How Did the Universe Begin? — Science and God

By Stephen Meyer – Discovery Institute – for Prager U

Was the universe always here? Or did it have a beginning? If so, how did it start?

From ancient times, philosophers and theologians have debated these questions.

But it wasn’t until the 20th century that a series of stunning scientific discoveries finally enabled us to get some answers. 

The story begins in 1912 when American astronomer Vesto Slipher observed that light coming from distant “nebulae” (clouds of dust and gas in outer space) appeared redder than expected. 

Why was this important?

Here’s where your high school science pays off. Remember learning about the Doppler effect? The frequency of sound, light, or other waves changes as the source and observer move toward (or away from) each other. To demonstrate this, your science teacher likely played a recording of a train whistle:  the pitch of the whistle lowers—that is, the sound wave stretches out—as the train recedes into the distance.

Well, the same thing happens with light.  

If a distant star or galaxy is moving away from us, the light coming from that object will also stretch out. Since in the spectrum of visible light, red light corresponds to the longest wave lengths physicists say light that has been stretched out has been “red shifted.” 

This evidence of “red-shift” suggested the nebulae were moving away from us.

In 1924 astronomer Edwin Hubble, working with a new 100-inch telescope on Mt. Wilson in California, showed that Slipher’s “nebulae” were not just clouds of gas around distant stars, but actually distant galaxies beyond our Milky Way. 

Soon after that, the Belgian physicist George Lemaître correlated Slipher’s red-shift data with Hubble’s measurements of the distances to other galaxies. Lemaître showed that galaxies that were farther away were receding faster than those close at hand. That suggested a spherical expansion of the universe in all directions of space, as if the universe were expanding like a balloon from a singular explosive beginning—from a “big bang.”

Oddly, Albert Einstein had earlier tumbled to this idea but then dismissed it. 

Einstein’s new theory of gravity known as general relativity envisioned massive bodies altering the curvature of space like a bowling ball making a depression on a trampoline. 

Einstein’s concept of gravity implied that space would contract in on itself unless gravity was continually counteracted by the expansion of space. For this reason, Einstein posited a constantly acting repulsive force—known as the cosmological constant—to counter gravitational attraction. But that implied a dynamic and expanding universe. . . and also a beginning. 

To avoid this conclusion, Einstein altered his own equations by arbitrarily assigning a precise value to the force of expansion to ensure that the strength of gravity and the repulsive force exactly balanced.  Thus he depicted the universe in a perfectly poised, static state—neither expanding from a beginning, nor contracting toward a collapse.

But then with Slipher and Hubble’s discoveries, the heavens talked back. In 1927, Lemaître informed Einstein (in a taxi cab, no less) about the red shift evidence for an expanding universe. In 1931, Einstein visited Hubble at the Mt. Wilson observatory and viewed the evidence for himself.  Later, he announced, to his great credit, that denying the evidence for the universe having had a beginning was “the greatest blunder of my scientific career.”

Throughout the 20th century, physicists proposed other theories that denied a cosmic beginning. One by one new evidence showed each to be inadequate. By the 1990s, the Big Bang theory had prevailed as the best explanation for multiple lines of astronomical evidence.  

So why was such evidence upsetting to Einstein and to many other scientists?  Princeton University physicist Robert Dicke, explained: “[an infinitely old universe would] relieve us of the necessity of [explaining] the origin of matter at any finite time in the past.” 

And so it would.

But if the physical universe of matter, energy, space and time had a beginning, it becomes extremely difficult to conceive of a physical or material cause for the origin of the universe. After all, it was matter and energy that first came into existence at the Big Bang. Before that, no matter or energy would have yet existed to do the causing. Consequently, whatever did cause the universe to exist would need to be immaterial and exist beyond space and time.  

To many scientists and philosophers all this sounds an awful lot like the first words of the Bible: “In the beginning God created the Heavens and the Earth.”

I’m Stephen Meyer of the Discovery Institute and author of Return of the God Hypothesis, for Prager University.

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From “The Devil’s Delusion” by David Berlinski – starting on pg 70

If the Big Bang expresses a new idea in physics, it suggests an old idea in thought: In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. This unwelcome juxtaposition of physical and biblical ideas persuaded the astrophysicist Fred Hoyle, an ardent atheist, to dismiss the Big Bang after he had named it. In this he was not alone. Many physicists have found the idea that the universe had a beginning alarming. “So long as the universe had a beginning,” Stephen Hawking has written, “we could suppose it had a creator.” God forbid!

Nonetheless, there is a very natural connection between the fact that the universe had a beginning and the hypothesis that it had a creator. It is a connection so plain that, glowing with its own energy, it may be seen in the dark.

Although questions may be raised about what it means, the connection itself cannot be ignored. “The best data we have concerning the big bang,” the Nobel laureate Arno Penzias remarked, “are exactly what I would have predicted, had I nothing to go on but the five books of Moses, the Psalms, the Bible as a whole.” Remarks such as this traveled far afield. They were repeated gratefully by men and women persuaded that at last cosmology had made some sort of sense.

They appeared in the New York Times. Physicists quickly came to their senses. They discovered elaborate reasons to avoid the obvious, not least of which, the fact that the obvious was obvious. For more than a century, physicists had taken a manful pride in the fact that theirs was a discipline that celebrated the weird, the bizarre, the unexpected, the mind-bending, and the recondite. Here was a connection that any intellectual primitive could at once grasp: The universe had a beginning, thus something must have caused it to begin. Where would physics be, physicists asked themselves, if we had paid the slightest attention to the obvious?

In this, the physicists were immeasurably assisted by the philosophers, their traditional enemies, of course, who aided in the work at hand by writing very elegant papers demonstrating that if the universe had a beginning, it was not a beginning that really began. The philosopher Adolf Grünbaum of the University of Pittsburgh was a master of this approach. If the universe did not have a beginning, his papers did not have an end. Fair is fair. Physicists who had been struggling to make precisely the same point welcomed such philosophical efforts with the relief a stutterer might show on having his interlocutor blurt out the stammered word.

All might have been well, or at least better than it turned out to be, had the Big Bang been another one of those tedious ideas that flicker luridly for a moment and then wink out. There are so many of them. But quite the contrary proved to be the case. Over the course of more than half a century—a very long time in the history of the physical sciences—inferences gathered strength separately, and when combined they gathered strength in virtue of their combination. One line of inference was observational; the second, theoretical; the two together, irresistible.

The inference to the Big Bang now follows. A universe that is expanding is a universe with a clear path into the past. If things are now far apart, they must at one point have been close together; and if things were once close together, they must at one point have been hotter than they are now, the contraction of space acting to compress its constituents like a vise, and so increase their energy. The retreat into the past ends in a state in which material particles are at no distance from one another and the temperature, density, and curvature of the universe are infinite. Such a state is known as a singularity, and in the case of the cosmos it is known as the Big Bang singularity.
The cone tapering into the past must end. The lines of sight converge. The universe had a beginning.

Searching for what he wished to find, Einstein discovered a solution to his own equations that specified just such a universe, the great thing having been there from the infinite past and destined to be there into the infinite future. For reasons that he could never make clear, Einstein found a universe so conceived particularly satisfying. Friends of his who knew him well have suggested (to me) that to the end of his life, Einstein regarded an expanding universe with a certain fastidious distaste.

In the 1920s, both Aleksandr Friedmann and Georges Lemaître discovered the solutions to the field equations that have dominated cosmology ever since, their work coming to amalgamate itself into a single denomination as Friedmann-Lemaître (FL) cosmology. To Einstein’s pained surprise, FL
cosmology indicated that the universe was either expanding or contracting, a conclusion nicely in accord with Hubble’s observation but profoundly in conflict with models of the universe in which the universe remained resolutely unchanging.

Having been joined at the fulcrum of observation and theory, Big Bang cosmology has been confirmed by additional evidence, some of it astonishing. In 1963, the physicists Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson observed what seemed to be the living remnants of the Big Bang—and after 14 billion years!—when in 1962 they detected, by means of a hum in their equipment, a signal in the night sky they could only explain as the remnants of the microwave radiation background left over from the Big Bang itself. More than anything else, this observation, and the inference it provoked, persuaded physicists that the structure of Big Bang cosmology was anchored into fact.

The wheel had come full circle.

If both theory and evidence suggested that the universe had a beginning, it was natural for physicists to imagine that by tweaking the evidence and adjusting the theory, they could get
rid of what they did not want. Perhaps the true and the good universe—the one without a beginning—might be reached by skirting the Big Bang singularity, or bouncing off it in some way? But in the mid-1960s, Roger Penrose and Stephen Hawking demonstrated that insofar as the backward contraction of the universe was controlled by the equations of general relativity, almost all lines of conveyance came to an end.

The singularity was inescapable.

This conclusion encouraged the theologians but did little to ease physicists in their own minds, for while it strengthened the unwholesome conclusions that Big Bang cosmology had already established, it left a good deal else in a fog. In many ways, this was the worst of all possible worlds. Religious believers had emerged from their seminars well satisfied with what they could understand; the physicists themselves could understand nothing very well.

The fog that attended the Penrose-Hawking singularity theorems (there is more than one) arose spontaneously whenever physicists tried to determine just what the singularity signified. At the singularity itself, a great many physical parameters zoom to infinity. Just what is one to make of infinite temperature? Or particles that are no distance from one another. The idea of a singularity, as the astronomer Joseph Silk observed, is “completely unacceptable as a physical description of the universe. . . An infinitely dense universe [is] where the laws of physics, and even space and time, break down.”

Does the singularity describe a physical state of affairs or not? Tell us.

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Berlinski continues by stating that a singularity can tell us nothing about the origin of the universe because the singularity itself does not appear to describe anything physical, at least not physical in relation to any known description of the universe. I disagree.

It is precisely what one should expect if the Creator of the universe is the infinite, eternal God as described in the pages of Scripture. An infinitely hot, infinitely dense entity is just another description of an attribute of God who dwells in unapproachable light and is a consuming fire whom none dare approach lest he be undone and consumed. The Great I Am cannot be understood by the laws He created to govern the physical universe. He exists outside of and before space/time matter/energy were made. So states the Scripture and so states the universe.