5 reasons why the universe demands a creator

The claim that the universe is eternal used to be respectable. Aristotle held it. So did most physicists until the middle of the 20th century, and the steady-state theory of the 1940s was built to keep an eternal universe in a world that was visibly expanding.

Then the evidence went the other way. Expansion, background radiation, the abundance of light elements: all of it points to a beginning around 13.8 billion years ago. The Quran had said the heavens and the earth were once joined and were then split apart.^[1] Whatever you make of that, the eternal-universe option is now the one carrying the burden. A theorem by Borde, Guth and Vilenkin adds that a universe which has expanded on average cannot have been expanding forever into the past.^[2]

Things that begin have causes. Denying that is a decision to stop asking. The classical statement is al-Ghazali’s: whatever begins to exist has a cause for its beginning, the world began, and so it has a cause.^[3] The strongest reply is that quantum events seem to happen without a cause, and that causes may only work inside time. But a quantum vacuum is a structured physical thing with its own laws, and a rule that holds everywhere except at the one point under discussion has been chosen for convenience.

Everything in the universe could have been otherwise. The electron could have had a different mass. The universe could have had five spatial dimensions, or two. Ibn Sina made the point a thousand years ago: whatever can exist or not exist needs something outside it to tip the balance, and the chain must end in a being whose existence is necessary.^[4]

Something that could have been otherwise needs a reason it is this way and not that. You can push the reason back a step, and back again, but an infinite chain of things that each need explaining does not add up to an explanation. It adds up to an infinitely long IOU. Leibniz put the question in its barest form: why is there something rather than nothing?^[5]

At some point you need something that is not contingent. Something that could not have been otherwise. That is what the word God is doing in this argument, before it does anything else.

Bertrand Russell replied in his 1948 radio debate with Frederick Copleston that the universe is simply there, and that to ask for its explanation is to treat the whole as if it were a part.^[6] That reply is the brute-fact option stated frankly. It may be coherent. It is also an admission that the question has no answer, which is a different thing from having shown the question is mistaken.

The strength of gravity. The ratio of the electromagnetic force to the strong force. The cosmological constant, which differs from the naive theoretical estimate by about a hundred and twenty orders of magnitude. Alter several of these even slightly and you get no stars, no chemistry, no anything.^[7]

The standard reply is that we could not observe a universe that did not permit observers, so of course we see one that does. That is true and it explains nothing. If you are facing a firing squad of 100 marksmen and all 100 miss, “well, I could not observe my own death” is not an explanation for why you are still standing.^[8]

A fair critic adds two points. We have a single universe to look at, so probabilities for its constants are hard to define, and life of a kind we do not know might arise under other values. Both points are right, and they weaken the numbers without removing the question. The Quran speaks of a Creator who “created everything and determined it in due measure”.^[9] Muslims read that as a statement about purpose, and they do not need any particular figure to be exact for it to stand.

Give chance enough time and it produces anything, the argument goes.

Except it does not. Chance produces noise. It produces the kind of thing you would expect from shaking a box of parts. What it does not produce is laws: regularities that hold everywhere, at every scale, in equations you can write on a card. The universe is a structure, and structure is what minds make.

The physicist Eugene Wigner called the fit between mathematics and nature “unreasonable”, since the formal patterns invented by mathematicians for their own reasons turn out to govern the motion of planets and atoms.^[10] The Quran invites the same observation: “You will not see any flaw in the creation of the Most Merciful. Look again: do you see any rifts?”^[11]

The strongest objection is that natural selection also produces order without a mind, and that laws may be necessary and need no designer. Selection explains the order of living things, but it runs inside the laws, and so it cannot account for them. To say the laws are necessary is to take the brute-fact option again.

Fine, say there are countless universes with different constants, and we are in one of the rare ones that works.

Now explain the multiverse. What generates it? What sets the rules for how universes get their constants? Why is there a universe-generating mechanism at all, when there could have been nothing? Versions of the idea from inflation and string theory require a mechanism with fixed laws, and a landscape of perhaps 10 to the power of 500 possible settings still has to come from somewhere.^[12]

You have replaced one finely tuned thing with a finely tuned machine for making them. The bill did not go away. It got bigger, and it is still addressed to the same recipient.

The physicists who take the multiverse seriously do so because their theories seem to imply it, and the idea was not invented to escape a creator. That is a fair point and it is worth granting. It still leaves the machine unexplained, and a machine that no experiment can observe is a weak foundation for a case against anything.