fortunate as to have received this revelation personally, to decide whether this new revelation is valid or not? The only dependable way is through natural theology. You have to ask, 'What is the evidence?' And it's insufficient to say, 'Well, there is this extremely charismatic person who said that he had a conversion experience.' Not enough. There are lots of charismatic people who have all sorts of mutually exclusive conversion experiences. They can't all be right. Some of them have to be wrong. Many of them have to be wrong. It's even possible that all of them are wrong. We cannot depend entirely on what people say. We have to look at what the evidence is.
I would like now to turn to the issue of alleged evidence or, as they're called, proofs of the existence of God. And I will mainly spend my time on the Western proofs. But to show an ecumenical spirit, let me begin with some Hindu proofs, which in many ways are as sophisticated and certainly more ancient than the Western arguments.
Udayana, an eleventh-century logician, had a set of seven proofs of the existence of God, and I won't mention all of them; I'll just try to convey a sense of it. And, by the way, the kind of god that Udayana is talking about is not exactly the same, as you might imagine, as the Judeo-Christian-Islamic god. His god is all-knowing and imperishable but not necessarily omnipotent and corn passionate.
First, Udayana reasons that all things must have a cause. The world is full of things. Something must have made those things. And this is very similar to a Western argument that we'll come to shortly.
Secondly, an argument not heard in the West is the argument from atomic combinations. It is quite sophisticated. It says at the beginning of Creation, atoms had to be bonded with each other to make bigger things. And such a bonding of atoms always requires the activity of a conscious agent. Well, now we know that's false. Or we know, at least, that there are laws of atomic interaction that determine how atoms bind together. It's a subject called chemistry. And you might say that this is due to the intervention of a deity but it does not require the direct intervention of a deity. All the deity has to do is establish the laws of chemistry and retire.
Third is an argument from the suspension of the world. The world isn't falling, as is clear by just looking out. We're not hurtling through space, apparently, and therefore something is holding the world up, and that something is God. Well, this is a quite natural view of things. It's connected with the idea that we are stationary and at the center of the universe, a misapprehension that all peoples all over the world have had. In fact we are falling at a terrific rate of speed in orbit around the Sun. And every year we go 2 pi times the radius of the Earth orbit. If you work that out, you'll find it's extremely fast.
Fourth is an argument from the existence of human skills. And this is very close to the von Daniken argument that if someone didn't show us how to do things, we wouldn't know how to do it. I think there's plentiful argument against that.
Then there is the existence of authoritative knowledge separate from human skills. How would we know things that are in, for example, the Vedas, the Hindu holy books, unless God had written them? The idea that humans were able to write the Vedas was difficult for Udayana to accept.
Well, this gives a sense of these arguments and shows that there is a pervasive human wish to give a rational explanation for the existence of a God or gods, and also, I maintain, it demonstrates that these arguments are not always highly successful. Let me now go to some of the Western arguments, which may be entirely familiar to everyone, in which case I apologize.
First of all, there is the cosmological argument, which is not very different from the argument we just heard. The cosmological argument in the West essentially has to do with causality.
There are things all around us; those things were caused by something else. And so, after a while, you find yourself back to remote times and causes. Well, it can't go on forever, an infinite regress of causes, as Aristotle and later Thomas Aquinas argued, and therefore you need to come to an uncaused first cause. Something that started everything going that was not itself caused; that is, that was always there. And this is defined as God.
There are two conflicting hypotheses here, two alternative hypotheses. One is that the universe was always here, and the other is that God was always here. Why is it immediately obvious that one of these is more likely than the other? Or, put another way, if we say that God made the universe, it is reasonable to then ask, 'And who made God?'
Virtually every child asks that question and is usually shushed by the parents and told not to ask embarrassing questions. But how does saying that God made the universe, and never mind asking where God came from, how is that more satisfying than to say the universe was always here?
In modern astrophysics there are two contending views. First of all, there is no doubt in my mind, and I think almost all astrophysicists agree, that the evidence from the expansion of the universe, the mutual recession of the galaxies and from what is called the three-degree black-body background radiation, suggests that something like 13 or 15 billion years ago all the matter in the universe was compressed into an extremely small volume, and that something that can surely be called an explosion happened at that time, and that the subsequent expansion of the universe and the condensation of matter led to galaxies, stars, planets, living beings, and all the rest of the details of the universe we see around us.
Now, what happened before that? There are two views. One is 'Don't ask that question,' which is very close to saying that God did it. And the other is that we live in an oscillating universe in which there is an infinite number of expansions and contractions. [5]
We happen to be roughly 15,000 million years out from the last expansion. And some, let's say, 80,000 million years from now, the expansion will stop, to be replaced by a compression, and all the matter will fly together to a very small volume and then expand again with no information trickling through the cusps in the expansion process.
The former of these views happens, by chance, to be close to the Judeo-Christian-Islamic view, the latter close to the standard Hindu views. And so, if you like, you can think of the varying contentions of these two major religious views being fought out on the field of contemporary satellite astronomy. Because that's where the answer to this question will very likely be decided. Is there enough matter in the universe to prevent the expansion from continuing forever, so that the self-gravity will make the expansion stop and be followed by a contraction? Or is there not enough matter in the universe to stop the expansion, so everything keeps expanding forever? This is an experimental question. And it is very likely that in our lifetime we will have the answer to it. And I stress that this is very different from the usual theological approach, where there is never an experiment that can be performed to test out any contentious issue. Here there is one. So we don't have to make judgments now. All we have to do is maintain some tolerance for ambiguity until the data are in, which may happen in a decade or less. It is possible that the Hubble Space Telescope, scheduled for launch next summer, will provide the answer to this question. It's not guaranteed but it is possible. [6]
Now, by the way, on this issue of who's older, God or the universe, there's actually a three-by-three matrix: God can have always existed but will not exist for all future time. That is to say God might have no beginning but might have an end. God might have a beginning but no end. God might have no beginning and no end. Likewise for the universe. The universe might be infinitely old, but it will end. The universe might have begun a finite time ago but will go on forever, or it might have always existed and will never end. Those are just the logical possibilities. And it's curious that human myth has some of those possibilities but not others. I think in the West it's quite clear that there is a human or animal life-cycle model that has been imposed on the cosmos. It's a natural thing to think about, but after a while its limitations, I think, become clear.
Also, I should say something about the Second Law of Thermodynamics. An argument that is sometimes used to justify a belief in God is that the Second Law of Thermodynamics says that the universe as a whole runs down; that is, the net amount of order in the universe must decline. Chaos must increase as time goes on; that is, in the entire universe. It doesn't say that in a given locale, such as the Earth, the amount of order can't increase, and clearly it has. Living things are much more complex, have much more order in them, than the raw materials from which life formed some 4,000 million years ago. But this increase in order on the Earth is done, it is easy enough to calculate, at the expense of a decrease in order on the Sun, which is the source of the energy that drives terrestrial biology. It's by no means clear, by the way, that the Second Law of Thermodynamics applies to the universe as a whole, because it is an experimental law, and we don't have experience with the universe as a whole. But it's always struck me as curious that those who wish to apply the Second Law to theological issues do not ask whether God is subject to the Second Law. Because if God were subject to the Second Law of Thermodynamics, then God could have only a finite lifetime. And again, there is an asymmetric use of the principles of physics when theology confronts thermodynamics.
Also, by the way, if there were an uncaused first cause, that by no means says anything about omnipotence or
