"Set aside the many competing explanations of the Big Bang; something made an entire cosmos out of nothing. It is this realization- that something transcendant started it all- which has hard-science types... using terms like 'miracle'." - Journalist Gregg Easterbrook
TODAY'S QUESTION: WE KNOW THAT SOMETHING CAUSED THE UNIVERSE ( PART 1). HOW SURE SCIENTIFICALLY ARE WE THAT IT ALL STARTED WITH THE BIG BANG?
Last time we left off analyzing evidence for whether or not the universe needed to have a transcendant cause in order for it to come into existence. We framed this within the first part of Kalam's Cosmological Argument, along with looking at evidence from quantum physics to show indeed, everything that begins to exist must have a cause. Today we will continue with looking at the rest of Kalam's Argument and see what this means for our universe itself!
The Kalam Cosmological Argument (continued)
Step one: Whatever begins to exist has a cause. (Explored & verified in previous post).
Step two: The universe had a beginning.
Step three: Therefore, the universe had a cause.
Alright, first let's take a look at whether or not we can prove step two with mathematics and science.
Step two: Mathematical Evidence
We know that the universe we live in is not eternal and must have had a beginning because of the number of absurdities that would arise within our time and space if there were an infinite number of things. An infinite past would involve an infinite number of events, meaning that the past cannot be infinite. Here's an example to more clearly show that that statement means. (As explained by PHD William Craig, pg 103).
"Imagine I had an infinite number of marbles in my possession, and that I wanted to give you some. In fact, suppose I wanted to give you an infinite number of marbles. One way I could do that would be to give you the entire pile of marbles. In that case I would have zero marbles left for myself.
However, another way to do it would be to give you all of the odd numbered marbles. Then I would still have an infinity left over for myself, and you would have an infinity too. You'd have just as many as I would- and, in fact, each of us would have just as many as I originally had before we divided into odd ad even! Or another approach would be for me to give you all of the marbles numbered four and higher. That way, you would have an infinity of marbles, but I would only have three marbles left.
... The notion of an actual infinite number of things leads to contradictory results. In the first case, in which I gave you all the marbles, infinity minus infinity is zero; in the second case in which I gave you all the odd-numbered marbles, infinity minus infinity is infinity; and in the third case in which I gave you all the marbles numbered four and greater, infinity minus infinity is three. In each case, we have subtracted the identical number from the identical number, but we have come up with nonidentical results."Mathematicians are actually forbidden from doing subtraction and division in transfinite arithmetic for this reason and only use infinite numbers in the conceptual realm.
The Gist: The idea of actual infinity is just conceptual and is not descriptive of what can happen in the real world, in our world and dimension of time. (Infinity could be a reality if we were in a different type of dimension of time, but that's a whole other story- in our universe, an infinite past is not possible). If you substitute 'past events' for 'marbles', you can see the absurdities that would result. The universe, therefore, must have had a beginning. (If still confused, google "impossibility of transversing the infinite").
Hold up! Some of you are probably thinking, hey, then how can God be infinitely old? Wouldn't all of this reasoning rule out God then? In short, no. Time and space are creations of God, which began at the Big Bang. If one were to rewind to the beginning of time itself, there is simply eternity there, and by that I mean timelessness. God, who is eternal, is timeless in his being. God transcends time, he's beyond time, and because of this he did not endure through an infinite amount of time because he is timeless. His domain transcends our dimension of time. Once he creates the universe, our universe, he could enter time... but that's a different topic altogether.
So now that mathematically we have shown that in our dimension of time, an infinite past is simply not possible, let's see what science has to say regarding there being a beginning of the universe.
Scientific Evidence
Albert Einstein in 1915 developed his general theory of relativity and began applying it to the universe as a whole. He was shocked that it didn't allow for a static universe, and instead, according to his equations, showed that the universe must be expanding. This meant that if you went backward in time, the universe would shrink back to a single origin before which it didn't exist. It was named the 'Big Bang' by astronomer Fred Hoyle.
Empirical Evidence to prove an expanding universe:
- 1929: American astronomer Edward Hubble discovered through light coming to us from distant galaxies that all galaxies are moving away from us. (Light appears redder when moving away from you, and bluer when moving towards you. Galaxies were and are "red shifting". Google red and blue shifting if confused!) If all galaxies were continually red shifting, this mean that the universe is literally flying apart at enormous velocities. Imagine we are all little raisins on a cake, and as the cake keeps expanding, every raisin is getting farther and farther apart. That is what is happening to our universe- its expanding!
- 1940s: George Gamow predicted that if the Big Bang was an actual event that really happened, the background temperature of the universe should be just a few degrees above absolute zero; this would be a relic from a very very early stage of our universe. And guess what? In 1965, two scientists discovered the universe's background radiation, and it was only 3.7 degrees above absolute zero. There is no explanation for this, except for the fact that it is a sign from a very early and incredibly dense state of the universe (which the universe would indeed be if it were more squished together, to simply put it), which was predicted by the Big Bang model.
- Another piece of evidence that the Big Bang is the origin of light matter. Heavy elements, such as carbon and iron, are made through a process where they are synthesized in the interior of stars and then exploded into supernovae into space (side note: I had to write a 7 page essay on this process for my astronomy final... good times....). Anyways, they go through a lot to be created, and we can explain and test this. However, very very light elements, such as deuterium, cannot have been created in the interior of stars because an even more powerful furnace would be needed to create them. There is only one way they could have been made - when the Big Bang itself happened, and temperatures were at billions of degrees. There is no other explanation.
Scientific evidence has now secured the fact that, yes, the Big Bang did happen. Stephen Hawking himself has said that "time itself, had a beginning at the Big Bang".
The Big Bang does not appear to have been a chaotic event that was disorderly, either. The universe we see today, and life itself, is very very dependent on a set of highly special initial conditions. If it had been any different in even the smallest of ways, our universe would be massively different as well. It appears to have been fine tuned for the existence of intelligent life with an insane complexity and precision. We will go into this later with evidence from physics and biology and all of that, but as for today, the goal was to simply show that the universe indeed had a beginning. We have proven step two of the argument.
I hope you will read on to step three, for it shows that if the universe had a beginning and everything that has a beginning must have a cause, that the universe must've had a cause... and what exactly can we prove this cause to be? And trust me, that's where things really start getting interesting.
If you have any questions at all, please please please feel free to ask or comment! Thank you for reading!
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