The universe and God

A sense of wonder

If we get out of our city or town, away from lights, and go outside at night, it is hard not to be impressed by the night sky. The milky way that is our home galaxy stretches across the sky, thousands of visible stars, many more not visible to the naked eye.

For millennia, people have looked at the night sky and wondered …..

Scientific facts

Astronomers estimate there are hundreds of billion of galaxies and maybe a billion trillion stars out there. The universe is awesomely large.

Observations and calculations show that the universe is expanding, and all the evidence indicates that expansion began in the big bang, almost 14 billion tears ago, when all matter, and three dimensional space itself, was compressed into a tiny high energy state. Science can only speculate what happened before that time, and what caused it.

Cosmologists have discovered the laws that govern the universe and expressed them in mathematical equations. Varying the values in these equations allows them to see what difference these changes would make to our universe. The surprising conclusion is that almost all changes would make the universe totally unable to support intelligent life.

Cosmology as evidence for God?

Many early cultures identified celestial objects with gods or spirits, and developed stories of how the universe came into being. Later, as astronomers discovered regularity in the movement of celestial objects, people began to see the universe as the creation of a powerful God.

But is this still a reasonable conclusion in the modern age?

This section of this website explores that possibility through these pages:

How did the universe start? explores the idea that we haven’t found anything in this universe that comes out of nothing, and so the universe could only have begun from a cause outside the space-time universe.

The Cosmological argument expresses these ideas in a formal philosophical manner and examines the evidence both for and against the conclusion that God was the cause.

Science and the design of the universe summarises the scientific evidence that leads to the “fine-tuning” conclusion that of all the possible universes, only an impossibly small number could support life.

Was the universe designed for us? starts with this evidence and looks at the options that might be used to explain this amazing fine-tuning.

The Teleological argument, the formal philosophical argument for God based on the apparent design of the universe, is set out and the objections to it examined.

An alternative fine-tuning argument Cosmologist Luke Barnes has developed a modified form of the fine-tuning argument for the existence of God.

Does mathematics prove God? Mathematics is a fascinating subject (for some), but what does it tell us about the universe and God?