What Qualities Would a Universe Created by Love Have?

Love has to be chosen - what evidence is there that the universe is contingent?

A universe characterized by chaos, blind chance, and random interactions is not something that would reflect in any meaningful way the creative power of a loving Trinity. It would be a universe that has always been here, means nothing, and is heading nowhere.

If Creation is made in the image of the Trinity, then we should expect to see the universe manifest qualities of love, the cardinal characteristic of the Trinity. Love can be defined as freely chosen mutual self-giving that seeks the good of the other. Altruism exists and is exhibited by many species, not just humans, so in that sense “love” clearly exists in the universe, but what about evidence of love in the very organization of the universe itself, not just in the behavior of a few sentient creatures?

The first quality we would expect to find is evidence of free will, since love must be freely chosen. Next is evidence that the universe is rational and intelligent, since perfect love requires perfect knowledge of the beloved. Related to intelligence is reason — if the universe is intelligent, then it should also be information rich. Finally and most obviously, the universe should be relational. Love is a relationship, not a concept or a principle. Over the next several posts we will look at the overwhelming scientific evidence for all of these qualities beginning with contingency.

Perhaps the best scientific evidence that the universe is freely chosen is that it is contingent.¹ Perhaps the most fundamental scientific observation about the universe is its origin at the Big Bang. As much as atheists and scientific materialists hate the implications of an ex nihilo creation event, all other serious explanations of the physical origin of the universe have steadily fallen away over the last century.² The Big Bang remains standing.

Human understanding of the cosmos is marked by radical changes. Yet, the overall direction of the changes has been consistent. It is toward an ever larger, ever more dynamic universe. From the ancient Greeks to the Middle Ages, it was thought that the heavens were a dome that contained lights and stored rain water. While astronomers observed the movements of the stars, they were not understood to be the result of the earth moving in an orbit around the sun. Nor was it understood that the sun was itself was one of billions of stars. Due to improvements in telescope technology, astronomers such as Copernicus, Galileo, and Kepler were able to radically change that conception. By the early 20th century, it was known that the universe was large, but no one understood it to be as large or as old as we understand it to be today. At the beginning of the century, the standard model was that the universe was thirty thousand light years in diameter. By the end of the century, it was closer to thirty billion. At the beginning of the early 20th century, the view was that the universe was “static”—meaning that it had always existed and was neither expanding nor contracting. By the end of the century, the view was that the universe had come into existence in a Big Bang and is constantly expanding.

In 1929, when the astronomer Edwin Hubble first observed the increasing spectrographic red shift of stars the furthest from Earth, he initially resisted the conclusion that he was looking at proof of an expanding universe. Albert Einstein, himself one of history’s greatest scientific revolutionaries, committed his self-described “biggest blunder” by initially refusing to follow the cosmic implications of his own work on General and Special Relativity. To prevent his theories from predicting a changing and expanding universe, Einstein added his now infamous “cosmological constant” (a fudge factor), to his equations.³

Why were scientists of the early 20th century so attached to the idea of a static universe? An expanding universe presupposes a universe that has a beginning and an end. Similar to the astronomers of the late Middle Ages who were conditioned by their religious and cultural views to see the Earth as flat and as the center of the solar system,⁴ scientists of the 20th century were also limited by their own cultural and religious preconceptions. If the universe had no beginning and no end, then that suggested that the universe simply existed and needed no further explanation. A meddling Deity was a needless complication. However, if the universe was not static, but rather dynamic with a definite beginning and an end, then many uncomfortable philosophical questions arose. How did the universe originate? What if anything pre-existed the universe? How will the universe end? Is there a purpose to the universe? A leading astrophysicist of the early 20th century, Arthur Eddington, summarized the situation this way:

Philosophically, the notion of an abrupt beginning to the present order of nature is repugnant to me, as I think it must be to most. And even those who would welcome a proof of the intervention of a creator will probably consider that a single winding up at some remote epoch is not really the kind of relation between God and his world that brings satisfaction to the world.

In the 1960s, radio astronomers named Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson working at Bell Laboratories in New Jersey detected a low but constant level of background microwave radiation in every direction of the sky.⁵ Initially assuming it was just static from their equipment, they removed the accumulated pigeon poop from the antenna, had the pigeons shot and tried again, but the radiation was still there. Now we know that what they were observing was the remnant of the massive creation event called the Big Bang that occurred approximately 14 billion years ago.

After background radiation was discovered, it was further observed that its subtle ripples corresponded exactly with the formation of galaxies. If the ripples had not existed then the universe would be the same uniform density throughout—no stars or galaxies would have condensed—hence no planets, no Earth, and ultimately none of us. Physicist George Smoot has called these ripples “the fingerprints from the Maker.” Stephen Hawking has called them “the most important discovery of the century, if not of all time.” Any lingering doubts regarding the Big Bang theory were put to rest in 2003, when NASA used extremely precise satellite measurements of polarized light and temperature differences to publish a map of the universe.⁶

This map and observations of “dark energy” made by the Hubble telescope proved that the universe is “flat” and not “curved.” In other words, that the universe is infinite and edgeless.⁷ An increasingly controversial hypothesis, “dark energy” was proposed as a mysterious anti-gravity force that accelerates the expansion of the universe at an ever increasing rate.⁸ The effects of dark energy would eliminate the possibility that the universe can fall back upon itself in a Big Crunch and then explode in another Big Bang to recreate itself over and over again. Our universe will only exist once. It came into existence in a flash and will infinitely expand until it disintegrates.

So, how will the Earth and then the universe end? The sun is now about halfway through its 10 billion year lifespan. It is burning 30% brighter than it did around 3.7 billion years ago when the first living things, bacteria, came into existence. In about 1 billion years, the sun will increase its output by another 10% and thus turn Earth into a hothouse where plants die, carbon dioxide levels drop, and the oceans boil off unless there is a very strong corresponding increase in a counter-regulatory mechanism affecting the temperature of the atmosphere. Ultimately, the sun will enter its death throes and expand, consuming all of the inner planets before it collapses upon itself and burns out. Over a period of 100 trillion years, the universe will collapse into widely separated black holes and all will be cold and dark. However, it is possible that in about 1 trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion years black holes themselves will disintegrate into particles that form individual atoms larger than today’s entire universe. However, even these “super atoms” will eventually decay leaving a featureless void. Everything associated with this existence will be completed and anyone capable of observing it from within will have long disappeared. A controversial recent hypothesis suggests that the ever increasing strength of dark energy may cause a “Big Rip” in a few billion years where everything in the universe may rip apart. Either way, where it used to be common, it is now becoming extremely rare to encounter an expert who seriously contemplates any scenario where the universe persists or repeats. It now appears definitive that physical immortality is an impossibility. Every human being and everything associated with humanity will disappear along with the universe itself. The end of everything will be the irreversible and inescapable extinction of everything.

Once we get beyond these sobering facts, it is interesting to contemplate the implications of a universe that came into existence in one creative moment, will exist for a definite period of time, and then end. A beginning begs the question of a cause. What was before the Big Bang? Scientists have struggled for explanations, but it seems as if these explanations by their very nature will elude science. Science is based upon repeatable experiments. The creation of the universe is an experiment that is impossible to repeat in a laboratory. Mostly, because it was VERY BIG.

We can’t reproduce the Big Bang even in miniature. The current state of super collider technology and theoretical physics can reproduce energies and pressures similar to when the entire universe was condensed to the size of a grain of sand and had existed for a infinitesimally small fraction of a second, but to reach even higher pressures that would have existed at even earlier time points is currently and will likely be always beyond our ability. While it is certainly acceptable in science to make inferences and assumptions regarding one-time events based upon what is known regarding other events, the forces, pressures, and nature of matter that existed at the singularity at the initial moments of the Big Bang are extremely unique. For the purposes of our discussion it may not matter, since getting asymptotically closer to the beginning instant of the universe still doesn’t tell us anything about what pre-existed that instant. What was on the other side of the creation moment?

Science can’t rerun Creation in order to study it. Science doesn’t have any creative power. All it can do is study what already exists. In a sense, all natural scientists do is engage in a massive effort of reverse engineering. Technology, which is a subset of science, can only recombine what already exists into new forms, but it cannot create new matter or new physical laws. Scientists are part of Creation and Creation needs to occur before scientists can exist. The best science can do regarding the origin of the universe is to reason backwards from any forensic evidence the Big Bang may have left behind. There is no evidence that anything physical existed before the Big Bang. Whatever there was that could cause a Big Bang, it must have been something that always existed (otherwise where did this pre-existing thing come from?), and it has to have creative power. Faced with this challenge, atheist “scientists” have created many science fiction narratives, such as the existence of multiverses, none of which can plausibly be proven by actual scientific observations. They are just myths with equations.

Something with a definite beginning begs the question of a cause. Something cannot cause itself. Nor can “nothing” cause a “something.” Those are logical contradictions that a child can grasp. Nothing can only be responsible for nothing because that is exactly what it is. Nothing is nothing and that’s the way it stays. Therefore, the universe had to be contingent upon something—a something that always was and always is. What existed before the Big Bang? Who or what was on the other side of the creation moment? Science will never be able to say. Theories such as the universe always existed or that the universe bounces into an infinite cycle of big bangs and big crunches are simply not supported by observations.

Our universe will only exist once. It came into existence in a flash and will expand until it disintegrates. While the Big Bang undoubtedly occurred, the exact mechanism of the Big Bang is not scientifically understood, particularly what happened during the first few seconds. Our current understanding of physics suggests that basic particles such as protons, electrons, and neutrons should have been obliterated by antimatter, meaning that the Big Bang should have snuffed itself out after barely getting started. We still don’t understand how dark matter and dark energy came into being. Or even if they truly exist, since have we have not isolated any to this day, even though dark matter supposedly makes up the overwhelming majority of the mass of the universe. The early “inflationary phase” of the universe is not explained, we just know that the ratio of the pull of gravity to kinetic energy of the explosion is perfect to a mind boggling 60 decimal places! So, while we don’t understand exactly how the Big Bang happened, we do know that it did happen.

It now appears definitive that physical immortality is an impossibility. Every living human being and everything associated with humanity will disappear along with the universe itself, ending in a state that physicists call “heat death,” where the energy potential of the universe has completely run down into a perfect state of entropy.

Stephen Hawking famously claimed that if the law of gravity existed then the rest of the universe would follow and therefore no God is necessary.⁹ Of course, the painfully obvious problem with that claim is where did the law of gravity itself come from? Gravity isn’t creative. It doesn’t cause matter to exist or come into existence; it only describes the behavior of what is already there. How can the law of gravity create itself out of nothing? Even more troubling, the “law” of gravity without any matter to act upon is only a concept and therefore can only exist in an immaterial mind. Very quickly then, in order for the Big Bang to occur out of nothing, logic requires the existence of an eternal, pre-existing Mind that has the creative power to bring a material universe out of existence from the profound nothing that was prior to the universe. If the universe is contingent and caused by God, then it was chosen. A choice requires an act of the will. In this case, we know from logic and from Revelation that the choice is made by a loving God in the form of a Trinity.

1. Something that is “contingent” is dependent on or conditioned by something else and is not logically necessary, can happen by chance or unforeseen causes, or is not necessitated, but is determined by free choice.

2. Ethan Siegel, “Why Isn’t Anyone Seriously Challenging the Big Bang?” Forbes, May 6, 2021, accessed May 11, 2021, https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2021/05/06/why-isnt-anyone-seriously-challenging-the-big-bang/?sh=15eed6cf689f.

3. "Cosmological Constant,” Wikipedia, accessed January 4, 2025, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmological_constant.

4. This is not really true, but is a widely propagated myth meant to slander the level of sophistication of medieval learning. Sacrobosco’s treatise, Tractatus de Sphaera / De Sphaera Mundi was a standard astronomy textbook for centuries demonstrating that the earth is a sphere.

5. “The Nobel Prize in Physics 1978,” NobelPrize.org. Nobel Prize Outreach, accessed January 4, 2025, <https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physics/1978/summary/>

6. “Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe,” NASA, accessed August 8, 2020, https://map.gsfc.nasa.gov/

7. In a curved universe, given enough time a baseball thrown in space would make a complete circuit of the universe and hit the pitcher in the back of the head. In a flat universe, the baseball would go on forever.

8. Antonia Seifert, et al, “Supernovae evidence for foundational change to cosmological models,” Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society: Letters, Volume 537, Issue 1, February 2025, Pages L55–L60, https://doi.org/10.1093/mnrasl/slae112.

9. John C. Lennox, “God and Stephen Hawking: Whose Design Is It Anyway?” (Oxford, England: Lion Hudson, 2011) 29.