God's Big Bang

By: Mr. Curmudgeon
mrcurmudgeon@inthepublicsquare.com

When people think of the conflict between religion and science, the skirmish between Darwin’s theory of evolution and the Biblical account of creation come to mind. The first legal clash over the issue in the U.S. was the Scopes monkey trial – the 1926 Tennessee court case that made headlines in newspapers across America. In reality, the titanic struggle of the roaring 20s between science and God began when a Soviet mathematician and a Belgian priest discovered a glitch in Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity, which, when corrected, suggested a supernatural origin for everything.

After reading an article by Einstein appearing in a German physics journal in 1922, the Russian mathematician Alexander Friedmann sent Einstein a letter questioning the great man’s math:

Most honored professor, do not hesitate to let me know whether the calculations presented in this letter are correct. I particularly ask you not to delay your answer to this letter. In the case that you find my calculations to be correct…you will perhaps submit a correction [to the physics journal].

Einstein wrote the journal’s editor admitting his mistake and declared Friedmann’s calculations “to be correct and illuminating.” What the Russian saw between the lines of Einstein’s equations describing space and time was an expanding universe, suggesting that, in the beginning, everything had a single point of origin.

In 1927, Einstein met with the Belgian priest and mathematician Georges Lemaitre. Commenting on Lemaitre’s published work, Einstein dismissed the priest’s finding saying, “Your calculation are correct, but your grasp of physics is abominable.” Lemaitre proposed that the expanding universe was “ashes and smoke of bright but very rapid fireworks.” What he called his “fireworks theory” today’s cosmologists refer to as the Big Bang.

The idea of an expanding universe was disconcerting to a majority of scientist, Einstein included. The scientific consensus held that the universe was eternal – having no beginning or end; what scientists later called the Steady State theory.

In a 1931 article for the science journal Nature, Lemaitre wrote:

At the origin, all the mass of the universe would exist in the form of a unique atom; the radius of the universe, although not strictly zero, being relatively small. The whole universe would be produced by the disintegration of this primeval atom...

What Lemaitre called the “primeval atom” is today called the quantum singularity, existing in the distant past when all the matter in the universe was concentrated within an area smaller than the nucleus of an atom.

A chief opponent of Lemaitre’s and his colleague’s theory was Fred Hoyle, the British astronomer. “The Big Bang is an irrational process that cannot be described in scientific terms,” said the Steady State proponent. “…nor challenged by an appeal to observation.” In fact, Hoyle coined the term Big Bang to denigrate the theory of an expanding cosmos. Ironically, in the 1950s, Hoyle announced that his atheism was “badly shaken” after calculating the necessary forces needed to produce carbon atoms within the nuclear engines of stars, an element necessary for life:

A common sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a super intellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as with chemistry and biology, and that there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature. The numbers one calculates from the facts seem to me so overwhelming as to put this conclusion almost beyond question.

In 1964, Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson, scientists with Bell Telephone Laboratories, built a large megaphone-like receiver for tests leading up to the launch of the Telestar communication satellite. While testing their 20-foot horned antenna they encountered radio interference they could not account for. After adjusting the instrument to mask signals from nearby radio and television stations, as well as cleaning up pigeon droppings inside in the antenna’s giant ear, the steady and faint radio signal persisted. Eventually, they realized they had stumbled upon the residual heat or eco of the Big Bang.

Further evidence was gathered when NASA launched the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) satellite in 2001. Two year laters, the space agency released an image showing a young universe with an equal distribution of heat throughout the cosmos, further confirmation of the rapid expansion of reality from a single point of origin.

In his 1978 book God and the Astronomers, American physicist Robert Jastrow wrote:

For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries…the astronomical evidence leads to a biblical view of the origin of the world. The details differ, but the essential elements in the astronomical and biblical accounts of Genesis are the same: the chain of events leading to man commenced suddenly and sharply at a definite moment in time, in a flash of light and energy.

Some scientists are unhappy with the idea that the world began in this way. Until recently, many of my colleagues preferred the Steady State theory, which holds that the Universe had no beginning and is eternal. But the latest evidence makes it almost certain that the Big Bang really did occur.

 The debate over evolution, therefore, is dwarfed by comparison to the overwhelming evidence that a supernatural agency touched-off the explosion leading to the existence of everything – including Darwin’s primates.

--Mr. Curmudgeon