The God Question, Part 1

We hear a lot from the atheistic community.

The media seems to enjoy writing about skeptics who are high-profile academics—scientists, professors, and the like—and their ideas. Article after article will appear and communicate to the world that only dumb people or ill-informed people embrace the belief in a personal, infinite God—one who has the power to create the universe and mankind.

But the person who holds an atheistic view puts himself in a very difficult position. When you think through the issues, you realize that stating, “There is no God,” is not a rational position to assume.

Let’s look at the arguments.­

You have to ask, “Does this universe really exist? And if something does exist, where did it come from?” When you ask that, you really only have two possible conclusions:

1. Something must be eternal.
2. Something not eternal came from nothing.

An atheist has only a few options.

First, they might say, “The universe is eternal.” But that’s not true, because the second law of thermodynamics says that the universe is not eternal. In a closed system, the available energy will become less and less until, finally, you have no available energy at all. This is called heat death.

Now, for the atheist, the universe is all there is. It is a closed system. There is nothing outside it, and we know that it only takes a finite amount of time for a system to reach heat death.

For the atheist, the universe has always been around. If the universe has always existed, it should have already reached heat death. However, there is clearly still energy present. So we can conclude that the atheist is wrong in his assumptions.

This means one of two things:

1. The universe was created a finite amount of time ago and hasn’t yet had enough time to reach heat death.
2. There must be a cosmic gas station attendant out there somewhere feeding it energy.

Gordon J. Van Wylen, former dean of the College of Engineering at the University of Michigan, said, “A final point to be made is that the second law of thermodynamics and the principle of increase in entropy have great philosophical implications. The question that arises is how did the universe get into the state of reduced entropy in the first place, since all natural processes known to us tend to increase entropy? ... The author has found that the second law tends to increase his conviction that there is a Creator who has the answer for the future destiny of man and the universe.” Van Wylen wrote the textbook on thermodynamics most universities use today.

If the atheist is logical, he must conclude the same. The universe is not eternal.

So if it’s not eternal, where did it come from? We’ll take a look at that next week.