Is there a creator?
Okay, this is a discussion about the existence of God, but I’m not using religious arguments in this discussion like a preacher. I’m just using cold logic, and it does have relevance to science fiction.
Ever since Charles Darwin published his book about evolution, there has been an ongoing argument about the existence of God. The truth is that many cosmologists and quantum physicists don’t believe in God, but most of them are not atheists. They are what you could call agnostics, people who don’t really care if God exists. They’re too busy trying to explain how the universe came into existence using quantum physics.
A notable cosmologist who has said that he doesn’t believe in God is Stephen Hawking. A notable astronomer who didn’t believe in God was Carl Sagan. I say ‘was’ because he died.
Let’s start with Darwin. Darwin was a minister, and he realized when he discovered evidence for evolution, which he called species selection, that it would cause a big controversy. That’s why he delayed publishing his book for quite some time after his journey to the Galapagos Islands where he located all of the evolution evidence. When people read his book, they decided that evolution explains why we humans came into existence and that God wasn’t necessary. In other words, they threw out the book of Genesis. First of all, Genesis is not a science book. It only relates the fact that God created us, not how He did it. In my opinion, Darwin did not kill God. Science is based on hard fact and repeatable experimental results. Religion is based on faith, which is a belief in something that can’t be proved. The Bible is a testimony to the belief that God created everything and us, not how He accomplished this amazing thing. That’s the job of science.
Stephen Hawking says that God isn’t needed because if there are an infinite number of universes, one of these was bound to lead to humans because of probability. That’s a big stretch even if you propose a very huge number of universes, and it still doesn’t explain how these universes came into existence.
For that, he says that quantum physics could explain how it happened because it is a provable fact that quantum particles can not only be in more than one place at the same time, they can pop in and out of existence. So, that’s how he thinks the universe came about in the big bang. It just popped into existence by itself. Really? That would be equivalent to a new Cadillac appearing in my driveway by itself. That’s not going to happen.
There are many arguments for the existence of God. Most of these are philosophical. One is that there has to be a prime mover, meaning that a supreme being had to be the spark of creation. The problem is that one could get into a circular argument using this idea because it’s a priori, meaning it’s self evident or derived from reasoning. The argument for a creator does fit our human experience. We see that anything complicated has to have a creator. So why couldn’t the universe have a prime mover? It’s certainly complicated enough.
The fact is that the physical constants that had to be present for us humans to exist are so complicated it would seem impossible for it to be a product of chance or accident as some cosmologists say. I can assure you that human existence would be some ridiculously improbable accident.
The truth is that science can neither prove the existence of God nor can it prove that God doesn’t exist. That’s the job of religion.
Thanks for reading.