And there was light: evidence for the origin of our Universe

“Then God said, “Let there be light”, and there was light”.

Genesis 1:3

The concept of creation out of nothing was a completely radical idea in antiquity. It was the Jewish religion that first introduced such a radical concept. Most, if not all, creation myths in antiquity parted from the premise that there was something before the formation of the universe. It is very tempting to point that such radical idea most closely resembles what today’s scientist call the Big Bang.

The Big Bang theory states that the observable universe is the result of a massive explosion that occurred about 13.7 billion years ago. It was as if the universe obeyed God’s command “Let there be light,” and there was the Big Bang. Although the Big Bang theory is agnostic whether or not anything existed before the Big Bang, it clearly argues that our observable universe had a beginning.

The idea of the Big Bang was not immediately accepted. The Aristotelian view of an eternal and static universe was accepted scientific theory up to the 1930’s. It was a Jesuit priest named Fr. George Lemaitre that first proposed the idea of a “primeval atom”, which today we called the Big Bang theory. Fr. Lemaitre based his theory on Einstein’s theory of relativity that, states the expansion of space and the discovery that galaxies are accelerating away from each other by astronomers Hubble and Humason in 1929. He argued that if galaxies are moving away from each other, then it follows that the further you go back in time the closer those galaxies are going to be and if you go far enough there is going to be a point where the size of the universe is a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a sub-atomic particle: a “primeval atom”. Fr. Lemaitre succinctly explains his theory in the abstract for his 1931 publication in the science journal, Nature:

“SIR ARTHUR EDDINGTON states that, philosophically, the notion of a beginning of the present order of Nature is repugnant to him. I would rather be inclined to think that the present state of quantum theory suggests a beginning of the world very different from the present order of Nature. Thermodynamical principles from the point of view of quantum theory may be stated as follows : (1) Energy of constant total amount is distributed in discrete quanta. (2) The number of distinct quanta is ever increasing. If we go back in the course of time we must find fewer and fewer quanta, until we find all the energy of the universe packed in a few or even in a unique quantum”.

Nature 127, 706 (9 May 1931)

Ironically, his theory was considered to be too religious by some since it pointed towards a beginning and in doing so it pointed to a creation. The Big Bang was confirmed by the finding of the Cosmic Microwave Background radiation by Nobel laureate recipients Penzias and Wilson in 1964 (Picture). Cosmologists Ralph Alpher and Robert Herman predicted this radiation in 1948 to be the remnant radiation of the Big Bang. Its temperature is exactly the temperature that physicists estimated it should be if it was from the Big Bang. Moreover the total amount of helium estimated to be present in the universe could only be accounted by the Big Bang because not enough time has passed for it to be produced by nuclear reactions inside of stars.

There is much speculation as to what happen before the Big Bang. At least two theories propose possible scenarios in which the Big Bang is not the beginning of the universe: eternal inflation and ekpyrotic models. It is not the scope of this post to explain in detail these purely mathematical theories other than to make readers aware that they are current working hypothesis. However, independently whether or not these theories are accurate an elegant mathematical theorem, developed by Borde, Vilenkin and Guth (BVG Theorem), demonstrates that any universe that has a Hubble expansion constant greater than zero has to have a beginning:

“We made no assumptions about the material content of the universe…The only assumption that we made was that the expansion rate of the universe never gets below some nonzero value, no matter how small. This assumption should certainly be satisfied in the inflating false vacuum. The conclusion is that past-eternal inflation without a beginning is impossible”.

Vilenki 2006, p 175 (Taken from “New Proof for the Existence of God”)

In other words, any universe or multi-verse has to have a beginning and since according to the principle of sufficient reason any beginning must have a cause, the question remains what caused the universe to begin?

In my next post, I will discuss, how science demonstrates the infinitesimally small probability that the observable universe was caused by random chance. Taken together the evidence from modern physics and philosophical/metaphysical arguments, it is reasonable to believe that God created the universe, out of nothing.

God Bless!

Please note:

I owed the inspiration of this post to Fr. Benedict Groechel talk, God the Father, which until recently could be found at EWTN for free download. The scientific and philosophical arguments were mostly taken from Fr. Robert Spitzer book: New Proof for the Existence of God.

I hope that I did not do any disservice to their work by my poor abilities to articulate it.

Also note, that there is a third hypothesis that states that the Big Bang is the result of an ongoing cycle of expansion and contractions, each one producing a new big bang and thereby a new universe. I did not include this hypothesis for the sake of brevity and the fact that it has been discredited by the observation that galaxy are moving irreversibly away from each other at an increasingly faster pace. Making it impossible for the predicted Big Crunch to happen. Moreover, evidence from the law of thermodynamics clearly indicates that even in this bouncing universe scenario, it must also have to have a beginning.