Pre-Alpha: The Existence of God, Episode II, How Did Stuff Get Here?

Walter Martin, founder of the Christian Research Institute, put it this way: There are two possibilities; either something in the universe is eternal, or something came from nothing.

If something came from nothing, we have to ask, “OK, how?” How did something come from nothing? I mean absolutely nothing - anything that was there before the beginning is not nothing. And for those who insist on proving everything scientifically, how does one explain this. 

So… first possibility – something is eternal. If this is the case, we have to ask, “What is it?" Two choices - it must either be matter, or whatever created matter. I can’t see a third alternative. Either matter – that is all the atoms and molecules in the universe - have been here forever, or at some time in the past they didn’t exist and then they somehow began to exist. But that still leaves the question; if matter is eternal, where did it come from? How did it come into being in the first place? If it came into being at some point, how? The question is the same in both cases; if matter is eternal, how did it get here? If it is not... well... how did it get here?

Most scientists agree that the universe had a beginning – the Big Bang, but where did all the atoms and molecules, the actual physical stuff involved, come from? Scientists will also tell us that not only did the universe have a beginning, but that it is expanding outward. But if the universe is eternal, and is expanding, it has been expanding for an infinite length of time. Therefore, it would have expanded to infinity already. If it has been expanding forinfinity, it would already have expanded toinfinity. There would be no more room for expansion. Therefore, because it is still expanding, it has not existed eternally.  

So if matter has not been here from infinity past, that leaves whoever or whatever created matter. People might ask, “Who created God?” Well that question is irrelevant. God is not stuff. God is Spirit, as the Bible says. God is not physical, so the same questions don’t apply. We ask the question about the origins of matter scientifically. Science doesn’t concern itself with the non-physical. So the question comes back to this: What is eternal, matter or the creator of matter. I believe reason would lead us to believe that if anything is eternal, it is whatever caused matter to come into existence.

That then leads us to ask another question. It is this: is there anything outside of the purely physical, or is “stuff” all there is? I’ll talk about this in another post, but for now, just something to think about.

Blessings,

John