In the Beginning, God

The doctrine of creation is under attack by people seeking to escape the authority of God’s Word. Today, R.C. Sproul demonstrates that science and reason demand a self-existent Creator in order to explain the universe as we know it.

In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. This is the most fundamental assertion of historic Christianity, and it is the single most bombarded target by secular philosophy and by Neopaganism in our day, because every pagan knows that if you can get rid of creation, you're rid of God and if you're rid of God, you can live however you want. And so everything that divides the Christian from the pagan is at stake in that opening assertion of the Old Testament.

Now, let's think about this just for a second. In the beginning. Now, the first thing that's being said here is that the heavens and the earth, the entire universe as we know it had a beginning. There was a time when the created universe was not. I mentioned before a few years ago a conference that I heard the famous astrophysicist Jastrow being interviewed when the Hubble spacecraft was sent aloft and he was on the radio and he said, "15 to 17 billion years ago, the universe exploded into being." I almost drove my car off the road. The universe exploded into being? What did it explode out of? Non-being?

Let me also add to this several years ago, I had the opportunity to exchange correspondence with Carl Sagan. And in our correspondence, we were talking about big bang cosmology and about how astrophysicists of our day have gone back in time to the last nanosecond before this eternally organized stable condensation of energy and material before it blew up. He said, "That's as far back as we can go and no further." And I said to Dr. Sagan, "How can you call yourself a scientist and stop your inquiry into truth at the most important moment in all of history?" He said, "Well, we just don't have to go there." I said, "Yeah, you do have to go there because you have to account for this singularity, this point of singularity, that for all eternity was stable and organized, immutable in a state of inertia, and then suddenly on a Tuesday afternoon at 4:00 it blows sky high."

Stop me if I'm lying, but doesn't the law of inertia say that anything that is at rest tends to remain at rest unless acted upon by an outside force? Your theory of the origin of the cosmos screams for a self-existent eternal being. You can't have it without it. The minute you say there's a beginning to the universe, you've got two options. Either the universe came out of nothing all by itself or the universe was created by something that is self-existent and eternal. They're the only options, folks. Don't let anybody play games with you on this.