Did God create the universe?

Andrew (No)

God is a human construct, as evidenced by the many different gods created to reflect the many different cultures on planet Earth. These are great stories that serve many purposes to different people, but they are simply stories. If a god created the universe, how would we know which one? For example, was it the Christian God, the Islamic Allah, or the Hindu Brahma? 

Once we’ve decided which god we’re talking about, we have the logical problem of what existed before the universe. Did god exist? Did this god exist in some void or other realm? If a god created everything, what created that god? Did god exist before time? The further one follows this line of thinking, the more logical problems mount.

To paraphrase Stephen Hawking, to grapple with our limited knowledge of the universe's origin, we use the idea of a god as a “god-of-the-gaps.” In other words, we use the existence of a god to fill the gaps in our scientific knowledge of how the universe was created. Our scientific knowledge of the origin of the universe may not be perfect, but we can extrapolate backward based on our understanding of the spontaneous origination of life and concepts such as the Big Bang theory and quantum mechanics for scientific grounding. While we can observe how life has developed on Earth by examining empirical evidence, there is no empirical evidence of the existence of a god that we can observe. In order to truly accept the divine creation model, we would require at least some basic level of empirical evidence for the existence of a god. 

Elizabeth (Yes)

Explaining creation without a Creator is difficult, considering the universe's clear design indicates an Intelligent Designer. There are scientific, rational, and spiritual reasons to believe God created the universe. In the scientific world, notable scientists and PhDs believe God created the universe, even while upholding the Big Bang theory. Science does not disprove God, and clues in nature hint toward ‘intelligent design.’ Scientists recognize through the ‘Goldilocks Principle’ that the Earth appears to be ‘just right’ for life to exist on it. 

As author and speaker Frank Turkek says, we can see how one intelligent, moral, immaterial, and personal God assembled the universe. CS Lewis also explains how natural laws themselves indicate a Creator, such as a universal sense of objective morality and basic beliefs. Nearly every culture on the planet has some belief in God or a Creator of the universe. Humans seem predisposed to believe in God as if Someone ‘put’ that desire in them. As many parallel and universal morals and laws are expressed across cultures worldwide, indicating that humans have a spiritual disposition to believe in God. 

The belief in God creating the universe is the ‘best’ or most rational explanation of the universe's origin, and quite simply, the universe has to have a cause. Something cannot come from nothing. Moreover, nothing can cause itself. The truth is the design and creation we see around us indicate a Designer and Creator—God. While some get bogged down in the unknowns behind how a necessarily all-powerful God can create everything without having also been created himself, they miss the point and all the evidence that points to obvious design in the universe. Not understanding how God could miraculously create does not make that thing impossible or untrue.