Why God Makes Sense in a World That Doesn't

The Beauty of Christian Theism

Ortlund, Gavin

• Publisher: Baker Academic
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781493432455
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

Outreach 2022 Resource of the Year (Apologetics) 2021 Book Award Winner, The Gospel Coalition (Evangelism & Apologetics) Christianity Today 2022 Book Award Finalist (Apologetics & Evangelism) Southwestern Journal of Theology 2021 Book Award (Honorable Mention, Christian Worldview/Apologetics) It has never been more important to articulate the wonder and enchantment of the Christian message. Yet the traditional approaches of apologetics are often outmoded in an age of profound disenchantment and distraction, unable to meet this pressing need. This winsome apologetics book for a new generation makes the case that Christianity offers a compelling explanatory framework for making sense of our world. Pastor and writer Gavin Ortlund believes it is essential to appeal not only to the mind but also to the heart and the imagination as we articulate the beauty of the gospel. Why God Makes Sense in a World That Doesn't reimagines four classical theistic arguments--cosmological, teleological, moral, and Christological--making a cumulative case for God as the best framework for understanding the storied nature of reality. The book suggests that Christian theism can explain such things as the elegance of math, the beauty of music, and the value of love. It is suitable for use in classes yet accessibly written, making it a perfect resource for churches and small groups.

1
The Cause of the World

Why Something Is More Plausible (and Much More Interesting) Than Nothing

The idea that things don’t come into being without a reason is pretty intuitive. That the entire universe didn’t come into existence without a reason—even more so. One might suppose that the rejection of such a possibility (a universe that began, but lacks a cause for its beginning) is among those constraints with which rational reflection generally begins. Arguments for God as the first cause, or cosmological arguments, draw upon this intuition that if the universe began, it must have had a cause.1 Such arguments can feel very powerful—often when I reconsider them I feel their forcefulness all over again, as if it were hitting me for the first time.

But did the universe come into being from nothing? It turns out that this is no easy question. Today there is a complicated body of views on the origins of the universe, many of which affirm some kind of cyclical or self-caused start to the universe—and engaging this discussion pulls you into some pretty technical areas within cosmology (the branch of astronomy concerned with the origin and evolution of the universe). You start off wanting to say, innocently enough, that the universe didn’t go “Poof!” from nothing, but to defend the point you find yourself talking about oscillating universes, quantum mechanics, eternal inflation theories, various definitions of the word “nothing,” “no-boundary” conceptions of time, and so forth (more on all this later).

To complicate matters further, many forms of the cosmological argument don’t involve the claim that the universe began to exist. In fact, putting all the focus on the universe’s origins can actually obscure the deeper metaphysical point that has animated cosmological arguments throughout the classical theistic tradition—namely, how do we account for existence as such? Why is there anything at all? A beginningless universe doesn’t actually take this question off the table.

So in this chapter we attempt an abductive approach that will allow us to traverse more lightly through the technical issues involved while also keeping an eye on the larger metaphysical and worldview implications throughout. We first consider what the best explanation for the origins of our universe is. Short of getting a PhD in theoretical physics, what is the most responsible and reasonable hypothesis with regard to whether the universe began? Following this, we turn to the larger philosophical question: Whether our universe (or the multiverse it inhabits) had a beginning or not, does it make more sense to understand it as deriving its being from something else or as a kind of self-existent “brute fact”?

In response, I suggest two modest conclusions: first, some kind of transcendent Cause to the universe/multiverse is more plausible than not; second, it is more interesting and evocative.

So think of this chapter as simply putting a foot in the door against naturalism. More work will need to be done; here at the outset we’re simply trying to crack open the metaphysical possibilities and suggest some initial, provisional impressions.

What Made the Big Bang Go “Bang”?

The term “big bang” was first coined by the English astronomer Fred Hoyle during a radio address in March 1949. Hoyle was advocating for a steady-state model of the universe, in which new matter is continually created as galaxies move away from each other. He set this theory in contrast to the major rival theory at the time, which he described as the view that “all the matter in the universe was created in one big bang at a particular time in the remote past.”2 For Hoyle, the idea of a beginning to the universe was pseudoscientific and irrational, too closely resembling creationism.

Hoyle was trying to account for one of the great surprises of the twentieth century: the discovery that our universe is expanding. This had been recognized since the 1920s, in the wake of Einstein’s general theory of relativity. In 1922, the Russian physicist Alexander Friedmann first theorized the expansion of the universe and offered a set of equations to describe it. In 1927, the Belgian Catholic priest and astronomer Georges Lemaître proposed a model for the expansion of the universe that was subsequently confirmed by a variety of observational science, such as Edwin Hubble’s explanation of the “red shift” of galaxies in 1929, which established that they are moving away from the earth at velocities proportional to their distance.

For several decades during the mid-twentieth century, the big bang theory and the steady-state theory competed as rival explanations for the expansion of our universe. But eventually, despite Hoyle’s continued protests (even late into his life), the big bang model won out, supported by a wide variety of data. This led to theories about an initial singularity, which represents the boundary or edge of space-time itself. In 1970 Stephen Hawking and Roger Penrose proposed that, given the validity of general relativity and a few other conditions (such as that energy is always positive), going back in time leads to an initial state at which the density of time, space, matter, and energy is infinite and the laws of physics break down. This is the standard “hot” model of the big bang, based on the Hawking-Penrose singularity theorems and building on the earlier work of Friedmann and Lemaître.

There are all kinds of continuing disputes about how we should understand big bang cosmology, some of which we will engage in a moment. But the core claim that our universe traces back to an absolute beginning and is therefore finite in history has been the standard cosmological view since the 1960s.

It is hard to convey just how explosive (forgive the pun) this discovery has been in the history of science. Science is stereotypically seen as an objective and dispassionate pursuit of evidence—but the notion of an absolute beginning has created surprisingly emotional reactions. The distinguished physicist and astronomer Robert Jastrow observed that many scientists have found the idea downright disturbing.3 Why is this? Jastrow suggests that it is because it violates scientists’ faith in the sufficiency of natural causes.4 Scientists seek to explain the world in terms of natural laws; but natural laws are formulated in relation to space and time and thus cannot apply to the singularity at which space and time break down. The big bang opens the door to the possibility of reality outside of the purview of what can be accounted for by science. It leads us to the very boundary of the physical and thus gestures toward the metaphysical.

Jastrow argues that if any scientist “really examined the implications, he would be traumatized.”5 Having opened his book stating he is an agnostic, he closes the book gesturing toward the theological implications: “For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.”6 Why should the big bang have such theological connotations? In order to appreciate this point, we must understand that the big bang does not arise out of some prior physical reality, like a cosmic vacuum or a state of minimal energy. As Paul Davies notes, people often misconceive of the big bang as “the explosion of a concentrated lump of matter located at some particular place in a pre-existing void.”7 But the big bang was not the beginning of matter within space and time; rather, it was the beginning of space-time itself (recall that from Einstein we learned that space, matter, and time are interdependent). This means that, on the standard model, before the big bang there was literally nothing.

It is difficult to grasp this because we cannot possibly imagine nothing. When we try, we tend to envision something and then hollow it out in some way and give it the label “nothing.” When I try to picture nothing, for example, I typically find myself thinking of blackness. But blackness, of course, is something—opposite of whiteness and light. Moreover, blackness requires space in which to exist. It cannot be nowhere. It also requires time in which to exist. It cannot exist never.

The difficulty of conceptualizing nothing can help us appreciate how mysterious and provocative it is to consider the emergence of the universe from nothing. Davies reflects on the sheer wonder of it:

The significance of this result cannot be overstated. People often ask: Where did the big bang occur? The bang did not oc...