Atheist Richard Dawkins and his ilk label themselves “Brights,” the idea being those who believe in a godless creation, with nothing existing outside of the material world, or transcending the material world, or having created the material world—they’re the “Brights,” in contrast (I guess) to us “Dulls,” who believe in a Creator God.
But the labels might be backward.
For starters, however the natural world, the universe itself, came about (Big Bang or no Big Bang, it’s irrelevant), and whatever nature’s first created material was, and no matter how small, no matter how ephemeral—it did not create itself. The concept “natural” doesn’t contain within itself the source of “naturality” any more than a sphere contains within itself the source of its own sphericity. The very notion of “natural” or “nature” (Where did this notion originate?), even before the initial manifestation of anything natural, implies something prior to the very concept itself, something to have conceived of “nature” and then made it real in one manifestation or another. (We’re talking the concept “naturality” itself, independent of any individual instantiation of it.) There is nothing a priori, nothing logically necessary about, say, a horseshoe crab, just as there’s nothing logically necessary about the “natural” itself. The mere existence of anything natural, from a quark to a quasar, implies a reality greater than not just the quark or quasar but greater than the very notion of naturality or nature itself.
Pure logic means, then, that something outside the natural, something transcending it—as Picasso transcended his painting Guernica—had to have originated the natural because, again, nothing in the concept of “naturality” or of “physicality” contains the origins of physicality or naturality any more than the painting Guernica contains its own origins. (What the painting contains is the idea of a Picasso.) Something beyond the physical, beyond the material, beyond the natural, something “supernatural” (Supermaterial? Superphysical?) must have brought the physical into existence in the first place.
What better explains the origins of the universe: an eternally existing God, or nothing?
Wrote David Bentley Hart:
[T]he doctrine that there is nothing apart from the physical order, and certainly nothing supernatural—is an incorrigibly incoherent concept, and one that is ultimately indistinguishable from pure magical thinking. The very notion of nature as a closed system entirely sufficient to itself is plainly one that cannot be verified, deductively or empirically, from within the system of nature. It is a metaphysical (which is to say “extra-natural”) conclusion regarding the whole of reality, which neither reason nor experience legitimately warrants. It cannot even define itself within the boundaries of its own terms, because the total sufficiency of “natural” explanations is not an identifiable natural phenomenon but only an arbitrary judgment. Naturalism, therefore, can never be anything more than a guiding prejudice, an established principle only in the sense that it must be indefensibly presumed for the sake of some larger view of reality. . . .[1]
The paradox of naturalism
To imagine that all natural reality, the entire created cosmos, is a closed system “entirely sufficient to itself” is as illogical as imagining the game of chess as a closed system “entirely sufficient to itself.” Otherwise, the game of chess had to have first conjured up the idea of the game of chess; and then, out of that idea, it had to create the board, the squares, the pieces, and the rules for the game. If that’s not logical for chess, then how much less so for the cosmos? If the very concept of “nature” didn’t create itself, and if every manifestation of nature, starting six levels down (if they exist) of the first created quark, and extending outward to the entire created cosmos, if they didn’t create themselves, then who or what did?
If someone rejects the idea of an eternally existing God, such as the God of the Bible, Yahweh, or, to be truly biblical, Jesus (see John 1:1-3)—what option is left? Nothing created itself; thus, either an eternally-existing God like Yahweh created the universe—or what?
Gravity. At least according to the late Stephen Hawking, who, in the 1900s, held the chair that Isaac Newton did in the 1600s. In one of his less perspicacious moments, and expressing a notion that Newton, who first mathematized gravity, would have deemed preposterous, Hawking opined: “Because there is a law such as gravity, the Universe can and will create itself out of nothing.”[2]
Unless I am missing something, gravity is not nothing, is it? (What are people getting all that plastic surgery for?) Isn’t gravity the bending of space and time by matter, and so don’t you need space, time, and matter—which are not nothing—to have gravity to begin with?
However desperate Hawking’s move, atheist Peter Atkins’ is worse: “If we are to be honest,” he writes, “then we have to accept that science will be able to claim complete success only if it achieves what many might think impossible: accounting for the emergence of everything from absolutely nothing. Not almost nothing, not subatomic dust-like speck, but absolutely nothing. Nothing at all. Not even empty space.” [3]
Atkins is being as logical as he can be, given his atheism. If you have something created explaining the origin of the universe, then whatever that created entity is, it would need an explanation itself; and that explanation would need an explanation itself; and on and on into an infinite regress that can never answer the question of origins.
What, then, better explains the origins of the universe: an eternally existing God, or nothing?
So—who’s Bright, and who’s Dull? And who’s the logical thinker, as opposed to the magical one?
[1] David Bentley Hart, The Experience of God (New Haven: Yale University Press, Kindle Edition, 2013), 17.
[2] Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow, The Grand Design (New York: Random House Publishing Group, Kindle Edition, 2010), 179.
[3] John Cornwall, ed., Nature’s Imagination (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 131.
