The Scientific Impossibility of a Universe Creating Itself, revised edition, 07/27/2024

The Failure of Dr. Peter Atkins to Back Up His Claim that “God Isn’t Necessary”               

               In both of Dr. Peter Atkins’ separate public debates with Drs. William Craig and Hugh Ross, the atheist admitted that he cannot "prove" God does not exist.  Instead he claimed that conceptions of a “god" of any kind are entirely unnecessary to account for the existence of the cosmos.  Nevertheless, by that claim Atkins instead exposed his liability to falsification by means of the very same intellectual grounds that he claims to champion in his relentless attempts to disparage "religion."

               Empirical evidence (which by definition refers to physical factors that are measurable, testable, perceptible, and universally-duplicatable), convincingly-indicate that the physical cosmos began to exist out of a "zero…volume beginning." Physicist, Paul Davies writes, "If we extrapolate [backwards into the past in regard to the currently-expanding cosmos] we reach a point when all distances in the universe have shrunk to zero…For this reason cosmologists think of the initial singularity as the beginning of the universe." Furthermore he writes, "On this view the big bang (BB) represents the creation event…not only of all matter and energy in the universe, but also of space-time itself."  Indeed, this view is even affirmed by physicists who reject belief in the God of Genesis.  Moreover, the BB undermines Atkin’s philosophy by manifesting itself as an unassailable miracle!  

               This body of facts in and of itself renders the notion of an atheistically-caused beginning of the universe to be utterly impossible.  The grounds for this stricture are framed solely by scientific insights that are wholly distinct from religious dogma.  For example, scientific events entail (1) physical entities that interact in processes with other objects (2) by forces that propel (or impel) them (3) within spatial regions (volume) (4) over a duration of time.  Yet all four of these factors were utterly absent prior to the zero-volume beginning that marked the creation of the cosmos.  In light of this complete absence of matter and energy and space and time at that beginning moment, there was absolutely no conceivable physical aspect of existence to draw on through which any scientific event could possibly have occurred.

               Although this paper begins by highlighting the impossibility of a materialistic beginning of existence, I now make a positive case for the BB creation of our cosmos by the God of Genesis 1:1.  Numerous observations that follow from Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity indicate that, like shot fired out of a shotgun, 1) virtually all galaxies are spreading apart from each other, 2) that expansion initially began to slow down, 3) the cosmic temperature is cooling off, and 4), the prediction that the BB would leave behind a certain form of “background radiation” is now corroborated, just as was expected.   

 You may continue this article of the same title which also includes a visual illustration of the BB plus my footnotes at my website: www.christianityontheoffense.com/articles