Rocco D’Ambrosca: 12/18/2008
Man has looked to the sky and questioned the world around him for as long as he has existed. We have always looked to explain the world around us to try and explain the things we can’t understand. Early man soon discovered or created, depends who you ask, religion as a tool to explain things that could not be easily explained. How did we get here? Who or what put us here? Why are we here? What is our purpose? Is there life beyond this one? All of these questions man has struggled with and continues to struggle with. How could we ever answer such questions? For many, faith in God and religion are the answer. For them God does exist and his existence may even be provable. In the end, God exists and his existence is provable.
In the earliest civilizations that man created, religion had a role. Even prehistoric man, including Neanderthals, had some type of religion. They buried their dead and had other rituals that are still being investigated through fossil evidence. Man soon developed full blown religions. These earliest religions were almost entirely polytheistic, worshipping many Gods. A specific God was used to describe specific events and aspects of nature that couldn’t be explained or understood without a supernatural explanation. Since these earliest times man has moved towards a predominantly monotheistic religious view. The largest world religions include Christianity and Islam with Judaism as the founding religion of both. Another event that has occurred since those early times has been the establishment and practice of science. Science has and continues to be our modern day source of answers. We don’t pay tribute and worship to the sun god or harvest god, we just use better fertilizer and soil. We now have explanations for most of the things we couldn’t explain before we had science. Does this mean God is no longer needed? That he never really existed? Or that he was simply just our creation to explain the things we couldn’t? Certainly not! God has always existed and will always exist.
How do we go out proving God’s existence? The best place to start is where he is claimed to exist, the Bible. The Bible is a mix of folk tales and history of the Jewish people, the Israelites or Hebrews who left Egypt and established a Kingdom in the present state of Israel (Bible). The Bible is used as the foundation for Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. It tells the story of God creating the Universe out of nothing in seven days, his creation of Man and all the creatures of the Earth, his interactions with Man, and eventually him becoming Man himself in the body of his son Jesus Christ the messiah (Bible). Many of the stories are grounded in historical fact, including the kingdom that once existed in Israel and all of the wars and battles they had with their neighbors and even the political environment surrounding the supposed time of Jesus (Bible). Mixed into all of these events are the involvements of God, his angels or messengers, and many, many, miracles. How do we separate the facts from the fiction? Do we just say that all of the supernatural occurrences are fantasy and should not be believed? What gives us the right to make such judgments? Making such judgments would be arrogant and an insult to the writers of the Bible who gave testimony to such occurrences. To be fair many events similar to events in the Bible are still present and unexplainable including many people with unexplainable supernatural abilities. We simply must search for explanations before we just right them off as fantasy.
The God of the Bible that many believe in is credited with many things. He is said to be all powerful, all knowing, and to have always existed. He is all present and doesn’t follow the laws of time, space, or matter. He is claimed to have worked through Moses to bring down unexplainable plagues upon Egypt, raining frogs and locusts, turning the Nile into blood, part the Red Sea and even through the power of the Holy Spirit, killed the first born child of all the Egyptians. He is claimed to have worked through Jesus to walk on water, multiply fish and bread, turn water into wine, and even raise the dead. How could such things be possible? Could it be that it is all fantasy or is that we just lack the understanding to explain such things?
Until recent years we had no way to explain the existence of God or any of the things he is attributed to have done. But now with the discovery of Quantum Mechanics, the Big Bang theory, and a much greater understanding of the Universe we are much closer to explaining such things. The world now as described by Quantum Mechanics is not a collection of unrelated material objects following the laws of motion described by Newton but a homogenous whole where every single particle is bound and connected to all others (Clayton). “Quantum mechanics tells us that light is neither a wave nor a particle, but both. In fact according to quantum mechanics all physical objects can display both properties even basketballs and airplanes. Another strange aspect of quantum mechanics is called the uncertainty principle. This principle says that if we try to say exactly where an object is, we cannot say exactly how fast or in what direction it is going. A third aspect of quantum mechanics is the principle of nonlocality. Before quantum mechanics, scientists thought that if you wanted to study the behavior of an object, you only needed to consider the conditions where you found the object. What happens on Mars has no effect upon what happens on Earth in this view. Quantum mechanics denies this seemingly obvious observation. Particles located hundreds of thousands of miles apart are entangled in this view, so that if you know a property of one particle you know the property of another hundreds of thousands of miles away. It is not the purpose of this article to explain how all this is possible, but numerous experiments on a microscopic scale have confirmed all three of the principles we have discussed. Our point in this article is that quantum mechanics is a support not a denial of the existence of God. Many notions of science and reality have to be rethought and redirected, but no biblical perspective is violated or denied.” (Clayton).
Clayton takes this further to explain how it is possible for the Universe to have been created as described in the Bible and even how to prove God’s existence. “Let us look at some reasons why this is true: 1) Complete determinism and materialism is impossible. It is obvious that changes on an atomic scale can have profound large scale affect on things in a totally different location in the world of quantum mechanics. Explaining all phenomena on a cause and affect basis is no longer possible. Science is forced to admit that instantaneous interactions do occur over distances that are beyond the relativistic laws of our universe. These things require us to question our standard notions of space and time and our conception of reality itself. 2) The interrelatedness of everything (the holism) in the cosmos verifies the structure espoused by the Bible writers. “In Him we live and move and have our being” fits well with the picture of reality we get from the nonlocal view of the cosmos. The concept of the Holy Ghost does not have any problem with the nature of the cosmos described by quantum mechanics. The atheist view of matter being self existing does not fare well with these new concepts. 3) The concept of creation is not denied but supported by this view. The concept of something from nothing in our three-dimensional universe is not influenced by what we have discussed. The biblical concept of God has always been that He exist outside of time and space as we know them. The idea of interconnectedness projected by quantum mechanics gives us a holistic universe, but God is seen as an entity that exceeds the effects of nonlocality. The degree to which we comprehend quantum mechanics is an indicator of the extent to which we understand the process of creation.” (Clayton). With Quantum Mechanics it is consciousness that is at the basis of all reality in the Universe. Below the smallest atom, electron, or subatomic particle is the consciousness of God that holds and binds the Universe together, al la the force in Star Wars that holds and binds the Universe together, the framework of the Universe so to speak (StarWars).
Others have also tried to prove God’s existence through science. St. Augustine created a logical argument for the existence for God based on cause and effect. Augustine’s argument was essentially, “1. Everything is caused by something other than itself 2. Therefore the universe was caused by something other than itself. 3. The string of causes cannot be infinitely long. 4. If the string of causes cannot be infinitely long, there must be a first cause. 5. Therefore, there must be a first cause, namely god.” (Schick). This argument has been updated and modified with the advent of the Big Bang theory and has been modified by Astronomer Hugh Ross to: “6. Everything that had a beginning in time has a cause. 7. The universe had a beginning in time. 8. Therefore the universe had a cause. 9. The only thing that could have caused the universe is god.
10. Therefore, god exists.” (Schick). The reasoning behind all this being that the Big Bang could not have triggered itself and must have been acted upon by an outside force such as God.
The other puzzling aspect of the Universe is the unprecedented organization, logic, and order that permeates every part of the reality we call the Universe. This leads very strongly to St. Thomas Aquinas’ argument for the existence of God. Aquinas argues that one of the ways God’s existence can be proven is from the order of things (Aquinas). This simply seems to be a very logical and fair way to go about it. If the Universe was created by an intelligent super being called God then he must have designed it in a way to reflect his intelligence. This is evident in all aspects of reality and the universe. The structure and organization of our bodies and all plants and animals is simply ingeniously efficient, the laws of physics so orderly and perfect that they just make complete logical sense and couldn’t be designed in any other way, the way that the Universe at every turn seems to be logically and intelligently organized and designed are all hallmarks of the order of things described by Aquinas. It is very hard to try and say that all of this is simply random chance; things are just too perfectly organized to have just randomly occurred in this way.
In the end God exists and his existence is provable. Man has always strived to explain things and the world around him. Man first used multiple gods and supernatural explanations to explain the things that he couldn’t. Eventually man developed science to explain the world around him, and it is this science that is now explaining and proving the supernatural. From Augustine to Aquinas to the cutting edge quantum physicists of today, all have made inroads into explaining and proving God’s existence. The essence of God may never be known and all may never be convinced of his existence, but there is certainly plenty of evidence to go on in his favor.
Works Cited:
Aquinas, Thomas. “Medieval Sourcebook: Thomas Aquinas: Reasons in Proof of the Existence of God.” Fordham University. 1270. Fordham University. 18 Dec. 2008 <http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/source/aquinas3.html>.
Clayton, John N. “Quantum Mechanics Atheist Tool or Spiritual Illuminater?” Does God Exist. Sept.-Oct. 1999. 18 Dec. 2008 <http://www.doesgodexist.org/sepoct99/quantummechanicsatheisttoolorspirtualilluminater.html>.
The New American Bible. Wichita, KA: Fireside Bible, 2002.
Schick, Theodore. “The ‘Big Bang’ Argument for the Existence of God.” The Secular Web. 30 Nov. 2005. 18 Dec. 2008 <http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/theodore_schick/bigbang.html>.
Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope. Dir. George Lucas. Perf. Mark Hamill, Harrison Ford. Film. 1977.
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