Why Is There Something?

Romans 1:20 is the verse every cosmological argument in the Christian tradition has leaned on, so begin by reading exactly what it claims. Paul says that certain things about God are invisible, that since the creation of the world they have nevertheless been clearly seen, that they are understood from the things God has made, and that the result is that people are without excuse. He names what is seen: His eternal power and divine nature. He does not say that creation reveals the Trinity, the cross, the forgiveness of sins or the name of Jesus. The content is thin and the claim about it is strong. Every apologist who uses this verse needs to keep both of those facts in view.

Notice also the purpose clause. The Greek eis to einai autous anapologetous can be read as result, so that they are without excuse, or as purpose, in order that they might be without excuse, and translations divide. Either way the verse is not chiefly an invitation to build proofs. It is part of an indictment that runs from 1:18 to 3:20 and ends with every mouth silenced. Paul's interest is that what people already know from creation is enough to make them accountable, not enough to save them. That is the first thing an honest apologetics learns from its own favourite text: the argument from creation has a real job, and salvation is not that job.

Christians have read this passage in two broad ways, and both are held by serious people. The first says Romans 1 licenses natural theology: careful reasoning from the world to God that any thoughtful person can follow. The First Vatican Council, in its constitution Dei Filius of 1870, taught that God can be known with certainty by the natural light of human reason from the things he has made, and cited this verse. Thomas Aquinas built the Five Ways on that confidence, and much of the Protestant tradition, from the Reformed scholastics to William Paley, shared it. On this view, a sound argument is one of the means God uses to clear away an obstacle, and refusing to make one is a failure of love toward the person who has honest questions.

The second reading says that Romans 1 describes a knowledge that is real but always suppressed, so that an argument built on it cannot reach neutral ground, because there is none. John Calvin taught that God has planted in every person a sense of the divine, the sensus divinitatis, and that creation is a dazzling theatre of his glory (Institutes 1.3 and 1.5), but that sinful people cannot read it rightly without the spectacles of scripture (1.6.1). In 1934 Karl Barth answered Emil Brunner's essay on nature and grace with a pamphlet titled simply Nein!, refusing any point of contact for the gospel in fallen human reason. Cornelius Van Til and his student Greg Bahnsen, whom you met in Module 1, argued that the Christian should not argue toward God from premises an unbeliever accepts, but should show that the unbeliever's own reasoning only works if God exists. On this view a cosmological argument concedes too much at the start, by treating God as a hypothesis to be tested.

This lesson does not settle that disagreement, because it is a real one, and you met the methods behind it in Module 1. What it will do is take the arguments seriously as arguments, in the form classical and evidential apologists actually make them, and test them as their critics actually test them. Whatever your method, you need to know what these arguments say, because they are the arguments your hearers have already heard of, and because many unbelievers, Muslim and secular alike, find them more persuasive than Christians who have never studied them expect.

Start with the oldest form, and with the most important distinction in this whole lesson. Some things exist but might not have. You are one of them: had your parents never met, you would not be here. The same is true of mountains, stars, oceans and, as far as we can tell, every physical thing. Philosophers call such things contingent: their existence depends on something outside themselves. The argument from contingency asks a simple question about them. Why is there anything contingent at all? If everything that exists is the kind of thing that might not have existed, what explains the fact that anything does?

Thomas Aquinas gave the argument its classic Christian form in the Summa Theologiae, in the first part, question 2, article 3, where he sets out five ways to God. The third way, from possibility and necessity, runs roughly like this. Things we see come into being and pass away, so they are able not to be. If everything were like that, there would be no explanation of why anything exists at all. So there must be something whose existence is necessary, which does not depend on another, and this all people call God. The second way, from efficient causes, makes a related move: a chain of causes that each depend on a prior cause right now, like a hand moving a stick moving a stone (the staff and hand is Aquinas's own image, in the first way), cannot go back without end, because without a first member none of them would be causing anything.

One fact about Aquinas surprises almost every student and is worth fixing early. He did not think reason could prove that the world had a beginning. In the same Summa (first part, question 46, article 2) he argued that the world's beginning in time is held by faith, from revelation, and cannot be demonstrated. His five ways are therefore not about what happened first, long ago. They are about what holds things in being now. His causal chain is like a chandelier hanging from a chain of links: the question is not which link was forged first but what the whole chain is hanging from at this moment. That is why Colossians 1:17, in Him all things hold together, sits so naturally beside him.

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz sharpened the argument at the start of the eighteenth century. In his short essay Principles of Nature and Grace, written in 1714, he states that nothing happens without a sufficient reason, and draws the consequence that the first question we have a right to ask is why there is something rather than nothing. His answer is that the sufficient reason for the whole series of contingent things cannot lie inside the series, since every member of it needs explaining, and so must lie in a being that carries the reason for its existence within itself, a necessary being. The principle he relies on, that every fact or every contingent thing has an explanation, is called the principle of sufficient reason. It is the load-bearing beam of the whole argument, and you will see in section 4 that it is exactly where the critics push.

Put the contingency argument in three lines so you can carry it. Every contingent thing has an explanation of its existence outside itself. The universe, the whole of physical reality, is contingent. Therefore the universe has an explanation outside itself, in something that is not contingent. Modern defenders, among them Alexander Pruss, whose book on the principle of sufficient reason appeared in 2006, and Richard Swinburne, have refined each premise against decades of objection. Notice what the argument does not need: it does not need the universe to have had a beginning. A universe that had always existed would still, on this argument, need an explanation of why it exists at all.

The second family of cosmological arguments does argue from a beginning, and its name tells you where it was refined. Kalam is the Arabic word for speech, used for the discipline of Islamic rational theology, and its medieval theologians pressed this argument against the Aristotelian philosophers who held the world eternal. Abu Hamid al-Ghazali, who died in 1111, attacked the eternity of the world at length in The Incoherence of the Philosophers, and in another work, al-Iqtisad fi al-I'tiqad (The Moderation in Belief), set out the argument in a simple form: whatever begins has a cause of its beginning, and the world began. But it was not only a Muslim argument. The Christian philosopher John Philoponus had argued against the eternity of the world at Alexandria in the sixth century, and in the thirteenth century Bonaventure argued, against his colleague Aquinas, that reason can show the world had a beginning. If you live among Muslims, it is worth knowing that this is shared ground: the argument is theirs as much as ours.

William Lane Craig revived it in The Kalam Cosmological Argument in 1979, and his three lines are the version most people now meet. Whatever begins to exist has a cause. The universe began to exist. Therefore the universe has a cause. Craig then argues that the cause must be beyond space and time, since it brought space and time into being, enormously powerful, and personal, because a timeless cause that produces an effect with a beginning looks like a free choice rather than a mechanism. Each step is contested, and the last is contested hardest.

Craig defends the second premise in two ways, philosophical and scientific. The philosophical argument says an actually infinite number of past events cannot exist, or cannot be built up one at a time. The usual illustration is Hilbert's Hotel, a thought experiment from the German mathematician David Hilbert, popularised by George Gamow in 1947: a hotel with infinitely many rooms, all full, can still take a new guest by moving everyone up one room, which strikes many people as absurd. The critics answer that modern mathematics, since Georg Cantor, handles actual infinities consistently, that strange is not the same as impossible, and that the hotel is a fact about infinite sets, not a proof that time had a start. This sub-argument has able defenders and able critics among philosophers, and it is not settled.

The scientific case must be told with particular care, because this is where Christian speakers most often overclaim. Here is what is well established. In 1927 the Belgian priest and physicist Georges Lemaitre proposed that the universe is expanding, and in 1931 he suggested it began from what he called a primeval atom. Edwin Hubble's observations in 1929 supported the expansion. In 1965 Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson published their detection of the cosmic microwave background, the cooled afterglow of an early hot, dense state, and the steady state theory of Fred Hoyle, Hermann Bondi and Thomas Gold lost most of its support. Measurements of that background now put the age of the observable universe at about 13.8 billion years. Hoyle, who disliked the theory, gave it its name on BBC radio in 1949: the Big Bang.

Here is what is not established. The Big Bang theory describes the expansion of the universe from an extremely hot, dense early state. It does not, by itself, say that this state was the absolute beginning of everything. Our best theories break down at the earliest moments, where gravity and quantum effects both matter and no tested theory covers them. Physicists have proposed models in which our expanding universe had a prior phase: Stephen Hawking and James Hartle's no-boundary proposal of 1983, cyclic models such as Paul Steinhardt and Neil Turok's, Roger Penrose's conformal cyclic cosmology, and eternal inflation. In 2003 Arvind Borde, Alan Guth and Alexander Vilenkin proved a theorem that any universe which has on average been expanding throughout its history cannot be extended indefinitely into the past. Vilenkin reads this as strong evidence of a beginning. Others, among them the physicist Sean Carroll, point out that the theorem uses a classical description of space-time and that models exist which escape its conditions. An honest summary: current cosmology is consistent with a beginning and gives some support to it, many cosmologists think a beginning likely, and the question is open in a way a preacher must not hide.

The church has been here before, and the lesson is worth learning. In 1951 Pope Pius XII, addressing the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, spoke as though the new cosmology had confirmed creation. Lemaitre, a priest who believed firmly in creation, was uneasy, and is reported to have urged that the claim not be repeated, because he held that physics neither proves nor disproves creation, and a faith tied to one model would be shaken when the model changed. Genesis 1:1 does not need the Big Bang. A Christian who says the Big Bang proves God has made his faith hostage to the next paper in a physics journal.

David Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, published in 1779, three years after his death, still contains most of the serious objections. In Part IX the character Demea offers an argument from a necessarily existent being, and Cleanthes answers him. First, Cleanthes argues, nothing can be proved to exist by argument alone, because whatever we can conceive as existent we can also conceive as non-existent, so no being's existence is necessary. Second, if each member of a series has been explained by an earlier member, it is unreasonable to ask for a further cause of the whole. Hume's illustration is twenty particles of matter: once you have shown the cause of each, to ask the cause of the twenty together is to treat a grouping made, in his phrase, by an arbitrary act of the mind as though it were a further thing needing a cause. Third, if there must be a necessary being, why not the material universe itself? Hume also argued elsewhere, in his Treatise of Human Nature, that we cannot know by reason alone that everything which begins has a cause, though in a letter of 1754 he protested that he had never asserted so absurd a proposition as that something might arise without a cause. His claim was that the principle rests on experience, not demonstration.

Bertrand Russell pressed the second objection in a famous BBC radio debate with the Jesuit philosopher Frederick Copleston in 1948. Copleston set out the argument from contingency. Russell replied that it commits the fallacy of composition: every human being has a mother, but it does not follow that the human race has a mother. The whole need not have the properties of its parts. Asked what explains the universe, he said that the universe is just there, and that's all. That reply deserves to be taken seriously. It is not lazy. It is the claim that explanation has to stop somewhere, and that the atheist stops with the world where the theist stops with God, and neither has explained more.

Then the objection every student has heard: who made God? Russell told of reading in John Stuart Mill's Autobiography that Mill's father had taught him that the question who made me cannot be answered, because it at once suggests the further question who made God, and that this had freed Russell, as a young man, from the first-cause argument. In The God Delusion (2006), in the chapter on arguments for God, Richard Dawkins says the arguments of Aquinas simply assume, without warrant, that God is immune to the regress they apply to everything else. Graham Oppy, the most thorough contemporary atheist critic, puts the point more carefully, in Arguing about Gods (2006) and later work: any theory has to end with something unexplained or necessary, and a naturalist who ends with a necessary initial state of the physical world has a simpler theory than a theist who adds a God beyond it.

Finally, the physicists' objections. Some events in quantum physics, such as the moment a radioactive atom decays, appear to have no determining cause, so perhaps the causal principle fails at the smallest scale. Lawrence Krauss's A Universe from Nothing (2012) argued that physics can explain how a universe arises from nothing. And if our universe sprang from an eternal inflating multiverse, its beginning would not be the beginning of everything.

Here are the replies, and how far each goes. To the fallacy of composition: it is a real fallacy, but not every inference from parts to whole is fallacious; a wall built entirely of red bricks is red. The defenders ask whether the whole of contingent reality is itself contingent, and argue that a universe made only of things that might not have existed could itself have failed to exist. To who made God: neither argument says that everything has a cause. The kalam says whatever begins to exist; the contingency argument says whatever is contingent. A God who is eternal and necessary is not a member of the series he explains. To Krauss: the philosopher of physics David Albert, reviewing the book in The New York Times in 2012, pointed out that a quantum vacuum governed by the laws of physics is not nothing, and that Krauss's question was merely moved back. To quantum indeterminacy: an event with no determining cause still happens within a field, under laws, in an existing space-time, which is very different from something arising from no conditions at all. To the multiverse: it moves the question back, and on some arguments the Borde, Guth and Vilenkin theorem applies to an inflating multiverse too.

Now be honest about what the replies leave standing. Hume's third question, why not let the universe be the necessary thing, has no knock-down answer; the theist argues that the universe shows every mark of contingency, with its particular laws, constants and parts, and the naturalist replies that we do not know enough about the deepest level of physics to say. The principle of sufficient reason is accepted by many philosophers and rejected by many others, and Russell's brute fact is a coherent position. J. L. Mackie, in The Miracle of Theism (1982), concluded that the cosmological argument fails because the demand for an explanation of the whole is one the naturalist is entitled to refuse. A student who presents the argument as an unanswerable proof will meet someone who has read Mackie or Oppy, and will lose more than the argument.

Suppose the argument succeeds. What has it shown? The contingency argument, if sound, shows that there is at least one necessary being on which everything contingent depends. The kalam, if sound, shows that the universe had a cause outside space and time, of immense power, and Craig's further argument, if it holds, that the cause is personal. That is a great deal. It is enough to make a confident materialism uncomfortable, and it fits Paul's phrase about eternal power and divine nature closely.

Now say what it has not shown, and say it in the same tone. It has not shown that the cause is one rather than several, though most philosophers judge one simpler, and Hume made the point at length. It has not shown that the cause is good, or cares about you, or has spoken, or is holy. It has not shown the Trinity, the incarnation, the cross or the resurrection. A Muslim, a Jew and a deist can accept every line of it. Aquinas knew this perfectly well: after the five ways, he spends hundreds of pages arguing for the further attributes of God, and he held that the Trinity cannot be known by natural reason at all. An apologist who stops at the end of the cosmological argument and announces that he has proved the Christian God has proved nothing of the kind.

So what is the argument for, in a church in Lagos, Lima or Leeds? Three things. It shows that belief in a Creator is not a refusal to think, and that the person who says science has made God unnecessary is making a philosophical claim, not a scientific one. It puts the question in its proper place, which is not how the universe developed, a scientific question, but why there is a universe to develop at all. And it opens a door that the gospel walks through. Paul at Athens did not stop at the God who made the world. He went on to the Man God has appointed and the resurrection, which is where Module 3 of this track will take you.

Expect the argument to land differently in different places. In a secular university, it will be heard as a serious philosophical argument that needs serious work. Among many Muslims it will be received as obvious, since the Qur'an itself appeals repeatedly to the signs of God in creation, and your work will be elsewhere, on who God is rather than whether he is. In a village where everyone believes in a high God but fears the spirits and ancestors, the question is rarely whether there is a Creator, and the Romans 1 point that matters is not his existence but his eternal power, which leaves no other power his rival. Know your hearers before you choose your argument.

This module ends with you having written five paragraphs, and the track ends with a written defence of the faith in your own words, prepared for the questions people actually ask where you live. Start the page now. At the top of a fresh page in your notebook, write: My defence of the faith. Under it write the question you recorded in the inquiry, in the words the person actually used.

Now write the cosmological argument, whichever form you find stronger, in three numbered lines in the language you speak at home. Under it write the strongest objection from section 4, stated so fairly that the person who raised it would say yes, that is what I mean. Then write your reply in no more than five sentences. Then finish with two sentences that begin: This argument shows... and: It does not show... If you cannot finish the second sentence, read section 5 again.

Then test it on a person. Explain the argument to one friend, family member or member of your church in under three minutes, without notes, and ask them to argue back as hard as they can. Write down the first objection they raise, even if it is one this lesson did not cover. That objection is data: it tells you what the people around you actually think, and it is the first entry on the list you will need at the end of this track.