yesso - philosophy - god - God as the Creator
People often make the following claim: "The universe exists, and the only way for the universe to exist is if God created it, and so therefore God exists." In this section I will show that this claim is nonsense. Throughout this discussion I will refer to this claim as the "subject claim".
There are a number of presumptions that are implied by the subject claim. Some of them are:
1- God must have existed in order to have created the universe.
2- It must have been possible to create something at the time at which God created
the universe in order for God to have created the universe.
An inquisitive scientist may be bothered by the questions "Why did the big bang occur? How did the universe come to exist in the first place?" A theologian may respond by saying "God created the universe, God caused the big bang." At this point, the scientist may become dissatisfied, and realize that he asked the wrong question. The theologian's answer does not simplify things, even if it were true, because it raises the much more difficult question "How did God come to exist?"
When the scientist asked the question, he was presuming that the "universe" is the set of all existing things (the thing that contains all existence). If God existed before the beginning of the universe, then there is more that exists than the universe. Thus, the question of how the universe began is not what we really want to know. What we really want to know is "How did the first thing ever to exist (possibly including God) come to exist?" And more importantly, "How did causality begin?"
Causality is an important concept that I will mention again and again in my philosophy discussions. Therefore I believe I should spend some time explaining it at this point. Causality is "the relation between causes and effects". The idea of causality is that every event is attributable to a cause. In other words, the state of the universe at time t is (to some extent) derived from the state of the universe at time t-x, where x is positive. The remaining factor determining the state of the universe at time t is pure randomness (the exact extent of which is described by quantum mechanics).
The problem with causality is, what exactly happened at the beginning of the universe? The very first existing possible time, t=0, cannot be derived from time t-x, because such a time t-x simply does not exist.
You could argue that the universe may have existed for an infinitely long time. If that were true, it would eliminate the need for the universe to have been created by God. I find this explanation to be an unlikely case, however, because if time moves forward at a non-infinite rate as we perceive it to, there is no way we could have ever made it to the year 2000. The explanation for this is as follows: If there is a time A and a time B, where time B is the year 2000, and if we were going backwards in time, we could never travel from time B to time A if time A is defined as a time that is always earlier than the time we have reached (which is possible if time goes back infinitely). Since we cannot go backwards from time B to time A, we also cannot go forward from time A to time B. Just before we arrive at B, we can decide that A was in fact 1000 years earlier, which leaves us another 1000 years of distance to travel before arriving at time B (a decision that can be made an infinite amount of times).
The concept of "creation" depends on causality, since "to create" is "to cause to exist". One cannot create causality, because causality must already exist for anything to be created (which is implied by the subject claim, presumption 2 listed above). Furthermore, one cannot create existence, because one must already exist to be able to create (which is implied by the subject claim, presumption 1 listed above), and existence must exist for anything to exist.
So, if we consider the "universe" to be the set of all things that exist, then the subject claim is false. Not only did God not create the universe, but the universe was not created at all.
I hope that this discussion has not only shown that God cannot be applied as an explanation for the beginning of the universe, but also to make it more clear what the problems in explaining the beginning of the universe really are.
There are other problems with the subject claim that I think are worth mentioning, but are not as philosophically significant. There are some more presumptions that are suggested by the subject claim:
3- If there is only one explanation for something, it is true.
4- If God existed to create the universe, he must still exist.
The absence of any other completely satisfactory explanation for the beginning (or the overall existence of) the universe does not justify the theological explanation. Also, the fact that an explanation cannot be disproven is not proof that it is true. The only way an explanation can be accepted is if there is proof that it is true.
Also, it should be fairly obvious that even if something existed and created the universe, there is no reason to believe that this thing has any of the properties that we attribute to God or that this being still exists, or is even able to affect our universe in any way other than by initializing it.