3.7 The State of the Question

This is the conclusion to chapter 3, "Creation and the Big Bang." Any publishers interested yet?

2.1 Relationships between Science and Faith
2.2 Critical Realism and the Coherence of Truth
2.3 Approaches to Scripture

3.1 General and Special Relativity
3.2 Three Cosmologies
3.3 An Inflationary Cosmology
3.4 Ex Nihilo Creation
3.5 The Cosmological Argument
3.6 The Fine Tuning Argument

8.1 Approaches to Genesis 2-3
8.2 Situating Genesis 2-3

_____________________________
3.7 The State of the Question
In this chapter, we have explored how the prevailing theories of the universe's origins fit "hand in glove" with the notion of a Creator and an Intelligent Designer. The Big Bang theory implies that the universe had a beginning. This fact leads naturally to the question of why the universe began and what its cause or causes were. The naturalists of the twentieth century were keenly aware of this dynamic, and it arguably fueled their resistance to the Big Bang theory.

Our increasing awareness of the universe's fine tuning has significantly amplified this argument. Even non-theists recognize the extreme improbability of the universe's balance such that the conditions for life are even remotely possible. [1] By far the most intuitive explanation for the universe's order is an Intelligent Designer. The argument would not specify much about such a Designer -- for example, it would not necessarily say anything about that Designer's moral character or awareness of happenings within the universe. Nevertheless, the case for a Creator based on the beginning and order of the universe seems eminently reasonable. 

What then are the non-theistic alternatives? In his 1988 Brief History of Time, Stephen Hawking suggested that perhaps the earliest quantum universe was a "no boundary" state to which our normal rules of cause and effect did not apply. He uses the example of the North Pole. You do not ask what is north of the North Pole because of the curvature of the Earth. Maybe, he suggests, the earliest universe was like that such that it does not make sense to ask why it began. [2] He and James Hartle called this the "no boundary proposal" in the early 1980s. [3]

Although they developed the math, much of this proposal sounds like a "what if." Over the decades, Hawking also leaned into the idea that this no boundary state might generate multiple universes -- the multiverse concept. He then invokes the anthropic principle. It is unlikely that most of these universes would be functional. However, he would say, the fact that we are having this conversation implies that we were the lucky ones.

In our fine-tuning section, we mentioned these suggestions. Our universe is amazingly balanced just right not only for the universe to be functional but for life to possibly exist on planets in certain key locations. Various versions of the multiverse proposal propose that the vast majority of universes are non-functional. They rise and go nowhere because they are not finely tuned as ours is. 

Perhaps they have too dense of matter and no galaxies form, or they do not have enough density to form. Maybe they have too many or too few dimensions. Some did not have an asymmetry between matter and antimatter or in the distribution of energy in the earliest universe. The ratios of their forces were not balanced to form atoms, or the resonances of their atoms were not balanced to form heavier atoms.

We are only here, this line of thought suggests, because we happen to live in the Goldilocks universe that was finely tuned. We are the one in a nearly infinite number of failed universes. And that is why you can read this book.

From an intuitive standpoint, these proposals seem less than satisfying. In itself, that would not mean they are wrong. Just maybe the rules of the early universe were different? Just maybe we are the lucky universe among a nearly infinite number of failed ones? Or the idea that there is an Intelligent Designer who created a universe that was "just right"? 

The last option currently seems most reasonable.

[1] Another example would be Stephen Weinberg in The First Three Minutes: A Modern View of the Origin of the Universe (Basic, 1993).

[2] Hawking, History of Time, 137.

[3] James B. Hartle and Stephen W. Hawking, “Wave Function of the Universe,” Physical Review D 28 (1983): 2960–2975.