This piece will be the first in a pair of discussions about the rationality of the belief in an intelligent designer of the universe. I will by no means have the space I need to have these discussions in a single column, so I will dispense them piecemeal.

As a Christian, I believe YHWH (יהוה) — later expressed as the incarnate Jesus Christ in the New Testament of the Bible — is the intelligent designer of the universe. This week’s column will center on the universe’s birthdate — the fact that it has a beginning.

Consider the fact that everything you know comes from something. In all other observable ways of knowing, we see things beget other things. There is a principle that you have to get something to have another something. Before our modern understanding of the Big Bang Theory, astronomers posited something known as the steady-state theory, which states the universe has eternally existed in an unchanging state. Thanks to Einstein’s general relativity and, later, Latimer’s calculations, we now know this is false and have generally subscribed to the Big Bang Theory, which states there was a dense mass of matter that exploded some 13.8 billion years ago and led to the ever-expanding universe we see today. We know now the universe has a beginning.

This, in no way, provides enough evidence for some creator, but it does reason that we must have some first principle or mover from which all else flows. The question then follows: What, or who, if you are a theist like me, caused it? The next thought to consider is our deep understanding of morality and consciousness. Depending on who you are, you may or may not hold to the idea of objective morality. We see in our world things that are just, true, right and wrong. Can these things only exist locally within our cultures? Are there fundamental things in our ethics and understanding of the world? This and more, next edition.