The cosmological and design arguments

What the heavens declare

The Bible does not begin by arguing that God exists. Its first sentence is a declaration: "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth" (Genesis 1:1). Yet creation points to its Maker: "The heavens declare the glory of God" (Psalm 19:1). They are, says John Wesley, "as a legible book, wherein he that runs may read it" Wesley.

For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood from His workmanship, so that men are without excuse.

Romans 1:20

To the people of Lystra, who had no Scriptures, Paul said that God "has not left Himself without testimony to His goodness" (Acts 14:17). Reasoning about God from creation, without appeal to Scripture, is called natural theology, and classical apologetics takes it as its first step (Classical and evidential apologetics). Yet "By faith we understand that the universe was formed" by God's word (Hebrews 11:3): arguments can be signposts, but not a substitute for faith. Whether God exists at all is the question of Does God exist?

Why is there anything at all?

The cosmological argument starts from the fact that the world exists and asks for its cause. It has several forms:

Of Thomas Aquinas's five ways to show that God exists, the first three are of this kind. The second ends: "Therefore it is necessary to put forward a First Efficient Cause, to which everyone gives the name of God" Summa I.2.3. His chain runs not back in time but through present dependence, like a hand moving a staff; he held that reason cannot prove the world had a beginning: that it had one is held by faith alone Summa I.46.2. Gottfried Leibniz's question, why there is something rather than nothing, belongs with the third way.

The kalam argument is named after the medieval Islamic theology (kalam) that developed it; William Lane Craig has revived it. For the second premise he argues that an endless series of past events could never have been crossed to reach today, and adds evidence from cosmology; the cause of space and time, he argues, must lie beyond them and be personal Reasonable Faith. The big bang theory says that the universe we observe has expanded from a hot, dense state; whether that was an absolute beginning, physics cannot yet say. Cosmology can support the second premise; it does not prove it.

A common objection is: then who made God? Bertrand Russell put it so: if everything must have a cause, so must God; and if something can be without a cause, it may as well be the world Why I Am Not a Christian. But none of these arguments says that everything has a cause, only what depends on another or begins; they end in what neither depends nor begins, the God who is "from everlasting to everlasting" (Psalm 90:2). So the weight falls on Russell's second half: why not the world? The answer lies in the premises that the world depends or began, which critics question, asking too whether causation within the world reaches its beginning; the argument is as strong as they are.

The watch and the fine-tuning

The design argument starts from the world's order. Aquinas's fifth way sees things without intelligence acting for an end, "as the arrow is shot to its mark by the archer" the fifth way. In 1802 William Paley argued: (1) a watch found on a heath, its parts fitted together for a purpose, shows a maker; (2) an eye is fitted together more finely than any watch; (3) so living things too show a maker. Of the watch he wrote, "the inference, we think, is inevitable, that the watch must have had a maker" Natural Theology.

Before him David Hume had pressed two questions Hume, Dialogues: the world is more like an animal or a plant than a machine, so the likeness to human work is weak; and a designer, if there is one, need not be one, good or infinite. Charles Darwin's natural selection went deeper, explaining without a designer how living things come to fit their surroundings; in his autobiography Darwin wrote that Paley's argument, once conclusive to him, failed once natural selection was discovered. Christians answer differently: some see evolution as a means of God's providence, others still read design in living things (Science and faith). And many apologists moved the argument's weight to the laws and constants of the universe.

That is the fine-tuning argument. Many physicists hold that if constants such as the strength of gravity, or the universe's initial conditions, had been a little different, there could have been no stable stars, no chemistry and no life. How narrow the range is, whether probabilities apply to it, and whether a deeper theory will explain the values are still debated. Craig reasons: (1) the fine-tuning is due to physical necessity, chance or design; (2) it is not due to necessity or chance; (3) so it is due to design. The reply most often made is the multiverse: among countless universes with different constants, we should not be surprised to be in one that allows life, for in the others no one is there to look. Some physicists hold one for reasons within their theories. Others reply that it is unobserved, that whatever produces universes may itself need fine-tuning, and that the question why there is anything remains.

Another objection is that both arguments put God in the gaps of present science, so that he retreats as each gap closes. Christians themselves have heeded that warning. Defenders reply that the strong forms begin from what we know, not from what we do not: that there is a world with laws, and that the laws allow life; science explains by means of laws, but not why there are laws.

What they show

If these arguments succeed, they show a first cause that exists of itself and a mind behind the world's order. Whether that cause is one, good and infinite needs further argument, as Hume asked, and Aquinas gave it at length after the five ways; the Trinity and the incarnation, he held, are known only by revelation (Faith and reason). They point to a Creator, not yet to the grace of God in Christ.

The five roads place them differently. Classical apologetics takes them as the first step, with historical evidence the second; evidential apologetics may begin straight from evidence such as the resurrection. Cornelius Van Til, a presuppositionalist, faulted them when they start from neutral ground and reach a merely probable god, but held that they may show that cause and order make sense only if the God of Scripture is presupposed (Presuppositional apologetics). Reformed epistemology holds belief in God rational without them, though they can strengthen it; the cumulative case weaves them in among other threads (Reformed epistemology and the cumulative case). Their limits are taken up in What arguments can and cannot do.

In conversation, offer them as an invitation to think together, not as a way to win. If a friend says the universe is just there, ask together why there is something rather than nothing. Be honest about what science does and does not say, and do not stake your faith on today's physics or on a gap. Scripture names the one the signposts point to: all things were created through the Son, and "in Him all things hold together" (Colossians 1:17). More on science and faith is in Do science and faith conflict? The next lesson, The moral and ontological arguments, turns to conscience and to the very idea of God.

Practice