Why I am a Christian (1)

The Origins of the Universe Hint at the Work of a Creator

Weary of reading the barrage of predictable, patronising and often ill-informed comments every time I scroll through the "Have Your Say" or "Comment is Free" section on any Christianity-related BBC or Guardian web posting, I decided at the end of 2012 to jot down the reasons why I am a Christian. 

I came up with 26 reasons why I find Christianity believable. I then tried to arrange the different reasons under the categories of cosmological, existential and philosophical, theological, Christological, scriptural and personal or experiential. 

It occurred to me that probably none of my 26 reasons, on its own, would convince me that Christianity must be true. There are counterarguments that you can find for each one and they're not that hard to locate on the Internet. But together the 26 reasons build a case which satisfies my curious mind and makes sense of my felt spiritual experience.

The first four reasons (to do with the origins of existence, the fine tuning of the universe, the improbably life-favouring properties of the Earth and the appearance of life from non organic matter) are cosmological and astrobiological in nature and they underpin my understanding as to why I think that my belief in a creator is not unreasonable. And that's where it starts for me.

I do not treat any of my 26 reasons as "proofs."

It can be proved that 2+2=4, that the Earth is not flat and that I am genetically related to my children. However, I do not believe anyone - even I myself - can categorically prove that I really love my wife Kathie. But I know I do. Nor can I empirically prove that a Van Gogh masterpiece has any artistic merit - though I know it has.

In the same way, I do not think anyone can prove - or disprove - that God exists. It's just not that sort of knowledge. People have to consider the evidence without prejudice and draw honest conclusions from what they observe and experience.

Sadly, I think that this is what too many people fail to do. I find that many, believers and sceptics alike, behave tribally, defending their tribe whether it's right or wrong and attacking the opposition even when they plainly have a point. Like an exchange in the British Parliament's House of Commons it generates more heat than light and descends to caricature and trading insults instead of actually debating the matter in hand.

Anyway, this is the first of 26 reasons I am a Christian. That's one new post every two weeks for a year.

I think that the origins of our universe (indeed, the very fact that there was a beginning to our universe) raise big questions because they point to the work of an originator - a Creator. "In the beginning..."

Oxford Professor of Mathematics John Lennox writes about his aunt baking a birthday cake. Though, he says, you can analyse the ingredients and quantify the temperature they must have been heated to in order to deliver the end product, you can't prove that John's aunt made it, or for what occasion, just by examining its properties. What you do know is that it is there. And the fact that it is there at all points inevitably to the existence of a baker.

As the age-old philosophical conundrum has it, why is there something rather than nothing?

My first reason for being a Christian is that the universe is there at all and that it came into existence from nothing. If everything that comes into existence has a cause, what caused the creation of the elements, trillions of spinning planets, our beautiful world, vast burning stars, mighty galaxies that are light years wide in span, dark matter, mass, light and energy? From nothing?

Rationalist scientists and atheist philosophers like Fred Hoyle and Bertrand Russell in the early 20th century, no doubt driven by atheist presuppositions (or perhaps just lazily adopting Aristotle's philosophy) denied our cosmos had a beginning, stating that it was just always there. According to this view, there was no need for a creator at all because everything always existed. This was the standard orthodoxy for sceptics.

But in 1929 all that changed. Edwin Hubble's observation of red shift when studying the light from far away galaxies pointed conclusively to the reality of an expanding universe. First proposed by Belgian Catholic priest and cosmologist Georges Lemaitre, Hubble confirmed the theory beyond doubt. 

By calculating the rate of expansion, cosmologists and mathematicians were then able to trace the origins of our universe to about 13.75 billion years ago. The Big Bang. No longer was anyone saying that the universe just always existed. Hubble proved that it must have had a beginning. This cosmological model is now undisputed by scholars. It is about as factually certain as the assertion that the Earth is spherical and travels round the Sun.

Lemaitre and Hubble established that the universe had a starting point and physicists since then have agreed that the raw materials for everything that exists were... nothing. Everything that is - trillions upon trillions of stars and planets spinning in perfectly symmetrical patterns in trillions upon trillions of vast galactic systems just appeared, by themselves, ex-nihilo, from nothing. As if by magic...

I think it is fair to say that this scientifically established consensus not only fails to rule out, in itself, a wise and powerful eternal creator, it practically calls out for one.

Of course, all this could have all just happened all by itself; the ultimate case of spontaneous combustion. But how? Why would all existing matter; an unimaginable mass of stuff and mind-boggling levels of energy just appear in an instant, without cause, from nothing at all, all by itself?

It's like the arrival in your driveway of an elegant limousine that had no designer, no manufacturer, and has no driver or fuel. It just isn't plausible.

Stephen Hawking and others have attempted to account for the incredibly precise physics necessary for our universe to exist by appealing to the concept of a "multiverse." According to this idea, our universe, unique among an infinite number of other universes, just happened to have all the right laws of physics to create it and sustain it.

Suffice to say that the multiverse theory does not come from long calculations chalked up on a university blackboard. It is thrashing about in the dark. It is nothing more than a hopeful guess, bereft of any evidence, indeed without any possibility of evidence since any proof could only exist outside our ability to test it.

This is the poverty of the kind of option you're left with if you have an a priori assumption of the impossibility of a creator God. This is the best that the most brilliant human minds on the planet can come up with.

It is philosophical desperation; the kind that must allow for the possibility, indeed - since there has to be an infinite number of universes – the kind that must insist on the certainty, of another universe somewhere populated by flying pasta trolls and candy floss teapots orbiting the planet of the fairies.

John Lennox's birthday cake is still waiting for an explanation of who baked it, who it was baked for and why. All we can really do is look at each other, shrug our shoulders and admit that it is there. And then enjoy eating it.

The fact remains that I am still waiting for an intellectually satisfying explanation as to why it is more logical, not less, that our vast, mysterious, complex and astonishingly beautiful universe came into being from nothing, all by itself, and not by the will of an all-powerful creator who is outside of time and has no beginning and no end.

That's why "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth" (Genesis 1.1) sounds like a decent starting point to me.

And that's the first reason why I am a Christian.