Asking the Right Questions

According to the popular culture, science has settled a lot of issues: God doesn’t exist, religions are fairy tales, and catastrophic climate doom is soon to be a reality, just to name a few. Like most aspects of that culture, it’s completely fake; nothing more than a facade to deceive the gullible and unwitting. For the not-so-gullible, all it really takes is a few questions to peak around the mask and see the true state of reality.

Asking the Right Questions

One great characteristic about our world is there is evidence for God everywhere. Scientific progression over the last century has compounded on that fact, opening new windows that show exceptional complexity. Despite the culture’s best push, scientific advancement is speeding towards the existence of God like a runaway train. It is unavoidable, mainly because it is the answers we find to the questions we have that are driving it. Hence the need for the mask. The culture is attempting to avoid the debate by simply claiming the science is settled. The best way to combat it is to ask questions. The right questions can rip the mask off entirely.

Take the origin of the universe as an example: Seventy years ago, the consensus in the cosmological circles still hovered around Steady State theory. This foundational belief in an eternal universe ran counter to Biblical teachings that the universe had a beginning. Fast-forward to today, and the Bible and science are in agreement. The work by Penrose, Hawking, and others now shows that not only does the universe have a beginning, it began from nothing.

A Universe From Nothing

How can something come from nothing? No one has any idea. According to the laws of thermodynamics, perhaps the most settled of all scientific laws, it is impossible. Lawrence Krauss attempts to explain how it could in his book A Universe From Nothing, but in the end all he’s done is redefine what nothing is. David Albert hammers him for this in his review posted in the New York Times. His review is particularly effective because he begins it with questions:

Where, for starters, are the laws of quantum mechanics themselves supposed to have come from? Krauss is more or less upfront, as it turns out, about not having a clue about that. He acknowledges (albeit in a parenthesis, and just a few pages before the end of the book) that every­thing he has been talking about simply takes the basic principles of quantum mechanics for granted. “I have no idea if this notion can be usefully dispensed with,” he writes, “or at least I don’t know of any productive work in this regard.” And what if he did know of some productive work in that regard? What if he were in a position to announce, for instance, that the truth of the quantum-mechanical laws can be traced back to the fact that the world has some other, deeper property X? Wouldn’t we still be in a position to ask why X rather than Y? And is there a last such question? Is there some point at which the possibility of asking any further such questions somehow definitively comes to an end? How would that work? What would that be like?

Then he answers those questions:

[W]hat the fundamental laws of nature are about, and all the fundamental laws of nature are about, and all there is for the fundamental laws of nature to be about, insofar as physics has ever been able to imagine, is how that elementary stuff is arranged. The fundamental laws of nature generally take the form of rules concerning which arrangements of that stuff are physically possible and which aren’t, or rules connecting the arrangements of that elementary stuff at later times to its arrangement at earlier times, or something like that. But the laws have no bearing whatsoever on questions of where the elementary stuff came from, or of why the world should have consisted of the particular elementary stuff it does, as opposed to something else, or to nothing at all.

The fundamental physical laws that Krauss is talking about in “A Universe From Nothing” — the laws of relativistic quantum field theories — are no exception to this. The particular, eternally persisting, elementary physical stuff of the world, according to the standard presentations of relativistic quantum field theories, consists (unsurprisingly) of relativistic quantum fields. And the fundamental laws of this theory take the form of rules concerning which arrangements of those fields are physically possible and which aren’t, and rules connecting the arrangements of those fields at later times to their arrangements at earlier times, and so on — and they have nothing whatsoever to say on the subject of where those fields came from, or of why the world should have consisted of the particular kinds of fields it does, or of why it should have consisted of fields at all, or of why there should have been a world in the first place. Period. Case closed. End of story.

Making People Challenge Their Worldviews

Atheists, by definition, are closed to the existence of God. They do not want to believe it, and debating them on the evidence for God is often futile. The only way to get the wheels actively turning in their minds is to ask questions about their beliefs. The right questions bring to light the many paradoxes within the atheistic worldview. The paradoxes create cognitive dissonances, which are particularly hard to ignore. Therein lies the key to getting people to change their minds.

The gap from absolute nothingness to the complex world we see around us is enormous. By asking the right questions, we can show the atheists that their worldview does not offer answers, but stories that often run counter to the evidence and against our observations. Ask enough, and you may just change some minds.