Let's just start with the answer. You should love Big Bang because the
discovery of Big Bang was the most amazing, stunning, unbelievable,
extraordinary, mind-boggling, gobsmacking, paradigm-shattering,
science-altering event in the history of human thought, and it brought the
discussion over the existence of God back onto the table.
You should love Big Bang because Albert Einstein rejected it out of hand as
ridiculous, and messed up a perfectly good equation trying to force the
universe to, well, not have a Big Bang right there at the beginning. Not only
did Einstein reject it, most if not all scientists rejected it. Einstein
rejected it even though his own personal General Theory of Relativity
predicted it a full decade before there was any evidence that it might be true.
This was a big surprise to Albert. He didn't put a Big Bang in there, so it was
quite a shock when it popped out. It was really shocking to him when all the
evidence started to line up in support of Big Bang. He had to go back and fix
his equation, which made it beautiful once again.
You should love Big Bang because British astronomer Fred Hoyle rejected it
to the end of his life in 2001, saying in 1982 that "the passionate frenzy
with which the Big Bang cosmology is clutched to the corporate scientific bosom
evidently arises from a deep-rooted attachment to the first chapter of Genesis,
religious fundamentalism at its strongest." He rejected it because it sounded
too much like religion.
And many of us reject it because it sounds too much like science.
Ah, the irony.
You especially should love Big Bang because if you don't, if you try to
argue for a young earth and universe that are only 6000 years old, not only do
skeptics and atheists dismiss that argument out of hand, they think you're an
idiot, and you've lost any chance you might have had to talk about the real and
serious issues of faith.
Here's the thing - I'm guessing that most Protestant believers reject Big
Bang in large part for the same reason that most science-minded skeptics accept
it without question. That reason is pretty simple - neither group has the
slightest understanding of what Big Bang really is.
So it might be useful to explain it. 1-2-3 go.
We all understand the universe to be the way that Isaac Newton's equations
describe it for us. It's logical, reasonable. It makes sense. It is common-sensical.
It's a WYSIWYG universe - what you see is what you get. When you look at it,
that's the way it is.
Yeah. Not so much.
Scientists had decided that since the universe looked really big and really
old, that it must in fact be infinitely big and infinitely old. It had always
been there, static, stationary, unchanging. That's what it looked like. That
must be the way it is, was, and had been.
Turns out not to be that way. At all.
In 1905 and 1915, Einstein turned our understanding of the universe upside
down and inside out. He even turned his own understanding of the universe on
its head.
In 1905 in the Special Theory of Relativity, he discovered that time is not
a constant. It's a variable. It changes as you get closer to the speed of
light. The closer you get, the more it changes. Time has a speed, and its speed
slows down as you speed up. The faster you go, the slower time passes.
And if you could reach the speed of light, time would stop altogether.
Actually, it's more accurate to say that at the speed of light, things that
happen aren't separated by time anymore. Everything happens at once. All of the
history of the universe happens at the same instant. Your birth, your life,
your death, everything happens at the same time.
What's more, he discovered that space and time aren't separate - they're
woven together. The universe is made of space-time. And at the speed of light,
space flattens to two dimensions. So not only does everything happen at once,
it all happens at the same place. Sort of. I have this physics t-shirt that
reads: Time exists so that everything doesn't happen at once. Space exists so
that it all doesn't happen to you.
In 1916 in the General Theory of Relativity, he revealed his discovery
that space-time is flexible, bendable, warpable. And what bends and warps
space-time is matter. Anything made of matter bends and warps space-time. What
we call that is Gravity. Gravity is the bending of space-time by anything made
of matter. The sun, the earth, the moon. You. Me. Matter of any size and shape.
We all bend space-time.
Among other things, this means that the closer you are to center of the
earth, for example, the slower time passes. Time passes more slowly at your
toes than at your nose.
Among other other things, this means that the more matter you have squished
into a very small place, the greater the warping of space-time. Space-time can
warp so much that it bends completely around itself into a sphere and cuts off
the universe. We call that a Black Hole.
Now it gets interesting. Like, if it wasn't already.
A guy named Georges Lemaître, a Belgian physicist who was also a priest, worked
through the math of the General Theory in 1927 and discovered something that
Albert himself didn't put there, didn't expect, and didn't want. Lemaître found out that the
General Theory predicts that the universe will be expanding as you go forward
in time. The universe expands. It doesn't stay the same size. It's not static,
stationary, or unchanging.
And if you turn around and look backwards in time, then the universe is
getting smaller. It's contracting. And it can only contract just … so … far …
before it … disappears altogether.
Fred Hoyle, in trying to explain this on the radio in 1949, called it a
"Big Bang." The name stuck. He didn't like it. Nobody else did at
first, either. Not the name. The name was fine. The concept. The universe
having a starting point.
It was just something the General Theory predicted. There was no evidence
for it. Without evidence, it's not science yet, neither true nor false.
Then.
In 1929, Edwin Hubble revealed his discovery that in looking at the light
of the distant galaxies in the universe, he found that the universe was in fact
expanding. It was getting bigger. Lemaître was right, Einstein
was wrong. There was a starting point, a place where it all began.
Now.
What does THAT mean?
Here's what we tend to think. We tend to think that there was a vast
emptiness, dark, an endless vacuum of nothingness, no planets, no stars, no
galaxies, no Walmarts, no Starbucks. Nothing but nothing.
That's wrong. It implies that nothing is, in fact, something. That
something would be space-time.
But as you go backwards in time, the universe contracts. Space-time
contracts. Space-time itself gets smaller and smaller until it just …
disappears altogether.
Which means this: Big Bang was that moment when space and time came into
existence.
Before Big Bang, there was no … before. No space. No time. No nothing.
There was no there there for anything to be there in, no when for anything to
be then in.
Then, in a tiny tiny fraction of a second, the rate of expansion perfect to
one part in ten to the sixtieth, the universe blew itself into existence. In a
moment of a moment of a moment, what we call the Singularity became a
universe-sized universe, a cosmos-sized cosmos, the whole process taking far
less than one second.
Science thinks that one part of the Big Bang was when the universe expanded from a nano-sized square to 250 million light years across in .000000000000000000000000000000000001 second.
Everything … came from … nothing. In, like, no time.
Space. Time. Energy. Matter. The laws of physics themselves. Everything and
the potential for everything else came from … nothing.
I told this to a classroom full of students in Switzerland a few years ago.
There was a long, long, quiet pause when nobody breathed and everyone tried to
absorb it. They were mostly skeptics, atheists who believed that science has
disproved the existence of God, that Big Bang was central to showing that God
does not exist.
Then I told them about the Bang. Quiet. And then someone in the back of the
room, some atheist, skeptical kid, said one word. He said, "God."
God.
That's why you should love the Big Bang.
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