https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/...ology-god/
EXCERPTS: . . . Since the late 1970s, philosophers and religious scholars — along with a few scientists who also dabble in those arenas — have asserted that we can. Known as the Kalam cosmological argument, it asserts that
• whatever begins to exist has a cause,
• the Universe began to exist,
• and therefore the Universe has a cause to its existence.
So what, then, is the cause of the Universe’s existence? The answer must be God. That’s the crux of the argument that modern cosmology proves the existence of God. But how well do the premises hold up to scientific scrutiny?
[...] Does everything that begins to exist, or comes into existence from a state of non-existence, have a cause? If you think about it rationally, it makes intuitive sense that something cannot come from nothing. After all, the idea that anything can come from nothing sounds absurd; if it could, it would completely undercut the notion of cause and effect that we so thoroughly experience in our day-to-day lives. The idea of creation ex nihilo, or from nothing, violates our very ideas of common sense.
But our day-to-day experiences are not the sum total of all that there is to the Universe. There are plenty of physical, measurable phenomena that do appear to violate these notions of cause and effect, with the most famous examples occurring in the quantum Universe.
[...] In other words, there is no cause for the phenomenon of when this atom will decay. It is as though the Universe has some sort of random, acausal nature to it that renders certain phenomena fundamentally indeterminate and unknowable.
[...] You might argue, and some do, that the Copenhagen Interpretation isn’t the only way to make sense of the Universe and that there are other interpretations of quantum mechanics that are completely deterministic. While this is true, it’s also not a compelling argument; the viable interpretations of quantum mechanics are all observationally indistinguishable from one another, meaning they all have an equal claim to validity.
[...] To assert that “whatever begins to exist must have a cause” ignores the many, many examples from our quantum reality where — to put it generously — such a statement has not been robustly established. It may be possible that this is the case, but it is anything but certain.
[...] Did the Universe begin to exist? This one is, believe it or not, even more dubious than the prior assertion. Whereas we can imagine that there is some fundamentally deterministic, non-random, cause-and-effect reality underlying what we observe as the bizarre and counterintuitive quantum world, it is very difficult to conclude that the Universe itself must have begun to exist at some point.
“But what about the Big Bang?” That’s what they all say, right? Isn’t it true that our Universe began with a hot Big Bang some 13.8 billion years ago?
Kind of. Yes, it is definitely true that we can trace the history of our Universe back to an early, hot, dense, uniform, rapidly expanding state. It is true that we call that state the hot Big Bang. But what’s not true [...] is the notion that the Big Bang is the beginning of space, time, energy, the laws of physics, and everything that we know and experience. The Big Bang wasn’t the beginning but was rather preceded by a completely different state known as cosmic inflation.
There is an overwhelming set of evidence for this [...] This represents a tremendous change to our picture of what the beginning of things looked like. Whereas a Universe filled with matter or radiation will lead back to a singularity, an inflating spacetime cannot. ... Remember, fundamentally, what it means to be an exponential in mathematics: after a certain amount of time, whatever you have will double. Then, when that same amount of time passes again, it doubles again, and so on and so on, without bound.
That same logic can be applied to the past: that same amount of time ago, whatever we had was half of what we had now. Take another, equivalent timestep backward, and it is halved once again. [...] That’s what inflation teaches us: our Universe, for as long as inflation went on, can only get smaller but can never reach a size of zero or a time that can be identified as the beginning. In the context of General Relativity and theoretical physics, we say that this means the Universe is past-timelike incomplete.
For all the successes of cosmic inflation, it does something that we can only consider unfortunate: by its nature, it wipes out any information from the Universe that existed prior to inflation. [...] Again, as before, a “Universe that came into existence from non-existence” is a possibility, but it is neither proven nor does it negate the other viable possibilities.
Therefore, the Universe has a cause, and that cause is God? By now, we have certainly established that the first two premises of the Kalam cosmological argument are, at best, unproven. If we assume that they are, nevertheless, true, does that establish that God is the cause of our Universe’s existence? That is only defensible if you define God as “that which caused the Universe to come into existence from a state of non-existence.”
Here are some examples that show why this is absurd. [...] that hardly sounds like the all-powerful, omniscient, omnipotent being that we normally envision when we talk about God. If the first two premises are true, and they have not been established or proven to be true, then all we can say is that the Universe has a cause; not that that cause is God... (MORE - missing details)
EXCERPTS: . . . Since the late 1970s, philosophers and religious scholars — along with a few scientists who also dabble in those arenas — have asserted that we can. Known as the Kalam cosmological argument, it asserts that
• whatever begins to exist has a cause,
• the Universe began to exist,
• and therefore the Universe has a cause to its existence.
So what, then, is the cause of the Universe’s existence? The answer must be God. That’s the crux of the argument that modern cosmology proves the existence of God. But how well do the premises hold up to scientific scrutiny?
[...] Does everything that begins to exist, or comes into existence from a state of non-existence, have a cause? If you think about it rationally, it makes intuitive sense that something cannot come from nothing. After all, the idea that anything can come from nothing sounds absurd; if it could, it would completely undercut the notion of cause and effect that we so thoroughly experience in our day-to-day lives. The idea of creation ex nihilo, or from nothing, violates our very ideas of common sense.
But our day-to-day experiences are not the sum total of all that there is to the Universe. There are plenty of physical, measurable phenomena that do appear to violate these notions of cause and effect, with the most famous examples occurring in the quantum Universe.
[...] In other words, there is no cause for the phenomenon of when this atom will decay. It is as though the Universe has some sort of random, acausal nature to it that renders certain phenomena fundamentally indeterminate and unknowable.
[...] You might argue, and some do, that the Copenhagen Interpretation isn’t the only way to make sense of the Universe and that there are other interpretations of quantum mechanics that are completely deterministic. While this is true, it’s also not a compelling argument; the viable interpretations of quantum mechanics are all observationally indistinguishable from one another, meaning they all have an equal claim to validity.
[...] To assert that “whatever begins to exist must have a cause” ignores the many, many examples from our quantum reality where — to put it generously — such a statement has not been robustly established. It may be possible that this is the case, but it is anything but certain.
[...] Did the Universe begin to exist? This one is, believe it or not, even more dubious than the prior assertion. Whereas we can imagine that there is some fundamentally deterministic, non-random, cause-and-effect reality underlying what we observe as the bizarre and counterintuitive quantum world, it is very difficult to conclude that the Universe itself must have begun to exist at some point.
“But what about the Big Bang?” That’s what they all say, right? Isn’t it true that our Universe began with a hot Big Bang some 13.8 billion years ago?
Kind of. Yes, it is definitely true that we can trace the history of our Universe back to an early, hot, dense, uniform, rapidly expanding state. It is true that we call that state the hot Big Bang. But what’s not true [...] is the notion that the Big Bang is the beginning of space, time, energy, the laws of physics, and everything that we know and experience. The Big Bang wasn’t the beginning but was rather preceded by a completely different state known as cosmic inflation.
There is an overwhelming set of evidence for this [...] This represents a tremendous change to our picture of what the beginning of things looked like. Whereas a Universe filled with matter or radiation will lead back to a singularity, an inflating spacetime cannot. ... Remember, fundamentally, what it means to be an exponential in mathematics: after a certain amount of time, whatever you have will double. Then, when that same amount of time passes again, it doubles again, and so on and so on, without bound.
That same logic can be applied to the past: that same amount of time ago, whatever we had was half of what we had now. Take another, equivalent timestep backward, and it is halved once again. [...] That’s what inflation teaches us: our Universe, for as long as inflation went on, can only get smaller but can never reach a size of zero or a time that can be identified as the beginning. In the context of General Relativity and theoretical physics, we say that this means the Universe is past-timelike incomplete.
For all the successes of cosmic inflation, it does something that we can only consider unfortunate: by its nature, it wipes out any information from the Universe that existed prior to inflation. [...] Again, as before, a “Universe that came into existence from non-existence” is a possibility, but it is neither proven nor does it negate the other viable possibilities.
Therefore, the Universe has a cause, and that cause is God? By now, we have certainly established that the first two premises of the Kalam cosmological argument are, at best, unproven. If we assume that they are, nevertheless, true, does that establish that God is the cause of our Universe’s existence? That is only defensible if you define God as “that which caused the Universe to come into existence from a state of non-existence.”
Here are some examples that show why this is absurd. [...] that hardly sounds like the all-powerful, omniscient, omnipotent being that we normally envision when we talk about God. If the first two premises are true, and they have not been established or proven to be true, then all we can say is that the Universe has a cause; not that that cause is God... (MORE - missing details)