In the Beginning...

The opening verse to the bible says, "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth."  For

millennia, there was no empirical evidence to suggest there was such a beginning.  Indeed, many people thought that the universe was eternal.  Nowadays, of course, we know different.  Virtually all of the scientific evidence we have points to a beginning to our universe at some finite time in the past (i.e., the "Big Bang"). So, is this scientific fact, that the universe had a beginning, reason to believe in the God of the bible?

I think the answer is a resounding "yes", and I am not alone.  For example, Robert Jastrow said in his book God and the Astronomers:

At this moment it seems as though science will never be able to raise the curtain on the mystery of creation. For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.

A simple way to frame the argument for the existence of God from the beginning of the universe, sometimes called the "Kalam Cosmological Argument," goes like this:

Premise 1: Anything that begins to exist has a cause.
Premise 2: The universe began to exist.
Conclusion: Therefore, the universe had a cause.

At this point, the question you have to ask yourself is, "What was the cause?"  Evidently, the cause has to be spaceless, timeless, immaterial (a spirit-being), eternal, powerful, and personal (i.e., an intelligent mind with will).  Sounds a lot like the God of the bible to me.

PS: Of course, there could be other potential beings that fit this bill that are not the God of the bible. But just getting to some infinitely powerful God does a lot of good.

PPS: Of course, there are objections to this argument.  They will be covered in later posts.