# Energy Cannot Be Created or Destroyed Objection Defeater ## Intro The objection runs like this. The First Law of Thermodynamics says energy cannot be created or destroyed. Everything in the universe is energy in some form, since even matter is energy locked up (E = mc²). So the energy in the universe was never created. It has always been here. A universe made of eternal energy does not need a Creator. It sounds airtight. It is not, and the reason is simple. The First Law is a rule about what happens *inside* the universe. Burn wood, and the energy in the wood turns into heat and light, but the total stays the same. Nothing inside the universe can make new energy out of nothing or make energy vanish. That is all the law says. It does not say anything about where the universe itself came from, any more than the rule "no money is created when you move it between your accounts" proves the bank was never founded. The word "created" is doing double duty. In the law, it means *produced by some process inside the universe*. When Christians say God created the universe, they mean something else: *brought the whole system, its energy and its laws, into being*. The law rules out the first. It is silent on the second. There is more. Physicists know *why* energy is conserved. In 1918 the mathematician Emmy Noether proved that energy conservation comes from a symmetry: the laws of physics work the same at every moment. But the universe as a whole is expanding, so it does not look the same from one moment to the next. That is why physicists say there is no single, conserved total energy for the expanding universe. Light crossing space stretches and loses energy, and that energy does not turn up anywhere else. The law the objection leans on is not even the right tool at the scale it is being used. And a quantity that stays constant is not the same as a thing that has to exist. The Second Law points the other way: if the universe's energy had been running forever, it would already have run down. ![Emmy Noether, the German mathematician who proved in 1918 that energy conservation follows from the laws of physics being the same at every moment](/codex/assets/emmy-noether-portrait.jpg) _Emmy Noether (1882 to 1935), whose 1918 theorem ties energy conservation to time symmetry. Image: public domain, via Wikimedia Commons._ ## In full The objection argues: (1) the First Law of Thermodynamics states that energy can be neither created nor destroyed; (2) all physical reality is a form of energy; (3) therefore the energy of the universe was never created and is eternal; (4) therefore the universe needs no Creator. The defeater runs in five moves: - **Equivocation on "created" (P1).** The First Law forbids the creation of energy by physical processes within a system. Christian doctrine affirms the creation of the whole system by a cause that is not one of its processes. The objection succeeds only by sliding from the first sense to the second. - **Scope of the law (P2).** The First Law is a regularity holding within an existing physical order. A law that describes how a quantity behaves while the system exists cannot, by itself, tell us whether the system began. - **Why the law holds (P3).** By Noether's theorem, energy conservation follows from the time-translation symmetry of the laws. General relativity keeps energy conservation locally, but an expanding universe lacks the global time symmetry needed to define a conserved total energy, which is why cosmological redshift removes energy from light with no compensating gain elsewhere. Physics does not supply the eternal, fixed cosmic total the objection assumes. - **Conserved is not necessary (P4).** A quantity that is constant over time is not thereby a being that exists of necessity. Constancy is a fact about how something behaves; necessity is a fact about whether it could fail to exist. Energy, being measurable, changeable in form and bound to particular laws, has every mark of a contingent thing. - **The Second Law and a finite past (P5).** Even granting a constant total, usable energy runs down. A past-eternal universe would already be at equilibrium; ours is not. That converges with the cosmological evidence for a beginning. The five-step equivocation pattern applies directly: | Step | Application | |---|---| | 1. The contested term | "created" | | 2. Sense A | produced by a physical process inside an existing system, out of nothing within that system | | 3. Sense B | brought into existence, system and laws together, by a cause that is not part of the system | | 4. What the First Law addresses | Sense A only, and it forbids it | | 5. What Christianity affirms | Sense B, *creatio ex nihilo*, which the First Law does not address | ## Argument structure | | Premise | Notes | |---|---|---| | **P1** | The First Law forbids energy being created by processes inside a system, not the creation of the system itself | Equivocation on "created" | | **P2** | A conservation law describes how a quantity behaves while the system exists; it is silent on whether the system began | Scope | | **P3** | Energy conservation follows from time-translation symmetry (Noether); the expanding universe lacks it globally, so there is no conserved cosmic total to call eternal | Noether 1918; general relativity; Carroll 2010 | | **P4** | Being conserved is not the same as existing necessarily; energy bears the marks of a contingent thing | Aquinas; [Contingency Argument](/codex/contingency-argument/) | | **P5** | The Second Law shows the usable energy of the universe has not been running down forever | [Argument from Thermodynamics](/codex/argument-from-thermodynamics/); [Borde-Guth-Vilenkin Theorem](/codex/borde-guth-vilenkin-theorem/) | | **C** | The First Law gives no support to an eternal, uncreated universe | | ## Form Defensive, built on an equivocation. The objection takes a true law and stretches it past its scope. The reply grants the law in full, shows what it covers, and then adds the positive point that the conservation of energy is itself one of the facts about the universe that needs explaining. ## Cheatsheet **The 30-second reply (read aloud).** The First Law is true, and I believe it. But look at what it actually says. Inside the universe, no process can make new energy or destroy it; it only changes form. That is a rule for how things behave once the universe exists. It says nothing about where the universe came from, the same way the rules of chess say nothing about who made the board. And physics tells us why the rule holds: the laws work the same at every moment. The universe as a whole is expanding, so physicists say it has no single conserved total energy at all; light loses energy as space stretches it, and that energy goes nowhere. Finally, something that stays constant is not something that must exist. The Second Law says the universe is running down. If it had been running forever, it would already have stopped. **The 5 fast facts:** 1. **The law is about isolated systems.** The standard statement is that the energy of an isolated system is constant. It assumes a system already exists and asks what happens inside it. 2. **Noether explains it.** Emmy Noether's 1918 theorem showed that if the laws of physics are the same at every moment (time-translation symmetry), a conserved energy follows. The conservation law is a consequence of that symmetry, not an independent fact about eternity. 3. **The expanding universe lacks that symmetry as a whole.** General relativity guarantees energy conservation locally, at every point. But an expanding universe does not look the same from one moment to the next, so there is no general, agreed definition of a conserved total energy for it. Cosmologist Sean Carroll put it bluntly in a 2010 essay titled "Energy Is Not Conserved." 4. **Light loses energy as space stretches.** A photon's energy depends on its frequency (E = hf). As the universe expands, the wavelength of light crossing it is stretched (cosmological redshift) and its energy drops, with no matching gain elsewhere. The cosmic background radiation has cooled this way from roughly 3,000 kelvin when it was released to about 2.7 kelvin today. 5. **The Second Law still runs.** Total energy can stay constant in an ordinary system while the *usable* part of it steadily shrinks. Hot coffee cools; its heat is not gone, only spread out where it can do no work. An eternal universe would be all spread out by now. **The 3 strongest counter-moves:** - *"Created by what?"* Ask whether the law forbids energy being produced *by a physical process*, or forbids *anything* bringing a physical system into being. Only the first is physics. - *"What is the total energy of the universe?"* Ask the objector to state it and say what law conserves it. In an expanding universe there is no agreed answer, which is the point. - *"Is constant the same as necessary?"* A thing can stay the same for as long as it exists and still be the kind of thing that might not have existed at all. **Reciprocal concessions (grant the small point, then collect a bigger one):** - *Grant:* energy is conserved in every experiment ever run. *Now collect:* that perfect bookkeeping is itself a fact that needs explaining. Why does the universe obey a law so exactly, moment after moment? See [Conservation Laws](/codex/conservation-laws/). - *Grant:* matter is a form of energy. *Now collect:* then matter's existence raises the same question energy's does, and the evidence that the present universe had a beginning (the [Big Bang](/codex/big-bang/), the Second Law, the [Borde-Guth-Vilenkin Theorem](/codex/borde-guth-vilenkin-theorem/)) applies to both. - *Grant:* some physicists describe the universe as having zero total energy, positive matter balanced by negative gravitational energy. *Now collect:* a balanced ledger is still a ledger. Zero net energy is a fact about how the universe's contents add up, not an explanation of why there are any contents, or any laws, to add up. **The closing line.** The First Law tells you energy cannot be made by anything *in* the universe. That is exactly why the universe's energy needs an explanation from something that is not. ## P1, The objection equivocates on "created" ### Affirmative case 1. **What the law forbids.** In thermodynamics, "energy cannot be created" means no physical process (burning, colliding, decaying, radiating) produces a net increase in the energy of an isolated system. It is a statement about transformations of what already exists. 2. **What Christianity affirms.** The doctrine of [Creatio ex Nihilo](/codex/creatio-ex-nihilo/) is not a claim that some process inside nature made energy. It is the claim that nature as a whole, its matter, energy, space, time and laws, exists because God gives it existence: *By faith we understand that the worlds have been framed by the word of God, so that what is seen hath not been made out of things which appear* ([Hebrews 11:3](/codex/hebrews-11-3/), ASV). 3. **The two senses do not touch.** Creation in the theological sense is not an event within the physical system, so it is not the kind of thing a law governing events within the system can rule out. ### Anticipated objections 1. *"If God added energy to the universe, that is a violation of the First Law."* ### Rebuttals 1. **Only if the law claims more than it does.** The First Law describes isolated systems. Whether the universe is causally isolated from God is precisely the question at issue, so assuming it to refute creation begs the question. C. S. Lewis made the point in *Miracles* (1947, ch. 8): the laws of nature describe the pattern events follow once they occur; they are not themselves a source of events, and they cannot tell you whether anything outside nature can feed new events into it. ## P2, A conservation law is silent on origins ### Affirmative case 1. **Laws describe behavior over time.** "The total stays constant" is a statement that compares the system at one time to the system at another. It presupposes that the system and its time already exist. 2. **The analogy holds.** A bank's rule that internal transfers never create money proves nothing about when the bank opened. Chess rules govern every move but say nothing about who carved the pieces. 3. **The universe's time had a boundary.** The [Borde-Guth-Vilenkin Theorem](/codex/borde-guth-vilenkin-theorem/) shows that a universe that has, on average, been expanding cannot be extended infinitely into the past. A law that runs "from moment to moment" cannot carry the objector past the first moment. ### Anticipated objections 1. *"If energy can never be destroyed, it can never have begun either. The law is symmetric in time."* ### Rebuttals 1. **Symmetric within time, not beyond it.** Conservation compares states at different times inside the physical order. At a past boundary there is no earlier state for the comparison to reach. Extending the law to "before time" is not applying physics; it is assuming that the physical order has no boundary, which is the conclusion the objector needs to prove. ## P3, Noether, the expanding universe and the missing cosmic total ### Affirmative case 1. **Why energy is conserved.** Emmy Noether's 1918 theorem showed that every continuous symmetry of a system's laws yields a conserved quantity. Invariance under shifts in time yields conservation of energy. The First Law is the downstream consequence of a symmetry, not a free-standing fact about energy's eternity. See [Conservation Laws](/codex/conservation-laws/). 2. **General relativity keeps it locally.** In Einstein's theory, energy and momentum are conserved at every point: what flows into a small region equals what flows out plus what accumulates there. 3. **But not as a global total in an expanding universe.** To turn local conservation into a single conserved number for the whole universe, the spacetime itself must be unchanged under shifts in time. An expanding universe is not: it is larger and cooler later than earlier. Physicists therefore say there is no general, agreed definition of a conserved total energy for such a universe. Sean Carroll's 2010 essay "Energy Is Not Conserved" is a well-known popular statement: photons "redshift, losing energy as space expands," and the reason energy is ordinarily conserved is time-translation invariance, which the expanding universe lacks. 4. **The redshift example.** Light from distant galaxies arrives stretched to longer wavelengths. Since a photon's energy is E = hf, lower frequency means less energy, and no other part of the universe gains what the light loses. ### Anticipated objections 1. *"Some physicists define a total energy of the universe anyway, and it comes out to zero. So energy is conserved after all, and a zero-energy universe can come from nothing."* 2. *"If energy is not conserved globally, then you cannot use thermodynamics against an eternal universe either."* ### Rebuttals 1. **Zero is still something, and the definitions are contested.** Edward Tryon proposed in 1973 (*Nature* 246) that the universe's positive mass-energy might be balanced by negative gravitational energy. Whether that bookkeeping is meaningful depends on which definition of gravitational energy one adopts, and there is no general agreement. More basically, a balanced account is not an empty account. The zero-energy proposal still requires fields, a spacetime and laws that make the positive and negative entries balance. That is a structured physical order, not nothing. See [Quantum Fluctuations Are Uncaused Objection Defeater](/codex/quantum-fluctuations-are-uncaused-objection-defeater/) and [Zero and the Metaphysics of Nothing](/codex/zero-and-the-metaphysics-of-nothing/). 2. **The Second Law does not depend on a conserved cosmic total.** The thermodynamic case for a beginning turns on entropy, the spreading-out of usable energy, which increases in the expanding universe as in any isolated system. That argument stands whether or not a global energy total can be defined. See [Second Law of Thermodynamics](/codex/second-law-of-thermodynamics/). ## P4, Conserved does not mean necessary ### Affirmative case 1. **Two different properties.** Being *conserved* means the amount does not change while the system exists. Being *necessary* means the thing could not have failed to exist at all. The first is a fact about behavior; the second is a fact about existence. One does not imply the other. 2. **Energy has the marks of contingency.** It comes in definite, measurable amounts; it changes form constantly; it obeys specific laws that could, so far as logic goes, have been otherwise. Nothing in its nature explains why it exists rather than not. 3. **The classical point.** Thomas Aquinas argued that in every created thing what it is (its essence) is distinct from the fact that it is (its existence), so its existence must come from outside it (*De Ente et Essentia*, ch. 4). Aquinas held that reason alone could not prove the world had a temporal beginning (*Summa Theologiae* I q.46), yet argued that even an everlasting world would depend on God for its existence at every moment. So the Christian case does not stand or fall on the age of the universe. See [Contingency Argument](/codex/contingency-argument/) and [Necessary vs Contingent Being](/codex/necessary-vs-contingent-being/). ### Anticipated objections 1. *"The universe is just a brute fact. It needs no explanation."* ### Rebuttals 1. **Then the First Law did no work.** If the objector retreats to "brute fact," the original argument from conservation has been dropped. The question becomes whether a contingent, law-bound, measurable reality can simply exist for no reason, which is the debate the [Principle of Sufficient Reason](/codex/principle-of-sufficient-reason/) and the [Contingency Argument](/codex/contingency-argument/) address directly. ## P5, The Second Law and a finite past ### Affirmative case 1. **Constant total, shrinking usefulness.** Even where total energy is conserved, the Second Law says the energy available to do work keeps falling as heat spreads out. A cooling cup of coffee loses no energy to the universe; it loses only the ability to do anything with it. 2. **An eternal past would mean heat death already.** Given infinite past time, the universe would long since have reached equilibrium: no gradients, no stars, no life. It has not. See [Argument from Thermodynamics](/codex/argument-from-thermodynamics/). 3. **The convergence.** The thermodynamic evidence, the [Big Bang](/codex/big-bang/) and the [Borde-Guth-Vilenkin Theorem](/codex/borde-guth-vilenkin-theorem/) all point to a universe whose present order had a beginning. ### Anticipated objections 1. *"Maybe the universe cycles, resetting itself each time."* ### Rebuttals 1. **Cycles carry entropy forward.** Richard Tolman showed in 1934 that in an oscillating universe entropy accumulates from cycle to cycle, so the cycles cannot extend infinitely into the past. See [Argument from Thermodynamics](/codex/argument-from-thermodynamics/) and [Quantum Physics Reverses Entropy Objection Defeater](/codex/quantum-physics-reverses-entropy-objection-defeater/). ## Master objections to the defeater **MO1: "You are just using God to fill a gap in physics."** - The argument does not rest on what physics has failed to explain. It rests on what the First Law actually says (a rule for processes inside a system), on what physics has positively found (no conserved cosmic total in an expanding universe, entropy rising, a past boundary), and on a distinction of logic (constant is not necessary). **MO2: "Science will eventually explain where energy came from."** - Any scientific explanation of energy's origin would describe a prior physical state governed by laws, which is more physical reality whose existence also needs accounting for. The question "why is there a physical order at all?" is not one more gap inside that order. **MO3: "God would also need a cause."** - The causal principle concerns what begins to exist or depends on another for its existence. The argument above identifies energy as that kind of thing. God, as the necessary and uncaused ground of existence, is not. See [Who Created God Objection Defeater](/codex/who-created-god-objection-defeater/). ## Tactical opening / closing - **Opening.** "I agree with the First Law completely. Let's read it carefully and see what it covers." - **Closing.** "Nothing in the universe can make energy. That is the best reason I know to look outside the universe for where it came from." ## Connection to Scripture - *Of old didst thou lay the foundation of the earth; And the heavens are the work of thy hands. They shall perish, but thou shalt endure; Yea, all of them shall wax old like a garment* ([Psalm 102:25-26](/codex/psalms-102-25-27/), ASV). The psalm sets a created order that wears out against a Creator who does not. - *And he is before all things, and in him all things consist* ([Colossians 1:17](/codex/colossians-1-17/), ASV). The steadiness of the created order, which the conservation laws describe, is attributed to Christ, who holds it together. - These texts are not physics and should not be read as predictions of thermodynamics. They do describe a world that is constant because it is upheld, and finite because it was made, which is the picture the physical evidence fits. ## Live-cite kit **Scientific:** - Emmy Noether, "Invariante Variationsprobleme," *Nachrichten von der Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften zu Göttingen* (1918) - Sean Carroll, "Energy Is Not Conserved," *Preposterous Universe* (22 February 2010) - Edward Tryon, "Is the Universe a Vacuum Fluctuation?" *Nature* 246 (1973) - Arvind Borde, Alan Guth and Alexander Vilenkin, "Inflationary spacetimes are incomplete in past directions," *Physical Review Letters* 90 (2003) - Richard Tolman, *Relativity, Thermodynamics and Cosmology* (1934) **Philosophical:** - Thomas Aquinas, *De Ente et Essentia*, ch. 4; *Summa Theologiae* I q.2 a.3 and q.46 - C. S. Lewis, *Miracles* (1947), ch. 8 **Aphorism:** - "The First Law says nothing in the universe can make energy. Good. Then something outside it did." - "Constant is not the same as necessary. My bank balance can sit still for years; that does not make it eternal." - "Energy is conserved because the laws hold still in time. The universe does not hold still." ## Scholarship Published academic works this page draws on, each matched to a publisher, index or library catalog record. - Arvind Borde, Alan H. Guth and Alexander Vilenkin, "Inflationary Spacetimes Are Incomplete in Past Directions," *Physical Review Letters* 90 (2003). [doi:10.1103/physrevlett.90.151301](https://doi.org/10.1103/physrevlett.90.151301) [PubMed 12732026](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12732026/) [open access](https://arxiv.org/pdf/gr-qc/0110012) - Richard Chace Tolman, *Relativity, thermodynamics and cosmology* (1934). [Open Library](https://openlibrary.org/works/OL1114573W) - Edward P. Tryon, "Is the Universe a Vacuum Fluctuation?" *Nature* 246 (1973). [doi:10.1038/246396a0](https://doi.org/10.1038/246396a0) ## See also - [Conservation Laws](/codex/conservation-laws/), what the conservation laws are, Noether's theorem, and why lawful constancy itself needs explaining - [Argument from Thermodynamics](/codex/argument-from-thermodynamics/), the Second Law case for a beginning - [Second Law of Thermodynamics](/codex/second-law-of-thermodynamics/), the law the objection overlooks - [The Heat Death Argument](/codex/the-heat-death-argument/), what a running-down universe means for human hope - [Quantum Physics Reverses Entropy Objection Defeater](/codex/quantum-physics-reverses-entropy-objection-defeater/), the companion objection about entropy - [Quantum Fluctuations Are Uncaused Objection Defeater](/codex/quantum-fluctuations-are-uncaused-objection-defeater/), why a vacuum is not nothing - [God Is the Eternal Atoms Objection Defeater](/codex/god-is-the-eternal-atoms-objection-defeater/), the same argument made for atoms - [Contingency Argument](/codex/contingency-argument/), why a contingent universe needs a necessary ground - [Creatio ex Nihilo](/codex/creatio-ex-nihilo/), the doctrine the objection misreads - [Expansion of the Universe](/codex/expansion-of-the-universe/), the expansion that removes a global conserved energy - [Cosmic Microwave Background](/codex/cosmic-microwave-background/), radiation cooled by cosmic expansion - [Kalam Cosmological Argument](/codex/kalam-cosmological-argument/), the broader case for a beginning - [Atheism](/codex/atheism/), master hub
## Common questions this page answers **Q: If energy cannot be created or destroyed, doesn't that mean the universe is eternal?** No. The First Law says no process inside the universe can create or destroy energy. It describes how energy behaves once the universe exists, and says nothing about whether the universe itself had a beginning. The Second Law actually points toward a beginning, since an eternal universe would already have run down. **Q: If energy can't be created, how could God create the universe?** The First Law forbids energy being produced by physical processes within a system. Creation in the Christian sense is not a physical process inside the universe; it is God giving existence to the whole system, its energy and its laws together. The law does not address that kind of cause. **Q: Is energy really conserved in the expanding universe?** Locally, yes: general relativity keeps energy conserved at every point. But energy conservation comes from the laws being the same at every moment, and the expanding universe as a whole changes over time, so physicists say there is no general, conserved total energy for it. Light crossing expanding space loses energy to redshift without that energy appearing anywhere else. **Q: Where does heat go if energy is never destroyed?** It spreads out. When hot coffee cools, its heat passes into the cup, the air and the table, so the total is kept but the energy becomes too dispersed to do useful work. That steady loss of usable energy is the Second Law of Thermodynamics, and across the universe it leads toward heat death. **Q: Does conservation of energy mean energy exists necessarily?** No. Being conserved means the amount stays constant while the system exists. Being necessary means the thing could not fail to exist. Energy comes in measurable amounts, changes form and follows particular laws, which are the marks of something contingent that needs an explanation for its existence. **Q: Is the total energy of the universe zero?** Some physicists, starting with Edward Tryon in 1973, have proposed that positive matter energy is balanced by negative gravitational energy. Whether that total is well defined is disputed. Even if it were zero, a balanced account still requires fields, spacetime and laws, which is a structured physical reality, not nothing.