THE BLINDING POWER OF PRESUPPOSITIONS

I am constantly amazed at the human capacity to miss the bleating obvious. We each have cherished beliefs that no amount of evidence to the contrary will dislodge. For most scientists this cherished dogmatic belief is that the material universe is all that is, all that was and all that will ever be. Take this recent article in Discover Magazine.

A universe with a beginning begs the vexing question: Just how did it begin? Vilenkin’s answer is by no means confirmed, and perhaps never can be, but it’s still the best solution he’s heard so far: Maybe our fantastic, glorious universe spontaneously arose from nothing at all. This heretical statement clashes with common sense, which admittedly fails us when talking about the birth of the universe, an event thought to occur at unfathomably high energies. It also flies in the face of the Roman philosopher Lucretius, who argued more than 2,000 years ago that “nothing can be created from nothing.” 

Of course, Lucretius had never heard of quantum mechanics and inflationary cosmology, 20th-century fields that contest his bold claim. “We usually say that nothing can be created out of nothing because we think it would violate the law of conservation of energy,” a hallowed principle in physics holding that energy can neither be created nor destroyed, Vilenkin explains. So how could you create a universe with matter in it, where there had been nothing before?

“The way the universe gets around that problem is that gravitational energy is negative,” Vilenkin says. That’s a consequence of the fact, mathematically proven, that the energy of a closed universe is zero: The energy of matter is positive, the energy of gravitation is negative, and they always add up to zero. “Therefore, creating a closed universe out of nothing does not violate any conservation laws.” 

Vilenkin’s calculations show that a universe created from nothing is likely to be tiny, indeed — far, far smaller than, say, a proton. Should this minute realm contain just a smattering of repulsive-gravity material, that’s enough to ensure it will ignite the unstoppable process of eternal inflation, leading to the universe we inhabit today. If the theory holds, we owe our existence to the humblest of origins: nothing itself.

One virtue of this picture, if correct, is that the spontaneous creation of our universe gives a definite starting point to things. Time begins at the moment of creation, putting to rest the potentially endless questions about “what happened before that.” 

Yet the explanation still leaves a huge mystery unaddressed. Although a universe, in Vilenkin’s scheme, can come from nothing in the sense of there being no space, time or matter, something is in place beforehand — namely the laws of physics. Those laws govern the something-from-nothing moment of creation that gives rise to our universe, and they also govern eternal inflation, which takes over in the first nanosecond of time.

That raises some uncomfortable questions: Where did the laws of physics reside before there was a universe to which they could be applied? Do they exist independently of space or time? “It’s a great mystery as to where the laws of physics came from. We don’t even know how to approach it,” Vilenkin admits. “But before inflation came along, we didn’t even know how to approach the questions that inflation later solved. So who knows, maybe we’ll pass this barrier as well.”

"Maybe our fantastic, glorious universe spontaneously arose from nothing at all."  Really?!?!?!  That's the best explanation you could come up with?  No other possibility but this bit of ridiculousness comes to mind? This is a textbook example of Romans 1:18-22.

The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of people, who suppress the truth by their wickedness, since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse.

For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened. Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools

“It’s a great mystery as to where the laws of physics came from. We don’t even know how to approach it,”  That's because there are some questions that science will never be able to answer.  In fact most of science is just dabbling in magic.  We think that if we put a scientific term on it it will be more than what it in fact is . . . a great mystery.  We can observe magnetism, electricity, gravity but in the end we really have no idea what it is, or how or why it exists, and outside of a supernatural creator we are ultimately reduced to speaking nonsense in explanation.