Why Snowflakes and Nothingness Point to the Existence of God
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A Universe From Nothing?
Not Possible Without God
A favorite magic trick is to pull a rabbit from an empty hat. Audiences well know that the magician does not produce something from nothing. That’s impossible. Nevertheless, they enjoy the illusion, wondering how the performer executed it.
Over the last ten years or so, some scientists have been trying to steal the spotlight from magicians by arguing that the universe—all matter—came from nothing, no God necessary.
Among the Amazon.com books hawking this belief are A Universe from Nothing, by Lawrence M. Krauss.
In my view, Krauss, an atheist, is flouting the laws of physics and common sense.
Nothingness is the absence of everything—light, darkness, color, shape, space, smell, sound, location, time, energy, gravity, and even potential. How could air, water, planets, and galaxies have popped into existence from nothing? They could not have.
Krauss—recognized as an outstanding scientist—is manipulating words in presenting his view, namely that a vacuum incubated the universe. He maintains that a vacuum is empty. It’s true that there is no detectable matter in a vacuum. But all vacuums contain the raw ingredients to produce matter: electromagnetic waves, energy, gravity, and subatomic particles. In other words, vacuums are not empty; they are not nothingness.
Other atheists, perhaps aware of the absurdity of the “something from nothing” argument, claim that the matter of the universe did not burst forth from nothing; rather, they contend, it always existed.
But to assert that matter had no beginning is to assert that ten thousand trillion billion million years ago, it existed. Call this long-ago point in time 1x. It is also to assert that the matter of the universe existed ten thousand trillion billion million years before 1x. Call this long-ago point in time 2x. Previous periods would be 3x, 4x, 5x, 6x, and so on into the centillions and beyond.
How then could Earth have popped into existence? After all, trillions upon trillions upon trillions of years preceded it. Why wouldn’t it have sprung into existence before? If a nonbeliever argues that it needed time to evolve or develop, the believer can point out that countless years preceded its appearance and, therefore, it had an unlimited number of years to develop. For the record, most scientists acknowledge that their research indicates that Earth is 4.5 billion years old and the universe, 13.8 billion to 26 billion years.
The idea that something cannot come from nothing was articulated in ancient Greece by Aristotle and Parmenides and in ancient Rome by Lucretius. Shakespeare repeated this dictum in the first act of King Lear.
The only other explanation for the existence of Earth and the rest of the universe (or universes, if there were/are any) is God, whom Christians, Jews, Muslims, and adherents of other religions regard as an all-knowing, all-powerful, eternal spiritual being outside the laws of physics. This being—and this being alone—had the power to conjure something from nothing.
Before retiring, Michael J. Cummings was a public-school English teacher, a journalist for 17 years, an adjunct instructor of English for 19 years at the Pennsylvania College of Technology, a freelance writer, and the author of more than thirty e-books and five print books. He was born in 1941 in Williamsport, Pa.
