Stand alone in the desert at night and you'll understand the question before anyone has to explain it to you. Millions of stars overhead, no city light to dull them, just silence — and the plain fact that the universe, in all its glory, exists as opposed to there being nothing. 

Why is there something rather than nothing?

Below are a few individual pieces of evidence, briefly presented, for two things:

a) that existence has a Creator rather than having come into being by accident, and

b) that this Creator spoke to the Jewish people at Mount Sinai and gave them the Torah — the blueprint and user manual for life. Each piece links to a short article, video, or audio so you can look into it further. This is just a starting point.

 

[1] Nothing Starts Itself

Everything you've ever seen happen was caused by something before it. A cup breaks because it fell; it fell because someone knocked it; they knocked it because they were reaching for something else — and so on.

Here's the thing, though: that chain can't actually go on and on forever. An endless line of causes with nothing at the start is impossible. The existence of existence itself requires a first cause that doesn't need a cause of its own — something eternal, outside of time and matter, powerful enough to start everything else.

That's the case for a "First Cause," and it's one of the oldest and simplest pieces of evidence for a Creator.

Watch / read: The Cosmological Argument for G-d's Existence (Aish.com)

First Cause Proof (JewishClarity.com)

[2] The Universe Actually Had a Beginning

Cosmologists teach us that the universe had a beginning about 13.8 billion years ago. They say that time, space, matter, and energy all came into existence together, initially as one point of concentrated existence and then exploded outwards to become the universe in what's called the Big Bang. Before that, there wasn't empty space and there wasn't time.

If space and time themselves had a starting point, then whatever caused them must exist outside of time and space.

Interestingly the 18th-century Torah sage Rabbi Chaim ibn Attar (known as Ohr HaChaim) explains, based on the Kabbalistic tradition, that the Torah's opening line can be read more literally than the standard translation suggests. "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth" is usually read as describing a starting time. But the Hebrew word for "beginning," reishit, can also mean a single starting point — what science today calls a singularity, one point containing everything else within it. Read this way, the verse says that God first created a point holding the potential for all of existence, then expanded it outward into the universe as we know it. This is what Rabbi Chaim ibn Attar and the sages before him explain was how the universe started. One point - one singularity - with everything in it, that was created from nothing which expanded outwards to form the universe as we know it. 

Astronomer Robert Jastrow — who described himself as an agnostic, not a believer — put it memorably, describing how science had circled back to something religious tradition had said all along. He said: Science climbs "the mountains of ignorance" chasing the answer, and "as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries."

Read: The Big Bang and the Big Question: A Universe without God?  (Aish.com)

[3] The Universe Is Tuned Like a Control Room Full of Dials

Over the last century, physicists, cosmologists and mathematicians have discovered something astonishing: the universe runs on a handful of forces — for example, gravity, the force holding atoms together and the cosmological force, the rate the universe expands — each set to an exact strength. Picture a control room full of dials, one dial for each force that the universe runs according to. Twist almost any dial even slightly, and the universe won't hold together. There will literally be no stars, no atoms, no chemistry, no life.

Physicist Sir Fred Hoyle discovered this firsthand while working out how stars manufacture carbon, the element all life is built from. It only works because of one wildly improbable, exquisitely precise coincidence inside the atom — and it shook him so much he famously expressed: "A common sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a superintendent has monkeyed with the physics, as well as chemistry and biology."

Let's take a look at the dial that controls how fast the universe expands. Scientist and Nobel laureate Steven calculated it has to be balanced to 1 part in a number bigger than the total count of atoms in the universe. Picture a 1 followed by 120 zeros. Nudge that dial by a single digit, and the universe either collapses back in on itself or flies apart too fast for a single star to form.

None of this comes from rabbis or philosophers — it comes from the highest level physicists, cosmologists and mathematicians measuring what's actually there. As physicist Paul Davies put it: "The entire universe is balanced on a knife-edge... the universe seems unreasonably suited to the existence of life — almost contrived — you might say a 'put-up job.'"

Interestingly, one of the most famous and influential atheists of the twentieth century, Antony Flew, spent much of his life travelling the world and arguing passionately for atheism. Yet towards the end of a life passionate atheism, he radically changed his mind.

Anthony Flew had always insisted that we should “follow the evidence wherever it leads.” As scientific knowledge advanced — particularly our understanding of the extraordinary complexity of DNA and the remarkable fine-tuning of the fundamental laws and constants of the universe — he came to believe that the evidence could no longer be explained by chance alone.

In his 2007 book, There Is a God: How the World’s Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind, Anthony Flew explained that he had come to see the complexity of life and the universe as pointing towards an intelligent source. He was not claiming to have become an adherent of a particular religion, but he did abandon his lifelong atheism and embrace belief in an intelligent creator and first cause.

Watch / read: The Fine Tuning of the Universe (Aish.com) 

God and Physics: Is the Multiverse Real? (Aish.com) 

Beyond Intelligent Design (Chabad.org)

The Design Argument for G-d's Existence (Aish.com) 

Design Proof (JewishClarity.com)

[4] The Parts of Us Science Can't Weigh

You're not just a bag of chemicals reacting to stimulus. You experience things: the taste of coffee, the ache of missing someone, the internal pull of "I should" or "I shouldn't." Philosopher David Chalmers calls this the "hard problem" of consciousness. He explains that neuroscience can describe what your brain is doing while you feel something, but it can't explain why there's anyone home to feel it at all.

Morality works the same way. Almost everyone agrees that some things — cruelty, betrayal, the Holocaust — aren't just "not to our taste," they're actually objectively wrong, for everyone, always. But if the universe is just atoms bouncing around with no purpose behind it, "wrong" can't really mean anything more than "I don't like it." Reason, morality, and the sense that some things genuinely matter make far more sense if the consciousness, in us, flows from a greater Consciousness.

Read: Moral Imperative Proof (JewishClarity.com) 

Ontological Proof (JewishClarity.com), on why our need for meaning points the same way

An Honest Word About Bias

Here's the uncomfortable part. It is almost impossible to come to the question of whether there is a Creator and whether the Creator has communicated to us with a completely open mind. Some of the very scientists most committed to a purely material universe have admitted, on the record, that their commitment isn't only about following evidence.

Geneticist Richard Lewontin wrote candidly that scientists take "the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs... because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism" — the assumption that nothing exists outside the physical world — "we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door." Philosopher Thomas Nagel admitted something similar: "I want atheism to be true... It isn't just that I don't believe in God... It's that I hope there is no God! I don't want there to be a God."

That's not a knock on science. It's a reminder that there's a difference between following evidence and defending a conclusion you decided on in advance. When several independent lines of evidence point the same way, the simpler, more honest conclusion deserves a real hearing.

Listen: Worldmask - Evidence of Faith - part 1 - Rabbi Dr Akiva Tatz 

Listen: Worldmask - Evidence of Faith - part 2 - Rabbi Dr Akiva Tatz 

Listen: Doubt & Certainty, an audio shiur by Rabbi Akiva Tatz (TorahDownloads) ·

Read: Faith vs. Knowledge (Aish.com)

[1] Sinai: A Claim No One Else Makes

Of the thousands of religions that have come along in the last few thousand years, every single one of them (besides Judaism) trace back to one person advocating that they have had an experience — a vision, a revelation, an angel appearing to someone alone in a cave or on a mountain. You either trust that person, or you don't. There's no way to check.

The Torah makes a very different claim: that God spoke, audibly, to every single member of the Jewish people — about 3 million people — all at once, in public, at Mount Sinai. Think about how hard it is to get ten people to agree on what they saw at a car accident five minutes ago. Now imagine inventing a fake national memory and getting an entire people to adopt it, pass it down faithfully to their children generation after generation, and never once get caught fabricating it. That's not the same order of difficulty as one person's private claim — it's a different category of claim altogether. And that memory hasn't faded. It's retold every single year at the Pesach seder, parent to child, back to the event itself.

There is so much to say regarding the National Revelation claim of the Jewish people. How it is simply impossible to fabricate a claim and how no one else ever has even attempted to claim that the Creator spoke to their entire nation and they lived to pas on the event first hand to the next generation.

Please feel free to check out the following:

Watch: Rabbi Kelemen - How Do You Know the Torah is True: A Study in Comparative Religion

Watch: Rational Approach To Divine Origin of Judaism

Watch: Rabbi Dov Ber Cohen National Revelation video

Read: The Rebbe Story

[2] The people who should have disappeared

In the 1600s, King Louis XIV of France asked the philosopher Blaise Pascal to give him proof of the supernatural. Pascal's answer: "Why, the Jews, your Majesty — the Jews." He meant it plainly. A small, exiled, endlessly persecuted people should have vanished like every other ancient nation. Mark Twain noticed the same puzzle centuries later, writing that Egypt, Babylon, Greece and Rome all "made a vast noise" and then were gone, while "the Jew saw them all, beat them all, and is now what he always was... All other forces pass, but he remains."

Read: History Crash Course #67: The Miracle of Jewish History (Aish.com)

[3] Amazing prophecies that came true

The Torah and the Prophets describe the future in specific terms: That the Jewish people would be exiled, scattering among the nations, be hated and persecuted, remain small in number and yet be a light unto the nations, eventually return to Israel which would faithfully remain baron to those inhabiting it in the meantime, and then would look again when the jews would return and that's exactly what happened.

Watch (under 10 minutes) - Compelling Evidence (Amazing prophesies)

Read: Historical Revelation

Read: The 7 Wonders of Jewish history

Read: Seven Wonders of Jewish History (JewishClarity.com)

 

Where to Go From Here

This is only a starting point. Each of these pieces of evidence can be looked into and there is so much more compelling evidence.

If you would like to look into anything in this area, or any area of Torah, please check out the free, hand picked learning partners available in the Resource Section of ElulTime.com.