No, Atheist Scientists Are Incompetent

Recently, a “physicist” by the name of Lawrence Krauss claimed that “all scientists should be militant atheists.” On the contrary, any scientist who is not a theist is incompetent.

Let’s define “God” as the “supernatural being who created the Universe.” That is, God is the cosmological singularity. To see this, unpack the definition of “God.” The word “supernatural” literally means “above nature,” or outside of space and time, and not subject to the laws of physics. “Super” just means “above,” and the meaning of “nature” is clear if we use the Greek work for nature: “physis.”

The initial cosmological singularity is not in space or time, but rather it is the origin of space and time, the origin of all that is, seen and unseen. The cosmological singularity cannot be in space or time, because it is intrinsically infinite, and anything in space or time, and subject to the laws of physics, must be locally finite. To put it another way, the cosmological singularity is the cause of everything that exists, but is itself uncaused.

The cosmological singularity is the uncaused first cause, which is how Thomas Aquinas (“The Five Ways”) and Maimonides (“The Guide for the Perplexed”) defined “God.” All competent Christian and Jewish theologians have known for the past 2,000 years that God in His essence is not an old man wearing a white gown. One of the greatest Christian theologians, John Chrysostom, said that no created being can see God as He really is. So He appears to us in a form we can comprehend, often as an old guy wearing a white sheet.

So now that we know that God is the cosmological singularity, the question of God’s existence is now a question of physics: Does the cosmological singularity exist?

If we accept the laws of physics, the answer is yes.

The Einstein equations of gravity — the equations of general relativity — tell us unequivocally that if gravity is attractive, at least at high density, then the cosmological singularity is there at the beginning of time.

If gravity is combined with quantum mechanics, then the cosmological singularity is present somewhere, whether or not gravity is an attractive force. This is because quantum mechanics, as Richard Feynman showed, is mathematically equivalent to a “sum over all histories”; quantum mechanics asserts that all possibilities exist. (Feynman was awarded the Nobel Prize in physics for proving this.)

One possibility is a history in which reality begins in a singularity. So quantum gravity necessarily contains a cosmological singularity. If quantum mechanics is correct — and it is — then the cosmological singularity exists. The cosmological singularity exists even in Stephen Hawking’s quantum cosmology, though he denies it in his popular books. If you read his technical papers, the singularity exists in all his models. The mathematics gives no alternative: God exists.

Quantum mechanics also demonstrates that the cosmological singularity controls all of space and time, and determines exactly what occurs throughout all history, past, present and future. (See my paper published last year in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and my forthcoming paper in Inference if you want a rigorous mathematical demonstration of this.) The bottom line: the cosmological singularity is indeed the cause of everything, which is to say the cosmological singularity is God.

The laws of physics apply to everything in nature, without exception. Period, end of discussion. Lawrence Krauss is a physicist in name only. I’ve debated him in the past, and I know he does not understand either quantum mechanics or general relativity. All scientists worthy of the name accept that the laws of physics apply to everything in the natural world; any who do not accept physics are not scientists. Any “scientist” who is not a theist is ignorant and incompetent.

Also read: No More Big Ideas? Try These On for Size