The Big Bang

In the bible it is said that the universe had a beginning and that beginning was God (let’s forget the specifics of the order of creation for a moment). And then, thousands of years after the bible was written, scientists come along and say the same thing. The universe began with a big bang. This bang was what created space and time. Just like the bible says. Proof of God, right?

This argument is an over simplification of an extremely complex issue. I, for one, have very little knowledge about the big bang. Cosmological evidence is notoriously hard to grasp and tends to pass too far over peoples heads for them to make any informed decision. This argument from evidence will have to be passed on to Stephen Hawking and his astrophysicist friends. Though he seems to think its silly.

And so we move from an argument from evidence to an argument from lack of evidence. Just about every religion in the world speaks of creation. They differ over the question of which God was doing the creating and how this creation came about. Some believe the universe was created from an egg, others from a dream and yet others from a handkerchief. And they’re right. But people who claim their God created the world are only taking the first step. They still have most of their work ahead of them. The next step is explaining how this was done.

Luckily enough religious people are in no way shy about making physical claims. The Abrahamic religions doubly so. God created the world in six days. First he created the Earth, then the sea and the sky. He created land and plants, and only then made the sun, moon and stars.

Just about everything in this order of creation has long been shown to be false. Plants could not have been formed before the sun or stars. The sky has nothing to do with the sea. The only resemblance between the biblical account of our beginnings and the scientific one is that there actually were beginnings. Everything coming after that is wrong. The religious score one point. Only one point.

But of course there was a beginning. As I’ve said in earlier posts, there is no such thing as infinity in the real world. We may not know how the universe began. It was a very long time ago after all. But we know it did. And it will one day end. At least in its present form.

Despite this, as we have done before, we will take a moment to assume we are wrong. Let’s imagine God did create the universe as we know it. We then have to again ask the question: Who created God?

This puts us in a bit of a pickle. We’ve gone all the way toward assuming the world was created by a higher being and now we’re stuck where we started. And even accepting everything written in the bible as true, we have no solution to this important question.

After all is said and done, I must conclude that a creature so complex as to create the universe must have himself have evolved. Probably as a product of natural selection.