8. Is the Big Bang theory compatible with Scripture and Christian faith?

When I went to Houghton, I revived an old Carl Schultz course called Science and Scripture and offered it online. The idea was to open it up to the public for auditing and possibly attract some students. Plus it was a Bible option for online students among a faculty that didn't really like online (what else is new). Since then, I've wanted to write a book on Science and Scripture that roughly covers the topics of the course. I floated a proposal a few years back but didn't get a bite.

In the meantime, especially in the light of AI developments, I've been thinking about self-publishing an intermediate work that could lead up to that ultimate goal. In training AI, you create snippet answers it seems. I've jotted down about 50 questions so far that might make for something like "Science and Scripture: Questions and Answers." Here's question 8: Is the Big Bang theory compatible with Scripture and Christian faith?

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Yes -- it is potentially compatible as long as one believes God is the one who caused the Big Bang.

The reason so many Christians assume the concept of a Big Bang conflicts with Christian faith and Scripture is because they assume it is atheistic. However, if one believes that God caused the Big Bang, then the theory actually supports faith in God. The Big Bang Theory itself says nothing about its cause. It simply says the universe started with a "bang." It is only about the how. It says nothing about the why. The only bone of contention, then, is how long ago it happened.

1. In the mid-1900s, the Big Bang Theory was the idea that the universe began in a hot dense state and then expanded rapidly from there to the vast cosmos we know today. As early as 1922, a Russian physicist named Alexander Friedmann recognized that Einstein's equations for general relativity could support an expanding rather than a static universe. In 1927, the Belgian priest Georges Lemaître (1894-1966) also suggested independently the idea of a "cosmic egg" or cosmic atom as a possible solution to Einstein's equations. Einstein disdained this possibility so much that he added a constant to his equation.

It is important to consider that many mid-twentieth-century cosmologists did not like this option precisely because it played so well into the idea of a Creator. After all, Lemaître himself was a Roman Catholic priest. One millennia-old argument for the existence of God was the cosmological argument, which argues that the universe must have had a cause. In the 300s BC, Aristotle suggested that the cosmos needed a "prime mover" to give it a first push. In the 1200s, Aquinas expanded this argument. 

The idea that the universe had a beginning raised the question, "Why did it begin? What was the cause?" And the cosmological argument stood ready to say that the best answer was a Creator, an intelligent Designer.

2. The very term "Big Bang Theory" was coined by Fred Hoyle (1915-2001) in the 1949 to make fun of the proposal. Hoyle favored an alternative known as the "Steady-State Theory." This was the idea that the universe may be constantly generating matter in some way somewhere as well as losing matter somewhere. Since it required no beginning to the universe, many cosmologists found it attractive.

Hoyle would have to swallow his mockery in 1964 with the discovery of a cosmic background radiation that confirmed that the universe had a beginning. Since this radiation was steadily in decline all over the universe, it served as a kind of timer since an early cosmic event. If the universe were infinitely old, it would have already dissipated.

Further, Edwin Hubble (1889-1953) had shown in 1927 that the universe was expanding. If you are acquainted with the Doppler effect, wavelengths stretch out if an object emitting them is moving away from you. With light, this effect produces a "red shift." Hubble observed this shift everywhere in the universe. Everything is moving away from everything else.

All these data points and more have led to the current sense that the universe began in a singularity -- a point of the smallest possible dimensions. It then rapidly expanded some 13.8 billion years ago into the massive space we now know. [1] The Big Bang that Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson discovered in 1964 is now thought to be a "cosmic microwave background" (CMB) that emerged as the early universe cooled enough to release photons all over the universe when the universe was about 380,000 years after the universe began.

3. An alternative proposal was the so-called "Oscillating Big Bang Theory." In this proposal, the universe explodes from a singularity but then collapses again into a singularity because of the gravitational pull of the universe's mass. Like the Steady State Theory, this approach would allow for a universe that was infinitely old and did not require a Creator.

However, there does not seem to be enough mass in the universe for this theory to work. The so-called "critical density parameter" (Ω) would seem to be less than 1. This observation suggests that the universe will expand forever. Once again, we are left with a unique beginning event, which leads to the question, "Why did the universe begin? What was the cause?" 

The existence of a Creator God remains a perfectly coherent answer. We might add that the frequent retort, "Then where did God come from?" is a non sequitur. It does not follow. It actually is circular because it assumes that God is part of the creation. We observe that events within the universe require a cause. We have no point of reference to say whether entities outside the universe need a cause.

4. The main bone of contention is then the length of time. Many Christians would consider 13.8 million years ago to be too long ago to fit with the Bible. We will explore the age of the earth and the universe in another chapter. There are however varying interpretations. For example, some would see Genesis 1 specifically in relation to the creation of the earth, not the universe. Some might suggest an apparent age theory where God created the universe to look like it's 13.8 billion years old. Some might view the days of Genesis 1 as ages rather than 24 hour periods.

In the end, however, the notion that the universe started with a bang supports rather than conflicts with the notion of God as Creator.

[1] Some key aspects of the current understanding emerged from the work of Alan Guth in 1980.