The Case for a Creator - Lee Strobel [59]
There is a kind of religion in science; it is the religion of a person who believes there is order and harmony in the Universe. Every event can be explained in a rational way as the product of some previous event; every effect must have its cause; there is no First Cause. . . . This religious faith of the scientist is violated by the discovery that the world had a beginning under conditions in which the known laws of physics are not valid, and as a product of forces or circumstances we cannot discover. When that happens, the scientist has lost control. If he really examined the implications, he would be traumatized. 35
Has this attitude, I asked Craig, fueled efforts to circumvent the idea of the Big Bang?
“I believe it has. A good example is the Steady State theory proposed in 1948,” he replied. “It said that the universe was expanding all right but claimed that as galaxies retreat from each other, new matter comes into being out of nothing and fills the void. So in contradiction to the First Law of Thermodynamics, which says that matter is neither created nor destroyed, the universe is supposedly being constantly replenished with new stuff.”
The concept was intriguing if nothing else. “What was the evidence for it?” I asked.
“There was none!” Craig exclaimed. “It never secured a single piece of experimental verification. It was motivated purely by a desire to avoid the absolute beginning of the universe predicted by the Big Bang model—in fact, one of its originators, Sir Fred Hoyle, was quite overt about this. He was very up front about his desire to avoid the metaphysical and theological implications of the Big Bang by proposing a model that was eternal in the past.”
I interrupted. “Wait a minute, Bill,” I said. Recalling a comment by science philosopher Stephen C. Meyer in my earlier interview, I asked: “Wouldn’t you agree that the motivations behind a theory are independent of its scientific worth?”
“Yes, yes, I’d agree with that,” Craig replied. “In this case, though, there were no scientific data supporting it. It’s a good illustration of how scientists are not mere thinking machines but are driven by philosophical and emotional factors as well.”
Rather than try to second-guess the motivations of cosmologists, I decided to ask Craig about several alternatives to the standard Big Bang model that have gained currency through the years. Maybe one of them could succeed in toppling the theistic conclusion of the kalam argument.
EXPLORING SAGAN’S COSMOS
The first alternative I mentioned to Craig—the Oscillating Model of the universe—was popularized by astronomer Carl Sagan on his Cosmos television program. This theory eliminates the need for an absolute beginning of the universe by suggesting that the universe expands, then collapses, then expands again, and continues in this cycle indefinitely. Interestingly, Sagan even quoted from Hindu scriptures to show how this is consistent with its cyclical themes. When I asked Craig about Sagan’s theory, he said that, yes, he was quite familiar with it.
“That model was popular in the 1960s, particularly among Russian cosmologists,” he said. “In 1968, when I was at the World Congress on Philosophy in Düsseldorf, I heard Soviet bloc cosmologists espousing this model, simply because of their commitment to dialectical materialism. They could not deny the eternality of matter because this was part of Marxist philosophy, and so, despite the evidence, they were holding out hope for the Oscillating Model.”
“But,” I interjected, “support for this model apparently hasn’t waned. As recently as 2003, Bill Bryson, in his best-seller A Short History of Nearly Everything, said that ‘one notion’ among scientists is that ‘we’re just one of an eternal cycle of expanding and collapsing universes, like the bladder on an oxygen machine.’ ” 36
“Well, several problems with the Oscillating Model have been well known for decades,” he replied. “For one thing, it contradicts the known laws of physics. Theorems by Hawking and Penrose