Why God Is One?

The purpose of this section is to argue how modern science testifies to the existence of a sole creator, a supreme force far superior to anything we know, a power responsible for the creation of the universe and of sustaining it. Moreover, at that moment of creation, it can demonstrate how all the various laws that govern the behaviour of everything in the universe were initiated. In order to arrive at these conclusions three sets of possibilities are debated:

First debate

Did the universe have a beginning or has it always been there?

Here we refer to the laws of 'thermal dynamics' which govern the movement of heat between different bodies.

The second law of 'thermal dynamics' states that heat travels from hot bodies to cooler bodies and not the opposite. If for example a hot oven is placed in a cold room the oven will warm the room, this is because heat will be transferred from the hot oven to the cold room. Never will the amount of heat originally in the room cause the oven to get hotter. This transfer of heat between the oven and the room will continue until the oven has used up all its fuel source (e.g. a gas cylinder) . When that point is reached the oven will start to cool until such a point when the temperatures of both the oven and the room become equal.

To calculate the amount of time during which the oven will continue to warm the room we need to know two things:

1. The amount of gas left in the cylinder.
2. The rate at which gas is consumed.

If for example there is 500 c.c. (cubic centimetres) of gas left in the cylinder and the oven uses up 10 c.c. every hour, with a simple division we find that the oven will continue to warm the room for 50 hours (call this stage A). After 50 hours the oven will start to cool till the point is reached where the temperatures of the oven and the room are equal (call this stage B).

Now let us apply this to the universe as a whole. We know that the total amount of energy in the universe is equal to the sum of energy in all the stars, galaxies, ...etc.. This is a finite amount no matter how large it is. These stars will continue to radiate heat, light and other types of radiation into the vast space of the universe, in the same way in which the oven would warm the space inside the room. So if we think of all the stars and all other active bodies in the universe as the ovens and the vast empty space as the empty room we can deduce the following:

From what is known about the life and death of stars in modern theories of cosmology, it is known that they would continue to radiate energy until they consume all their resources. To be precise, when all the hydrogen, that constitutes the vast majority of the mass of stars, has been converted into helium and other heavier elements in a process of continuous nuclear reactions. After that stage the stars start to collapse and end up as cold dead bodies.

Since the amount of matter in the universe (in the form of stars, nebula, quasars.....etc.) is finite, then these energy sources will radiate energy into the universe for a finite length of time. In our example of the oven and the room we calculated that time to be 50 hours. Theoretically, and if we can calculate the total amount of energy in the universe, and also the rate of consumption of energy, we can also calculate the length of time (although obviously not as accurately as in the case of the oven) in which the stars will continue to radiate energy. For argument's sake, let us assume that the universe will continue to radiate energy for another 50 billion years. Since there is still plenty of energy available in the universe we are still in stage A.

Now if we go back to our original debate, and try to decide whether the universe had a beginning or has it always been there, we can quickly reach the conclusion that if it had always been there, or in mathematical terms if the age of the universe goes back to infinity, it should have been a cold and dead place by now simply because infinity, is older than 50 billion years.. If the age of the universe is infinity, we should have been at stage B a long time ago,. The accuracy of the figure 50 billion is of no importance to the result, for whatever figure we chose to make it, it will always be less than infinity.

What that means is that the universe had a definite beginning. That beginning, for arguments sake, being less than 50 billion years ago. The birth of new stars in the universe does not affect our analysis, they are not born out of the void, they are merely a conversion of hot gases into hot new stars. Their birth is not an addition to the total amount of matter that already exists in the universe. The total amount of matter remains constant. After a time all the hot gases in the universe will be used up and no new stars will be born.. As for the newly born stars, they too will eventually consume all their energy and die.

But 'thermal dynamics' is not the only branch of science to provide evidence in support of a beginning to the universe, for recent discoveries in space and cosmology also confirm that the universe had a definite beginning called the Big Bang, first by the discovery of the background radiation in 1965 by two American astronomers then later by COBE (Cosmic background explorer satellite) that proved beyond any doubt the theory of the Big Bang.

The Big Bang theory states that sometime between 15 and 20 billion years ago all the matter in the universe originated from an extremely dense concentration of matter and space that exploded outwards giving birth to all the galaxies and other heavenly bodies that comprise the universe as we know it today.

Another very important discovery that supported the theory of the Big Bang was the discovery that the universe is expanding, every day the universe gets bigger. This necessarily means that if we were to go back in time the universe would be contracting until it would reach a point from which it started, and that takes us back to the Big Bang.

Now if we accept that the universe had a definite beginning, the next step would be to debate whether that beginning was caused by an intelligent power or by mere chance.