person is honest or not, you do not flood the air with dissertations on the relative nature of honesty; you would give me evidence one way or the other.  The techniques of much of the philosophical arguments that go on would eliminate most of engineering and technology if they were applied in those fields.

    The purpose of this brief study is to offer a logical, practical, pragmatic proof of the existence of God from a purely scientific perspective.  To do this, we are assuming that we exist, that there is reality, and that the matter of which we are made is real.  If you do not believe that you exist, you have bigger problems than this study will entail and you will have to look elsewhere.

THE BEGINNING

If we do exist, there are only two possible explanations as to how our existence came to be.  Either we had a beginning or we did not have a beginning.  The Bible says, "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth" (Genesis 1 :1).  Most atheists maintain that there was no beginning.  The idea is that matter has always existed in the form of either matter or energy; and all that has happened is that matter has been changed from form to form, but it has always been.  The Humanist Manifesto says, "Matter is self-existing and not created," and that is a concise statement of the atheist's belief.

    The way we decide whether the atheist is correct or not is to see what science has discovered about this question.  The picture below on the left represents our part of the cosmos.  Each of the disk shaped objects is a galaxy like our Milky Way.  All of these galaxies are moving relative to each other.  Their movement has a very distinct pattern which causes the distance between the galaxies to get greater with every passing day.  If we had three galaxies located at positions A, B. and C in the second diagram below, and if they are located as shown, tomorrow they will be further apart.  The triangle they form will be bigger.  The day after tomorrow the triangle will be bigger yet.  We live in an expanding universe that gets bigger and bigger and bigger with every passing day.

Now let us suppose that we made time run backwards!   If we are located at a certain distance today, then yesterday we were closer together.  The day before that, we were still closer.  Ultimately, where must all the galaxies have been?  At a point!  At the beginning!  At what scientists call a singularity!  In 1999, it was discovered that the galaxies are accelerating in their expansion.  Any notion that we live in an oscillating or pulsating universe has been dispelled by this discovery.  The universe is not slowing down, but speeding up in its motion.

A second proof is seen in the energy sources that fuel the cosmos.  The picture to the right is a picture of the sun.  Like all stars, the sun generates its energy by a nuclear process known as thermonuclear fusion.  

Every second that passes, the sun compresses 564 million tons of hydrogen into 560 million tons of helium with 4 million tons of matter released as energy.  In spite of that tremendous consumption of fuel, the sun has only used up 2% of the hydrogen it had the day it came into existence.  This incredible furnace is not a process confined to the sun.  Every star in the sky generates its energy in the same way.  Throughout the cosmos there are 25 quintillion stars, each converting hydrogen into helium, thereby reducing the total amount of hydrogen in the cosmos.  Just think about it!  If everywhere in the cosmos hydrogen is being consumed and if the process has been going on forever, how much hydrogen should be left?

Suppose I attempt to drive my automobile without putting any more gas (fuel) into it.  As I drive and drive, what is eventually going to happen?  I am going to run out of gas!  If the cosmos has been here forever, we would have run out of hydrogen long ago!  The fact is, however, that the sun still has 98% of its original hydrogen.  The fact is that hydrogen is the most abundant material in the universe!  Everywhere we look in space we can see the hydrogen 21-cm line in the spectrum--a piece of light only given off by hydrogen.  This could not be unless we had a beginning!

A third scientific proof that the atheist is wrong is seen in the second law of thermodynamics.  In any closed system, things tend to become disordered.  If an automobile is driven for years and years without repair, for example, it will become so disordered that it would not run any more.  Getting old is simple conformity to the second law of thermodynamics.  In space, things also get old.  Astronomers refer to the aging process as heat death.  If the cosmos is "everything that ever was or is or ever will be," as Dr. Carl Sagan was so fond of saying, nothing could be added to it to improve its order or repair it.  Even a universe that expands and collapses and expands again forever would die because it would lose light and heat each time it expanded and rebounded.

The atheist's assertion that matter/energy is eternal is scientifically wrong.  The biblical assertion that there was a beginning is scientifically correct.

THE CAUSE

If we know the creation has a beginning, we are faced with another logical question--was the creation caused or was it not caused?  The Bible states, "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth."  Not only does the Bible maintain that there was a cause (a creation) but it also tells us what the cause was.  It was God. The atheist tells us that "matter is self-existing and not created."  If matter had a beginning and yet was uncaused, one must logically maintain that something would have had to come into existence out of nothing.  From empty space with no force, no matter, no energy, and no intelligence, matter would have to become existent.  Even if this could happen by some strange new process unknown to science today, there is a logical problem.

In order for matter to come out of nothing, all of our scientific laws dealing with the conservation of matter/energy would have to be wrong, invalidating all of chemistry.  All of our laws of conservation of angular momentum would have to be wrong, invalidating all of physics.  All of our laws of conservation of electric charge would have to be wrong, invalidating all of electronics and demanding that your TV set not work!  Your television set may not work, but that is not the reason!  In order to believe matter is uncaused, one has to discard known laws and principles of science.  No reasonable person is going to do this simply to maintain a personal atheistic position.

The atheist's assertion that matter is eternal is wrong.  The atheist's assertion that the universe is uncaused and selfexisting is also incorrect.  The Bible's assertion that there was a beginning which was caused is supported strongly by the available scientific evidence.

THE DESIGN

If we know that the creation had a beginning and we know that the beginning was caused, there is one last question for us to answer--what was the cause?  The Bible tells us that God was the cause.  We are further told that the God who did the causing did so with planning and reason and logic.  Romans 1:20 tells us that we can know God is "through the things he has made."  The atheist, on the other hand, will try to convince us that we are the product of chance.  Julian Huxley once said:

We are as much a product of blind forces as is the falling of a stone to earth or the ebb and flow of the tides.  We have just happened, and man was made flesh by a long series of singularly beneficial accidents.

The subject of design has been one that has been explored in many different ways.  For most of us, simply looking at our newborn child is enough to rule out chance.  Modern-day scientists like Paul Davies and Frederick Hoyle and others are raising elaborate objections to the use of chance in explaining natural phenomena.  A principle of modern science has emerged in the 1980s called "the anthropic principle."  The basic thrust of the anthropic principle is that chance is simply not a valid mechanism to explain the atom or life.  If chance is not valid, we are constrained to reject Huxley's claim and to realize that we are the product of an intelligent God.