Psalms 19:1 · NKJV

Who Created God? What the Beginning of the Universe Shows

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What does Psalms 19:1 say?

"If God created everything, who created God?" It's a fair question, and it's the first thing worth clearing up: the argument was never that everything needs a cause. It's that whatever begins to exist needs one. If God didn't begin, the question doesn't apply to Him.

So did the universe begin? In 2003, Arvind Borde, Alan Guth and Alexander Vilenkin published "Inflationary spacetimes are not past-complete" in Physical Review Letters 90, 151301. Their conclusion, in their own words: "inflationary models require physics other than inflation to describe the past boundary of the inflating region of spacetime."

Read that carefully, because a lot of Christian videos don't. The BGV theorem is a constraint on past-eternal inflationary models. It is not a proof of creation from nothing. Vilenkin has said as much himself: "my own view is that the theorem does not tell us anything about the existence of God." We're not going to quote a physicist against his own meaning to win a point. What the theorem does is close a door — the universe probably isn't past-eternal in the way people once assumed — and leave the question of what's on the other side genuinely open.

Psalm 19:1 (NKJV): "The heavens declare the glory of God; And the firmament shows His handiwork." That's a claim about what the sky means. It isn't a substitute for reading the physics carefully.

Full episode: https://youtu.be/BAa1tVmLk7Q

Bible references

Scripture in this video is quoted from the NKJV.

Transcript (show)

For most of history, most scientists believed the universe was eternal. No beginning to explain. That is no longer the mainstream view. In 2003, three physicists, Arand Bour, Alan Guth, and Alexander Valenkin published a theorem that has become known as BGV. In their words, a cosmological model which is inflating or just expanding sufficiently fast must be incomplete in null and timelike past directions.

Inflationary models require physics other than inflation to describe the past boundary. In plain English, the universe cannot be past eternal. Something else outside the physics of the expanding cosmos is required to describe how it got started. Valenin himself, one of the theorem's authors and not a Christian, said of the escape scenarios, "None of these scenarios can actually be past eternal.

Transcript from the video's captions on YouTube.

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