The Case for a Creator - Lee Strobel [48]
Thousands of years ago, the Hebrews believed they had the answer: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth,” opens the Bible. 4 Everything began, they claimed, with the primordial fiat lux—the voice of God commanding light into existence.5 But is that a simplistic superstition or a divinely inspired insight? What do the cosmologists—scientists who devote their lives to studying the origin of the universe—have to say about the issue?
It seemed to me that the beginning of everything was a good place to start my investigation into whether the affirmative evidence of science points toward or away from a Creator. At the time, I wasn’t particularly interested in internal Christian debates over whether the world is young or old. The “when” wasn’t as important to me as the “how”—how do scientific models and theories explain the origin of all? 6
“In the beginning there was an explosion,” explained Nobel Prize–winning physicist Steven Weinberg in his book The First Three Minutes. “Not an explosion like those familiar on Earth, starting from a definite center and spreading out to engulf more and more of the circumambient air, but an explosion which occurred simultaneously everywhere, filling all space from the beginning with every particle of matter rushing apart from every other particle.” 7
Within the tiniest split second, the temperature hit a hundred thousand million degrees Centigrade. “This is much hotter than in the center of even the hottest star, so hot, in fact, that none of the components of ordinary matter, molecules, or atoms, or even the nuclei of atoms, could have held together,” he wrote. 8
The matter rushing apart, he explained, consisted of such elementary particles as negatively charged electrons, positively charged positrons, and neutrinos, which lack both electrical charge and mass. Interestingly, there were also photons: “The universe,” he said, “was filled with light.” 9
“In three minutes,” wrote Bill Bryson in A Short History of Nearly Everything, “ninety-eight percent of all the matter there is or will ever be has been produced. We have a universe. It is a place of the most wondrous and gratifying possibility, and beautiful, too. And it was all done in about the time it takes to make a sandwich.” 10
The most intriguing question is what caused the universe to suddenly spring into existence. For Bryson and many others, its mere presence somehow seems to explain itself. In a chapter called “How to Build a Universe,” he vaguely speculates on exotic theories about a “false vacuum,” or “scalar field,” or “vacuum energy”—some sort of “quality or thing” that may have “introduced a measure of instability into the nothingness that was” and thus sparked the Big Bang through which emerged the entire universe.
“It seems impossible that you could get something from nothing,” he said, “but the fact that once there was nothing and now there is a universe is evident proof that you can.” 11
Yet could there be another explanation that better accounts for the evidence? Might the mysterious causation be divine? Maybe Edward Milne was right when he capped his mathematical treatise on relativity by saying: “As to the first cause of the Universe . . . that is left for the reader to insert, but our picture is incomplete without Him.” 12
I knew this investigation would take me into the slippery world of theoretical physics, where it’s sometimes difficult to discern between what’s profoundly scholarly and what’s just plain silly. That was well-illustrated in late 2002 when a debate broke out over a highly speculative theory from two French mathematical physicists (who happened to be twins) about what might have preceded the Big Bang.
As amazing—and amusing—as it seems, the scientific community couldn’t figure out whether the brothers “are really geniuses with a new view of the moment before the universe began or simply earnest scientists who are in over their heads and spouting nonsense,” said a New York Times article that featured the provocative headline: “Are They a) Geniuses or b) Jokers?”
While