Suppose the following.
You are sitting eating breakfast. There is a racket outside. You check to see, and a DeLorean has pulled into the driveway, and someone hops out. Much to your surprise, it is a future version of yourself, aged about forty years! The elder you walks up to you and says:
"I am you from the future. Take this." You hand yourself a blue notebook. "Keep this safe. Do not write in it or alter it in any way. Within it are the keys to time travel. You must study and work to understand this book. Remember this date. You must come back to this exact time to perform this task as your future self. Do not tell anyone about this. If this technology gets out, who knows what will happen? There would be no way to control it, and it could destroy the world. Do you understand?"
You nod your head, jaw-dropped. The elder-you hops back into the DeLorean and zips to who-knows-where and who-knows-when. You go eat some lunch.
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Analogy #1 -
Imagine the assurance and motivation of getting a glimpse at your future self. If you knew that one day you would be a brilliant concert pianist, and you were able to get a sneak peak at it, you would be motivated in your practices. You would know that, no matter how difficult, there would be a payoff in the end.
If you knew that you were going to invent time travel, you would be very engaged in your science classes, and you would have great confidence.
Spiritually, God's Word gives us a peak at our futures. It tells us that we will be forever with our Maker, that we will worship him with increased capacities, and that we will have good things to do in a renewed world. In that world we will be totally free from sin, decay, and heartache. It will be awesome.
According to Christianity, the resurrection of Jesus is the in-break of our future hope into the present. Our hope is a resurrection hope, and we believe Jesus has already had that resurrection, that he was the first-fruits of what is to come. We have been given a sure word about our future and hope, and our present life with all its difficulties is a growing into what we will become, a growing into who we really are.
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Analogy #2 -
The experience of being visited by your future self would be like experiencing a miracle.
This experience would come to you as a bending of the rules of the universe as you understand them. Time flows in one direction, and we experience it that way, and you just can't go backwards and forwards and visit other versions of yourself. This isn't common place. It isn't the way the rules work.
Seeing a future version of yourself must have been sort of what it was like for the disciples to see Jesus alive again. What a shock! They knew, just as well as modern people, that dead people don't get up again. But when you see it with your own eyes... you adjust. You are humbled a bit about what things must happen and what things mustn't happen...
How would you react?
I am reminded of Scrooge as he is visited by Marley's ghost. He initially has the bravery to talk back to the ghost and explains him away as a bad bit of mustard. He is experiencing the ghost and disbelieving in him at the same time.
I imagine that many people would take a visit from their future selves as a bit of trickery, as a hallucination, as a bit of bad mustard...
If there is more to the world than the naked eye can see, what sort of evidence could convince you of this? Would the evidence be able to overcome your desire to offer alternative explanations?
I think that gullibility and skepticism are twin dangers. Too many, afraid of one side, fall off the other in the quest for truth.
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Analogy #3 -
Why does the blue book exist?
How old is the blue book?
The way I have presented the scenario would seem to introduce a very interesting loop. The book seems to be infinitely old. Because the future-you had already had it for about forty years, and he inherited it the same way from another future-you that had used it for forty years. Presumably, without the existence of this blue-book, you would never had discovered time travel. Perhaps no one would have.
To maybe tweak the scenario to avoid the presence of a physical book, imagine that the future you sits down and has a long conversation with you about the necessary details you will need to work out the theory of time travel. So there is a nugget of information that gets transferred. Continually. You can't put a start date on it because it is eternally in that loop. You get it and pass it along to yourself... who will pass it along to yourself. Ad infinitum.
But why does this book, or why does this knowledge exist in the first place?
It seems a little like cheating. You get something for nothing. No one ever had to do the work of discovering this knowledge, but it has brute-forced its way into this loop. Implausible. At least unexplainable. Unaccountable.
You can explain the mechanics of how you got the book, but ultimately you cannot explain why. And the how is not terribly satisfying once the existential question of why begins to gnaw at you.
Consider an analogy from this blue book to the universe itself.
Why does the universe exist? Why is there something instead of nothing? How is there something instead of nothing?
It is logically, metaphysically, common-sense-ically absurd to think that something literally came from nothing uncaused and for no reason. The way that the Big Bang has traditionally been espoused points back to a singularity of time and space, a pointed beginning to the Whole Show. Before the Big Bang, there was no time. There was no space. There was nothing. In all honesty we cannot even fathom nothingness because we probably think of the darkness and the vaccuum of outer space. But an empty vacuum is actually not nothing; it is still, at least, an empty something. Oh what a conundrum!
Christians and other theists have traditionally put forward different versions of something known as the Cosmological Argument for the existence of God. These arguments rest upon the absurdity of the claim that something comes from nothing. Let me reproduce two versions:
The Kalam Cosmological Argument -
1. Everything that begins to exist has a cause.
2. The universe began to exist.
3. Therefore, the universe has a cause.
The Leibnizian Cosmological Argument -
1. Anything that exists has an explanation of its existence, either in the necessity of its own nature or in an external cause.
2. If the universe has an explanation of its existence, that explanation is God.
3. The universe exists.
4. Therefore, the universe has an explanation of its existence.
5. Therefore, the explanation of the existence of the universe is God.
The difference between these two different explanations is that of cause and reason. What caused all this? Why all this? Not necessarily identical questions.
The Kalam Cosmological Argument digs into our mechanical understanding of things. The cause. Number 1 in the argument seems to make intuitive sense, and there are no known counterexamples in our verifiable experience. We do not see things popping into existence willy-nilly. We see the existence of humans, and both evolutionists and creationists alike feel the need to give a cause. Their very names are grounded in this reality. They both realize that things don't just pop into existence. If they did, it would be nice for a money tree to grow suddenly and unaccountably in my back yard. Sadly, this will not occur.
The second premise in the Kalam argument takes as its evidence both philosophy and science. The philosophical arguments - which I will for brevity's sake skip for now - conclude that an actually infinite number of things cannot exist, even though the idea of the infinite can. This premise in the Kalam argument does not rest solely on philosophy, but also on science. The science - through study of things like background radiation - pushes us to see that there was a beginning to things.
If we accept the first and second premises, logic pushes us to the third premise: the universe has a cause.
This is a not a conclusion that many modern scientists really like. This is not a conclusion that many modern people really like. Let's think out some of the implications of this conclusion...
If the universe has a cause for its existence, that cause must be something other than or outside of the universe itself. The universe can do no causing until it actually exists. It doesn't exist before it exists. It is absurd to think that something can bring itself into existence. This would be the equivalent of saying that the blue book in our example brought or caused or willed itself into existence. Furthermore, if there is a singular beginning to time and space, the cause of the universe must be something outside of time and space as we know and experience it. And it must be powerful enough to cause the universe as we see it. So we have gotten to a powerful, non-physical cause.
Consider how the Leibnizian argument supplements this. Anything that exists has an explanation of its existence, either in the necessity of its own nature or in an external cause. We can certainly imagine the universe being different than it is. It does not seem that the universe must necessarily exist. It might not have. So its explanation is not in a necessity of its own nature. In that case, its explanation must be in an external cause. Here we are pressed with the ever-present, ever-powerful question of the child: Why?
I think that the Leibnizian argument supplements the Kalam argument by pushing us beyond a mere Cause to a Mind. Before the beginning, there was nothing. And in the nothingness, there was the Cause. But why did it choose the moment it did to bring about the explosion we call the Big Bang? Why not before, why not after, why not somewhere else? (I recognize even the inadequacy of these questions to grasp the full nature of what was going on.) There was an act of the will. The thing that did the Causing was not something like a law of gravity or a number or something like that. It was more like an agent, a very powerful non-physical Mind, deciding to act.
How do atheists escape these uncomfortable conclusions? There are some different options. You decide for yourself how respectable they seem:
1. Something literally came from nothing, uncaused and for no reason. (The miracle of all miracles.)
2. The universe has always existed. This used to be the popular scientific view. An eternal universe. As cosmology began pointing to the falsity of this fact, we see attempts to keep it in place. For instance, Einstein - to his later regret - fudged numbers on some of his equations in order to have a steady-state universe, one that was not expanding. He did this because he was not pleased with the picture of an expanding universe because he knew that it had to be expanding from something. What he wanted to believe shaped his science in this case.
I think some scientists operate as if, yes, there was an explosion that brought the universe into the state it is currently in. But they do not operate as if it really had a beginning. The Big Bang was just one thing in the history of the universe and it had some state prior to the Big Bang that led up to and caused it. In this case, they conveniently avoid some of the conclusions we have reached, and they avoid the picture that science has recently painted. And they retain belief in an eternal sort of universe. Okay.
3. The third is like the second. A variation. Some scientists put forth theories that make it sound like time can warp around or turn around on itself. They make it seem like there is not a true beginning point. Like time - instead of running in a straight line as we experience it - is actually more like a loop. This way, they avoid the singularity of time and space that the evidence seems to point to.
In this way - and this is what got me thinking on this post in the first place - the universe is like the blue book. It exists as a brute fact, part of a vicious unexplainable loop. There is no explanation internal as to why it would have to exist. There is nothing we have discovered - and there is no reason to suppose that we will discover - an explanation that makes the universe necessary. So why does it exist?
If you avoid a beginning to the universe, you have sidestepped the Kalam Cosmological Argument, but you have done nothing to escape the Leibnizian Cosmological Argument. You may be able to give mechanical how sort of explanation, but you are still pressed with the why question. If the universe exists eternally in a straight line, or whether the universe exists eternally in a loop, there is still the quandary that it didn't have to be and yet is. So why?
4. This is a silly question that I refuse to think about. It isn't a question worth asking. I guess that is one way of avoiding things.
Now what do the Cosmological Arguments do for me personally? They incline my ears to listen. There are good reasons, it appears, to think that there is a Cause and Reason to the universe that is outside the universe. Perhaps... this Cause or Reason might want to communicate with us or give us more than bare existence. Perhaps this Thing that made all this wouldn't be done with all this.
Wait, you may say. Don't you run into the same problems with an eternal God that you do with an eternal universe?
Well, as I see it, you either have an eternal God or an eternal universe. Because if everything is finite, then why isn't the universe already done and gone? Because if everything is finite in time, then there was a time when nothing existed, and then stuff existed, which doesn't make sense.
I would put God forth as the uncaused Cause, as a being who is not contingent by nature, but necessary by nature. If there is anything eternal, it makes more sense to me to believe in an eternal God than in an eternal universe, especially considering the evidence against an eternal universe. I do believe in universal truths that would be true in any universe, such as the rules of mathematics, but if these are universally and eternally true, where are they grounded? Why are they there? Is there some eternal necessity in their nature? I think there must be an eternal Being that exists by a necessity of its own nature, that is the ground of other necessary and contingent things.
How does God reveal himself in the Bible? As self-sufficient, eternal, Creator, the ground of absolute morality and truth. He is the ground of being. He names himself, "I AM." God is the stopper of the infinite regress. He confronts us with his existence. He is who he is. From eternity to eternity. The God of Scriptures is consistent with, yet far richer, than the picture we get using science and reasoning. What then will we do with him?
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