Why the Big Bang Theory works...

A while ago, blogger Makarios dropped by to lambaste my post on the new slogan for the Atheist Bus Campaign.

Popping over to his blog, it's entertaining to watch him expound his Christian theories - but one in particular made me feel that I needed to post about it.

"The Big Bang just renders atheists incoherent and incapable of putting together even a single line of logical thought," he triumphantly rants, in this post. According to his interpretation, the Big Bang Theory is reliant on the belief that; "everything that began to exist came from absolutely nothing."

He concludes: "The cause was and had to be supernatural, or outside of and transcendent to nature." i.e. 'God.' 'Something' can't come from 'nothing' without divine intervention.

The problem with this theory is that it's complete rubbish.

For a start, it's centered around a totally contradictory fallacy - that the universe had to 'start' somewhere. Everything has a beginning, Makarios argues, so what existed before the beginning of the universe? He concludes that it must be God.

But that logic instantly poses the question of God's origins. If 'everything has a beginning' than God must logically have one too. So God was around to create the universe... But who was around to create God?

Christians argue that God is timeless - he's always existed. The concept of the 'beginning' is one that panders to man's limited understanding of existence: Mankind only comprehends a traditional narrative that includes a beginning and an end.

Well, that's actually an interesting theory. But what if it wasn't God that was timeless, without beginning or end, but the universe itself?

One common theory for the cause of the 'Big Bang' was simple physics. In 'the beginning' everything already existed: The entire universe - every atom of matter and energy - was already there, compressed to an almost incomprehensibly small size - perhaps not much bigger than an atom itself.

There was no beginning, but for the purposes of our demonstration, we'll start the story of the universe at this point - when all matter and energy was compressed to a boiling, seething speck on the brink of detonation.

Science shows us that compressing something heats it up - for example, it's compression, not a spark plug, which causes the combustion of diesel in a diesel engine.

By that same science, the continued compression of the entire universe would heat it up, hotter and hotter, until it burned more fiercely than anything man could comprehend - and the inevitable result would be an explosion.

That explosion sent matter and energy blasting off in all directions - the 'Big Bang' that scientists have written about. As this matter got further and further away, mass was attracted to mass and planets, stars and nebulae formed. Eventually, they became the galaxies, constellations and star systems that we know today.

The 'Big Bang' sends all the matter, energy and mass in the universe shooting off in all directions. Independent to the 'bang,' gravity and other forces would eventually create planets, stars, moons and every other stellar body in existence.

We know that this all took place - and the 'explosion' from the 'Big Bang' is continuing to send everything in the universe hurtling outwards, like an ever-expanding sphere of something in the limitless black void of nothing. As it does so - as science proves it always must - the entire universe is cooling.

Eventually - in quadrillions of years - that cooling will reach another tipping point. Then, the universe will begin to contract, as all cool things do...

Inevitably, the expansion will cause the universe to cool to a critical point, when it will begin to contract. All the planets, moons, suns and matter will be 'sucked' back towards the central point, getting compressed into one single thing as they do so.

The ever-expanding sphere of something will become an ever-contracting one. Smaller and smaller the universe will become, until everything - all that matter, mass and energy - is contracted once again into that small, tiny, compressed ball of stuff that started off the 'Big Bang' in the first place...

As things contract - and become compressed - they get hotter and hotter until the whole cycle begins again and there's another 'Big Bang.' Momentum continues contracting the cosmos, until the temperature increases towards that critical tipping point again.

We're back to the beginning again - a single speck of boiling matter that contains the entire universe within itself. The compression continues until this 'speck' reaches critical mass and we have another 'Big Bang,' starting the cycle all over again.

The universe expands and contracts, in an endless cycle. There was no 'beginning.' The universe didn't appear out of nowhere. It was always here, and always will be.

[Einstein beat you to this theory, Genius. It's the popular concept known as an 'Oscillatory universe' in which the 'Big Bang' is preceded by a 'Big Crunch' as you have described. - Editorial Bear]

Some scientists even surmise that as the universe travels outwards (as it's doing at the moment) time travels forwards. When the universe eventually cools and begins to contract, time will run backwards... Meaning that the entire scope of creation is self-contained. The concept of time, of 'beginning' and 'end' and everything in between, becomes meaningless.

As far as my limited understanding of science goes (and feel free to correct me, Mycroft, Tom and The Chemist) this adequately explains 'the beginning' and the apparent contradiction in 'the Big Bang' - that something can't appear 'from nothing' without something (i.e. God) to create it.

With this theory, God, who is apparently timeless, doesn't need to exist to create the universe because the universe is equally timeless; trapped in a cycle of expanding and contracting across time spans that our fragile human brains can barely comprehend.

It raises further questions - are the results of each cycle of 'the Big Bang' the same? Or do random permutations create 'different' universes each and every time.

Perhaps we'll never know - the human experience is only the blink of an eye in cosmic terms, and we're all just one, short blip on only the current leg of an endless cycle.

Let's leave that to the astronomers to figure out (and the philosophers to worry about.) All that concerns me is a logical, rational, scientific theory that deflates yet another dreary argument in the 'believer's' playbook.

As far as I'm concerned, God didn't create man. Man created God.

The Earth is just one of billions of planets capable of supporting life. We're just along for the ride, no more significant to the scope of the universe than ants or bacteria. It's being humble enough to accept that which opens our minds to understanding that any religious creation myth is ultimately inadequate.

How did the Universe Begin?

One of the big theological questions is: "How did it all begin?"

Well, that much is still a mystery. It's entirely possible that some higher power created the universe with one click of his (or her) fingers.

What we DO know is that the universe was created about 14 billion years ago, in an event that most scientists describe as 'the Big Bang.'

Why do I believe this?

Until recently, scientists believed in a 'static' universe - that the current configuration of planets, stars and galaxies were fixed. In 1912, an American called Vesto Melvin Slipher discovered something revolutionary. Peering through his telescope, he realised that objects in space (in his example, a spiral galaxy) were actually moving further away from Earth.


Scientists and astronomers realised that the planets and galaxies weren't moving away from Earth, but rather away from a universal central point.

By calculating the speed and trajectory of the voyaging galaxies' outward journey, scientists worked out that fourteen billion years ago, all the moons, planets, suns and galaxies must have started out from one location, in the center of the 'radius' of the Big Bang. They've been expanding outwards in a 'ripple' ever since.

The Big Question:

This is where my ignorance of scientific matters reveals itself.

I don't know why the Big Bang happened. I've tried reading the theories of primordial nucleosynthesis and it all seems wildly complicated.

I get the impression the big brainiacs are saying that the mass of the universe was squished and scrunched into such a tiny, atom-sized scale that all that pressure and heat created a spontaneous nuclear reaction that 'exploded' the existence into creation.

I don't understand physics enough to know if that makes sense, it's just as easy for somebody like me to imagine that it was a higher power who lit a 'universe firework' that detonated reality as we know it.

Some conjecture that the universe started with a 'cosmic egg,' which was the prior universe, having expanded to its maximum reach, collapsing in on itself in something called the 'Big Crunch.' This makes sense as it's what scientists hypothesise will happen once our current universe has reached the limits of its expansion.

But at the risk of sounding ignorant, I don't pretend to know why or what caused the Big Bang. I only know that it happened - and that's the biggest window religious people have to argue the existence of God.

What else could explain the sudden 'detonation' of an entire universe?

I don't believe in God, so I don't believe he created the universe. However, I've got an open mind, so when it comes to the Big Bang, I'm not going to tell anybody that they're wrong for attributing the creation of the universe to a higher power.

The age of the Earth? Creationists are wrong.

Evolution vs. Creation Doctrine? Creationists are wrong again.

The existence of God? Nobody can know for sure.