The Big Bang Is Not the Bogeyman Some Would Make It Out to Be
When I was teaching Sunday school, I did a series of classes using Lee Strobel's works. The following is from The Case for A Creator, chapter 5. While there may be the stray original item from me, I deserve no credit for what is written in this particular article. It is properly attributed to Lee Strobel in its entirety.
From the get-go I want to be clear that I am not taking a position on the young earth/old earth debate in this post. As non-essential doctrine, I don't get too wound up about it. Devout Christians that I hold in high regard come down on different sides of the issue. And each of them is, to the best of my knowledge, a slave to the truth and intellectual honesty. I find Dr. John Lennox's remark that we know that God created but not necessarily when He created quite fitting. However, I will admit a bias for Scripture and the testimony of our Lord Jesus Christ on the matter.
In his book The First Three Minutes, physicist Steven Weinberg said, "In the beginning there was an explosion. Not an explosion like those familiar on Earth, starting from a definite center and spreading out to engulf more and more of the circumambient air, but an explosion which occurred simultaneously everywhere, filling all space from the beginning with every particle of matter rushing apart from every other particle." And interestingly enough, there were photons… he further said, “The universe was filled with light.” Now to me, it seems that Dr. Weinberg's words provide a good scientific description of the creation event described very simply in Genesis 1:1.
In ancient times, Christian philosophers sought to refute Aristotle’s view that the universe is eternal. While the universe seemed upon observation to be eternal, Christian, Jewish and Muslim theologians believed Scripture's proclamation that God created the universe at a specific time in the finite past. Aristotle believed that God isn’t the creator of the universe but simply imbues order into it.
Muslim theologians picked up these arguments when Islam took over North Africa. The tradition became lost to the Christian West, but it began to be highly developed within Islamic medieval theology. One of the most prominent Muslim scholars was al-Ghazali (1058-1111).
It got passed back into Latin Christendom via Jewish thinkers who lived side-by-side with Muslim theologians, particularly in Spain. It has become known as the Kalam Cosmological Argument.
‘Kalam’ reflects its Arabic origin - it means ‘speech’ or ‘doctrine’ - and it came to characterize the highly academic (Muslim) theology of the Middle Ages, which later evaporated.
It is the simplest of philosophical arguments, just 3 steps (2 premises and a conclusion). It follows:
1. That which begins to exist has a cause
2. The universe began to exist
3. Therefore, the universe has a cause
Then, doing a conceptual analysis of what it means to be a cause of the universe, we find surprising number of divine attributes can be identified.
That Which Begins to Exist Has a Cause
We would expect this to be accepted by virtually everyone, but scientific evidence that the universe began to exist is now so extensive that atheists are forced to attack the first premise.
People who take this position generally don’t try to prove the premise is false because they can’t do that. Instead they dial their skepticism so high that nothing could convince them. While it’s true they have the right to play the skeptic, no one should demand unreasonable standards of proof.
It’s intuitively obvious - one never has to worry about a giraffe suddenly appearing in front of your car during your morning commute or a tiger suddenly appearing in your living room while you are out, using it for a litter box. It’s a principle constantly verified by science. At the very least, we have better reason to believe it’s true than false.
I think it's also important to grasp the idea of absolute nothingness. For instance, it’s not empty space. Space is not empty; there are plenty of particles there and unseen forces at work.
Scientists have theorized that some sort of quantum vacuum could be responsible for bringing the universe into existence. But in experiments, what scientists have detected are actually ‘virtual particles’ - theoretical entities that it's not even clear exist. "Nonetheless," says Dr. William Lane Craig, " a quantum vacuum is a sea of fluctuating energy, with a rich physical structure and can be described by physical laws." It is most certainly not nothing.
Even famous skeptic David Hume said, “I never asserted so absurd a proposition as that anything might arise without a cause.” Historically, no one has defended such an absurd position, but skeptics have been backed into a corner by the evidence the universe had a beginning.
The Universe Had a Beginning
Ever since the ancient Greeks the assumption has been that the universe is eternal. Christians just had to say that even though it appears static, we believe the Bible. The 20th Century discovery that the universe is not unchanging and eternal was surprising and unanticipated.
Early Christian and Muslim scholars used mathematical reasoning to demonstrate that it’s impossible to have an infinite past. They pointed out the absurdities that would result if you were to have an actually infinite number of things. While infinity is used in theoretical realms, it is just conceptual. It can't obtain in the real world (of course, here I would submit that God is the only thing in reality in which infinity does exist).
Christian and Muslim scholars pointed out that you cannot have an infinite number of events in the past. You could never arrive at the present. Even if you could have an actual infinite number of things, you could never form a collection by adding one member after another because no matter what you can always add one more. This is true of things like marbles or sticks as well as increments of time. This is sometimes called the Impossibility of Traversing the Infinite.
Then, in the 20th Century, scientific evidence amassed supporting what Christians have always believed. Einstein noticed that his General Theory of Relativity described a dynamic universe. He actually had to put in a fudge factor the get a static universe.
In 1929, Edwin Hubble observed that light from distant galaxies was redder than it should be. This red shift indicated that the universe is flying apart at incredible velocities.
Then in 1940s, a scientist predicted that if the Big Bang really happened, then the background temperature of the universe should be just a few degrees above absolute zero. In 1965 two scientists discovered the universe’s background radiation - only 3.7 degrees above absolute zero.
The very, very light elements like deuterium and helium cannot be synthesized in the interior of stars like heavy elements - it's not hot enough. They must have been formed in the furnace of the Big Bang in temps that were billions of degrees.
Scientists believe they can see all the way back to the first 1/10 million trillion trillion trillionth of a second of the creation of the universe, back to the Singularity, essentially to the very beginning of the universe. The Singularity is the state at which the space-time curvature, along with temperature, density and pressure becomes infinite. It’s the beginning point, the point at which the Big Bang occurred.
When asked about how the theory is regarded, William Lane Craig said, “It’s the standard paradigm of contemporary cosmology. I would say that its broad framework is very securely established as a scientific fact. Stephen Hawking has said, ‘Almost everyone now believes that the universe, and time itself, had a beginning at the Big Bang.’”
But many people, many scientists, don’t like the implications. One has said "it irritates me,” another called it "repugnant." Still another said, "I would like to reject it." Robert Jastrow, astronomer and planetary physicist, said he found it "distasteful to the scientific mind." Now to be fair, I'm not suggesting all scientists dislike it because of its possible theological implications. For many, it's simply a matter of a dislike for the disorderly and/or unexplained. Jastrow encapsulated this sentiment well when he added, "There is a kind of religion in science: it is the religion of a person who believes there is order and harmony in the Universe. Every event can be explained in a rational way as the product of some previous event; every effect must have its cause; there is no First Cause… This religious faith of the scientist is violated by the discovery that the world had a beginning under conditions in which the known laws of physics are not valid, and as a product of forces or circumstances we cannot discover. When that happens, the scientist has lost control. If he really examined the implications, he would be traumatized."
Therefore, the Universe Has a Cause
Only a personal explanation can account for the first cause of the universe. A scientific explanation is insufficient. As William Lane Craig notes, “Since it’s the first state, it simply cannot be explained in terms of earlier initial conditions and natural laws leading up to it.” So what can we deduce about this personal cause? The entity must transcend space and time since it created both; must be eternal and uncaused since it fulfills the role of necessary first condition; must be unimaginably powerful, since it created the universe out of nothing; must be immaterial since nothing physical existed before it created the universe; and it must possess free will and personal agency since it chose to create.
Last I checked, an extremely powerful, eternally existing immaterial Being with freedom of will and personal agency was as good a definition of God as any. And it is logically derived from what we know of the beginnings of the universe. Christians have nothing to fear from the Big Bang; on the contrary, it can be useful in our apologetic efforts. It is not the age of the universe that is important to our efforts here but the fact that the universe had a beginning. Whether that beginning was sooner rather than later is of little import for our purposes here. As we have demonstrated, the fact that EVERYTHING, even time itself, came into existence with the creation of the universe has huge implications for both the theist and the naturalist.