COSMOLOGY
This week's video clip (from The Case for a Creator) covered "cosmology", which is a fancy word for the study of the universe.
We learned that from the times of the ancients all the way to 1953, people all over the world have believed that the universe is static, or constant. This means that it is as it has always been - no change. I suppose this makes sense if you don't know otherwise. It's easy to understand why they would make gods to represent these planets and stars which they believed had never changed.
In 1953, Einstein proposed the theory of relativity. One of the ideas of his theory was that the universe was moving. It was either contracting or expanding, but not staying the same. Around the same time, a Belgian astronomer named Lemaître developed a theory that the universe was constantly expanding. Building on this, American astronomer Edwin Hubble discovered that objects appear to be moving at a speed proportional to their distance from the earth.
This leads to a couple of interesting observations. First of all, if things are expanding out from earth, then everything must have started from here! Think of the universe expanding like rings of ripples expand from where a stone was thrown in a lake. The center of those rings is where it all started. Similarly, think of the universe of stars and planets as dots on a balloon. As you blow the balloon up, the stars stay in the same arrangement - they just get farther out from the center. What is at the center? We are!
The second observation is that at some point, the universe must have been smaller and denser. Our earth is at the center of the balloon in the last example. The stars keep going farther away, but since we are in the center, they continue to look the same to us. Imagine if we could watch time in reverse. Instead of the balloon getting larger, it would get smaller. Instead of everything going farther away, it would get closer to the center. At some time, there was a beginning of things. Everything must have been in one single point. The cosmologists call this "singularity". Sounds to me a lot like the creation story in Genesis!
In the video, Strobel also explained something called "Kalam's Cosmological Argument". It is a concept that goes like this:
This leads to a couple of interesting observations. First of all, if things are expanding out from earth, then everything must have started from here! Think of the universe expanding like rings of ripples expand from where a stone was thrown in a lake. The center of those rings is where it all started. Similarly, think of the universe of stars and planets as dots on a balloon. As you blow the balloon up, the stars stay in the same arrangement - they just get farther out from the center. What is at the center? We are!
The second observation is that at some point, the universe must have been smaller and denser. Our earth is at the center of the balloon in the last example. The stars keep going farther away, but since we are in the center, they continue to look the same to us. Imagine if we could watch time in reverse. Instead of the balloon getting larger, it would get smaller. Instead of everything going farther away, it would get closer to the center. At some time, there was a beginning of things. Everything must have been in one single point. The cosmologists call this "singularity". Sounds to me a lot like the creation story in Genesis!
In the video, Strobel also explained something called "Kalam's Cosmological Argument". It is a concept that goes like this:
- Whatever begins to exist must have had something that caused it
- At some point the universe began to exist (singularity)
- Therefore, the universe had a cause
When you say something "had a cause", isn't that a fancy way to say "it had a creator"?
As Strobel pointed out, the science of Cosmology points directly to a creator!
