The Case for a Creator - Lee Strobel [54]
Still, I spotted an inconsistency that threatened to unravel Craig’s argument. “If the idea of the universe being infinitely old leads to absurd conclusions, then what about the idea of God being infinitely old?” I asked. “Doesn’t your reasoning also automatically rule out the idea of an eternal deity?”
“That depends,” he said. “It rules out the concept of a God who has endured through an infinite past time. But that’s not the classic idea of God. Time and space are creations of God that began at the Big Bang. If you go back beyond the beginning of time itself, there is simply eternity. By that, I mean eternity in the sense of timelessness. God, the eternal, is timeless in his being. God did not endure through an infinite amount of time up to the moment of creation; that would be absurd. God transcends time. He’s beyond time. Once God creates the universe, he could enter time, but that’s a different topic altogether.”
I quickly reviewed in my mind what Craig had said so far, concluding that it was logically coherent. “How convincing do you think the mathematical pathway is?” I asked.
“Well, I’m convinced of it!” he replied with a chuckle. “In fact, this is such a good argument that even if I were living in the nineteenth century, when there was little scientific evidence for the beginning of the universe, I would still believe that the universe is finite in the past on the basis of these arguments. For me, the scientific evidence is merely confirmation of a conclusion already arrived at on the basis of philosophical reasoning.”
THE PATHWAY OF SCIENCE
At this point, we turned the corner to begin discussing the scientific evidence for the universe being created in the Big Bang billions of years ago. “What discoveries began pointing scientists toward this model?” I asked.
“When Albert Einstein developed his general theory of relativity in 1915 and started applying it to the universe as a whole, he was shocked to discover it didn’t allow for a static universe. According to his equations, the universe should either be exploding or imploding. In order to make the universe static, he had to fudge his equations by putting in a factor that would hold the universe steady.
“In the 1920s, the Russian mathematician Alexander Friedman and the Belgium astronomer George Lemaître were able to develop models based on Einstein’s theory. They predicted the universe was expanding. Of course, this meant that if you went backward in time, the universe would go back to a single origin before which it didn’t exist. Astronomer Fred Hoyle derisively called this the Big Bang—and the name stuck!
“Starting in the 1920s, scientists began to find empirical evidence that supported these purely mathematical models. For instance, in 1929, the American astronomer Edwin Hubble discovered that the light coming to us from distant galaxies appears to be redder than it should be, and that this is a universal feature of galaxies in all parts of the sky. Hubble explained this red shift as being due to the fact that the galaxies are moving away from us. He concluded that the universe is literally flying apart at enormous velocities. Hubble’s astronomical observations were the first empirical confirmation of the predictions by Friedman and Lemaître.
“Then in the 1940s, George Gamow predicted that if the Big Bang really happened, then the background temperature of the universe should be just a few degrees above absolute zero. He said this would be a relic from a very early stage of the universe. Sure enough, in 1965, two scientists accidentally discovered the universe’s background radiation—and it was only about 3.7 degrees above absolute zero. There’s no explanation for this apart from the fact that it is a vestige of a very early and a very dense state of the universe, which was predicted by the