Ben Cartwright July 21, 2004
Last night, as I was about to go to sleep, I started thinking. I thought about the universe. I thought about several things, and I finally came to this one thought: what would it be like if nothing had ever existed? Stop reading for a moment and try to imagine nothing. I think when we perform this mental exercise, we tend to picture a big, black space full of nothing. But that would not truly be nothing, because even space is something. True nothingness would be� well� nothing. No empty space. Just nothing. Try to imagine that nothing existed at all. Anywhere. Ever. If you do that, then you�re in the frame of mind that I was in last night when I began to ponder these things.
Now try to imagine that out of that nothingness comes something. How could this happen? It couldn�t, of course. Absolute nothingness could never produce something. There are no raw materials. It�s impossible for something to appear spontaneously out of nothing. Sure, maybe if there were even a few hydrogen atoms or something floating around, a case might be made, but if there truly was a time when nothing existed anywhere, then nothing would still exist now (I�m not sure words like �still� and �now� would apply, since even the time-space continuum would not exist).
This brings me to my main point. Since we look around us and we see lots of something, we can infer that there was never a time when nothing existed. Since something cannot arise spontaneously from nothing, then we know that there must be something or things that have always existed. Scientists dealing with string theory have proposed the idea that the universe (or universes) might be in some sort of infinite loop which has no beginning or end. This would make sense, and although our human minds constantly cry out for a beginning, I have reasoned above that there can be no real beginning to it all, at least not one that came from nothing. This flies against our human experience, because everything we see has a beginning, and seems to be moving along and changing. Imagine a hula hoop, and notice that if this represents the development of the universe (or universes), there is no real point where you can say, �This is the beginning.� So one possibility is that the universe has somehow always existed, and is in some repeating loop.
Another possibility is that someone out there created the universe. However, and this is crucial to my argument, this entity, if it exists, could not have had a beginning either, since something cannot arise from nothing. This is the Christian concept of God, always existing, perhaps even �existing outside time,� whatever that means. But, as the title of my article states, we come to the question �who made God?� Since everything we know has a beginning, when did God begin? I always find it very interesting that when I suggest that maybe the universe and the matter in it has just always existed, many Christians will scoff at this idea. But if I then say that perhaps God has always existed, this idea seems perfectly rational to them. Why is this? It seems that the idea of �always existing� itself is not the problem, since they judge God to fit this category. I can only guess that because the �God� idea matches what they want to be true, it seems more rational.
Now, I myself find the idea of the universe always existing more likely than the idea of God�s always existing, and last night, I asked myself why this was. It didn�t take me long to find the answer: the universe is real. As far as I can tell, it exists. I can see it, and I can touch parts of it. I can take scientific instruments and measure things in the universe. The universe is definitely here. As to the issue of God, I do not know if there is such a being. I hear lots of people saying there is, but I see no hard evidence for God�s existence (ironically, some version of this very argument is often used to support God�s existence, but hopefully readers of this article can see why that does not hold water).
Therefore, because I know the universe is here, I can more easily believe that it has always existed than believe that God, whose existence is still in question, has always existed. Certainly, logic dictates that something has always existed, but I think that what is most likely, without invoking any invisible, untestable beings, and just going by what data is available, is that the universe, in some shape or form, has always existed.
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