Since a universe is not possible without God,  we will have to change the question Instead of asking what the universe would be like without God, let’s ask, what would the universe be like if God were not the God revealed to us in the Bible?

The God revealed in the Bible has four main characteristics:

Power

Faithfulness

Love

Wisdom

Imagine a universe ruled by a God without those traits.

Power. Let’s go back to the beginning of the universe. The Big Bang was an enormously tricky thing to pull off. If the universe expanded too quickly, all matter would be scattered too quickly for anything to form. Nothing would come of it. If it expanded just a tiny bit too slowly, it would collapse on itself and nothing would happen. There was no margin for error.

The matter that expanded had to be remarkably smooth as it blew across space, otherwise it would create such turbulence that nothing could hold together. All would descend into chaos. Yet it had to have just a tiny bit of roughness, scratchiness, otherwise the matter could not have been able to clump together to form stars and the earth and all the other components of the universe. The velocity of the explosion and the composition of matter both had to be exactly right to an astounding level of perfection, or the universe would be chaos.

Only a God powerful beyond our comprehension could exert that kind of control. Had God not been as powerful as the Bible claims, any attempt to create a universe would produce a chaotic wasteland in which nothing could ever get organized enough to amount to anything.

Faithfulness. Our universe is governed by laws: of gravity, thermodynamics, electromagnetism, chemistry, physics. It is, to a large degree, predictable. It has patterns, seasons, continuity. It runs on order and logic. All these things are what make science possible. We can understand the universe because we can count on it being, in most ways, the same today as it was yesterday. The earth will orbit the sun in a predictable way, chemical reactions will occur faithfully, providing food and oxygen, our senses will give us accurate and reliable information about our surroundings. That could happen only in a universe in which God is faithful.

We can count on God to be who God is. We can count on God’s universe to be what God made it to be.

If God were not as faithful as Bible claims, we would live in a baffling, magical world. That may sound like fun and sheer fantasy. But imagine living in a world where things happen for no reason, where the only way anything ever survives is by sheer luck. A universe in which God is not faithful would be a nightmare of insanity.

Love. Imagine if everything in the universe were 100% reliable and predictable. Imagine a world in which everything happens according to a plan, a formula. It would be very easy on God. It would be easy on us. No problems, ever. Religious people with a “control freak” view of God believe the universe is like that.

But if the universe were like that, then nothing new would ever take place. Imagine a universe in which choices do not exist. Where life simply repeats itself in an endless cycle. Nothing ever changes or evolves. I don’t think you could call that life at all. It would be a robotic world, a sterile world of machines, performing exactly as programmed. It would be a universe in which nothing surprising, interesting, or important would ever happen.

A world without love would be a world that existed only for the creator, shared with no one.

Wisdom. How do you create a universe that balances the opposite needs of faithfulness and love? That preserves enough order so that we can understand and depend upon it, yet creates enough change and spontaneity and chance and surprise and choice so that what we know as life can exist? It takes incredible wisdom to figure out how to keep those in balance.

Genetics provides insight into how God reconciles opposites to achieve balance. How does God demonstrate faithfulness, preserving order and dependability? Through the use of DNA replication, a template system that makes offspring the same as their parents. This process transfers thousands of traits from one generation to the next so that there is continuity. So that baby humans do not come out as ostriches, or bacteria, or cabbages but as something very much like what the parents were.

At the same time, God uses random genetic recombination, jumping genes, and mutation so that at each birth a new person is created, a person entirely different from any that ever existed before. Possibililty and change have been built into the system. If God were not wise, God could never have accomplished such a system. All life would be lurching between the twin extremes of chaos and meaningless mechanical existence.

If God were not wise, the incredibly delicate balances of nature required to keep such diametrically opposed concepts as faithfulness and love in balance would be impossible to achieve. Agnostics point to the intricate systems and laws of nature and say that these are what run the world, not God. But there is nothing scientific in such proclamations. In science, you don’t get something from nothing. Processes do not create themselves; laws do not create themselves.

Power does not just happen. Faithfulness does not just happen. Love does not just happen. Wisdom does not just happen. The universe works because

Gen 1:4 “ I am the Beginning and the End; the Almighty God. ”

The universe works because God is powerful, faithful, loving, and wise.

The wisdom of God determined that what makes existence most worthwhile is relationship. So God created us and the universe to share relationship. Relationship cannot happen between strangers. We cannot share any relationship with God if we do not know God. But a God of negative infinity is so far beyond us that we cannot know anything about God unless God chooses to make it known, unless God chooses to come to us and reveal it.

The first step in God coming to us was the creation of a universe built on faithfulness, love, and wisdom to reflect what God is, so that we would know who God is.

Look about you. From the tiniest particle of matter to the vastness of the greatest galaxy , God is there. The whole universe declares that God has come in power, in wisdom, in faithfulness, and in love to share the gift of life.

And that is only the start. God keeps finding more and better ways to come to us, to reveal more and more to us about who God is.