In, Bangs, Crunches, Whimpers, and Shrieks: Singularities and Acausalities in Relativistic Spacetimes, John Earman, a philosopher of science, warns believers of some errors in efforts to localize God in spacetime. The first warning has to do with causation:
So for Craig [W.L. Craig, a theistic philosopher apparently attempting to use the Big Bang to prove God’s existence] the principle “Whatever begins to exist has a cause” applies to these [Big Bang] models. However, on Craig’s reading this principle is not an obvious “metaphysical truth”; in particular, it is not a consequence of the widely held principle “Every event has a cause”, which is satisfied in the FRW’s big bang models without any help from the theists. [page 209; FRW = “Friedman-Robinson-Walker”]
In other words, there are philosophically distinct forms of cause-and-effect and I’ll use this point as part of my effort to redirect attention to the general issues of being and away from misdirected efforts to see God’s presence in particular events of an unusual or spectacular sort. By the way, this doesn’t mean there are no logically coherent ways to argue from being to a Creator, only that there are some logically incoherent ways and we should avoid such. Such great thinkers as Aristotle and Maimonides and Aquinas have provided such arguments—better regarded as tests of coherence or rationality but that’s another story. Those arguments should at least implicitly respect knowledge of being in its concrete forms but those arguments cannot proceed directly from or be fully founded upon empirical thought, not even those highly disciplined forms of empirical thoughts we label as `scientific’.
More generally, it’s necessary to the living spirit of a civilization to develop a coherent understanding of being, but more is needed than the type of analysis done by scientists and many sorts of philosophers. That type of analysis plays a role but not usually the dominant role in a larger understanding of created being, of all of Creation.
Things, the most concrete forms of created being, are true and truth is thing-like. In other words, what exists must be accepted to be understood but not `explained’ as Newton explained momentum by writing down mathematical equations. Brain-scientists and physiologists and optical physicists deal with problems in human beings gathering true information about our world. Philosophers and theologians should be paying attention to those scientists and what they discover about, for example, human tendencies to see patterns in the most disordered of data. They should be paying attention to those scientists, indeed to all empirical researchers including historians and language scholars, but the very fact that we can identify and correct specific problems tells us there is no general `knowledge problem’.
Both philosophers and theologians have the responsibility to first learn about what exists before talking about what exists. Christians can only talk about existence as a gift, something given by God. This holds in general for all of created being and in particular for their individual selves.
We Christians need to learn how to properly use scientific knowledge along with all other sorts of legitimate knowledge in our efforts to understand Creation. This is my how I’d advocate dealing with this issue:
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God is His own act-of-being, the supreme act-of-being, and also the source of being for all of Creation.
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From a certain limited viewpoint, the Old Testament covenants are a pre-scientific image of a God who moves His Creation along by way of laws given before the fact, laws which can be seen as binding Him only because He chose them as adequate for His purposes.
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God should not be excluded from the story He’s telling but He tells the story which is this world as a Creator God, the source of being, and not as some pagan God throwing thunder-bolts and leading armies into battle in a world which somehow exists independently of Him.
Professor Earman has more to say which is worth paying attention to in this world in which so many accept or reject the God they wish to believe in or disbelieve in rather than taking revelation, natural and special, in the way it is presented. Earman notes:
Speaking purely personally now, it strikes me as bordering on the sacrilegious to see God’s creative force as able to operate only at a singularity or ideal point. It is more to His glory if He operates everywhere and everywhen, and if He operates independently of such contingencies as whether there is an initial singularity and, if so, what type it is. Those who want to find God in the big bang should beware of falling into the trap of relegating God to the diminishing interstices left by modern science. Once the trap is recognized it is easy to escape using God’s supernatural attributes. If there is no first instant for the physical universe or no prior physical time to the big bang at which God can operate, no matter. The Creator “may be conceived to exist in a metaphysical time” and “to exist temporally prior to the inception of physical time”. [Quotes are from Craig’s article “Professor Grünbaum on Creation”, Erkenntnis, 40, 325-341.] The constraints of physics cannot bind the Creator. But precisely to the extent that a supernatural cause of the beginning of the universe does not have to answer to the constraints of nature, scientists qua scientists are entitled to ignore it. [page 209]
We Christians have failed to achieve a greater understanding of Creation and we have retreated from any claims that such a Christian understanding is possible. We have retreated from the stances of the likes of St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas, Isaac Newton, Blaise Pascal, and a handful of more recent thinkers who saw a true need for such a stance but failed to get even so far in the great work as did Newton and Pascal and certainly failed to follow Augustine and Aquinas in developing a more complete Christian understanding of Creation which was faithful to the Biblical and Creedal revelations while also integrating the best of empirical and speculative knowledge in a plausible way.
We endanger our faith and even endanger our relationship to God when we restrict the Almighty to being such at only points, such as singularities, where our understanding of reality seems to break down. He is Creator but He remains here as the most important character in the story and stories He’s telling.