Black Holes and God

We get a significant number of emails and letters from people who have doubts. The doubts are not just about the existence of God and our claim that the Bible is the Word of God. People also have doubts about the scientific material in our presentations and literature. We have often referred to black holes and their implications for creation and the ultimate end of time. Just as some people reject the idea that there is a God, some also don’t believe in black holes. Black holes and God have many things in common.

Both black holes and God are unseen, mysterious, and frighteningly powerful to the degree that makes some people very uncomfortable. The result is that people attempt to deny the reality of black holes just as atheists try to deny the existence of God. We are seeing literature which claims that scientists are faking black holes and they don’t really exist. The “Does God Exist? Program deals with evidence. There are several lines of evidence that God exists. The evidence for God includes:

1) The creation of space/time and matter/energy from non-physical origins.
2) The cosmological fine-tuning that allows stable matter to exist.
3) Design features in life-forms that preclude chance as a causal agent.
4) The existence of human consciousness and spirituality.
5) Human morality
6) The resurrection of Jesus Christ

In the same way, black holes have several lines of evidence to support their existence:

1) Mathematical arguments such as the solutions to Einstein’s general relativity field equations.
2) The observed behavior of stars and gases around invisible points in space.
3) Explosive multi-band emission from quasars.
4) X-ray and radio emission from galaxy centers.
5) X-ray binaries.
6) Gravitational lensing.

In an excellent article on the American Scientific Affiliation website, Sarah Salviander makes this comment concerning the skepticism about black holes and God:

“The forces at work in the rejection of black holes are also at work when people declare themselves to be skeptical of God’s existence…God is even more of a disruption to the materialistic worldview than black holes. A belief in God demands thoughts, feelings, and behaviors that some non-believers find distressing, perhaps because this group tends to be composed of people who seem to want to set themselves up as minor gods of their own universes.”

You can read the entire article HERE.
— John N. Clayton © 2019