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Must God exist to explain how the universe began?

Background

This philosophical question is a form of the Cosmological Argument or First Cause Argument. The question is whether it makes sense that the universe "came into existence from nothing". Modern physics suggests that the notion of time, and hence cause and effect, break down at the time of the big bang, rendering the intuitive demand for a "first cause" meaningless.

Implications to Other Questions

Is the world explainable without God?
Must God exist to explain how the universe began?

Experts

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Agree
Experts In Religion


John Polkinghorne    Physics Professor and Reverend
Agree
...you have a choice. You can either say, "Well, that's just the way it is; we're here because we're here." That seems to me unduly intellectually supine. I would like to understand why the world is the way it is. Shortcutting some detailed argument, I would say that for me the most satisfying insight is that the world is indeed not 'any old world,' but a creation whose given law and circumstance has been willed by its creator to be capable of fruitful process.
06 Apr 1990    Source


Experts In Science


Roy Spencer    Meteorologist
Agree
All naturalistic cosmological theories of origins must invent physics that have never been observed by science -- because the "Big Bang" can't be explained based upon current physics. A naturalistic origin of the universe violates either the First or Second Laws of thermodynamics -- or both. So, is this science? Or faith?
08 Aug 2005    Source


Experts In Christianity


John Clayton    Christian Teacher
Agree
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. ... 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...
27 Aug 2007    Source


Disagree
Experts In Philosophy


John Stuart Mill    Philosopher, Political Economist, 19th Century
Disagree
But the fact of experience is not that everything we know gets its existence from a cause, but only every event or change does so. Nature has a permanent element, and also a changeable one; the changes are always the effects of previous changes, but so far as we know the permanent existences are not effects at all.
01 Jan 1874    Source


Bertrand Russell    Iconic Philosopher of 20th Century
Disagree
If everything must have a cause, then God must have a cause. If there can be anything without a cause, it may just as well be the world as God, so that there cannot be any validity in that argument. It is exactly of the same nature as the Hindu's view, that the world rested upon an elephant and the elephant rested upon a tortoise; and when they said, "How about the tortoise?" the Indian said, "Suppose we change the subject." The [First Cause] argument is really no better than that.
06 Mar 1927    Source


Austin Cline    Philosopher
Disagree
Because time is an aspect of the universe, it‘s hard to see how it can be said to have a “beginning” in the way the word is normally used. The concept of a “beginning” normally assumes a “time before” at which the object did not exist — but there was no “time before” the universe. Without a time before, the notion of "cause" no longer applies.
01 Jan 2008    Source


Experts In Physics


Steven Weinberg    Nobel Laureate in Physics
Disagree
In essence, [the Cosmological Argument] argues that everything has a cause, and since this chain of causality cannot go on forever, it must terminate in a first cause, which we call God. The idea of an ultimate cause is deeply attractive, and indeed the dream of elementary particle physics is to find the final theory at the root of all chains of explanation of what we see in nature. The trouble is that such a mathematical final theory would hardly be what anyone means by God.
17 Jan 2007    Source



Comments

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JGWeissman gave their takeonit on 08 Mar 2010
Disagree
What principle is it that requires that the universe, but not God, be caused by something else? Saying God created the universe explains nothing, it just pushes the question back one step.