This essay is part of a book by R.C. Sproul titled, 1 and 2 Peter, which is a study of those two books of the Bible. The topic may seem a little strange to come out of that book, but when I came across the section I was intrigued.
Sproul is a philosopher, theologian, and pastor and has written more than sixty books. I highly recommend his work. The following is from pages 166 and 167.
“Virtually every argument that has been lodged against the existence of God, in the final analysis becomes some type of an argument of self-creation. In the final analysis, the universe creates itself. When the Hubble spacecraft was sent into outer space, an American astrophysicist said, “Sixteen to eighteen billion years ago, the universe exploded into being.” He knew that the universe is not and cannot be eternal, because it does not have sufficient reason for its own being. Every particle of it is the result of something antecedent to it, and therefore it manifests contingent being. Scientists understand that, so they have to posit that there was a time when things started. The usual argument is that sixteen to eighteen billion years ago, all the energy and matter in the universe was compressed into an infinitesimal point of singularity, which remained in a perfect state of organization until, at a particular moment in time, it exploded.”
“Of course, the law of interia says that things at rest tend to remain at rest unless acted upon by an outside cause, or things in motion tend to stay in motion unless acted upon by an outside cause. The law of inertia is what makes the game of golf so frustrating. The ball goes into motion against the forces of gravity, but other forces stop its progress much sooner than the golfer would like. At the same time, if the law did not exsist, if there was nothing to act against that ball in motion, the golfer would have only one shot–the original tee-shot, which would go forever. Eighteen holes would take an eternity to accomplish.”
“Many years ago I corresponded with Carl Sagan about this matter, and I asked him about the outside force that supposedly produced the big bang. He said that we can take it back to the final nanosecond before everything changed, and he was satisfied to stop his inquiry at that point. I suggested that stopping at that point is where he stopped being a scientist because he did not care to seek a sufficient reason for the theory.”
“Some time ago a Nobel Prize winner said that we can no longer believe in that earlier form of self-creation called “spontaneous generation,” in which things supposedly just pop into being. We now know, he said, through better scientific analysis that spontaneous generation does not happen. In fact, it cannot happen because we cannot get something from nothing quickly; it takes time, he said, so we must consider “gradual spontaneous generation.” Such intelligent people seem to be educated beyond their intelligence when they make such arguments. It is laughable to think of nothing producing something in any circumstance, yet such thinkers say that Christians are weak-minded for believeing that a self-existent, eternal, omnipotent being created the universe out of no preexisting matter.”
