Nothing comes from nothing,
Nothing ever could. ((“Something Good” from The Sound of Music (1965). Lyrics by Richard Rodgers.))
Lawrence M. Krauss is a renowned cosmologist and professor of the School of Earth and Space Exploration at Arizona State University_._ He is the author of numerous articles and books, including the best-selling The Physics of Star Trek and A Universe from Nothing that includes an Afterword from atheist provocateur Richard Dawkins_._ Krauss is an outspoken atheist, evolutionist, and anti-Christian. The following is his starting point upon which he builds his worldview:
[M]ost of the energy in the universe resides in some mysterious, now inexplicable form permeating all of empty space. It’s not an understatement to say that the discovery has changed the playing field of modern cosmology.
For one thing, this discovery has produced remarkable new support for the idea that our universe arose from precisely nothing. ((Lawrence M. Krauss, A Universe from Nothing: Why There is Something Rather Than Nothing (New York: Free Press, 2012), xiii.))
He goes on to claim that “every day beautiful and miraculous objects suddenly appear.” Krauss mentions “miracles,” and Richard Dawkins, who wrote the Afterword to Krauss’ book and heaps abundant praise upon it, describes evolution as “magic” in his own book The Magic of Reality: How We Know What’s Really True.
Evolutionists must believe in “miracles” and “magic.” An evolutionist like Krauss can’t explain how the world works except to descend into irrationality. The following is from the Preface to his book:
In the interests of full disclosure right at the outset I must admit that I am not sympathetic to the conviction that creation requires a creator, which is at the basis of all the world’s religions. Every day beautiful and miraculous objects suddenly appear, from snowflakes on a cold winter morning to vibrant rainbows after a late-afternoon summer shower. Yet no one but the most ardent fundamentalists would suggest that that each and every such object is lovingly and painstakingly and, most importantly, purposely created by a divine intelligence. ((Krauss, A Universe from Nothing, xiii.))
I don’t know of a single “fundamentalist” who has ever claimed that God designs every snowflake. God did design the material (and everything else) that makes up snowflakes and the process by which they form. Dr. Krauss has not explained how the water came into existence to make the snowflake or the informational structure that constitutes the substance we call water to explain how it always reacts the same way to temperature variations and predictable weather conditions.
Here is the Kraussian “science” behind it all: “our universe arose from precisely nothing.” So for Krauss, “nothing” must be “a kind of ‘something’” because “[a]bsolute nothingness means no laws, no vacuums, no fields, no energy, no structures, no physical or mental entities of any kind—and no ‘symmetries.’ It has no properties or potentialities. Absolute nothingness cannot produce something given endless time—in fact, there can be no time in absolute nothingness.” ((Abraham Varghese, “The ‘New Atheism’: A Critical Appraisal of Dawkins, Dennett, Wolpert, Harris, and Stenger,” in Anthony Flew with Abraham Varghese, There is a God: How the World’s Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind (New York: HarperCollins, 2007), 170.))
Dr. Krauss is engaged in some evolutionary sleight of hand. He needs energy to make his evolutionary machine work. He must steal that energy from the theistic power plant that he ridicules, misrepresents, and claims it doesn’t exist. Consider this bit of irrationality:
In fact, many laypeople as well as scientists revel in our ability to explain how snowflakes and rainbows can spontaneously appear, based on simple, elegant laws of physics. ((Krauss, A Universe from Nothing, xiii.))
Snowflakes and rainbows don’t “spontaneously appear.” The material, conditions, and natural laws necessary for them to appear exist. What about the “laws of physics”? What makes them laws? No one has ever seen a law of physics. How does a materialist like Krauss account for non-physical entities like mathematics and physics in a cosmos that seemingly came into existence out of nothing and continues to operate in terms of fixed and predictable laws?
In 1960 the Princeton physicist—and subsequent Nobel Prize winner—Eugene Wigner raised a fundamental question: Why did the natural world always—so far as we know—obey laws of mathematics?
As argued by scholars such as Philip Davis and Reuben Hersh, mathematics exists independent of physical reality. … Despite the many other enormous advances of modern physics, little has changed in this regard. As Wigner wrote, “the enormous usefulness of mathematics in the natural sciences is something bordering on the mysterious and there is no rational explanation for it.”
In other words, as I argue in my book [God? Very Probably: Five Rational Ways to Think about the Question of a God], it takes the existence of some kind of a god to make the mathematical underpinnings of the universe comprehensible. ((Robert H. Helson, “Existence of God: The Rational Arguments from Mathematics to Human Consciousness,” Independent (May 17, 2017): http://bit.ly/2w1Fcli))
Some evolutionists and non-religionists like physicist Max Tegmark ((Max Tegmark, Our Mathematical Universe: My Quest for the Ultimate Nature of Reality Paperback (New York: Vintage Books, 2015), 5.)) have gone so far to say that the cosmos—including us—“is nothing but mathematics.” ((Max Tegmark, “The Great Math Mystery,” NOVA.)) Does this mean that love, compassion, morality, and a whole host of human emotions are nothing but mathematics?
Krauss has stated that “Science is only truly consistent with an atheistic worldview…” I’m sure Isaac Newton, Robert Boyle, Johannes Kepler, Joseph Lister, James Young Simpson, Samuel F.B. Morse, Wilbur and Orville Wright, Werner von Braun, Raymond Damadian (inventor of the MRI), and many other scientists would be surprised to know this since modern scientists stand on the shoulders of these Christian scientists.
On the centenary of James Clerk Maxwell’s birth, Albert Einstein described Maxwell’s work as the “‘most profound and the most fruitful that physics has experienced since the time of Newton.’ Einstein, when he visited the University of Cambridge in 1922, was told by his host that he had done great things because he stood on Newton’s shoulders; Einstein replied: ‘No I don’t. I stand on the shoulders of Maxwell.’”
Maxwell’s work in the field of mathematical physics led to the invention of television, mobile phones, microwaves, and nuclear energy. He has been described as the father of modern physics. James Clerk Maxwell (1831–1879) was a committed Christian who viewed his biblical faith as the basis for all the scientific work he did. ((Ian Hutchinson, “James Clerk Maxwell and the Christian Proposition”: http://silas.psfc.mit.edu/Maxwell/))
The something from nothing hypothesis is illogical, unscientific, and faith-based. It can’t account for anything since anything is something and something does not appear spontaneously from nothing.