The beginning of the physical universe via the Big Bang has always been a thorn in the flesh for atheists. And as a result atheists have come up with many alternatives to explain it away because, as atheist scientist Hawking once remarked, that “Many people do not like the idea that time has a beginning, probably because it smacks of divine intervention.”
One attempt to explain how we got a universe from nothing comes from atheist Peter Atkins who argues that regardless of the universe’s overwhelming immensity and diversity, it is “an elaborate and engaging rearrangement of nothing” (1). Atkins then espouses the quantum fluctuation hypothesis within which “space-time generates its own dust in the process of its own self-assembly” (2).
However, in New Scientist David Darling critiques this idea; he writes: “What is a big deal – the biggest of them all – is how you get something from nothing. Don’t let the cosmologists try to kid you on this one… “In the beginning,” they will say, “there was nothing – no time, space, matter or energy. Then there was a quantum fluctuation from which…” Whoa! Stop right there. You see what I mean? First there was nothing then there is something. And the cosmologists try to bridge the two with a quantum flutter, a tremor of uncertainty that sparks it all off. Then they are away, and before you know it they have pulled a hundred billion galaxies out of their quantum hats” (3).
As evidence Darling’s point is informative. Atkins’ view holds to a beginning with nothing but then, as the philosopher Keith Ward captures, requires “an exactly balanced array of fundamental forces, an exactly specified probability of particular fluctuations occurring in this array, and an existent space-time in which fluctuations can occur” (4). Essentially, there was never nothing since quantum fluctuation is something; it thus doesn’t answer the question of how we got the universe from nothing.
However, Atkins continues by saying that “time brought the points (non-spatiotemporal entities) into being, and the points brought time into being” (5). However, this is problematic. One ought to respond by asking how a cause can bring about an effect without already being in existence? Again Keith Ward illustrates the fallacy in Atkins’ statement:
“If time brought points into being, time must already have existed before the points. And if the points brought time into being, they must have existed before time. But to say that two things have each existed before the other is a simple contradiction. Since contradictions convey absolutely no information, the cosmic bootstrap turns out to be vacuous. Far from being an ultimate explanation, it says nothing at all” (6).
1. Daily Telegraph, 6 April 1998.
2. Atkins, P. 1992. Creation Revisited. p. 143.
3. Darling, D. New Scientist. p. 49.
4. Ward, K. 1996. God, Chance and Necessity. p. 40.
5. Atkins, P. ibid.
6. Ward, K. ibid. p. 49.