In Light of Modern Science, God Is More Likely to Exist

I will present two arguments for God that, in the light of modern scientific evidences, increase the chance that God exists. Firstly, a cosmological argument for God. We know from experience that things become existing objects due to causes or culminations of causes outside of themselves that ground their existence. Therefore it seems to reasonable to look at the universe and ask whether it has a cause or whether it simply goes backwards and backwards, like a reverse of the story of Tristram Shandy. Traditionally most atheists have upheld this belief (one could mention Bertrand Russell, who used this objection in his essay "Why I Am Not A Christian". But it seems significantly less likely that this is so in light of modern cosmology. Cosmologists are now pretty certain that the universe originated in the Big Bang 13.7 billion years ago. The universe is quite obviously expanding from somewhere (because of the observation of a red shift between galaxies) and this is what convinces many physicists (e.g Roger Penrose) of a beginning of the universe. What is remarkable is this beginning represents not just the start of the universe in its current state but literally the coming into being of everything from a state of nothingness. Now there are highly speculative theories about an eternally oscillating universe which might result in the universe not having a beginning and thus no need for any cause, but these have not recommended themselves to the majority of physicists. You can summarize the argument so far as follows: 1) everything that begins to exist has a cause 2) the universe began to exist 3) therefore, the universe had a cause Now what properties must this cause have? Well, it seems it must be existent outside the universe and thus immaterial and timeless (at least sans the universe). it must also be unchanging, since only things in times can change. Also, it must be enormously powerful in order to create our massively turbulant universe as it is today. It must also I think be personal for two reasons: 1) a timeless event cannot produce a cause which isn't also timeless unless it possesses agency. 2) only two kinds of things can have the properties of timelessness and immateriality discussed earlier one would be abstract objects like numbers or sets, the other a mind, but numbers can't stand in causal relations, so the entity that caused the universe must be a mind. A mind is a fundamentally personal attribute. Thus we are brought to a personal, uncaused, timeless, immaterial, immensely powerful first cause of the universe. And this, to quote Aquinas, is what everyone means when they talk about God. A second argument is the teleological argument from the fine-tuning of the initial conditions of the Big Bang for intelligent life. This is not an argument that fine-tuning implies a fine-tuner, otherwise the argument would be obviously circular in its reasoning. This is to draw upon the fact that there are multiple arbitrary constants and quantities in the universe which physicists have detected that fall into an infinitesimally small range permitting intelligent life-forms such as ourselves. For example, Roger Penrose has calculated that the low entropy condition of the Big Bang had a chance of ten, to the power ten, to the power 123 chance of randomly occurring, he has said that he knows of no other place in physics were such a slim chance event has manifested itself in reality.[1] Now this kind of unique balance of conditions in the universe cries out for explanation. there are three options to explain such fine-tuning: chance, necessity or design. Chance appears to have been ruled out by such slim odds. The other option is physical necessity of these laws being at these values. But these values and quantities are arbitrary and therefore inexplicable by physical necessity. Therefore,we should posit that they were designed. But design implies a designer, a designer who is personal, and massively intelligent this is what we all mean when we speak of God. Footnotes [1] Roger Penrose, "Time-Asymmetry and Quantum Gravity," in Quantum Gravity 2 (ed. C. J. Isham, R. Penrose, and D. W. Sciama; Oxford: Clarendon, 1981), 249