Something Never Comes From Nothing

Jonathan Banning and Dan Lankford are posting every Friday on facebook some short pieces they’re calling “Faith-Building Fridays.” Subtitled “50 Reasons to Believe.”

Jonathan wrote they’ve designed this project with the hope to “convict, confirm, and establish your faith.”

Their goal is three fold: To build faith in God’s existence, in the inspiration of the Scriptures, and in the identity of Jesus Christ.”

Here’s one of their early posts from January, written by Jonathan.

Something never comes from nothing. That’s one of the most fundamental facts about our natural world. Stuff doesn’t just pop into existence; it always comes from a source. For that reason, when we look at all the physical stuff around us we’re compelled to ask the question, “Where did all of this come from?” Because something never comes from nothing.

That simple reality is why the old-school skeptics used to argue that our universe was eternal, that everything has always been here. Turns out that the best way to avoid the question of origin is to argue that the universe had no origin. They argued vehemently for the eternal universe, and, in some cases, even cut corners to win the argument. The reason Einstein made the rookie mistake of dividing by zero when establishing his theory of general relativity was to avoid the fact that his equation proved the universe was not eternal.

Of course, this debate was put to rest in 1919 when a man named Sir Arthur Eddington first observed that our universe was in a constant state of expansion. He found that everything in the universe was exploding outward in every direction from a central point – like shrapnel from a bomb. It was as if the entire universe had burst into existence from a single infinitesimal point of nothingness. Edwin Hubble would go on to observe the same, and because of this discovery, the scientific community would go on to accept that our universe was not eternal. That’s why the prominent atheists of our day no longer argue for an eternal universe, but that our universe originated with a “Big Bang.”

It is a verifiable scientific fact that our universe had a beginning – something did, indeed, come out of nothing. What does that mean?

It means that our world cannot be explained naturally. It means that our existence must be the result of something “supernatural” – something beyond the physical. What we see when we consider the origin of our universe is precisely what is written in Hebrews 11:3, “By faith, we understand… that what is seen was not made out of things which are visible.” –

We commend these young gospel preachers for this important project. And we invite our readers on facebook to check out these posts every Friday. They can be found on The Temple Terrace Church of Christ facebook page. We pray these 50 posts can do much good.

–Ken Weliever, The Preacherman