What Came Before The Big Bang?
The other day, a Christian sent me a two part video series that he made about how his 4 month study of Cosmology proves that God exists. Like most fundamentalist Christians and many mainstream religious believers, he starts off with his dogmatic conclusion that God exists and then works his way into finding evidence to support this already determined conclusion. This quite honestly is not how science works.
In any case, he proceeded to reassert the First Cause Argument by dressing it up with scientific terminology. He even quoted Dr. Stephen Hawking at one point so that he could “prove” that God exists.
The basic question that religious people tend to exploit is that of the First Cause. When scientific observation discovered the Big Bang Theory, many religious people where quite beside themselves. Still today, there are many fundamentalist Christians who can’t accept the Big Bang Theory as being an accurate model for the beginning of the Universe. On the other hand, many do accept the overwhelming evidence for the Big Bang, but then ask the next logical question, what came before the Big Bang. This was the central question in that two part video that was sent to me.
Interestingly enough, in 2007, Dr. Stephen Hawking gave the Berkeley Physics Oppenheimer Lecture which addresses this very question. In that lecture, Hawking starts the lecture with an ancient Creation myth. While he didn’t use the one in the Bible, he could have easily swapped creation myths.
Fairly early in the lecture, Hawking states, “it made no sense to talk of a time before the universe began. It would be like asking for a point south of the South Pole. It is not defined.” Hawking clarifies this statement later in the lecture, “Suppose the beginning of the universe, was like the south pole of the Earth, with degrees of latitude, playing the role of time. The universe would start as a point at the South Pole. As one moves north, the circles of constant latitude, representing the size of the universe, would expand. To ask what happened before the beginning of the universe, would become a meaningless question, because there is nothing south of the South Pole.”
So what is before the Universe? Incase you could not follow what Hawking is saying from my limited excerpts, if space and time are linked (See Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity) than before the Universe, there was no time. Since the word “before” denotes time, that basically means that there was no before the Universe as we understand time.
But that is not an answer that sits well with the god crowd. Hawking tries to then explain his own theory which is currently the best scientific model for how our Universe began.
“The idea is that the most probable histories of the universe, would be like the surfaces of the bubbles. Many small bubbles would appear, and then disappear again. These would correspond to mini universes that would expand, but would collapse again while still of microscopic size. They are possible alternative universes, but they are not of much interest since they do not last long enough to develop galaxies and stars, let alone intelligent life. A few of the little bubbles, however, will grow to a certain size at which they are safe from recollapse. They will continue to expand at an ever increasing rate, and will form the bubbles we see. They will correspond to universes that would start off expanding at an ever increasing rate.”
Hawking jokingly concludes that, “We are the product of quantum fluctuations in the very early universe. God really does play dice.” This of course is a play on the famous Einstein quote and not an endorsement of the concept of god as religious people understand the term.
Filed under: First Cause Argument, god of the gaps, Religion, science
