Evidence Part 3: The Big Bang

This is a continuation of a series. Part 2 can be found here.

Modern day Science™ considers itself triumphant in the existence of the "Big Bang" theory. Because of this theory science was able to explain away all the nonsense about God creating the earth in six days. Thanks to Science™ we now know that the universe formed itself, and took about 14 billion years to get to where we are today, and it is still expanding and changing.

But is that really true? Not really. First off, let's get rid of some straw men. Christians by and large do not now, and never have believed that the earth was created in a literal six days, or that the earth is 5,000 years old. Yes, there is a small minority of people who believe that, but claiming that is part of the core of Christianity is false.

Secondly, what is the big bang theory, and how did it come about (the scientific theory, not the TV show)? Let's see what Wikipedia has to say about it. Note that I am using Wikipedia in part because it can not be said to be biased towards the existence of God.

The Big Bang theory developed from observations of the structure of the universe and from theoretical considerations. In 1912 Vesto Slipher measured the first Doppler shift of a "spiral nebula" (spiral nebula is the obsolete term for spiral galaxies), and soon discovered that almost all such nebulae were receding from Earth. He did not grasp the cosmological implications of this fact, and indeed at the time it was highly controversial whether or not these nebulae were "island universes" outside our Milky Way. Ten years later, Alexander Friedmann, a Russian cosmologist and mathematician, derived the Friedmann equations from Albert Einstein's equations of general relativity, showing that the universe might be expanding in contrast to the static universe model advocated by Einstein at that time. In 1924 Edwin Hubble's measurement of the great distance to the nearest spiral nebulae showed that these systems were indeed other galaxies. Independently deriving Friedmann's equations in 1927, Georges Lemaître, a Belgian physicist and Roman Catholic priest, proposed that the inferred recession of the nebulae was due to the expansion of the universe.

In 1931 Lemaître went further and suggested that the evident expansion of the universe, if projected back in time, meant that the further in the past the smaller the universe was, until at some finite time in the past all the mass of the universe was concentrated into a single point, a "primeval atom" where and when the fabric of time and space came into existence.

Starting in 1924, Hubble painstakingly developed a series of distance indicators, the forerunner of the cosmic distance ladder, using the 100-inch (2.5 m) Hooker telescope at Mount Wilson Observatory. This allowed him to estimate distances to galaxies whose redshifts had already been measured, mostly by Slipher. In 1929 Hubble discovered a correlation between distance and recession velocity—now known as Hubble's law. Lemaître had already shown that this was expected, given the cosmological principle.

In the 1920s and 1930s almost every major cosmologist preferred an eternal steady state universe, and several complained that the beginning of time implied by the Big Bang imported religious concepts into physics; this objection was later repeated by supporters of the steady state theory. This perception was enhanced by the fact that the originator of the Big Bang theory, Georges Lemaître, was a Roman Catholic priest. Arthur Eddington agreed with Aristotle that the universe did not have a beginning in time, viz., that matter is eternal. A beginning in time was "repugnant" to him. Lemaître, however, thought that

If the world has begun with a single quantum, the notions of space and time would altogether fail to have any meaning at the beginning; they would only begin to have a sensible meaning when the original quantum had been divided into a sufficient number of quanta. If this suggestion is correct, the beginning of the world happened a little before the beginning of space and time.

Note the emboldened text above. Every major cosmologist actually opposed the theory, because they thought it supported religious ideas about the origin of the universe. So far from being a triumph of science pushing out silly religious ideas, it was an idea, proposed by a priest, which pushed out dilly scientific beliefs.

Religious people at the time did not and do not now have a problem with the big bang theory. It does not in any way disprove God or provide an alternative beginning of the universe. It merely confirms Judeo-Christian beliefs about the universe.

The big bang theory does not say anything about what caused the big bang, or how or why the universe came into existence. It does describe what happened in the early universe. For the how or why of the start of the universe, in some sense it is not a scientific question. First off, "why" questions cant' be answered by science. But even the "how" involves pure speculation.

In that sense, theories about the "how" of the big bang are all based solely on faith, not on observation (since we can't observe anything outside the observable universe, by definition). In the next post I'll go over some of the ways Science™ has tried, unsuccessfully, to eliminate the "need" for God.

Next part is cosmology, here.

[N.B.: I use the term "Science™" to denote, not actual science, but the false idea of science "worshiped" by adherents of scientism.]

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