The Big Bang and the Cosmological Argument for God
If Biblical Creation is Wrong, Why Believe It?
As the island of our knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance.John Wheeler
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Thursday, 28 November 2002
Monday, 12 March 2007
Abstract
The Christian U-Turn
From the Enlightenment, some of its greatest minds of science have dismissed God as an unnecessary hypothesis, unnecessary to explain how galaxies came to shine or how life grew so complex. The universe could be explained by the laws of physics alone, and the late astronomer and atheist Carl Sagan concluded, there was “nothing for a Creator to do”, and every thinking person was forced to admit “the absence of God”.
In the last few decades, Christians have decided to live by the motto, “If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em”. Although skeptical scientists still insist that science has no need of religion, theologians now admit religion needs science. People like physicist turned theologian, Robert John Russell, of the grandly titled Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences, accept religion cannot make its moral claims persuasive or its spiritual comfort effective without credible cognitive claims.
Most Americans might believe in a God they can pray to but not as many believe in the biblical God with his finger wiggling briskly in history. They do not find the God credible who parts seas, or individually created every species, or stops the sun in the sky. Fearing that people, even minimally acquainted with science, are increasingly seeing religion as anachronistic, theologians are blatantly aiming to hijack natural science as evidence for Christian belief.
Scientists, who are Christians, like astronomer, Allan Sandage, are being urged to come out of the closet and aver that scientific discoveries support rather than undercut faith and a sense of the spiritual. Allan Sandage came to God through half a lifetime of astronomy. He wondered why there is something rather than nothing, and so “willed himself to accept God”. Today the scientific community scorns faith, says Sandage.
The reason is clear enough. Faith requires the most rational people to abandon their sense and believe absurd things. Whatever brand of Christianity is adopted, they believe the bible. Yet this primitive book, full of horrors, contradictions and untruths, has to be accepted as “The Truth”. If Sandage and people like him can abandon a rational position to believe ancient fictions, they really ought to examine their own thought processes and motivations. It is less the humility of men like Sandage that take them to God than their arrogance. When someone as clever as they are cannot understand something, they are obliged to concede something is cleverer. It could only be God. Yet, they are not clever enough to wonder why there should be a God in the first place, or how it is a hypothesis that explains anything.
The Big Bang
A few years before the millennium, Martyn Chown, a prominent science writer for the New Scientist, described the Big Bang as a “titanic fireball” that “erupted, literally out of nothing” and at the instant of the eruption of the fireball, “all matter energy, space and time came into being”. Answering the question, “How could this be?”, Chown wrote that the theories are “not yet good enough”.
The idea of a Big Bang, albeit not the name, came about when astronomers realized that the universe was expanding and not in a static equilibrium, as they had thought. Previously, it was far from certain that there had been anything that could be called a creation. The idea was put forward by a Christian priest called the Abbé Georges Lemaître, a Belgian physicist in 1927, and was popularized by the Russian, George Gamow. Arthur Eddington brought Lemaître’s paper to the attention of the scientific world, which otherwise had ignored it.
Keen to keep the notion of equilibrium, some physicists decided that the expansion must be due to the continuous creation of matter. Eddington, a life long Quaker, who experimentally confirmed Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity in 1919, did not like the idea of a beginning. Despite that, in 1933, he published his popular work, The Expanding Universe, which introduced many small boys, later to become astronomers, to the discipline for the first time.
Thomas Gold, the Austrian astonomer, Fred Hoyle, a world famous British astrophysicist, and Jeffrey Burbidge, a US astrophysicist, had argued for a steady state model of the universe, diametrically opposed to the Big Bang model. Hoyle thought the idea of the universe having a beginning was laughable, so he coined the phrase “the Big Bang” as a joking expression of it. Thus the name for the successful theory of the nature of the universe was invented to disparage it, but the Big Bang has been the idea supported by the evidence so far.
In the last few decades cosmologists have got together a lot of evidence that the universe we see indeed started in this Big Bang. The Big Bang model predicts the formation of nuclei, the relative abundances of certain elements and the existence and exact temperature of the microwave background—the glow of radiation left over from the initial explosion, which permeates the universe. The 1965 observation of the microwave background radiation by Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson, of the Bell Telephone Laboratories, for the first time gave direct evidence of the Big Bang. The COBE observations in 1992 virtually proved the Big Bang theory for cosmologists. The universe began about 13.8 billion years ago. From the cosmological argument, Christians are saying it is scientific proof of God!
Einstein, who was Jewish but educated by Catholics, was yet another who preferred the idea of a static universe, stable and unchanging, and introduced the cosmological constant into his equations to give it. When it was shown to be expanding, Einstein thought he had blundered, but it is now proving to be a useful factor to account for the universe expanding faster than thought.
Einstein discovered that space and time are closely linked—space-time. Space has three dimensions, and time has one, so space-time is four dimensional, but the four components are discrete. The universe must have had a beginning if Einstein’s general theory of relativity is correct, the energy density is positive, and the universe contains the amount of matter we observe now. By extrapolating Einstein’s theory of general relativity back in time, scientists deduced that the universe emerged from a single, small, unbelievably dense, hot region. Conventional cosmology explains what happened since then, including the formation of matter, and its coalescence into galaxies, stars, planets and chemical systems.
Dishonest Christian propagandists claim that these physicists, whom they label as agnostic or atheistic scientists, did not like the idea of a creator God because of the cosmological argument, that can perhaps be seen most clearly in the syllogism:
- Everything that begins has a cause.
- The universe began in the Big Bang.
- The universe therefore must have a cause.
So now, Big Bang cosmology, which has no need of a Creator, is read nonscientifically by scientists who are Christians to mean a design and a purpose lies behind the universe.
The obvious fallacy of this syllogism is that the First Cause, God, is not caused but exists forever. If the theologian can conceive of an uncaused God, then why cannot the universe itself be uncaused? Either the universe is eternal or it just happens without a cause. Christians think scientists did not like the conclusion that the cause was God, but as noted above there are faults with the entire argument that Christians merrily ignore, and honest scientists do not. So, they are not worried in the least. Christians should note that it is scientists who are making the discoveries they think are so devastating for unbelief. Some of these scientists are Christians, but, if the people doing the work were all Christians, then the scientific world would want it checking by scientists with no supernatural cosmic eggs to hatch.
Unfortunately scientists, whether they believe in super Henny-Penny in the sky or not, cannot resist making theatrical asides about God, especially in contexts like this. It gets them publicity, something that many of them crave. George Smoot, the team leader of COBE, said:
It’s like looking at God.
It made sure he got the headlines of almost every newspaper in the world. It was important work, and deserved headlines, but it shows how biased the press are to the supernatural. Without his eye-catching comment, the reports would have probably been in inside page science columns, and hardly been noticed. Still NASA are good at getting publicity for reasons of funding, and it had probably all been carefully worked out.
What Christians do not consider in their argument is that the Big Bang discovered by Abbé Lemaître was the start of time as well as space. If there was no time and there was no space, then nothing existed before the Big Bang. That means that the Big Bang itself must have been the First Cause, because no God could have preceded it. This is not proof that there is no God, but it is evidence that any God there is is the universe itself. It is an argument for pantheism. Needless to say, the supposed Christian “scientists”, demonstrating their dishonesty as scientists and their mendacity as Christians, say the Big Bang is proof God is not the same as the universe and God is not contained within the universe. Christians say God must have existed before time and space showing He is transcendent. Yet from the equations, so too is the universe!
What can be said is that these Christian “scientists” are not being scientific. They are not using scientific arguments, and are therefore lousy scientists. Stephen Hawking writes, “the actual point of creation lies outside the scope of presently known laws of physics”, and Professor Alan Guth of MIT says “the instant of creation remains unexplained”. Physicist, Leon Lederman, a Nobel Prize winner, wrote in The God Particle, a book about the Higgs boson that had nothing to do with God:
A story logically begins at the beginning, but this story is about the universe and unfortunately there are no data for the very beginnings—none, zero. We don’t know anything about the universe until it reaches the mature age of a billion of a trillionth of a second. That is, some very short time after creation in the Big Bang. When you read or hear anything about the birth of the universe, someone is making it up…
Well, scientists have to take care not to be dogmatic too! We can be sure the sun will rise tomorrow and the day after, because we have been seeing it do it since men began to observe their world, and now we have an excellent set of hypotheses that account for the phenomenon. An analogy is true of the Big Bang. Physics based hypotheses or models can extrapolate beyond the point zero of time!
Perhaps it cannot study zero itself, but physical and mathematical methods that work in the time we experience also work in negative time. Equations can be solved to delineate worlds before time = 0! The physicist can deduce what happened before time began based on what happens now. It is no different in principle from a hunter tracking a deer. You follow the signs. The signs might not be perfect, and the hunter does not get his game, and equally the physics might have missed something important, but the principle is clear, and does not involve God.
Christians just hope and pray, inventing new imaginary properties for God, to allow their hopes and prayer to be fulfilled. The sign of pseudoscience is that it can always find explanations of everything that its believers need to explain. That is what the supposed scientists who try to argue a scientific case for Christianity do. Some even do it by discarding qualities that Christians have always thought their God had, like omnipotence or benevolence. As Popper showed, pseudosciences cannot be falsified, and so cannot be tested. Christians will not accept that God or Christianity can be wrong, so they cannot be tested. You take it or leave it on trust—or faith!
For Christians, that is all right. It is all made up. No one, so far, can see before the Big Bang except Christians, but physicists can follow the signs. Lederman, tongue in cheek, concludes: “Only God knows what happened at the very beginning”. Christians, and publicity seeking scientists, can always see God wherever they want Him to be! Mundane scientists however, by following the signs, have actually discovered things that God has never revealed through prayer or saintliness.
Time and the Relativity and Quantum Theories, a Simple Relationship
Moreover, the universe might be unbounded and therefore never began and never ends. Stephen Hawking says:
So long as the universe had a beginning, we could suppose it had a creator. But if the universe is really completely self-contained, having no boundary or edge, it would have neither beginning nor end: it would simply be. What place, then, for a creator?
Time might not have been the same as ours when the universe was young and highly compressed. Suppose that the time of the universe is really:
where T is a constant, perhaps Planck’s time, and t is the time we now experience. T is very small (10-43 sec), so the time we now experience is the same as universal time. When t = T, tu is 0, and universal times shorter than T are negative. If T is the Planck time, then observed time does not start until then. When t is 0, the time we extrapolate to be that of the Big Bang, the universal time that these cosmological events are experiencing is really ( -∞ )! In universal time, the universe never has a beginning, because there is an eternity before “time” (the Planck time?) arrives. So, we are experiencing an illusion like the railroad tracks seeming to come together in the distance. When we walk along them they never do. If we could walk along universal time, the universe would never start, it would just always be there.
What is interesting about this equation is that it can be derived directly from the Theory of Relativity’s equation for time dilation. For bodies moving at speeds approaching the speed of light, time dilates. If v is the velocity of the moving object and c the velocity of light, then:
where tv is an interval of time for the object moving at speed v, and to is the interval of time passed by the stationary observer observing the moving object. The actual measure of time for the moving object dilates so its time goes slower relative to the stationary observer. If time had dilated by a factor of 2, then each unit of time is twice that of the stationary observer, and in one unit of time to the traveller, the stationary observer will have passed two units of time.
If the observer were the moving object, the equation would remain the same because the motion is a relative motion between the two objects, it being arbitrary which one is assumed to be stationary. Anyway, the equation shows that time stops when some object is travelling at the speed of light because tv = ∞ . If the reciprocal of the term on the left hand side were the measure, it is not the factor by which the moving object has its time dilated, but the time that passes in terms of the stationary observer’s time:
The ratio, v/c is itself the ratio of two times, the times it takes the object to travel a specified distance because v = s / t, where s is an interval in space or, in other words, a prescribed distance. The relationship between velocity and this time interval is inverted so we can write the equation:
Sorting the terms gives this simple equation:
Using the difference of two squares, it reduces to the same form as the original hypothesised equation. When we trace back our observed time to zero at the Big Bang, universal time has the value tc, the time that corresponds with T in our original surmise, the time we took to be Planck’s time, a fundamental unit of time. For universal time to reach zero, our observed time has to become imaginary. It suggests that there never was a Big Bang. On the miniscule scale, time is eternal. Perhaps that will actually please Christians [†]
Why should it be? It seems that not only is space quantized, but so is time. That is why there is a maximum speed, the speed of light. It is the minimum time that any object can take to cross the smallest unit of space. The reason there is a minimum is that some oscillator is necessary for time to be measured, and no oscillator has the energy to oscillate fast enough to measure any shorter time. That is because energy is quantized. Planck showed that high energy quanta could not be filled, and so the amount of energy distributed among high energy oscilators actually falls away, explaining the distribution of black body radiation, it unexpectedly falling away at high frequencies (short times!). Infinite energy would be needed to measure zero time, and plainly that is impossible. It is the same reason and explanation as the infinite energy needed to equal the speed of light.
This links the large and the small scale theories, the Relativity and Quantum theories.
Brooding Supernatural Eggs
Christians never get it, and prefer to hatch their supernatural eggs. John Polkinghorne, another physicist who became an Anglican priest in 1982, speaking about the so-called Anthropic Principle, says:
When you realize that the laws of nature must be incredibly finely tuned to produce the universe we see, that conspires to plant the idea that the universe did not just happen, but that there must be a purpose behind it.
In the same way, the purpose of intestines is so that tapeworms have their own universe to live in. Evolution too provides clues to the nature of God. Arthur Peacocke, a biochemist who became a priest in the Church of England in 1971, finds in evolution signs of God’s humility—He has chosen to limit his omnipotence and omniscience. He acts selflessly for the good of creation. So, He lets chance mutations and the Darwinian laws of natural selection bring about the diversity of life on Earth. God is a loving parent who lets His child be and become, freely and without interference. God lets creation make itself. This is the type of God that scientists can have no grumble with. One that resists the devilish temptation to interfere in things once He had set them going.
Unable to agree, as ever, other Christians want to find ways that God can wiggle his finger in history. Since few scientists can accept miracles, how can God then act without violating the laws of physics? Chaos theory, which describes phenomena whose exact outcomes cannot be predicted, offers a gap for God to act in the world. Some theologian-scientists see the random decay of a radioactive atom as another gap for God to act in. Polkinghorne says that God selects which possibility becomes reality. Russell says, “Quantum mechanics allows us to think of special divine action”. Ho hum!
The dishonest—because nonscientific—message they offer instead is that science can uphold faith. The truth is that these “experts” believe it because they are Christians, not because they are scientists. It is another Christian confidence trick. They aim to deceive themselves and potential converts.
Christians resent science because science seems to undermine belief. They saw it as reducing the miracle of life to a series of biochemical reactions, explaining Creation as a moment in space-time, rendering existence meaningless and robbing the world of spiritual wonder. If it indeed does these things, the question to be faced is whether they would prefer to live in ignorance.
If the biblical Creation is demonstrably wrong, what is the spiritual advantage in believing it? If life can be shown experimentally to be part of a continuum from organic chemistry, then what is the spiritual gain in thinking it was breathed into a clay man by God? Equally, when evolution shows that human beings are a type of animal—something that was obvious before Darwin but which science had not until him explained—then what is the point of still believing that we are a special creation of God in His own image? Lastly, what could be so disastrous in these people—obsessed with the spiritual—finding wonder in the world they can actually see around them, as artists, poets, composers, and, yes, scientists do?
Annex
Six Arguments for God
The Cosmological Argument for God is only one that Christians use. There are several others, and they are summarized here. All have been refuted, though not for dishonest Christians. Even if they still impress them, they ought to acknowledge that the arguments are not sound, but they do not. They still offer them to gullible potential converts, knowing they can capture someone else’s life and purse.
• 1. The cosmological argument—The universe exists and so must have been caused. Everything is caused by some cause and eventually these causes lead back to the beginning of them all, the start of the universe. The universe must have had a cause, and it must therefore have been caused by God.
The obvious stupidity of this is that the First Cause, God, is not caused but must exist forever. If the theologian can conceive of an uncaused God, then why cannot the universe itself be uncaused? Either the universe is eternal or it just happens without a cause. J Richard Gott and Li-Xin Li, Princeton physicists, think Big Bangs happen but the universe exists forever.
• 2. The teleological argument—The content of the universe often seems designed, implying a designer.
Evolution by natural selection explains the complexity in the natural kingdom that is taken by believers to be evidence of design. Moreover, the designer could not have been God because he was not a perfect designer as a perfectly good being ought to be. Some of the designs in Nature are not the best ones, such as the vertebrate eye, and nor is Nature free of what seems to be unnecessary cruelty, if the designer is supposed perfectly good. Christian Fundamentalists always like to cite the human eye as being so complicated it could never have evolved so it must have been designed. It is a “God of the Gaps” argument, but helped in this case by Darwin actually picking it out as apparently absurd and needing the evidence of eyes of intermediate complexity, to show possible evolutionary pathways.
A “Designer” is not obliged to stick to any particular prototype, and so eyes could have been designed in quite different ways, and the apparent marked differences between vertebrates eyes, insects eyes and molluscs eyes, say, are proof of Gods creativity, Fundamentalists argue. At one time Darwinists agreed that there were many different varieties of eyes which must have evolved on no less than 65 different occasions. Of course, the whole basis of evolution is now known in the genetic theory made possible by Watson and Crick proposing the correct structure of DNA, the vehicle for genes. Geneticists have now discovered that eye development, whatever the form of the eye, depends on a single gene labeled pax6, which shows that all eyes evolved from some proto-eye coded for by this gene. The proto-eye could have been nothing more than a pair of photosensitive cells. It was not much of an eye but, in the land of the blind, he who has even imperfect vision is king, and plainly this very simple light detector evolved subsequently into all the forms of eyes in animals we now see because it gave a great advantage to those animals that had it.
One of those was a cubozoan or box jellyfish (Tripedalia cystophora) which has twenty four eyes in clusters on the four sides of its box-shaped body. In each cluster, two pairs have remained as very simple organs, simply an indentation lined by light sensitive cells, able to respond to changes in lightness and dark. The other pair in the cluster of six is, however, remarkably sophisticated compared with its four neighbours. Though they are only a tenth of a millimeter across, they have a lens, an iris, a cornea and a retina, and so have all of the elements of much more sophisticated eyes, though these throw an imperfect image on to the retina, much out of focus, because the focus is behind the retina not on it. The effect of this blurred image in sea water full of small drifting particles of debris and tiny swimming creatures is to put these small objects so out of focus they are effectively invisible. Any large object that is more or less stationary within the jellyfishs field of view casts a discernable image, albeit with fuzzy edges. So, here in a single creature are two types of eye, a primitive one, and a more sophisticated one, close to the complex eyes of vertebrates and molluscs but still in an incomplete form. The transition forms of eyes, Darwin hoped to see are illustrated perfectly in one lowly jellyfish.
• 3. The rational argument—The universe, being subject to order, natural law and the Anthropic Principle, implies an intelligence. Charles Townes, a Christian who shared the 1964 Nobel Prize in Physics for discovering the maser and the laser:
Many have a feeling that somehow intelligence must have been involved in the laws of the universe.
This is a variant of the design argument. Believers argue that the world as it exists is so unlikely that it requires a Primal Intelligence to have designed it—but that is even more unlikely. The emergence of intelligence in the universe that we experience has come as a result of evolution. It took a long time, and implies that intelligence is unlikely. Yet the assumption of the rational argument is that a supreme intelligence existed at the outset. It is vanishingly unlikely that intelligence could evolve in zero time.
• 4. The ontological argument—To conceive of God implies that He exists to put such a vast conception into the human mind.
If God does not exist, humanity would conceive of whatever was the greatest thing it could conceive of. That would be considered to be God. In practice the human concept of God grows just like this. Recently the idea of parallel universes has been proposed. Christians therefore propose a God that is not just bigger than our universe, but bigger than all universes that exist.
• 5. The moral argument—humanity’s sense of right and wrong requires a moral God to be able to implant it in the human mind. Moreover life is often unjust and justice can only be done by a moral God sitting in judgement over everyone post mortem.
Right and wrong are socially conditioned traits, and historically are arbitrarily applied irrespective of a person’s beliefs. The European world was most cruel and unjust when Christianity was most powerful, so the historical evidence does not favour a Christian just God influencing His worshippers. Post mortem justice is merely a human wish which requires something impossible—the personality to survive death.
• 6. The argument from human experience—People claim to have experienced the very presence of God.
No one doubts that they have had an experience, but it is their assumption that it is God. Nothing suggests that these experiences of “God” are not natural, even if they are abnormal experiences. Alien abduction is distressingly real to those apparently normal people who experience it. Shadowy aliens carry out by night semi-medical procedures that leave vaguely sexual sensations. Women believe they have had eggs taken from them to create a hybrid new race, and men sperm. The experience is real, but not the alien.
With electrodes, Dr Michael Persinger, Professor of Neuroscience at the Laurentian University in Canada, stimulates part of the brain of an ordinary woman with no history of hallucinations, inducing visions of grey beings, a face speeding towards her, a sense of extraordinary wellbeing and a vaguely sexual sensation—common experiences of those who believe they have been visited by aliens, spirits, ghosts, angels or gods.
Oxygen deprivation under laboratory conditions, similarly reproduce out-of-body and near death experiences where the dying think they have glimpsed heaven—a long dark tunnel, ending in a bright light, with angelic creatures accompanied by a reassuring euphoria. Those who indulge in sexual perversions with near-hanging and asphyxia seek the same pleasure.
Epilepsy caused by brain lesions was once considered the sacred disease because people claimed visions and hallucinations similar to mystics when having epileptic fits. Biblical miracles, such as Jacob’s ladder of angels, or Paul’s conversion, reflect some of these natural phenomena of the brain. This God is a brain disorder.
Moses and Exodus
