NOTWITHSTANDING St Thomas Aquinas’ Natural Theology, demonstrating the five proofs for the existence of God, modern science gives enlightenment to the “cosmological argument”.
In modern cosmology, Einstein’s mathematical General Relativity deals with macroscopic components in the universe-at-large as does Quantum mechanics deal with microscopic components within the world of the atom, including Einstein’s later Quantum field theory.
These integrate gravitation, electro-magnetism and nuclear force fields under the same fundamental principles.
Underlying all this mathematical world view and experimentation is Planck’s constant and the dominance of Einstein’s mathematical inter-conversion formula E=MC2 and the Laws of Conservation as affects relativity’s “energy and matter” – “matter-energy cannot be created or destroyed”.
While for most of us, cosmological science is esoteric and beyond our ken, the “cosmological argument” derives much support from its consequential findings in so far as it implies that the universe is a real entity, finite and the totality of all existing things whose energy, matter, space and time are all of a single continuum with a beginning and an end.
All natural objects actually existing, from chemical elements to galaxies, in their singularity are the necessary unfolding of contingent specificities which can only be the causal design of an Almighty God creator.
The universe is not infinite, nor is it a laboratory product from another universe nor did it happen by sheer chance, though this is implied in the practised-scientism of those whose general ideology is to espouse science as the art of eliminating God.
Typical of scientism was that engaged by atheist Professor Lawrence Krause, a panelist on the Q&A ABC TV program on February 18, when prompted by the question as to “What was before the big bang?”.
Just to take issue with two of his contentions:
Firstly, there are other universes.
Secondly, in dealing with the void/space, virtual particles “pop in and out of existence”.
Both imply that matter has the capacity to create itself “out of nothing” (void is not nothing): the idea of a creation out of nothing but without a Creator.
If there are other universes (a semantic contradiction) and virtual particles, then these phenomena must be a part of the real physical universe.
If they are not, then virtual universes along with virtual particles are not observable or measurable by empirical experiments.
Such inferences are outside the ken of science and have no meaning in empiricism except in the subjective minds of their proponents, and the “creation” of philosophers and scientists who use science to play God.
“There is one thought greater than that of the universe and that is the thought of its Maker.” (John Henry Newman)
DOUG McCLARTY
Moorooka, Qld
