Mr. Moderate

Most English translations of the Christian Bible begin with words like these:

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.

Well, this isn’t a blog post about the word “God” in the above quote, but rather about the word “beginning.” Some prominent Christian apologists (for instance, William Lane Craig) want to take the scientific theory of the Big Bang and assert that this event in the past history of our universe is a “beginning.” Well, I suppose that the nuclear explosion at the Trinity test site in New Mexico was in some sense a “beginning” (it was the first manmade nuclear explosion), but it did not mark “the beginning of time” in any real sense. And frankly, I see no real reason to view the Big Bang as “the beginning of time” in any sense more than the Trinity test explosion.

In my previous post about the size of our universe, I noted that “when we get to looking about 13.5 billion years away from the Earth, we can’t see any further away because at about 13.5 billion years ago the universe went from being opaque (light could not travel through it) to transparent (light could suddenly go, and keep going, until it finally arrives at our telescopes).” What we can observe with our instruments is the cosmic background radiation that arises roughly 400,000 years after the Big Bang happens. Before that time (400,000 years after the Big Bang), we cannot observe any facts about what occurred. Instead, all we have are theoretical guesses which cannot be verified because there is literally no observable evidence against which to measure the truth or falsity of our theoretical guesses.

So, while we humans can use our telescopes and other instruments to observe lots of facts about what happened within our universe from about t+400,000 years to the present, we cannot observe anything prior to that point about 400,000 years after the Big Bang itself. There are, unfortunately, a plethora of ways in which the available evidence (all dating from after 400,000 years following the Big Bang) can be interpreted. Scientists can be expected to take at least decades, if not centuries, to sort through all of the competing theoretical claims before they might all get behind one particular set of claims and proclaim that the mystery is solved.

In his 1988 book, A Brief History of Time, Stephen Hawking had this to say (pp. 8-9) about the possibility of ever observing any consequences of any time “before” the Big Bang:

Hubble’s observations suggested that there was a time, called the big bang, when the universe was infinitesimally small and infinitely dense. Under such conditions all the laws of science, and therefore all ability to predict the future, would break down. If there were events earlier than this time, then they could not affect what happens at the present time. Their existence can be ignored because it would have no observational consequences. One may say that time had a beginning at the big bang, in the sense that earlier times simply would not be defined. It should be emphasized that this beginning in time is very different from those that had been considered previously. In an unchanging universe a beginning in time is something that has to be imposed by some being outside the universe; there is no physical necessity for a beginning. One can imagine that God created the universe at literally any time in the past. On the other hand, if the universe is expanding, there may be physical reasons why there had to be a beginning. One could imagine that God created the universe at the instant of the big bang, or even afterwards in just such a way as to make it look as though there had been a big bang, but it would be meaningless to suppose that it was created before the big bang. An expanding universe does not preclude a creator, but it does place limits on when he might have carried out his job!

Of course, I disagree with several of the implications of Hawkings’ writing, above. We cannot say for certain that we will never discover a way to observe happenings prior to our current obsevational barrier of about 400,000 years after the Big Bang. And if the universe is ultimately determined to be cyclical in nature (which goes against current evidence), then one might postulate that God could have kicked off the cycles at some point substantially earlier than the Big Bang which marks the beginning of our own relative time.

However, barring some unexpected scientific advance, we should not expect any evidence to ever be discovered from prior to the 400,000 year barrier noted above. Such evidence quite simply should not exist because it was all destroyed immediately after it was created. Every minute that passes, we humans can see one additional light minute further away, but not one iota of time earlier along the Big Bang time line. Our instruments cannot observe anything earlier in the time line because they cannot penetrate the barrier that exists out there at about the 400,000 year point, and we have no theoretical reason (at present) to believe that our instruments ever will.

But we humans have never let a lack of observable evidence force us to call off a scientific investigation, and there is no good reason to do so when it comes to the Big Bang. Instead, however, we will proceed down the far more difficult path of locating later evidence that yields inferences about earlier states of affairs within our universe. And, we will also surely keep looking for pathways into other space-time continuums, which some people would call “other universes.” (I do not; to me, the “universe” contains everything that exists, so all existing space-time continuums are part of “the universe.”)

While the Big Bang theory as it now exists is certainly compatible with the idea of creation ex nihilo, in fact it provides no evidence whatsoever in favor of (or against) that idea. And in fact, most scientists attempting to study the earliest moments of the Big Bang have concluded that “something” existed at t=0 time when the Big Bang got started. And that “something” was not a gravitational singularity. As I noted above, there are many ways that the singularity aspect of the Big Bang can be eliminated, and it is virtually certain that science will settle on one of them someday. That certainty allows me to similarly assert that time t=0 of the Big Bang event is not in any sense a “beginning” of anything other than a self-relevant event, like t=0 time at the explosion of a nuclear bomb.

Creation ex nihilo (literally, “creation out of nothing”) requires that nothing existed before the created thing emerges. A physical Big Bang requires that “something” (some “cause”) existed out of which the Big Bang emerged as an “effect” in keeping with our usual view of cause-and-effect ordering. One postulated answer from string theory suggests that giant multi-dimensional “branes” collided to produce the Big Bang. (See brane cosmology for more.) The answer postulated by Christians would most likely be that God existed before the Big Bang began, so unless Christians are willing to assert that God is “nothing” (they won’t), then clearly “something” (at least their God) existed before the Big Bang if you happen to base your cosmological ideas on Christian (or other religious) dogma. And for the atheists who assert that the Big Bang arose out of a quantum fluctuation, such a fluctuation can’t take place if “nothing” exists. There must be at least a quantum vacuum for a quantum fluctuation to occur, and even a quantum vacuum qualifies as “something” for the sake of this discussion.

It is without much doubt that the Big Bang represents a substantial explosion as viewed from a human perspective. But there is really no good reason to believe that t=0 time for the Big Bang is any more special that was t=0 time for the Trinity test. Both represent some sort of a beginning, but only a self-relative sort of a beginning, and not an absolute beginning in the way that some folks with axes to grind would have us all believe.