The Case for a Creator - Lee Strobel [51]
“Generally, people who take this position don’t try to prove the premise is false, because they can’t do that. Instead, they fold their arms and play the skeptic by saying, ‘You can’t prove that’s true.’ They dial their degree of skepticism so high that nothing could possibly convince them.”
“On the other hand,” I interjected, “they have every right to play the skeptic. After all, the burden of proof should be on you to present affirmative evidence to establish this first premise.”
Craig conceded my point with a nod. “Yes, but you shouldn’t demand unreasonable standards of proof,” he cautioned.
I asked, “What positive proof can you offer?”
“In the first place,” he replied, “this first premise is intuitively obvious once you clearly grasp the concept of absolute nothingness. You see, the idea that things can come into being uncaused out of nothing is worse than magic. At least when a magician pulls a rabbit out of a hat, there’s the magician and the hat!
“But in atheism, the universe just pops into being out of nothing, with absolutely no explanation at all. I think once people understand the concept of absolute nothingness, it’s simply obvious to them that if something has a beginning, that it could not have popped into being out of nothing but must have a cause that brings it into existence.”
Admittedly, that was difficult to dispute, but I needed something more substantial. “Can you offer anything harder than just intuition? What scientific evidence is there?”
“Well, we certainly have empirical evidence for the truth of this premise. This is a principle that is constantly confirmed and never falsified. We never see things coming into being uncaused out of nothing. Nobody worries that while he’s away at work, say, a horse might pop into being, uncaused, out of nothing, in his living room, and be there defiling the carpet. We don’t worry about those kinds of things, because they never happen.
“So this is a principle that is constantly verified by science. At least, Lee, you have to admit that we have better reason to think it’s true than it’s false. If you’re presented with the principle and its denial, which way does the evidence point? Obviously, the premise is more plausible than its denial.”
Still, my research had yielded at least one substantive objection to kalam’s first premise. It emanates from the wacky world of quantum physics, where all kinds of strange, unexpected things happen at the subatomic level—a level, by the way, at which the entire universe existed in its very earliest stages, when electrons, protons, and neutrinos were bursting forth in the Big Bang. Maybe our commonplace understanding of cause-and-effect doesn’t apply in this circus-mirror environment of “quantum weirdness,” a place where, as science writer Timothy Ferris writes, “the logical foundations of classical science are violated.” 19
IS THE UNIVERSE A FREE LUNCH?
I pulled out the copy of the Discover magazine that I had been prompted to purchase after I had seen the marble-sized universe on its cover. I flipped it open and read the following to Craig:
Quantum theory . . . holds that a vacuum . . . is subject to quantum uncertainties. This means that things can materialize out of the vacuum, although they tend to vanish back into it quickly. . . . Theoretically, anything—a dog, a house, a planet—can pop into existence by means of this quantum quirk, which physicists call a vacuum fluctuation. Probability, however, dictates that pairs of subatomic particles . . . are by far the most likely creations and that they will