The whole works.

By WILLIAM CARROLL [Public Discourse] – Many cosmologists who now routinely speak of what happened “before the Big Bang” think that to reject some original Big Bang is to eliminate the need for a Creator. They deny the need for a Creator because they think that “to be created” means to have a temporal beginning. In such a scenario, accepting or rejecting a Creator is tied to accepting or to explaining away an original Big Bang. You might remember Hawking’s famous rhetorical question: “So long as the universe had a beginning, we could suppose it had a creator. But if the universe is really completely self-contained, having no boundary or edge, it would have neither beginning nor end: it would simply be. What place, then, for a creator?”

What place, indeed? Creation, as a metaphysical notion, affirms that all that is, in whatever way or ways it is, depends upon God as cause. The natural sciences have as their subject the world of changing things: from subatomic particles to acorns to galaxies. Whenever there is a change there must be something that changes. Whether these changes are biological or cosmological, without beginning or end, or temporally finite, they remain processes. Creation, on the other hand, is the radical causing of the whole existence of whatever exists. Creation is not a change. To cause completely something to exist is not to produce a change in something, is not to work on or with some existing material. When God’s creative act is said to be “out of nothing,” what is meant is that God does not use anything in creating all that is: it does not mean that there is a change from “nothing” to “something.” In the quotation cited at the beginning of this essay we find Hawking telling us that it is not necessary “to invoke God . . .to set the Universe going.” But creation does not mean “to set the Universe going”—as though some change occurred at a putative beginning. To deny such a change, as Hawking does, is not to deny creation.

Cosmology, evolutionary biology, and all the other natural sciences offer accounts of change; they do not address the metaphysical questions of creation; they do not speak to why there is something rather than nothing. It is a mistake to use arguments in the natural sciences to deny creation. But it is also a mistake to appeal to cosmology as a confirmation of creation. Reason can lead to knowledge of the Creator, but the path is in metaphysics, not in the natural sciences.

Continued at Public Discourse | More Chronicle & Notices.