Religion Reality Check

The Fallacies of Intelligent Design Theory

The Case for Design Based on Big Bang Creation

ID advocates hold that a creator is needed to explain the origin of things. While a created, human-centered universe can probably never be ruled out, nothing in our current understanding of cosmology and physics requires it. In any event, the big bang has been seized upon by theists as pointing to a beginning of the universe and, therefore, to creation. Pope Pius XII interpreted the big bang as confirming church teachings. However, quite a heavy massaging of scripture is required to make it conform to scientific knowledge. Like life on earth, the universe is also evolving with time. The light from galaxies far away left there long ago, and those galaxies look markedly different from those nearby. This is very difficult to reconcile with the earth-centered firmament spoken of in Genesis and other parts of the Bible, such as Psalm 102: "The Lord God laid the foundation of the earth, that it not be moved forever." So we should not be surprised to hear objections to the big bang raised by biblical literalists.

The Kalam Cosmological Argument

Other theists reason along different lines. They point out that, with the big bang, time is shown to proceed only forward. Proof of creation lies in the observation that any entity confined to a half dimension of time must have had a starting point of origination. This assertion is based on the ancient, Islamic Kalam cosmological argument. Christian philosopher William Lane Craig has promoted Kalam in his writings and debates on the existence of god. He states the argument as a simple syllogism:

(1) Whatever begins has a cause.

(2) The universe began to exist.

(3) Therefore, the universe had a cause.

That cause is interpreted as the creation. Craig is not saying everything in existence must have a cause, which is a common misinterpretation. Only something with a beginning is asserted to require a cause. This supposedly defuses the usual query, "What caused god?" Having no beginning, god has no need of a cause, in the theological view.

Craig gives no good reason for (1), other than a kind of metaphysical intuition. He holds that the first premise is so intuitively obvious, especially when applied to the universe, that probably no one in his right mind really believes it to be false (Craig: 1979). Of course, his debate opponent might reply that the first premise is so intuitively wrong that probably no one is his right mind really believes it to be true. Subsequent paragraphs explain the rationale for this position.

Premise (1) is disputed on the basis of the non-causal nature of quantum phenomena. Quantum electrodynamics is a theory more than half a century old of the interactions of electrons and photons that has made successful predictions, confirmed by experiment, to accuracies as great as 12 significant places. The spontaneous appearance of electron-positron (anti-electron) pairs for brief periods of time in a vacuum is a counter example to statement (1), an example of something that begins without a cause - something from nothing. Of course, even if quantum processes are random, the ID advocate might still argue that they remain causal in nature. "Where did the laws of chance come from?" they may ask, effectively admitting that god does play dice with the universe. This is an attempt to turn the argument around and place the burden of proof on the skeptic. But it is theism that is the less parsimonious hypothesis, adding one extra element: a supernatural designer. When the burden is properly placed on Craig and his colleagues, the fact that, with conventional quantum mechanics, an example of a non-causal mechanism exists is sufficient to refute Kalam premise (1).

For Craig, the empirical evidence for the big bang justifies premise (2). He also argues that an infinite regress into the past cannot occur and so time must necessarily have a beginning. However, many responses to Craig have questioned whether it makes any sense to talk about a cause before the existence of time. Astrophysicist Victor J. Stenger (Professor Emeritus of Physics and Astronomy, U. of Hawaii, and Adjunct Professor of Philosophy at the U. of Colorado) has proposed an alternative response in which the assumption of a beginning of time (though not the big bang) is challenged. He shows that the universe did not necessarily have a beginning, that t = 0 is an arbitrary point, and that time exists, at least in an operational sense, on both the negative and positive sides of the time axis. Stenger's response is presented in the section below entitled "Was There a Beginning to the Universe?"

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The Case for Design Based on Big Bang Creation: Pages (1), 2, 3. 4