Truth
The Big Bang and the Christian Scientists
Abstract
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
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, Marcus 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.
The Christian Logic of an Astrophysicist!
Hugh Ross in The Fingerprint of God, builds up a whole fatuous scenario on the assumption that the Big Bang supports the idea of a Creator. He is supposed to be an astrophysicist, but it must be hard to accept anything he says when this is an example of his reasoning.
• 1. A Creator must exist. The Big Bang ripples are clearly pointing to an ex nihilo creation consistent with the first few verses of the book of Genesis.
These are lies. The COBE ripples say nothing about a creator, but simply are evidence for a Big Bang, which, if anything, suggests that the First Cause could not have been God because the Big Bang was the first event that ever happened, and the most rational justifiable speculation on any supposed God is that the universe is God—pantheism. It is self-created, or uncaused, or creation is an illusion of our imperfect knowledge of reality.
Creation ex nihilo confirms that nothing existed before the start of the universe. But the Big Bang ripples do not necessarily imply that creation was ex nihilo. Nothing is known about the moment of creation or what it was out of. “Nothing” in quantum physics is a state with no classical space-time (A Vilenkin, 1983). It is not literally “nothing”. Nothing seems to mean that space, time, energy, entropy, etc, have lost their meaning, and quantum gravity might be the dominant force. In any case, the Big Bang is not even remotely like the first verses of Genesis. This is an even bigger Christian lie, because it is obvious to anyone who reads the relevant verses. That the lie is so prevalent and successful these days either proves that Christians do not read their bibles, or that the bible is irrelevant to what they believe.
• 2. The Creator must have awesome power and wisdom. The quantity of material and the power resources within our universe are truly immense. The information, or intricacy, manifest in any part of the universe, and especially in a living organism, is beyond our ability to comprehend. And what we do see is only what God has shown us within our dimensions of space and time!
The Creator is merely an assumption, and not well founded. These inconceivable powers are excellent reasons for rejecting the Christian idea of a personal God. There is no basis in the least except what Christians value so much—gullibility—to suppose an invisible entity as big as or bigger than the universe should exist, and be excessively interested in one transient creature with an inflated ego. It explains nothing and is contrary to Occam’s Razor, which would cut the unnecessary entities into half—Nature sufficing.
• 3. The Creator is loving. The simplicity, balance, order, elegance, and beauty seen throughout the creation demonstrate that God is loving rather than capricious. Further, the capacity and desire to nurture and to protect, seen in so many creatures, makes sense if their Creator possesses these same attributes. It is apparent that God cares for His creatures, for He has provided for their needs.
Again the Creator is assumed with no good reason. The qualities listed are all specially picked to suit the thesis and contradictory ones could be picked to counter it. Capricious is not the antonym of loving. Natural love often is capricious. God’s love seems to be capricious not constant or consistent. He does not care just as often as he cares. The feeding of every animal necessrily harms some other lifeform. The sex-lives and breeding of many animals are too horrible to contemplate deeply, as modern horror films like Alien, based on the ichneumon fly, show. This is all special pleading, and proves that something at least is not balanced—Christian opinions.
• 4. The Creator is just and requires justice. Inward reflection and outward investigation affirm that human beings have a conscience. The conscience reflects the reality of right and wrong and the necessity of obedience.
If this is true then it is something which has evolved to help us live socially. It differs then not a whit from a bee collecting honey or a dog rolling on its back before its master. In fact, though, it is probably largely socially conditioned by upbringing. We are social creatures and our mutual wellbeing and social cohesion are served by justice. Our rulers like us to be obedient to them. That has always been a prime purpose of religion.
• 5. Each of us falls hopelessly short of the Creator’s standard. We incur His displeasure when we violate any part of God’s moral law in our actions, our words, and our thoughts. Who can keep his or her thoughts and attitudes pure for even an hour? If each person falls short of his or her own standards, how much more so of God’s standards?
Each successive link of this Christian chain of supposed logic gets more incoherent. Is this a God of love or not? Why should a God of love be displeased that the possibility of doing something immoral should enter our minds, when He is supposed to have given us Free Will. He gives us Free Will, then sends us to Hell for exercising it. What is perfect about a God like that? No compassionate God could possibly impose such contradictory or impossible demands. Either God is actually a wicked God, or He is merely the invention of wicked and greedy people who want to control the lives and wallets of others. The latter is more likely!
• 6. Because the Creator is loving, wise and powerful, He made a way to rescue us. When we come to a point of concern about our personal failings, we can begin to understand from the creation around us that God’s love, wisdom, and power are sufficient to deliver us from our otherwise hopeless situation.
In this Christian thesis God made us this way. If it is possible for Him to make wicked creatures, then God cannot be Himself perfect. It is His fault that we have failings and need rescuing. Why then does He not accept His responsibility and rescue us instantly, since He is “loving, wise and powerful”. The truth is that this whole scheme is a scam to oppress people who are ignorant and unsophisticated.
• 7. If we trust our lives totally to the Rescuer, Jesus Christ, we will be saved. The one and only path is to give up all human attempts to satisfy God’s requirements and put our trust solely in Jesus Christ and in His means of redemption, namely, His death on the cross.
This is the ultimate cop out. We have been given Free Will but can only exercise it by giving it back. Then we shall be rescued by the Rescuer that we give our free will to, and those who do not will still fry for eternity. There is no need to worry about that possibility because when we die, we are dead and experience nothing at all, but the Christian sheep while they are alive will have to keep coughing up the readies to keep the professionals tormenting them with rubbish like this.
Anyone who could write as Ross does is completely cynical or deranged. They are confidence tricksters and should be locked up for fraud. One thing is certain. If they are right, and God exists and is perfectly good as they say, then they will not have the blissful time they expect post mortem. No good God could put up with such deceit, and justice demands that they should be punished for it.
Anthropic Principle
Physicists have discovered that the cosmos seems custom-made for life. A cosmologist, Brandon Carter, proposed (1974) the Anthropic Principle, according to which our place in the universe is privileged in that our presence allows us to observe it. If the constants of nature—unchanging numbers like the strength of gravity, the charge on an electron and the mass of a proton—were any different, then atoms would not hold together, stars would not burn and life would never have happened.
The possibility of life as we know it depends on the values of a few basic, physical constants and is in some respects remarkably sensitive to their numerical values. Nature does exhibit remarkable coincidences.Martin Rees, Cambridge, UK
A philosopher, the Christian, William Lane Craig, thinks he has an allegorical argument refuting the natural as opposed to the supernatural interpretation of the Anthropic Principle. The natural interpretation is that we could not be here if the world had not been suitable. The supernatural interpretation is that God made it so. Craig considers the case of a prisoner facing death by firing squad. They shoot off a volley but the prisoner is still alive. Why is he still alive? It could be good luck, but Craig thinks this is so unlikely that the prisoner has to conclude the outcome was deliberate. The prisoner is of course the universe with humans contemplating it.
Christians are fond of false analogies. They easily fool the Christian sheep. By focussing on this one case that Craig knows, because it is his tale, is going to turn out all right for the victim, the perception of the gamut of possibilities is distorted. It is the same trick as pulling out a dollar bill and noting what a unique number it has, and how unlikely it was that that number should have been on the dollar bill. Of course, it was not unusual because any other number of the billions possible would have been looked upon with equal amazement. Craig selects his victim as the one who is saved from all of the millions who died in the same circumstances. Since they were dead, they had no tale to tell!
Here Craig lets his victim escape because he is God and can do it, so we conclude it must have been deliberate. It was indeed. The author planned it. To put it in perspective, consider all the cases when the outcome was as expected. The prisoner was shot dead and could not think about his bad luck. But one day, all the rifles jammed, the victim could not be shot and was released. “It was an act of God”, they would all say, and the prisoner would, as Craig suggests, think so.
It was actually luck. This is the real parallel. To have escaped seemed so fanciful everyone assumed God saved the victim. Christians are just like that. Our universe seems so unlikely that God must have made it so, but all the others that were unsuitable had no survivors to think about it.
Besides inventing false analogies like this, Christians claim that life appeared on earth too soon. The Hadean period of the earth when it was hot and lifeless lasted a billion years and was followed by the Archaean, when there were bacteria on earth, which lasted another billion. Christians claim they can identify within 10 million years in this long period when life actually arrived, and it was too soon. Too soon for what? For life to evolve? The idea of panspermia is that life arrived from elsewhere in space. It did not have to evolve on earth, but mainly only Christians who refuse to accept evolution at all will categorically say it could not have done.
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?
