It is Completely Impossible for Science to Account for the Cosmos Part I

“By faith we understand that the world [aeons in Greek] was fashioned by the command of God...”  (Hebrews 11:3-RSV)

At both recent public debates on the existence of God my atheist challenger Jim Corbett stated that Christians are silly to posit their (our) so-called “god” as the creator of all things.  He further said it is more intellectually legitimate to accept that we simply don’t know how the cosmos came into existence yet...  In my reply I challenged him with the question, how it could be that naturalistic processes should be able to bring even one single little thing into existence out of nothing.

Science is the study of orderly natural processes within the physical realm specifically.  In strictly scientific investigation non-physical entities are not even hypothesized (considered) as either potential causes or effects.  This restriction of investigation to physical entities is both a laudable and a necessary requirement for healthy scientific inquiry.  In a recent posting I actually argued briefly that the scientific enterprise deserves and indeed requires protection from the encroachment of religion into its investigational programs concerning natural processes  [correction-- I have yet to post it...almost finished].

However, when it comes to the actual cause of the absolute beginning of the cosmos in the Big Bang, scientific considerations do not apply.  They cannot.  Indeed they cannot even conceivably apply (pun intended).  Let it first be stated that, that the universe had such a beginning out of nothing cannot be argued away.  This early 20^th Century discovery has now become the strong scientific consensus, conceded to be true even by atheistic thinkers.  For a summary list of the roster of evidence supporting the Big Bang, see my paper, “The Prints Are Everywhere” at www.christianityontheoffense.com.  Now, in addition to that pattern of observational evidence, Albert Einstein’s mathematically conceived General Theory of Relativity concluded that all of matter, energy, space, and time itself came into existence out of nothing.  Indeed this is the fundamental point of today’s posting.  There was a moment in time in the past before which nothing existed at all.  And this is not mere speculation.  Of the status of Einstein’s position, renowned astrophysicist Roger Penrose has stated that “general relativity [is] one of the best confirmed principles in all of physics” (boldface mine).  See http://www.reasons.org/articles/another-success-for-general-relativity

to be continued