Have you, like countless others, ever
wondered how the world began? Stephen Hawking, the famous British theoretical
physicist, wrote: “We find ourselves in a bewildering world. We want to make
sense of what we see around us and to ask: What is the nature of the universe?
What is our place in it and where did it and we come from?”1
Practically
all cultures on earth have a cosmogony -- a creation myth of how the world came
into being. These traditions present a broad variety of scenarios that range
from the death of a god or animal, whose body parts became the land, sea, and
sky; to a primordial sea, from which gods and the world emerged; to eggs that
hatched creator-gods; to struggles among gods, who produced offspring through
incest or self-fertilization; to men springing forth from the tears of gods or
even fleas from the skin of a dead god. The numerous tableaux had been limited
only by the ancients’ imaginations.
Under
scrutiny, however, all of these stories of origin are nothing but continuations
of previous circumstances, built on things that already existed. On the other
hand, the Genesis account of creation in the Bible tells of a universe that
emerged from nothing.
Science confirms
Scripture
In
great steps, advances in modern science are confirming the Biblical account.
While science textbooks have to be revised or updated from time to time in the past
200 years to accommodate new discoveries and theories, in 3,500 years nothing
ever needed to be changed in the Bible. Rather, many mysteries in the Scriptures
have become clear and well established facts in the light of increasing
scientific knowledge.
Astronomer
Hugh Ross remarks: “Instead of another bizarre creation myth, here (in the
Bible) was a journal-like record of the earth’s initial conditions – correctly
described from the standpoint of astrophysics and geophysics – followed by a
summary of the sequence of changes through which Earth came to be inhabited by
living things and ultimately by humans. The account was simple, elegant, and
scientifically accurate.”2
Science
writer Fred Heeren notes: “Hebrew revelation is the only religious source
coming to us from ancient times that fits the modern cosmological picture. And
in many cases, 20th-century archeology and myth experts have also
been forced to turn from older views that treated the Bible as myth to ones
that treat it as history.”3
The
convergence of Biblical teachings and scientific findings is truly amazing. Let
us begin with the first few words and verses of the Bible to see for ourselves
this growing harmony between science and Scripture.
A beginning
“In the beginning …” (Gen1:1).
The
Judeo-Christian Scriptures unfold with the story of the birth of the universe.
Ancient men generally believed in so such thing. The Greek philosopher
Aristotle taught around 2,300 years ago that the world was eternal – it had
always existed. Indeed, the starry sky we see on a clear night seems to be
unchanging. Albert Einstein, considered one of the most brilliant scientific
minds in modern times, tried to prove that we live in a static, unchanging
universe. As late as the early 1960s, two-thirds of the leading American
scientists surveyed professed their belief in the steady-state theory of the
cosmos.4
In
1917, though, after Einstein published his theories of special and general
relativity (1905 and 1915), Dutch astronomer Willem de Sitter saw an oversight
in Einstein’s equations. He pointed out that if the density of the universe were
low enough, it would not be static, but expanding at nearly the speed of light.5
In 1922, Russian astronomer Alexandr Friedmann found a hidden mathematical
prediction in Einstein’s equations: The universe was finite, not infinite.
Anything that is not infinite must have had a beginning.
In 1927 American astronomer Edwin
Hubble discovered that, based on the observed redshift (wavelengths of light
lengthening or turning red when moving away from the observer), all the other galaxies
were speeding away from the Earth. The farther away they were, the higher their
velocity – as fast as about 25,000 miles per second!6
The law of inertia states that a
body at rest remains at rest and a body in motion remains in motion unless
acted upon by some outside force. Hence, the galaxies have once been close
together before a force caused them to move away from each other. Ergo, the
universe had a beginning. The editors of the Encyclopedia Britannica express their agreement: “The observed
expansion of the universe immediately raises the spectre that the universe is
evolving, that it had a beginning…”7
In
addition, the science of thermodynamics dictates that heat must flow from a
warm body to a cold one. If the universe has always existed, its temperature
should be uniform throughout. However, observations indicate that the cosmic
temperature is still cooling down. Therefore, the universe has not always
existed – it had a starting point.
Robert
Jastrow, founder and former director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space
Studies, concludes that “the astronomical and biblical accounts of Genesis are
alike in one essential respect. There was a beginning, and all things in the
Universe can be traced back to it.”8
A Beginner?
“In the beginning God…”
(Gen1:1).
The
law of causality, or cause and effect, declares that nothing can happen or
exist without a cause. The universe, being an effect, must have had a cause.
What caused the universe to come into existence?
Scientists
are able to analyze and explain the observable universe; but they remain in the
dark as to its cause. Paul Dirac, the Nobel laureate from Cambridge University
The
Encyclopedia Britannica admits the
implication: “…the notion that the Cosmos had a beginning, while common in many
theologies, raises deep and puzzling questions for science, for it implies a
creation event -- a creation not only of all the mass-energy that now exists in
the universe but also perhaps of space-time itself.”10 Stephen
Hawking is of the same mind: “So long as the universe had a beginning, we could
suppose it had a creator.”11
Empty space created
“In
the beginning God created the heaven…” (Gen 1:1).
If
the universe had a beginning, then “space” has not always been there. There was
once a state or condition when the emptiness of space did not exist at all.
As
most people today know, “heaven” is the empty space above and surrounding Earth
in all directions, where the stars and the planets are. How did space come into
being? Jewish mystics have long been familiar with this mystery: The Ein Sof (the “Infinite Nothingness”)
contracted Itself to make room for space. The “contraction” is known in
Kabbalistic terms as the tzimtzum.
Can
you imagine what empty space is like? It contains nothing, not even light or
darkness. Yet, surprisingly, scientists have discovered that the vacuum of
“empty space” is not absolutely empty. Space possesses electromagnetic
qualities, dielectric permittivity, intrinsic impedance, and immense
“zero-point” energy that helps keep all the electrons in the cosmos in their
orbits around atomic nuclei!12
A cosmic “air
pocket”?
Perhaps
we can use an analogy, although inadequate, to imagine the relationship between
the Ein Sof and space: If the Ein Sof were the atmosphere that is
everywhere around us, then space would be an “air pocket” (which air travelers
are quite familiar with). An air pocket forms when a mass of air cools, becomes
heavier, and sags as one distinct body. The air pocket is still very much a
part of the atmosphere, but for the time being has acquired a separate identity
of its own.
Matter materializes
“In the beginning
God created the heaven and the earth”
(Gen1:1).
After
creating “heaven” (space), God went on to create the “earth” in the emptiness He
had just brought forth. Here, “earth”
may mean something else other than the planet Earth, because the next passage
says that the earth was still “without
form, and void.” The Hebrew word used was 'erets (from a root meaning “to be firm”). We could thus take “earth” in the passage to mean “solid matter.”
The
first law of thermodynamics states that matter can neither be created nor
destroyed. Something cannot be created from nothing. If so, how did the first
speck of matter materialize? Paul says God created the physical universe from
invisible materials: “…what is seen was
not made out of things which are visible” (Heb 11:3b, NASU).
A
medieval Jewish sage in Spain
All things from
“nothing”
Cosmologists
generally believe that in the beginning there was nothing. Then, all of a
sudden, from out of that nothing, the universe was born. Jewish sages are in
complete agreement. They just differ in their concept of “nothing.”
Scientists
arrive at a mathematical “zero.” Stephen Hawking says that “the total energy of
the universe is exactly zero.”14 Paul Davies wonders: “Astronomers
can measure the masses of galaxies, their average separation, and their speeds
of recession. Putting these numbers into a formula yields a quantity which some
physicists have interpreted as the total energy of the universe. The answer
does indeed come out to be zero within the observational accuracy. The reason
for this distinctive result has long been a source of puzzlement to
cosmologists. Some have suggested that there is a deep cosmic principle at work
which requires the universe to have exactly zero energy.”15
In
contrast, by “nothing” Jewish philosophers mean the Ein Sof – the “Infinite Nothingness” -- God. It appears He was that
“deep cosmic principle at work” in the beginning.
A thought in God’s
mind?
In Space-Time and Beyond, Fred Alan Wolf wrote: “The quantum physicist
calls the ‘pre-matter’ phase, the quantum wave function. The quantum wave
function is very well calculated, but it is not matter! It is not anything,
really… As fantastic as it sounds, the mathematical models for such things are
very well defined and, mathematically at least, well understood… the quantum
wave represents where and when something is likely to occur; in other words, it
is a measure of the probability of an event taking place… this probability not
only exists in our minds, but also moves in space and time. In other words this
wave is both in our minds and out there in the world.”16
Before
matter first appeared, was it merely a probability in the mind of God? Paul
Davies muses, “it seems that the entire universe may be nothing more than a
thought in the mind of God.”17 James Jeans, the knighted British mathematician,
says: “The world looks more like a great thought than a great machine”18
and adds: “If the universe is a universe of thought, then its creation must
have been an act of thought.”19
From
wave to particle?
In 1906 English physicist J.J. Thomson
won the Nobel Prize for demonstrating that electrons were particles. In 1924 French
physicist Louis de Broglie (who won the Nobel Prize in 1929) proposed that all
matter, including light, possessed a quality called “wave-particle duality” – that is, they can appear as either
waves or particles.20 J.J. Thomson’s only son, George Paget Thomson,
likewise became a Nobel laureate in 1937 by proving that electrons were waves!
Both father and son, as well as de Broglie, were correct – they established the
wave-particle duality common to all subatomic entities.
Quantum physicists now know that
when an atom is broken down to its subatomic components, particles like
protons, neutrons, and electrons surprisingly lose their characteristics as
particles. They may sometimes still behave like particles, but they no longer
have dimensions. Thus, a subatomic entity, such as an electron, can appear as a
particle or a wave. Amazed physicists found that if we assume that a quantum
entity is a particle, it will appear as a particle. Assume it is a wave, and we
will observe it as a wave! We see matter the way we believe it exists. In
theory, all matter, including humans, has this property of duality.21
Was
the wave-particle duality principle responsible for a thought of God morphing
from a wave into the first particle of matter?
Infinitesimal speck
Advocates of the Big Bang Theory
hold that the universe began as an infinitesimally small, infinitely hot, and
incredibly compact point called a “singularity.” It contained all the matter of
the universe. This hews closely to what Jewish sages have taught for centuries.
In
his exegesis of Genesis in the 12th century, Moses Maimonides said that the entire universe had
been created from something smaller than a mustard seed.22 Nachmanides corroborated that: “Now this
creation was a very small point and from this all things that ever were or will
be formed.”23 Later, in 1930, Belgian astronomer Georges
Lemaitre described the primal atom as a super dense “cosmic egg.”
Astronomer
Edwin Hubble’s discovery of an expanding universe implies that all the
particles that make up the universe were indeed once tightly packed together. The
supremely hot and compact speck suddenly exploded and dispersed at close to the
speed of light, eventually forming the stars and the galaxies.
Fellow astronomer John D. Barrow of the University of Sussex England
“Quantum fluctuation”
The
NASA posits that the creation of the universe was the result of a “quantum
fluctuation.” Quantum what?
Edward
Tryon first proposed the idea in a Nature
magazine article in 1973: “Is the Universe a Vacuum Fluctuation?”25 Scientific
writer Andrew Chaikin remarks:
“Quantum mechanics says that matter and energy can appear spontaneously out of
the vacuum of space, thanks to something called a quantum fluctuation, a sort
of hiccup in the energy field thought to pervade the cosmos.”26
Physicists have realized that even
the supposedly empty vacuum of space has “things” swarming in it. As author
Richard Morris (The Edges of Science)
points out: “In modern physics, there is no such thing as ‘nothing.’ Even in a
perfect vacuum, pairs of virtual particles are constantly being created and
destroyed. The existence of these particles is no mathematical fiction. Though
they cannot be directly observed, the effects they create are quite real. The
assumption that they exist leads to predictions that have been confirmed by
experiment to a high degree of accuracy.”27 The spontaneous
appearance and disappearance of virtual particles in space is what scientists
call a “quantum fluctuation.”
Law of parity. An article in The New York Times (August 21, 1990), entitled "New
Direction in Physics: Back in Time," explains that “the vacuum's
totally empty space is actually a seething turmoil of creation and
annihilation, which to the ordinary world appears calm because the scale of
fluctuations in the vacuum is tiny and the fluctuations tend to cancel each
other out."28
In
other words, as soon as a virtual particle appears, its closely following
antiparticle twin collides with it, destroying both of them. The process of
mutual destruction is part of the “law of parity.” (The “virtual particles” are
pairs of matter and antimatter, such as quarks and antiquarks, which form the atoms
that make up all things in the universe. An antiparticle is identical to its particle
partner in every way, except that its charge or spin is the exact opposite.)
The
Encarta Encyclopedia sheds further
light on the matter: “In physics, the seemingly inviolable law of parity holds
that the conversion of energy into matter produces equal amounts of matter and
antimatter that then annihilate each other.”29
A
quark of nature
Until the 1950s physicists
believed there was always perfect balance and symmetry in the creation and
mutual annihilation of matter and antimatter. Yet, if that was the case, the
universe could never have materialized. All matter would have vanished almost
as soon as it had appeared. But a quirk of nature happened. Every so many
collisions left one extra particle or quark surviving intact.
Matter-antimatter
imbalance. In
1964, James W. Cronin of the University
of Chicago Princeton did experiments which
showed that every so often an extra particle survived the matter-antimatter
annihilation: two in each 1,200 decays of a particle produced a survivor that
violated the law of parity. For their achievement, Cronin and Fitch shared the
Nobel Prize in physics in 1980.30
Physicist
Gerald Schroeder speaks of even greater odds: In the first 1/100,000 of a
second of the Big Bang, more quarks than antiquarks were produced –
10,000,000,001 particles for every 10,000,000,000 antiparticles -- establishing
a numerical edge of matter over antimatter. Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg
wrote: “The one part in ten billion excess of matter over antimatter is one of
the key initial conditions that determined the future development of the
universe.”31
The extra quarks left by the
matter-antimatter imbalance in the quantum fluctuations accumulated and bonded
together to form the elements that gave birth to the stars and the galaxies,
and, later, all living organisms. What caused the imbalance?
Astrophysicist John Gribbin
comments that, although scientists can describe in detail what happened after the creation, they cannot explain what
started it all. The “instant of creation remains a mystery… maybe God did make
it, after all.”32
1
|
Stephen
Hawking, A Brief History of Time,
1988, p. 171
|
2
|
Hugh
Ross, The Creator and the Cosmos,
1993, p. 15
|
3
|
Fred
Heeren, Show Me God, 1997, Preface;
quoted in “The Beginning of the Universe,” Does God Exist?, 2000, p. 12
|
4
|
Gerald
Schroeder, The Science of God,
1997, p. 23
|
5
|
De
Sitter, World Book 2005 (Deluxe)
|
6
|
Robert
Faid, “The Factual Scientific Accuracy of the Bible,” Mysteries of the Bible Now Revealed, 1999, p. 136
|
7
|
Cosmos,
Encyclopaedia Britannica 2009 Student
and Home Edition
|
8
|
Robert
Jastrow, Journey to the Stars,
1989, p. 47
|
9
|
Quoted
by Grant Jeffrey, The Signature of God,
1996, p. 117
|
10
|
Cosmos,
op. cit.
|
11
|
Hawking,
op. cit., pp. 140-141
|
12
|
“Why
‘Six Days’?,” Personal Update,
November 2003, p. 11
|
13
|
Quoted by Schroeder, op. cit., p. 184
|
14
|
Hawking,
op. cit., p. 129
|
15
|
Paul
Davies, God and the New Physics,
1983, pp. 31-32
|
16
|
Fred Alan Wolf, Space-Time and Beyond, 1987, pp.
128-129
|
17
|
Quoted
in “Whence Our ‘Reality’?,” Personal
Update, Dec. 2003, p. 4
|
18
|
Quoted
by Schroeder, op. cit., Introduction
|
19
|
James
H. Jeans, The Mysterious Universe,
revised edition, 1932, p. 181
|
20
|
De
Broglie, Louis Victor, World Book 2005
(Deluxe)
|
21
|
Schroeder, op. cit., p. 160
|
22
|
Cited
by Schroeder, op.
cit., p. 58
|
23
|
Quoted by Schroeder, op. cit., 1997,
p. 184
|
24
|
John D. Barrow, The Origin of the Universe, 1994, pp. 3-5
|
25
|
Cited
by Schroeder, op.
cit., p. 62
|
26
|
Andrew Chaikin, “Are There Other Universes?”, Science
|
27
|
Richard
Morris, The Edges of Science, 1990,
p. 25
|
28
|
“New
Direction in Physics: Back in Time,” The
New York Times, nytimes.com/1990/08/21/science, Internet
|
29
|
1980:
Nobel Prizes, Microsoft Encarta
Encyclopedia Deluxe 2004
|
30
|
Ibid.
|
31
|
Steven
Weinberg, “Life in the Universe”; quoted by Schroeder, op. cit., pp. 188-189
|
32
|
John
Gribbin, “Taking the Lid Off Cosmology,” New
Scientist,
|
(Excerpted from Chapter 3, Conundrums
of Creation, THE DEEP THINGS OF GOD: A Primer on the Secrets of Heaven
and Earth by M.M. Tauson, Amazon.com)
