“Causing the Cosmos:” Dean Zimmerman

On April 25, The King’s College was pleased to host Dr. Dean Zimmerman, one of the most influential Christian philosophers of our day, for a lecture on cosmological arguments for the existence of God.

Dr. Zimmerman entitled his talk “Causing the Cosmos.” He opened with the question of why there is something rather than nothing—a question that has weighed on thinkers since philosophy’s beginning—and surveyed a number of attempts to answer it. Contemporary theoretical physicist Lawrence Krauss attempts to redefine the concept of “nothing” to allow for a highly complex vacuum so charged with energy that it was likely to erupt into a universe containing matter at some point. Stephen Hawking proposes a theory of “spontaneous creation,” in which the laws of gravity and quantum physics theoretically allow universes with a beginning and an end to avoid violating the conservation of energy—the law that energy never increases or decreases, only changes forms—because such universes would have a net energy level of zero. Spinoza suggested centuries ago, implausibly, that our universe is itself somehow necessary in all its details. Various contemporary theories boil down to essentially that assumption. Other thinkers suggest a multiverse—not that multiple universes with a common origin have become separate from one another and still coexist, but that every causal way a cosmos could possibly exist, does exist. Finally, some believe there is a necessary, non-contingent (or uncaused) being at the back of everything who was special enough to bring our universe into existence (a view that underlies theism)—or else is somehow part of it (a pantheist view). And some have suggested that the question of why things exist needs no answer at all.

Dr. Zimmerman, while taking the position that a being resembling what Christians and Jews call God—necessary, non-contingent, self-existing, and able to create everything that is—is the best explanation for the cosmos we inhabit, acknowledged that it is not an airtight, knockdown explanation and does not (by itself) rule out the possibility that the question of existence needs no answer. But having the best explanation of all the attempted explanations, he said in closing, is by no means worthless.

Highly respected by both Christian and secular scholars, Dr. Zimmerman is a professor of philosophy at Rutgers University and director of the Rutgers Center for the Philosophy of Religion. He also plays keyboard for the rock band Jigs and the Pigs.