By J. Adams
April 7th, 1995
-The Beginning-
In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth...
(The first sentence of the Bible)
"It would be very difficult to explain why the universe should have begun in just this way, except as the act of a God who intended to create beings like us."
(Stephen Hawking, 'A Brief History of Time', p.127)
In modern cosmology, the leading explanation for the history and status of the observable universe is known as the Big Bang model. According to this model, the universe had a beginning- and an explosive one at that. At the Big Bang, the Moment of Creation, the universe began with zero size and infinite heat and energy. This pure, unified energy was released into what we perceive as a space-time continuum thus giving rise to today's observed universe.
In denying the role of our Creator, science has systematically misjudged their observations and sought to believe the universe had a random origin when, in fact, this is clearly not the case. Instead of theorizing that there was a potent Moment of Creation at which God unleashed the energy to be used for His works, science hypothesizes that the universe was the chance outcome of a meaningless Big Bang.
Increasingly, however, the accumlating evidence is undermining the secular scientific view of the cosmos. The universe that has emerged from the so-called "Big Bang" is of such improbable organization and orderliness that it goes against reason to argue that it is not of intelligent, purposeful design. Consider, for instance, some of the questions Stephen Hawking posed about the nature of the universe in his book, 'A Brief History of Time':
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1. Why was the early universe so hot?
2. Why is the universe so uniform on a large scale? Why does it look the same at all points of space and in all directions? In particular, why is the microwave background radiation so nearly the same when we look in different directions? It is a bit like asking a number of students an exam question. If they all give exactly the same answer, then you can be sure they have communicated with each other. Yet, in the model described above, there would not have been time since the big bang for light to get from one distant region to another, even though the regions were close together in the early universe. According to the theory of relativity, if light cannot get from one region to another, no other information can. So there would be no way in which different regions in the early universe could have come to have had the same temperature as each other, unless for some unexplained reason they happened to start out with the same temperature. 3. Why did the universe start out with so nearly the critical rate of expansion that separates models that recollapse from those that go on expanding forever, so that even now, ten thousand million years later, it is still expanding at nearly the critical rate? If the rate of expansion one second after the big bang had been smaller by even one part in a hundred thousand million million, the universe would have recollapsed before it reached its present size. 4. Despite the fact that the universe is so uniform and homogeneous on a large scale, it contains local irregularities, such as stars and galaxies. These are thought to have developed from small differences in the density of the early universe from one region to another. What was the origin of these density fluctuations? (Hawking, pp.121-122) |
To answer these questions Hawkings first presents the idea of the anthropic principle. According to this principle we see the universe the way it is because we exist:
| According to this theory, there are either many different
universes or many different regions of a single universe, each
with its own initial configuration and, perhaps, with its own
set of laws of science. In most of these universes the
conditions would not be right for the development of complicated
organisms; only in the few universes that are like ours would
intelligent beings develop and ask the question: 'Why is the
universe the way we see it?' The answer is then simple: If it
had been different, we would not be here! (Hawking, pp.124-125) |
The egocentrism of modern man is quite evident in this perspective. In a nutshell, it is saying that the orderliness of man and his universe is simply a consequence of our good fortune in an otherwise disordered reality that must exists elsewhere- beyond our sight. It's like saying: "Well, everything I see indicates that the universe is of intelligent design, but since I don't believe in an omnipotent God and, in fact, I think I'm the only intelligent designer, I'm going to imagine that the orderliness I see is only a fluke in the midst of vast chaos beyond my sight." This is a gross self-delusion created to maintain an egocentric point-of-view.
Fortunately, Hawking discounts the anthropic view and presents a far more realistic explanation for the orderliness of the universe:
| One would feel happier about the anthropic principle, at
least in its weak version, if one could show that quite a number
of different initial configurations for the universe would have
evolved to produce a universe like the one we observe. If this
is the case, a universe that developed from some sort of random
initial conditions should contain a number of regions that are
smooth and uniform and are suitable for the evolution of
intelligent life. On the other hand, if the initial state of
the universe had to be chosen extremely carefully to lead to
something like what we see around us, the universe would be
unlikely to contain any region in which life would appear. In
the hot big bang model described above, there was not enough
time in the early universe for heat to have flowed from one
region to another. This means that the initial state of the
universe would have to have had exactly the same temperature
everywhere in order to account for the fact that the microwave
background has the same temperature in every direction we look.
The initial rate of expansion also would have had to be chosen
very precisely for the rate of expansion still to be close to
the critical rate needed to avoid recollapse. This means that
the initial state of the universe must have been very carefully
chosen indeed if the hot big bang model was correct right back
to the beginning of time. It would be very difficult to explain
why the universe should have begun in just this way, except as
the act of a God who intended to create beings like us.
(Hawkings, pp.126-127) |
Rather than accept the existence of an omnipotent God and the idea of Creation, however, secular science has resorted to the equivalent of "Ptolemic epicycle" models of the Big Bang- what I refer to as irrationales. The dominant theory of the Big Bang in cosmology today is the inflationary model of the universe. According to this model, introduced by MIT's Alan Guth, there was a brief, extraordinary phase of inflation in the early universe. This expansion is said to be "inflationary" because it entails that the universe once expanded at an increasing rate rather than at a decreasing rate as it does today. By introducing this inflation into the Big Bang model, it is hoped that much of the uniformity of the observed universe can be explained without reference to intelligent design by an omnipotent God. In other words, by introducing inflation into explanatory theory, science has been able to sidestep considering God and has thereby been able to maintain a secular, egocentric point-of-view.
The problem with inflation, however, is that it goes completely against the laws of physics and observed reality. According to the laws of physics, following the release of energy at the moment of an explosion, there will be a decreasing rate of outward expansion over time. Yet, with the Big Bang physicists are now saying that there is an exception to their rule. If this were not enough, the inflation that physicists are speculating about would entail that the outward expansion of the universe was, for a brief time, at a rate in excess of the speed of light. Once again, however, this goes against all the observations and laws that go into contemporary physics. Thirdly, in order for the inflationary model to be true, the cosmological constant of non-zero energy density would have to be smaller than current particle physics theories indicate by a staggering factor of 10^120, or 1 followed by 120 zeros. Lastly, the universe required in the inflationary model would have to be 10 million billion times larger than we observe it to be. (Kafatos, 'The Conscious Universe', pp.156-157)
Given that the inflationary model is grossly inconsistent with modern physics and observed reality, one should wonder why the theory was ever proposed, never mind popularly accepted. The answer should be clear. Science is irrationally struggling against the obvious truth revealed in religion millenia ago: the universe was intelligently designed and created by an omnipotent God. Rather than allowing reason to guide science to truth, however, man is being unreasonably misguided into false beliefs- gross self-delusion- due to an irrational, secular, egocentric bias.