Look at your phone. Say it reads 40 percent. That one number tells you something you did not even have to think about: the phone has not been running forever. If it had, it would be dead. A battery that drains cannot have been draining for an eternity and still have charge left.
Now hold that thought and look up.
A Law That Only Runs One Way
The universe works the same way your phone does, and we know this from one of the most thoroughly tested laws in all of science. The second law of thermodynamics says that usable energy is always running down. Stars burn out. Heat spreads from hot things to cold things until there is no difference left to work with. Everything winds down, and nothing winds itself back up.
There is no exception clause. The law does not pause for anyone, and it does not run backwards on its own.
Why the Stars Settle the Question
Here is the problem for anyone who wants an eternal universe. If the cosmos had always been here, it would have exhausted its usable energy an eternity ago. Every star would have burned out. Every temperature difference would have evened out. No stars, no heat, no you.
But step outside tonight. The stars are still burning. Our battery is not dead yet.
So the universe has not always been here. At some point it was wound up, and anything that has been wound up needs someone to do the winding. Atheism, to avoid that conclusion, needs a clock that built itself and then wound itself. That is not science. It is wishful thinking.
The Bouncing Universe
The thoughtful atheist has a reply ready. Perhaps the universe bounces forever: bang, crunch, bang, crunch, with no first bang at all.
The trouble is that disorder does not reset between cycles. It carries over, so every bounce would be bigger than the one before it. Now run the film backwards. If each cycle is larger than the last, then the cycles behind us are smaller and smaller, shrinking toward a first one. The physicist Richard Tolman worked this out back in the 1930s. And on top of that, the expansion we actually observe is speeding up, not slowing toward any crunch. There is no bounce on the way.
Only Closed Systems?
The second reply is more technical. The second law, the atheist points out, applies only to closed systems.
That is correct. Now follow where it leads. If the physical universe is all there is, as atheism insists, then the universe is the ultimate closed system. There is nothing outside it to recharge it, by definition. The law applies in full, and the clock is winding down.
But suppose someone wants to say that something outside the universe is recharging it. Fine. Then we are no longer talking about atheism. We are talking about a source of energy and order beyond the physical universe, which is a strange thing for an atheist to need.
I find it remarkable that a conclusion of this size can be reached from so little. One well-tested law. One glance at the night sky. The battery is not dead, so the universe was wound up, and a wound-up universe asks a question that chemistry cannot answer. Who did the winding?
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