In 2012, Lawrence Krauss published his ground-breaking scientific treatise entitled, A Universe from Nothing. In an Afterword of one edition, Richard Dawkins claims that Krauss’ science is the knock-out blow to a creator. Is he right? I believe that you, after reading this post. will conclude he is not and will be asking yourself, “How can such a respected and intelligent scientist miss something so obvious?”
Imagine that you are a jigsaw puzzle expert sitting down to a 2000-piece jigsaw puzzle. Like most jigsaw puzzle aficionados, you begin sorting out the most obvious pieces. For example, those with a flat side must be edge pieces. When you finally complete the whole border of the puzzle, you realize you now have a frame that will support your completion of the picture it borders.
Now comes the hard part. You focus on one of the many hundreds of pieces and try to discover how it might connect with other pieces. As you persevere in picking up hundreds of pieces you begin to see how a few of them connect with others into little islands. In time, you begin to see parts of what the puzzle portrays. As you succeed in discovering how additional pieces fit into these islands, they grow and disclose even more of what the puzzle portrays. The number of orphan pieces gradually grows smaller and finally the last piece is in place.
Looking at the empty puzzle box, is your first reaction that you started from nothing? Upon reflection, is it not clear that all the pieces of the completed picture were there before you started? Does it dawn on you that you have discovered nothing about where the pieces came from and what created them? You know that some creator conceived the picture, designed the 2000 pieces from which it could be assembled and created all the pieces that make up the picture. You realize that all you have done is discovered how the pieces work together to complete the picture. You realize that, although you discovered how the puzzle was assembled, you had discovered nothing about its creator.
Krauss is an excellent puzzle-solver working on an innumerable number of puzzle pieces. His book chronicles the discovery of more and more pieces that make up the universe. The more pieces he and his peers discover, the more they can see how they fit together to make up everything we experience.
They become so satisfied with the fulfillment of discovering how all the pieces work together, they ignore where the pieces came from. Their discovery of elementary, sub-atomic particles, which appear and disappear, apparently randomly, leads some of them to the supposition that particles emerge from nothing. Since these particles are the building blocks of everything in existence, they postulate that the universe comes from nothing as well. This leads Dawkins to assert that since existence came from nothing, it didn’t come from a creator.
How could such an admirably intelligent scientist miss something so obvious. You realize that your discovery of how the puzzle pieces work together uncovers nothing about what created them. How can some of the worlds’ most intelligent people miss this? How can they miss that all scientific knowledge is limited to what we can experience – the pieces that make up existence. Common sense says that a creator beyond existence must have created everything in existence. Science can never discover anything beyond existence. It can never discover our creator. Does its inability to discover a creator prove there isn’t one?
After all, must creation not be from nothing in order to be creation? Do you find A Universe from Nothing to be not much of a knock-out blow?
Del H. Smith conducts research into life’s meaning and is the award-winning author of the AMAZON Best Seller, Discovering Life’s Purpose.