Actor Gabriel Byrne: "When the sun is shining I don't believe in God," he told the Guardian. "When I get on a plane I think there might be one." THE UNIVERSE: A BEGINNING OR "PAST ETERNAL"? A book in the Bible called Genesis says that the universe had a beginning. Is...
WHAT IS "NOTHING"? Okay, we need to wrap our heads around a concept that can be difficult to understand. The word “universe” refers to four things: space, time, matter and energy. The Standard Model of the Universe is the accepted explanation for how the universe...
ATHEISM'S REACTION TO THE STANDARD MODEL OF THE UNIVERSE In our first blog on a “beginning,” we said that for centuries theists have claimed the universe had a beginning, and atheists claimed it was past eternal. It seems that issue was settled in the 1920s when...
THE LAW OF ENTROPY (also called the Second Law of Thermodynamics) Astronomer and physicist Sir Arthur Eddington: "The second law of thermodynamics [law of entropy] holds, I think, the supreme position among the laws of Nature . . . if your theory is found to be...
A BIG BANG SINGULARITY Astronomer Edwin Hubble created a constant that would reflect the “rate or expansion” of the universe. If we play that movie of the universe’s expansion in reverse, it takes us back to a beginning when the original big bang actually occurred,...
TERMS “Cosmology” (koz-MAH-lah-jee) is a field of science that studies the origin and properties of the universe. The word “kalam” (pronounced “kuh-LAHM”) is a word that refers to medieval Islamic theology. In the 1100s AD, there was an Islamic scholar named...
THE KALÄM COSMOLOGICAL ARGUMENT Here is the very simple argument that we presented for God’s existence in the last blog: Premise 1: Whatever begins to exist has a cause. Premise 2: The universe began to exist. Conclusion: Therefore, the universe has a cause. In our...