In philosophy, the cosmological argument for God’s existence says:

1. All things that begin to exist have a cause of their beginning to exist.
2. The universe began to exist.
3. Therefore, the universe was caused to exist (and by inference, God is the cause).

Does science support this? Absolutely. Overwhelming scienti c evidence tells us that the universe exploded into being out of nothing at some point in the distant past. Now some Christians have a problem with the Big Bang theory. They’ll ask me, “Oh no! You don’t believe in the Big Bang, do you?” as if I’m giving up on the Bible. My response is always the same. “Yes, I believe in the Big Bang—I just know who banged it!”

There are ve main lines of scienti c evidence—denoted by the acronym SURGE—that point to the de nite beginning of the universe. They are: The Second Law of Thermodynamics, the Expanding Universe, Radiation Afterglow from the Big Bang Explosion, Great galaxy seeds in the Radiation Afterglow, and Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity.

The conclusion that the universe had a beginning is virtually certain (see chap. 3 of I Don’t Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist), and the evidence that it began via a Big Bang explosion is very strong. According to the evidence, the universe began from nothing—literally no thing physical, temporal, or spatial. Once there was no time, no space, and no matter and then it all banged into existence out of nothing. It was not an explosion of pre-existing matter, but the creation of matter itself. Therefore, the cause of the universe must be something beyond space, beyond time, and beyond matter — a Being who is spaceless, timeless, and immaterial. Those are the attributes of God.

What caused this creation event? To answer this, it’s important to realize that the Big Bang was not an explosion in space but the explosion of space. It was not an explosion in time but the beginning of time.