I’m doing some thinking aloud here in an attempt to address the Christian claim that atheists are somehow compelled to believe the universe arose from nothing. Nothing can’t create something they say, so a creator is required – and what do you know? This creator turns out to be their very own pet god, YHWH, in one of his many incarnations. Definitely not Allah, Ra or any of the other hundreds of creator gods dreamed up by mankind through the millennia.

I’m not convinced atheists do claim that the universe can only have come from nothing. It’s an argument put into the mouths of atheists by some Christians who say, in effect, ‘if you don’t accept that our God made the universe then you have to believe it came from nothing.’ But it is the result of a false dichotomy (or false witness) because the position is not the only alternative to claim that a supernatural entity made everything. Lawrence Krauss, for example, demonstrates how something can arise from nothing and he and other scientists tell us that in any case there is no such thing as nothing – there’s always something, if ‘only’ at the quantum level.

The notion then, that in God’s absence the universe can only have come from nothing is a straw man, created by Christians desperate to diminish, dilute and dismiss scientifically viable alternative explanations.

It’s patently dishonest. (Christians being intellectually dishonest? Whoever heard of such a thing?) It’s dishonest because, in fact, it is Christians who believe the physical universe was created from nothing. I’m going to attempt to show you that they do and in the process dismantle their claims that their God was the one who magicked up everything from this nothing.

1. God too would have had to have create something from nothing.

Here’s the problem. God had nothing to go on. No raw materials with which to create the universe, and no raw materials from which to make the raw materials. There was only him and nothing. It is not unreasonable to ask, therefore, where the material from which he made the universe came from. The necessary ingredients for a universe – gravity, black holes, dark matter, dark energy, vast quantities of chemicals and what-have-you – are all physical phenomena, none of which existed before god allegedly made them. So, from what did he make them?

Perhaps he used parts of himself, in which case, he’s been depleted ever since, missing those bits of himself he used to make matter. Or maybe he turned part of himself into the physical universe so that he retained his integrity while integrating the universe into his very being – like a divine dream, say, or a tattoo.

The bible, however, doesn’t support either of these propositions. It makes clear that God created the earth and that which surrounds it (it has little concept of the universe as we now know it) as entities entirely separate from himself. His creation did not deplete him, nor was it a part of him (though he wasn’t, in the early days, averse to making guest appearances in it). Which bring us back to my original question; with what did he make it when there was only himself and nothing? Everything, Christians tells us, is made from something, so if God did not make the universe out of himself then he can only have made it from nothing. Everything there is, everything there has ever been – from gas clouds to planets, bugs to brains – God apparently produced from nothing.

Those who argue for this – and everyone who says God made everything is doing just that whether they realise it or not – does not advance our understanding of how the universe came into being one iota. All it does is introduce a sentient being into the equation, long before sentient beings existed. Moreover, the presence of such a being is superfluous, adding only unnecessary complication while explaining… absolutely nothing. Applying Occam’s razor we can just as easily take God out of the equation and be no worse off. There is a far greater probability that phenomena that do actually exist created the universe, not one that is mere conjecture.

Next time we will look at an empirical and logical impossibility that also means (a) God can’t have had anything to do with it.