The answer is No. If the quantum world is eternal and without beginning, as you have defined it then by definition the quantum world is God, which means that God is not a thinking, feeling, purposeful Being, but a thing. There cannot be two eternal,. self-existing co-existing Gods.
Now I do not believe this to be true, but some people like Richard Dawkins do and so they think that everything that happens is an “accident,” and life has no meaning or purpose, which is false.
I don’t believe it to be the case. Even if the quantum wolrd is ever existing and sufficient to create the present universe, it still begs the question as to why it exists and has the laws it has.
This comes closer to the mark - as theists we believe that God create heaven and the universe; He did not use any substance that we can know, so as far as the universe goes, it came into existence by the creative act of God, and thus from "nothing’ (else). 
Your response makes me glad I did not take up archery. 
I am not reading science in Gen 1:1, but biblically I believe that Christ created all, and He is the alpha and omega - thus for the sake of this discussion, I emphasise how we understand “the beginning”.
I agree that the term “universe” would be incomprehensible within Genesis.
For the point made here, in the beginning means God create all that we can comprehend as our world, and in the context of today, that often means the universe - however I will not labour the point.
I apologize for arriving late to the party.
A great point that bears repeating. The same goes for theology, too. Apologists are more interested in scoring points against the opposition than anything else.
And now for something completely different … I saw this article a few years ago and thought it was fascinating. I’d love to hear @pevaquark’s take on it, and I also wonder if the idea has gained any traction since its 2015 publication.
From the article:
The physicists emphasize that their quantum correction terms are not applied ad hoc in an attempt to specifically eliminate the Big Bang singularity. Their work is based on ideas by the theoretical physicist David Bohm, who is also known for his contributions to the philosophy of physics. Starting in the 1950s, Bohm explored replacing classical geodesics (the shortest path between two points on a curved surface) with quantum trajectories…
Ali and Das explain in their paper that their model avoids singularities because of a key difference between classical geodesics and Bohmian trajectories. Classical geodesics eventually cross each other, and the points at which they converge are singularities. In contrast, Bohmian trajectories never cross each other, so singularities do not appear in the equations.
In cosmological terms, the scientists explain that the quantum corrections can be thought of as a cosmological constant term (without the need for dark energy) and a radiation term. These terms keep the universe at a finite size, and therefore give it an infinite age. The terms also make predictions that agree closely with current observations of the cosmological constant and density of the universe.
As far as theological reflection goes, I think a universe with no beginning and no end fits just as well with the biblical description of God as the current model. Thoughts?
Matthew, thank you for your thoughtful response.
Dr. Hawking has made his opinions well known in the fields of theology and philosophy, which makes me think that the question is more than a scientific one.
Of course all involved would need to get their act together. But thinking that others could or would act irresponsibly does not excuse someone for doing the same.
The way I see it is that responsible scientists, philosophers, and theologians need each other. They cannot allow themselves to become isolated as seems to be the case now without the movement for Truth and Freedom becoming frustrated.
The question is “Does the universe have a Beginning?”, (that is, “Did it emerge out of Nothing?”) I would say that this is a scientific question, right? I did not say: From where did the universe come?, which is not a scientific question.
I did not say that scientists made4 this claim. I said that using scientific facts, this claim makes sense. You did disagree, which is fine, but do not put in my mouth that I did not say.
Lawrence Krauss, who is a noted scientist, published a book, entitled A Universe Out of Nothing Since this work is part of the debate, why are you not attacking him as well as me in trying to set the record right?
First if all my argument is not based the claim General Relativity overrules Quantum Mechanics at the Beginning of the universe. We are talking about less than 1 second here and we certainly do not know exactly what happened. All we can see is the result of what happened. That looks to me from what I see, including what you have told me through this discussion, especially the origin of mass, energy, time and space, is that the universe was created out of nothing,
The problem is this. If the universe was created by a thing that cannot think, then there is no Why? There is no purpose.
Just because we believe in God and believe that God created the universe does not mean that Christians can ignore the rules of logic. Please note that John 1:1 refers to Jesus Christ as the Logos, the Word, Who is the Source of Logic and good philosophy.
Now there is a big difference between God creating the universe through an eternal physical thing like quantum fields and God creating through a special event and one time procedure like a singularity which formed a temporary bridge to the eternal. God works through then physical. God does not make the physical eternal in order to work through it, if God could create something that is eternal.
That is if you define the universe as “matter and energy”, but I think it is reasonable to think of quantum vacuum as part of the universe as well, so it is not really “quantum vacuum creating the universe” but rather the universe going from one state S1 (quantum vacuum) to a state S2 (the universe as we know today). The “purpose” is in the fact that the laws governing such state S1 allow for the unfolding of processes which generate conscious, moral beings, which are totally contingent. We could still have a universe of philosophical zombies or without the possibility of life (even with a multiverse or infinite space, life/consciousness could simply be impossible no matter how the particles and variables combine), but we do live in a universe which contains these possibilities, which is enough evidence of a creator and purpose for me.
A valid analogy would be “if human beings came to be by a process which cannot think (evolution), then there is no why”, which has been discussed time after time here to not be necessarily the case. Even if evolution has no direct interference from God, it still occurs in within a possibility space that allow the emergence of conscious, moral beings.
Thank you for your response, because this is a very important problem.
The statement in quotes that is in quotes is true as far as it goes. That is why BioLogos calls its view theistic creation. Evolution is a natural process, but it was designed by God to create the biosphere of earth. God creates or works God’s purposes through evolution. Evolution works through the laws of God, so God does not need or want to interfere with evolution.
Evolution did not create humanity except as a tool of the Creator, Who can and does think and fashioned evolution on all its ecological facets in such a way to create rational and spiritual human being is God’s own Image and a habitat for humanity and other creatures.
Dawkins says that evolution is not a rational purposeful process created by a Rational, Purposeful God, and therefore life is not rational and purposeful. Christians need to take the opposing point of view. This matter needs to be resolved and can be fairly easily. If Life is good, meaningful, and purposeful, then God created the universe Period, no ifs, ands or buts. If life is evil, meaningless and purposeless, then God did not create the universe Period. When all is said and done, Life is Good.
On the other hand you said that the quantum vacuum was eternal and without beginning, so it was not created by God and thus was not designed by God, and not used by God to create.
What makes you think that the laws that govern S1 allow of the unfolding of S2, when S1 and S2 are totaling different. S1 was without time, space, matter, and energy. It was static and eternal. S2 is not static and eternal, but dynamic and finite. S2 is characterized by time, space, matter, and energy.
So how could something which is infinite become finite. It cannot. Now it just occurred to me that for some pantheism or panentheism is the answer, but that does not really make sense either.
I am puzzled by thus phrase. “Totally contingent” means “totally dependent.” Human beings are not totally dependent. They are conscious moral being who can be independent of other and their surroundings. Morality can be good or it can be not good. We can make good choices and bad choices. We need to be interdependent, not dependent or independent.
You are convinced that the universe is Good based on your life experience and you take this as convincing evidence that God created the universe. That is good. My point is this. If our life experience indicates that God created the universe and this evidence is reinforced by theology and the experience of others. why do we seem so willing to surrender this fact to scientific speculation about the origins of the universe. I am not against science or speculation, but science needs to be based on proof and not theory.
Well, as far as I know, that is what the theorys are claiming, of course, the theory might be wrong, but if they are right, that is necessarily the case.
Laws of quantum physics could also be a tool of the creator.
If God precedes time and is timeless himself, he could have created something that existed before time and from which time arose. In your words, created a tool from which time and other properties emerged from.
I’m using contingent in the sense that it is used in cosmological arguments like those:
Maybe the word has other uses which I’m not aware of, but that is the use I’m refering to.
I’m not necessarily saying the theory is right. As far as I know (and I could be totally wrong since I don’t have that much knowledge in advanced physics), these ideas are still hypothetical and we would need a more complete unified model of physics to be able to better comprehend these issues with more certainity. I just don’t discard the possibility that they may be right, especially because they have some really good arguments going for them (which could be proven wrong in the future, but we have to deal with some degree of uncertainity in science). And I also don’t think that the matter of these theorys being right or wrong have all that much theological significance.
Interesting argument, which assumes that the universe is rationally structured, which today’s atheists do not. Of course if God is the Necessary Being, then God’s existence cannot be doubted. Of course God 's existence is denied, in part I think because God is so necessary that God provides the order is the background for everything that is.
Contingent as used here means interdependent. That is important because our knowledge is dependent upon the fact that all things are related, they are interdependent. We can know what happened in the Beginning because this began a chain of events that continues today.
Now if there was no Beginning, then there is no chain of events that continues until today. The truth and the facts are important, because the facts determine the Truth. God created the universe with the Beginning because that was the best way to create the universe. This also what the evidence indicates, not a universe without the Beginning, because God is Good.
What happened to this view? I cannot find any current discussion of it on the internet. It sounds like they have found just what Hawking and Krauss were looking for.
I, for the first time in this thread have no idea (or at least I like to imagine I knew something of which I was talking about before). The first time I personally came across this paper was through Reasons to Believe:
Here, Hugh Ross kind of puts a line in the sand and asks:
Has one of Christianity’s core beliefs (“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth”) just been falsified? Did the Bible get it wrong about the beginning of the universe? Is God irrelevant?
All three of those questions are rather crazy to me to even ask with this paper let alone any paper. Because the questions are even asked it lets me know that the article will seek to entirely disprove, cast doubt and debunk the article because a lot is at stake- i.e. a false dichotomy is presented that either the paper is true or the Bible/Christianity are true.
The objections are interesting.
I’d have to agree with you, especially from a Genesis 1 perspective. My apologies if this went a strange turn but I think that it is interesting how being tied to certain theological conclusions can cause many to reject legitimate scientific research. But this being highly speculative I think we ought to have pause on such ideas as the paper has 22 citations since 2015. For comparison, a paper I was a coauthor for published around the same time got 16 citations or so- that paper that we wrote though was hardly ground breaking so I’ll stick to my curiosity with some reservation about such papers I think for now.
Google Scholar gave me 74 when I searched on “Cosmology from Quantum Potential.” That doesn’t seem revolutionary, either. It seemed highly speculative to me, too. I was just curious if it was gaining any ground.
On RTB’s four criticisms, No. 1 was spurious, but No. 2 was more troublesome to me (their solution seems designed to give the “infinite age” by removing the singularity). On No. 3, their equations did resolve issues and make predictions, so I didn’t think this was necessarily fair. No. 4 was definitely shady.
As far as the theory itself goes, Genesis easily can be read as God bringing order from chaos rather than creating ex nihilo, so I don’t see a problem there. And since Hebrew does not have words for things like “timeless” or “infinite,” it routinely describes God with terms that indicate an existence with no beginning and no end, so I don’t see a conflict there, either.
Bottom line for me:
Google Scholar also cites this article from ICR and this article on as one of the 74 sources as well as something from Essays in the Philosophy of Humanism called “the overwhelming improbability of classic Christian theism.” But scrolling through it’s somewhere above 22 and less than 74. Not too bad but it just suffered from the unfortunately result of ‘pop science’ catching wind of the paper and misunderstanding it.
Talking about a chain of events only makes sense within time. If you have no time, there is not an eternal chain of events in the past, but rather a timeless state.
Hey Matthew, just curious here. I’ve seen you talking in many topics about arguments for God which you think are bad (and I agree with you in most of your remarks), but it got me curious about what arguments/reasons you think are good or which reasons you personally have to be a theist. I don’t know if the question is too personal, but I would find it interesting to hear about them if possible (what reasons someone which is so critical, in the good sense, about arguments for God finds good/reasonable).
@Jay313, I think that you are making the same mistakes that fundamentalists are making but in a different manner.
Fundamentalists take4 Gen 1 in isolation as do you. Now let us agree that Gen. 1 says God brought order out of chaos. Now Who or what created the chaos? Was it God or some other creator? From the Bible it is very hard to say another creator, since there is only One God the Creator, so according to the Bible God created everything even the chaos out of nothing.
Now here science actually helps Gen. 1 out. The Big Bang Theory says that the universe began as a small infinitely dense ball of mass. This fits well with the description of the initial form of the universe found in Genesis 1:2 (NIV2011)
2 Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep,
The universe began with a singularity that had no form, or structure. There was no light or energy for a nano second before energy was created by God through the Word (Logos) which caused inflation and the Big Bang.
The problem of ex nihilo is not a scientific question or even theological question. It is a philosophical question. Science cannot understand Nothing, because it is not physical, nor than theology understand Nothing because it is not spiritual. Nothing is a philosophical or logical concept which is needed for humans to understand Reality.
God is the opposite of Nothing, but Nothing is not the absence of God, but the absence of the universe, which includes us. Humans are a part of the universe, not outside of it. We cannot really understand God, but we do experience the reality of God in the reality of life and faith.
If God is God, the Creator, then God is infinite and beyond time and space. If the universe is the universe, then the universe is finite and thus has a Beginning, and it exists in time and space. How can God create something that Has no beginning and no ending so is infinite without creating Godself? God and God’s Creation as not the some, they are different so saying that God has no Beginning is no evidence in favor of an eternal universe.
The false dichotomy of the Fundamentalists that, either the Bible is true or evolution is true, is based on the bad theology that the Bible is the Word of God, which is a relatively new and relatively narrow belief. The dichotomy that God created the universe with a Beginning ex nihilo or the universe is eternal and uncreated is well established belief founded on the fullness of the faith and our understanding of the nature of the universe, based on science, philosophy, and science.
You have no argument from me. It has long been established that time begins with the Beginning of time. Take that away and you have no universe as we know it or at all.
“Let your conversation be always full of grace, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how to answer everyone.” -Colossians 4:6
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