Against Deep Time

Either we are created or we are not; there is no third possibility. Whichever of these possibilities is true, it is hard for many people to believe. If we aren’t created, then life created itself, which is logically impossible since an effect cannot precede its cause. If we say it is logically impossible for life to pop into existence out of non-life, but still it may have happened, we’d have to concede that this is hard to believe. Indeed, it is harder to believe than it appears because a cause cannot give to its effect a property it does not have. Thus no possible congeries of chemicals, however aided by accidentally titrated bursts of lightening (or whatever “enlivening” energy one posits) can cause life to emerge because none of the elements contributing to the cause of life have life in them, and thus cannot conspire to convey that property to something else. So it is that life could not have emerged except from life. In order to finesse this difficulty, some people have claimed that life hitched a ride to earth on an asteroid. But this claim just pushes the question back a step: where did that life come from (and how did it survive the trip, or even get on the asteroid)? Many people will say that it is not at all hard to believe that life can emerge from non-life given enough time. We may call this view the perspective of “deep time,” and in this perspective, time takes the place of an intelligent creator. What a creator can do in an instant can be done randomly, without purpose, over a very long stretch of time. But it is hard to believe that the impossible can become possible if only there is enough time in which chance happenings can stumble upon an accident that issues in life, and indeed, life that is wandering mindlessly toward intelligence and moral self-awareness. For many people, it is hard to believe we are created on purpose by God, who is the Being whose essence is existence and therefore cannot not exist, and moreover, He created us for Himself. The idea is regarded by many people as far-fetched that there could exist a Being Who cannot not exist, is conscious of Himself, creates on purpose, and perhaps most difficult of all, is eternal, immaterial, not bound by space and time, is intellect, and is the fulness of perfection.

If we say that God created the world and us within it, then it remains a question how this happened. We may accept that God called into being in an instant the matter of which the world would be formed, but after that, was the work finished quickly, in six days, or was it done over a very long time?  In seeking to answer this question, we have two sources to guide us: Scripture and the material world itself. The question here concerns which source will be of primary authority and which of secondary when the two sources appear to conflict. I contend that Scripture is our primary source since in it, in particular Genesis 1-11, God gives us an account of what He did in creating us, and how long He took to do it. It is clear as we read this account that it is history; it is not metaphor, allegory, or poetry, and so a question we each must decide is the degree of reliability we ascribe to the history. Of greatest importance, however, is that in Scripture we are told who we are, namely beings made in the image and likeness of God for communion with Him, and how we became flawed creatures in need of a Redeemer. Without this communication from God, we’d be at a loss to understand ourselves, and this, as we can see all around us, is a calamity of the soul for those afflicted in this way. Of course, both Scripture and the world around us have to be interpreted, and this is a complex process involving the interpretation of Scripture, the investigation of the world around us seeking to understand how it works and, if possible, how it came to be as it is, and also the comparative analysis of Scripture in light of what we find in creation, and of what we find in creation in light of Scripture. We must bear in mind that both Scripture and the world are given to us by God and so the truths the two embody cannot conflict. Thus where a conflict arises, there is an error in interpretation and we need to find it and correct it.

The world God has made is intelligible and so can be understood by reasoned investigation. In this effort, we should be aware that the fallacy of personal incredulity warns us not to think that an interpretation of facts is incorrect because we find it hard to believe. If an interpretation of facts is incorrect, it may be that we lack sufficient data, or we have misidentified relevant facts, or we have reasoned incorrectly about them, or maybe, and importantly, we have made inferences without sufficient evidence in defense of a worldview in need of help. While we should pay attention to the fact that an interpretation may strain credulity and may do so because it is untrue, this alone is not sufficient to reject it. Moreover, we should understand that there was never nothing, understood as a total lack of being. Some kind of existence has always been, since if ever there was nothing, there’d be nothing now. The reason is that in order for matter to come to be, there must exist a first cause to make it happen because matter is not the cause of itself.  Stephen Hawking allegedly asserted that the universe could have leapt into existence out of nothing according to the laws of nature. This sounds dubious coming from someone who apparently was able to “hold down a job” and find his way home each day. If the laws of nature existed and somehow guided the coming to be of the material world, it was not out of nothing because the laws of nature, which are something, already existed.  Here’s the curiosity in this obviously flawed assertion. It isn’t just that Hawking purportedly said that laws of nature could exist in nothingness, but that there could be laws of nature before there was a nature to express them. The world could not have come into being from natural laws that were prior to it since those laws, being natural, could not have created themselves, and thus at best could be an instrument used by a conscious creator to effect his purposes. So, either the material world has always existed, or it was created by the Being whose essence is His existence and is thus the cause of Himself. This Being, God, would then be the cause of all other beings, including we humans, who are not the cause of ourselves.

If human intelligent life developed over a very long time by random mutations, then it must be true that like all random phenomena, our existence is without purpose, and thus without inherent meaning. Of course, everyone who makes anything, whether chair, electric motor, or book, makes it for a reason, and the reason for which a thing is made is its purpose. So if we are made by God, our purpose in life is the reason for which God made us. If this is true, then it makes sense to think that God made us with a nature the development of which forms the largest measure of the purpose of a human life. This is what the Bible means by saying that we are made in the image and likeness of God. Among the consequences of being created in God’s image is that we act with purposes in mind and with intent to influence the future. In the history of Christian thought, there have been a number of efforts to describe what the “image and likeness” of God in us means, but I suggest that whatever nuances one sees in this idea, it includes fundamentally that our nature is moral and intellectual. However, for this writing, the important truth to hold in mind is that either we are created, or we aren’t. Upon the resolution of this disjunction, everything hangs. The reason a statement of this sweep can be made with confidence has to do with the phenomenon of worldviews.

            Each of us understands himself and his experiences through a set of propositions we reason from, but generally not to. These propositions, or presuppositions, constitute our worldview. When scripture admonishes us to put on the mind of Christ, we are admonished to adopt the presuppositions, the worldview, of a brother or sister of Christ, of one belonging to the household of God, and made in His image and likeness. I contend that the question of our creation out of nothing by God is the most important question we can ask about ourselves, and how one answers it will constitute the fundamental presupposition of his or her worldview. That this fact is not widely appreciated is lamentable since it leaves open room to think that on the matter of God, there is neutral ground upon which theists and atheists can stand together. But this is not true because either God exists or He doesn’t, there is no third, neutral position, and so if a theist, I shall say a Christian, accepts the “neutral” position, he is obliged to talk as if God doesn’t exist or worse, it doesn’t matter since God is irrelevant to human affairs. People will say that we are compelled to stand on neutral ground because not everyone believes in God, and thus if we are to engage in conversation about matters of public importance, we must not alienate the atheists among us. But this is plainly nonsensical since the “neutral” position, while paying respect to the atheism of atheists, offends the theism of theists and in this way shows that the position is not neutral. Now this needn’t mean that atheists and theists cannot talk with one another, but rather that when we talk among ourselves, each participant has the right to communicate in a way that is authentically his own. It seems, however, that this can happen only where worldviews permit it, that is, where fundamental presuppositions of reality and human life do not contradict, for then communication can become impossible. It might sound odd to say that the prospects for meaningfully addressing the ills of society, and importantly individual human lives, would improve if Christians determined to act and speak as Christians, thus placing the truth of God and the Gospel squarely in the public square. It is true all around that nothing will become a topic of discussion unless people resolve to discuss it. Mightn’t we admit that churches in the main are boring and uninspiring, especially for the young? And here I speak only of those churches that have yet to abandon the nominal worship of God for godless social justice agitprop.

Here things complexify because any institution we create, to the extent that it succeeds, becomes an engine of social influence along with the truth purportedly embodied in the institution. To be specific, we can see in the history of Christianity that the early years of the church were a time of social ostracism and abuse in which the nascent institution lacked the status and influence that would attract lesser, ambitious men. In time, however, the institution grew in power to the place where it made sense to the ruling class to co-opt it. In 313 A.D. Christianity was made legal in the Roman Empire, and in an edict of 380 A.D. it became the state religion of the empire. It is beyond the purpose of this writing to explore the consequences of this on the development of Christian thought, but the effect, I shall say, served Mammon more than God. This is not surprising when we consider, for example, the grotesque American monster called constitutional “law” and search for some kind of rational correspondence between this so-called law and the Constitution it pretends to interpret. Over time, people rightly lose interest because truth is overwhelmed by an ambition that embraces truth only to the extent it serves private ends, wholly detached from the common good, and so we can understand why most Americans have little idea about the contents of their Constitution, just as most Christians have little idea about the truth that animates their faith. However, if an institution at its inception embodies a truth, the truth remains true as the corruption of the institution proceeds, and thus it can be a mistake of significant consequence to dismiss a truth with its corrupted institution. Of course, an institution may decline because people no longer perceive a need for it, but the need may be thought obsolete because people stop believing in the teaching of the institution. However this may be, it remains that either we are created, or we aren’t.

 While it may be true that we cannot prove either by direct observation or by mathematical demonstration which of these possibilities is true, we can consider which possibility is more likely to be true. Those of us who have been alive for a while may recall that as children in public schools we were told that “Science” has shown us that the earth is billions of years old and the universe is even billions of years older than that. In fact, however, we have no evidence that this is true, and certainly the claim is not known either by direct observation or by mathematical demonstration, and so in any sense that matters, science has not shown that the earth and the universe are denizens of deep time. One might say that radiometric tests on rocks of various kinds show that the earth is in fact very old, but there is controversy over the accuracy of such tests given that the same rock, when dated by several different methods, will yield wildly disparate ages. The difficulty here is that when seeking to measure the decay of a radio-active element within a rock, one must know how much of that element was in the rock when it formed, which cannot be known, and one must assume that the present rate of decay of the element has remained constant over time, which also cannot be known. If deep-time advocates hang their case on radiometric dating of rocks, their case is pitifully weak.

We should ask why people insist that the earth and the universe are billions of years old even though we have no evidence for it. For example, depending on the astronomer, one will hear that comets have a run time of 30,000 to 100,000 years before they are depleted and gone. Yet we hear that comets are as old as the universe, which at present is held to be 13.8 billion years. So, comets should have disappeared essentially at the beginning of the universe. Might we not think the universe is much younger than establishment scientists claim? In response to this challenge, an astronomer named Jan Oort posited the existence of what has come to be called the Oort Cloud, which is what amounts to a comet-making machine somewhere beyond the solar system that accounts for why we still have comets. There is no evidence for such a thing, but its existence is thought to be necessary by the facts that (a) the universe is 13.8 billion years old and (b) we still have comets. So the Oort Cloud is thought to be required by the presupposition of deep time, namely, that the universe is nearly 14 billion years old. A few years ago, a well-known emeritus professor of genetics at Harvard University gave a talk to a group of scientists in which he acknowledged what everyone at the gathering knew: that scientific research in recent decades demonstrates that the Neo-Darwinian evolution hypothesis is wrong. Nevertheless, he said, we continue to defend the hypothesis until something better comes along because we know that something like Darwinism has to be true because there is no Creator.

It would be a mistake to think that scientists are somehow peculiarly susceptible to intellectual errors aimed at protecting the presuppositions of their worldview, because this is a natural human practice, whether scientist or not. For many years, Christians have been told that “Science” has shown their faith to be false. This false assertion rests on the mistaken belief that the methods of the natural sciences can reveal anything about the existence of God or the age of the earth, and certainly the sciences have nothing to say about whether there is a God who has revealed Himself to us as our Creator and Redeemer. We live in a moment in which many people, perhaps most, think that knowledge is the product either of empirical observation or mathematical demonstration; all else falling into categories like opinion and superstition. So the natural sciences enjoy a prestige that religion does not, even though most people know little about either. Nevertheless, many Christians have held to their faith even under the pressure of ubiquitous claims that there is no “scientific” evidence for it, that indeed the earth is far older than the Bible indicates it is, that the claims of Genesis about creation in six days, Adam formed from the dust of the ground, Eve taken by God from Adam’s body, and so on are “myths,” by which is meant fairy tales that no longer rationally can be held. It looks like the tenacity of some Christians is paying off in a hefty volume of scientific discovery that at the very least makes it difficult to believe that the Neo-Darwinian hypothesis of evolution, that once swept all before it, is actually true. It will be useful in this regard to rehearse a few examples by way of preparing the ground for a discussion of an argument for the existence and nature of God that one finds in the Summa contra Gentiles of St. Thomas Aquinas.

Charles Darwin is recorded as having said that if his hypothesis of the development of life on earth is true, then it will be borne out in the fossilized creatures we find in rock layers around the world. That is, we should find intermediary forms that show one kind of creature becoming another kind of creature. There is no such evidence, and indeed the story depicted by fossils turns Darwin’s hypothesis on its head showing many kinds of creatures going extinct and the “tree of life” narrowing in just the way Darwin’s hypothesis predicts it will not. I should mention as caveat that I won’t dwell on the few examples people will hold out as intermediary forms, like Archaeopteryx, which appears in the earth’s strata with no precursor forms and no subsequent forms that show the development from one kind of animal to another kind, as the Neo-Darwinian hypothesis requires. They don’t reveal what many people hoped they would. So researchers in this area find again and again that body forms of creatures appear in the record essentially de novo with no precursor forms and afterword remain largely unchanged, that is, they find no fossils in later strata, closer to our time, that show development of living creatures into new kinds of creatures. The excuse that the fossils needed to acquit Darwin’s hypothesis will be found in time may have had some rational purchase 150 years ago, but no longer. We may reasonably conclude that the critical fossils have not been found because they don’t exist, and they don’t exist because the hypothesis is false.

The “scientific” embrace of a materialist worldview renders the findings of the inquiries of scientists mostly pseudo-science. Transcendent, or spiritual, reality is both logically and ontologically prior to the material, but if one holds from the beginning of his work that the material world is all there is, he will fail to see the objects of his inquiries accurately. If material reality is all there is, then there is no Creator. Many scientists who think this way will say that the natural sciences are not committed to ontological atheism, that is, the view that God is but an idea without actual existence, but rather their commitment is to methodological atheism, that is, the view that whether God exists or not, the natural sciences proceed on the conviction that natural phenomena can be explained without recourse to an intelligent designer and creator. This is an unambiguous example of a distinction without a difference because methodological atheism is advanced as a neutral position taking no stand on the question of God’s existence. But as we have seen, on the matter of God’s existence and relevance to human life, there are no neutral positions. Thus in practice, there is no difference between ontological and methodological atheism since, clearly, ontological atheists will of necessity do science as methodological atheists, while a Christian who is a scientist could not bear to study creation as if its Creator had nothing to do with it.

So then, God spectacularly reveals Himself to Moses on Mt. Sinai. God tells Moses he is being dispatched to the court of the pharaoh of Egypt to deliver God’s demand that he set the Israelites free from slavery. Moses beseeches God for His name, since the Israelites will want to know who sent him. God gives His name thus: Being. With this name we can infer the following: that God is not bound by space and time, and indeed, as the Creator of space and time, he precedes them both logically and chronologically (if this latter word has an application to Being before the creation of time). However, the methods of the natural sciences are designed to investigate material phenomena within space and time, and for this reason, the methods of the natural sciences are incompetent to declaim upon God. The question of God’s existence, as St. Thomas will treat of it, is a philosophical one.

 In the 13th and 14th centuries, theologians began to advance a conception of being we may call “univocal.” In this conception, being is a concrete property of individual existent things. Thus, we can think of God as just another being, superior in power perhaps, but alongside us as beings possessed of our own individual existence. But when we think of God in this way, it becomes impossible to understand how God interacts with us in any way other than as a power outside of us, seeking to move us in ways that often frustrate our own free will. This view sees God as a locus of will in competition with our own wills, and thus when we submit to God, we are subjecting ourselves to a ruler who demands, on pain of punishment, our compliance with His commands, thus subverting our freedom in the manner of a human tyrant. Such a being is naturally feared, but frightfully difficult to love. He is a being who in time will happily be discarded. Thomas Aquinas’ conception of being is analogical, not univocal, and in this conception, all created beings are joined together by a shared centeredness in the Creator who is the ground of our being. In other words, God is not situated alongside us amid the phenomena of individual beings, but is Being Himself, and the existence we enjoy is analogous to His being as He has given it to us in the mode of created finitude.  Therefore, we can cooperate with God who works within us, not by force from outside of us, but in a way that respects our freedom and indeed enlivens it as He holds before us what is good, and that thus naturally draws us toward it in free choice of it. “In Him we live, and move, and have our being.” And so we can see that the arguments against God coming from atheists are arguments Christians can agree with since the God they are rejecting Christians, too, reject because it is not God. St. Thomas offered a number of ways to demonstrate the existence of God, but he found the argument from motion to be the most fundamental.

St. Thomas Aquinas was a Dominican monk from Italy, near Naples, who lived from 1225-1274. He is best known as author of the Summa Theologiae, and people might remember this work best for the Five Ways of demonstrating the existence of God. Thomas presents these demonstrations in a rather cursory form in the Summa Theologiae, but in the Summa contra Gentiles he goes into greater detail. The argument can be stated simply, and we may then consider it in more detail. There is motion, that is, things move. However, nothing moves itself. Moreover, there cannot be an infinite regress of moved movers. Therefore, there must be a first, unmoved mover, and this we call God.

We begin by recognizing that what Thomas is seeking to explain is the necessary, logical structure of motion as it is happening here and now. He is not positing some non-descript first cause well into the metaphysical distance that we must assume in order to get things going, after which, we have no need of it. By “motion” Thomas means change. He uses the Latin word motus to describe this phenomenon and by it he means every kind of change to which material things are subject. We grow, and not just in body, but in mind, and we not only grow but we decline and eventually die. We fall in love, become angry, feel compassion, laugh at what is funny (and unhappily, at what is not). Water flows downhill, birds fly, wood can burn with fire, food is digested. In these examples we can see that at all moments, things are in a state that is in potential with regard to any other state of which it is capable. A fellow is quietly listening to a friend tell a story. The listener is focused and dispassionate, and then the friend says something that is particularly funny. The once dispassionate listener bursts into laughter. While he was quietly listening, we would say that the listener was in potency, as Thomas would have it, or we may say in potentiality to be laughing. When he laughs, the potential to laugh is actualized. So motion is change from potentiality to actuality. When a new human being is conceived, he receives all the human nature he will ever have, but that nature is in potential, its moral and intellectual potentialities, or capacities, having yet to be actualized. The change from potential to actual, from potency to act, is what Thomas means by motus, motion.

Next in the argument laid out above is the assertion that nothing moves itself. When thinking about a tree growing or a baby developing we properly think in terms of motion from potency to act, but what is potential can only come about by what is actual, and so we see that it is important to understand motion also with regard to change as that which is actual moving what is in potential into actuality. This is what Thomas means when he says that nothing moves itself. What is in potential can only be moved by what is actual, that is, a potential cannot actualize itself. One might think that in human beings, the mind sets the body in motion and so what is in potential can move itself. But of course, none of us has set ourselves in motion in the first place. This brings us to the idea of causation, and especially a realization that will become crucial in a moment, namely, that if everything has a cause, and for every thing its cause is outside of it and not within it, then there can be no motion at all because there is nothing to begin and drive the series of causes. This is because without a cause which itself is pure act, having within it no unactualized potential, there would of necessity be an infinitely regressing series of causes and effects, but as we will see, this is impossible and would result in no motion at all, that is, no reality for us to live in and to study. The reason for this is that the cause of motion must be an act. A thing cannot cause itself to actualize a potential, but must be moved by something outside itself. A student seeking to learn a language must be acted upon by another who possesses that language. Even when someone gets a language book to study on his own, the language is conveyed by the author of the book who possessed the language first. A useful shorthand way of saying this is that no one can be mover and moved at the same time in the same way. Again, we can observe that an effect cannot precede its cause; the acorn does not precede the oak tree that produced it.[i]

The argument proceeds from observing that nothing moves itself to the understanding that there cannot be an infinite regress of moved movers because in the absence of a first unmoved mover, there would be no motion at all. Imagine a train going down a track. The last car is being pulled by the car next-to-last. That car is pulled by the one before it, and the one next ahead is pulling that one and so on. If this series of cars pulling cars went on to infinity, there could be no motion because the motion must result from a cause that needs no other cause outside of it in order to act. There would be only a very long train of motionless cars. In other words, motion must have a starting point in order to be, and things in potential cannot be that point because it takes actual motion to actualize a potential. In other words, no created thing moves itself, yet there is motion. Therefore, there must be an unmoved mover, a thing that is pure act, having within it no unactualized potential, which is what it means to be perfect, and is thus able to move itself. This we call God. This argument makes clear why it is that life could only have come into being through life, that is, through that cause which possesses perfectly the nature it gives to His effects in the mode of created finitude.

Now, if the reasoning ended here, the argument would be of limited value because it would establish only that the universe has a cause, but it would tell us nearly nothing about that cause we are calling God. However, from this argument we can know the following. First, God is eternal, and this we know because He is, by definition, the uncaused cause of all other things, pure act, and therefore cannot not exist. This is what is meant by saying that God is the being whose essence is His existence. We human beings exist, but our existence is not our essence, it doesn’t define what we are. God, we may say, is Being Himself.

Second, God is immaterial. Matter is the principle of the corruption of existence. All material beings are created in the sense of not being the cause of their existence, and all such beings change over time, in our normal use of the word, and are subject to going out of existence as the beings they presently are. God is not such a being and this in part because in Him there is nothing of matter which is, by its nature, in need of a cause outside of itself.

Third, God is outside space and time. We know that physicists have an understanding of time that figures into theories of matter and motion understood as speed of movement. But time is such a notion as to have a number of applicable understandings including what it means for human experience. Aristotle contended that time comes into being with matter because matter is the principle of change, and time is the means by which we measure change. But God is unchangeable because God is immaterial, and therefore God is outside of space and time.

Fourth, God is intellect; He is conscious and intelligent. We know this because God is the cause of us, our Creator, and as we have observed already, a cause cannot convey to its effect a property it does not have. This is how we know that life cannot be an effect of non-living causes. Since we are conscious and intelligent, and we are the effect of which God is the cause, He too is conscious and intelligent, but certainly in a way we cannot grasp because God, unlike us, does not express His nature in the mode of created finitude.

Fifth, God is the fullness of all perfection. Every capacity we have in moral and intellectual excellence is in God in its fullest degree of perfection. For this reason we know that God is one and not more than one, for multiplicity is division which is a form of imperfection requiring each entity to be somewhere in particular, separated from the others without which there can be no individual identity among beings sharing a common nature. This necessity of place means that if there were gods, rather than God, they must be located in space and time, which God is not. How do we know that in God there is nothing evil? How do we know that in God we will not find the fullness of ignorance, blindness, dishonesty, and so on? Because these kinds of things are defects; they are privations. Ignorance is the condition of an intellect without the good of knowledge. Blindness is the absence of the good of sight in an organ endowed with it, and so on. So in God lies nothing evil, but the fullness of goodness, truth, and beauty.

Thus, we know that God exists, He is the fullness of all perfection, and He created us on purpose for Himself. The argument offered here is intended to show that the existence of the Creator God of the Bible is God indeed, and that this truth has more to support it than does the atheist assertion of life erupting spontaneously and developing accidentally within the long cradle of deep time. It seems there is little evidence to support it, yet the idea of deep time is hoisted aloft on a powerful wave of desire to be alone in the universe, or, if not alone, at least not sharing being with its Creator. It appears, however, that the weight of evidence and argument is on the side of the Creator, as it should be, and that from this perspective, we may look forward eagerly to what more we will discover of what God has made for us.

[i] The oak tree/acorn example may strike some people as an instance of the chicken/egg conundrum, and this is because it is. The tree must precede the acorn as the chicken must precede the egg. In order to act, a thing must first exist, and as we have seen, babies in utero, like acorns and eggs, are potential in need of actualization the impetus to which must come from without, as for examples a mom and a dad, an oak tree, and a chicken.