Creating the Universe

The article by Mark Alpert ’82, “How It All Began” (feature, April 22), is a good read but points to some fundamental mistakes. The subject is the Suborbital Polarimeter for Inflation, Dust and the Epoch of Reionization, or SPIDER, and Mr. Alpert states that “SPIDER’s results may shed light on one of the biggest questions in all of science: What created our universe 13.8 billion years ago?”

First of all, the question is not what, but who? As the theologian R.C. Sproul has pointed out, a being with the quality of aseity, or eternal self-existence, is a logical necessity. The first law of logic is that you can’t get something from nothing. Self-creation is a logical contradiction because the thing created would have had to exist before it existed. Self-existence is not.

Secondly, Mr. Alpert and the Princeton scientists he refers to should get hold of a book of essays titled In Six Days: Why Fifty Scientists Choose to Believe in Creation (John F. Ashton, ed.). In particular, I recommend the one by John R. Baumgardner *70, who has an M.S. in electrical engineering from Princeton and an M.S. and Ph.D in geophysics and space physics from UCLA.