While visiting my dad for his 85th birthday, we watched some of our old family movies. It was funny to see my brother as a one-year-old, crawling around, playing with the puppies, and eating from the dog’s food dish. To think that this cute little baby would grow up to be a distinguished college professor and international lecturer! It got me thinking about how God makes special people out of nobodies. We come into this world naked and helpless, and God transforms us into the unique people we each are through our experiences and choices.

The laws of physics state that matter and energy can neither be created nor destroyed.

It’s been said that God delights in making something out of nothing, and I believe it. In fact, I believe that God made everything out of nothing. The Nobel Prize-winning physicist Dr. Arno Penzias seems to agree. He put it this way: “The best data we have [about the formation of the universe] are exactly what I would have predicted had I had nothing to go on but the five books of Moses, the Psalms, the Bible as a whole. It was a moment of discrete [individually distinct] creation from nothing!”

Skeptics ask, “How could the universe have been created from nothing? The laws of science say that nothing can ever be created or destroyed—only rearranged. In our physical world, you have to have something to start with.” Perhaps the clearest and most compelling answer I’ve found to that argument is put forth by James Perloff in Tornado in a Junkyard:1

“The most widely accepted theory of the universe’s origin says that, at one time, all mass and energy were compressed in a tiny ‘cosmic egg.’ Then, about fifteen billion years ago, the egg exploded, creating the universe in the Big Bang. …

“But the Big Bang itself violates natural law. The laws of physics state that matter and energy can neither be created nor destroyed. This is the First Law of Thermodynamics, the law of conservation of energy. As the well-known physicist Paul Davies wrote in his book The Edge of Infinity, the Big Bang ‘represents the instantaneous suspension of physical laws, the sudden, abrupt flash of lawlessness that allowed something to come out of nothing. It represents a true miracle—transcending physical principles.’2

“If one allows for an event beyond natural law—a ‘true miracle,’ as Davies put it—then it is logically inconsistent to exclude other events, such as creation by God. If there was a ‘cosmic egg,’ who put it there? The cosmic chicken? Scientists have always agreed that there is a cause for every effect. How then can the greatest effect of all—the universe itself—have arisen without a cause?”

That cause, I believe, was God’s command. God spoke and—BANG!—the universe was created.

1 James Perloff, Tornado in a Junkyard (Arlington, Mass: Refuge Books, 1999), 29.

2 Paul Davies, The Edge of Infinity (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1981), 161.

Curtis Peter Van Gorder is a member of the Family International in the Middle East.