The Big Bang and Christianity — part 1
This is a response to a recent article by Gerald R. Baron. His basic thesis is that the ‘fact’ that the universe had a beginning, i.e. the Big Bang, has the “obvious metaphysical implication” that this creation event must have had a supernatural cause, thus a Creator of some kind. In recent articles he has revealed himself to be a Christian. I assume therefore that he readily embraces the Big Bang theory because it appears to corroborate his belief in a Creator God. This is something which other Christians have been keen to do.
I am a big fan of his work on Medium. He is doing great work in the ongoing battles against atheism, secularism, physicalism, and Darwinism, and in this article I agree with his observations regarding Fine Tuning, the Multiverse and so on. I have reservations, however, about his unquestioning advocacy of the Big Bang hypothesis in order to support his argument, which is the subject of this article. I believe that he has too readily accepted this story because it appears to support his theological beliefs.
Baron gives a detailed history of the development of the Big Bang theory in his article. (If anyone is unfamiliar with that, and would like to find out more, please read that.) He contrasts the idea that the universe had a beginning in time with Indian religions which “suppose an eternal and infinite universe”, and the modern scientific Steady State Theory, most famously advocated by Sir Fred Hoyle.
For the general public, the best known part of the Big Bang story is that Edwin Hubble’s observations of the red-shifting of light from distant galaxies suggested that the universe is expanding. In Baron’s words, this “definitively proved the expansion of the universe through observation. He showed that observable galaxies were moving away from each other and this could be seen in the red shifting”.
Baron repeats the orthodox conclusion: “An expanding universe could only mean one thing. Run the time backwards and it would be collapsed into some sort of tiny beginning”. As he also says: “The conclusion that the universe had a beginning was on its way to becoming scientific orthodoxy”.
That is very well put, and Baron obviously agrees. For me, however, there is a certain irony in that last statement since, as he well knows, Darwinism is also scientific orthodoxy, and he is rightly not very keen on that. So a more interesting question is not whether something is scientific orthodoxy, rather whether it is true or not.
The first thing that can be pointed out, contrary to the orthodox story, is that Hubble’s observations of the red-shifting of light did not prove that the universe was expanding, or at least he himself did not think they did. For in a 1936 paper he said that “the expanding models are a forced interpretation of the observational results”¹. Baron is simply incorrect to say that the red-shifting of light “definitively proved the expansion of the universe”. The red-shift phenomenon is not in dispute, but an expanding universe is not the only possible deduction from it, even if that has now become the one generally accepted.
The most popular alternative at the time was a set of theories which can be grouped under the general heading of ‘Tired Light’. This was the theory that Hubble subscribed to, not an expanding universe. (It is possible that he may have entertained the expansion theory upon initial discovery of the red-shift. If so, it is clear that he quickly abandoned it.) This had first been proposed by the German physicist Walther Nernst in 1921², several years before Hubble’s discovery of the cosmological redshift-distance relation. He pointed out that in a universe of unlimited age, whether it be stationary or freely expanding, the temperature of interstellar space should be continually increasing, owing to its accumulation of stellar radiant energy. Noting that the temperature of space has instead remained quite low, he proposed that light photons must lose energy as they travel through space. (To spell it out, that is the explanation for the red-shifting.) He published a further paper on the same theme in 1938³.
Another advocate of this idea was Fritz Zwicky, who in 1929, seven months after Hubble had published his red-shift results, proposed a quite different interpretation of his findings, suggesting that galaxies and space were cosmologically static and that the red-shift was instead due to light photons gradually losing their energy during their long journey through space⁴.
In 1935, Hubble himself suggested that some mechanism other than expansion might be responsible for producing the cosmological red-shifts⁵. Then in 1936, he wrote a further paper that came out decidedly in favour of the tired-light model. His data agreed with a stationary Euclidean universe in which the red-shifts were due to some unknown effect, which caused photons to lose energy as they traveled through space⁶. (This is the paper where my first quote was taken from.) He was therefore agreeing with Nernst and Zwicky.
This story, which I believe to be the true facts about Hubble, is not something that you will find often, if ever, in histories of the Big Bang theory. They merely repeat the conventional story, which Baron has also adopted. In reality, the man whose discovery led to the theory of the expansion of the universe, and therefore to the Big Bang, contrary to what you are led to believe by TV documentaries, popular science books, and Gerald Baron, himself did not believe in the idea, saying in his paper that the data were incompatible. In 1938 Walther Nernst praised Hubble’s conclusions, noting that his own hypothesis had anticipated the redshift discovery as early as 1921. He said: “It is highly significant that Hubble, one of the discoverers of redshifts, should consider the model of the expanding universe to be unreliable”⁷.
The Tired Light debate aside, there are other good reasons not to believe in the Big Bang, primarily the assumption that the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation is its afterglow. This was another conclusion that was rushed to, on the basis of some poor science.
In the light of the above, it would seem that there are four possible scenarios:
- Hubble and the Tired Light advocates were wrong about the red-shift, the universe is indeed expanding, and there was a Big Bang
- the Tired Light advocates were right, the universe is not necessarily expanding, and there is therefore no need to postulate a Big Bang
- Tired Light aside, the universe isn’t really expanding, merely appears to be
- the universe is expanding, but the cause of this is something other than the Big Bang.
The third of these may appear preposterous when put in those terms — how could science get it so wrong? — but is not really so strange. After all, if the second scenario is true, then Big Bang advocates have managed to persuade themselves, on the basis of the red-shift phenomenon, that the universe is expanding when it isn’t. It’s possible that scientists may now be making another similar mistake. After all, we cannot actually see the universe expanding for ourselves; it is merely an inference from data, which may have been misinterpreted.
In relation to the fourth scenario, we already know that the Big Bang hypothesis is inadequate to explain the observable universe. If there was an original ‘explosion’, then we would expect the rate of expansion to be slowing down. On the contrary, the current understanding is that the rate of expansion is accelerating. Cosmologists have therefore been forced to hypothesise the existence of a mysterious, invisible ‘dark’ energy in order to account for this. Since this is undetectable by scientists, we spiritually minded people suspect that some kind of supernatural influence is at work.
For example, the esotericist Douglas Baker once said: “The dark matter and energy now being probed by modern science are the mental matter and energies known to ancient sages”⁸. Unfortunately for Gerald Baron he is not referring to Christian sages, rather the Vedic sages of ancient India. Robert Cox, who has studied these matters in some depth, agrees. Here he is talking about dark matter, but the same logic can be applied to dark energy: “Is it possible that this represents the discovery (or rediscovery) of the galactic field of tamas known to the ancients thousands of years ago?”, and says that the dark-matter halo of modern science “corresponds directly to the dark neck of Shiva, which extends above his galactic torso”⁹.
To conclude, I hope that I’ve demonstrated that the Big Bang is not necessarily a scientific fact, whatever the majority of cosmologists and physicists say. In part 2, I’ll discuss an alternative cosmological viewpoint, why the Big Bang theory is so appealing to Christians, and whether or not Genesis 1 endorses the Big Bang theory. Baron says that Einstein “accused Lemaitre of allowing his Christian beliefs to get in the way of science”. In the light of the above, and also in anticipation of part 2, I suggest that he must be careful not to fall into the same error.
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I hope you have enjoyed this article. I have written in the past about other topics, including spirituality, metaphysics, psychology, science, Christianity, politics and astrology. All these articles are on Medium, but the simplest way to see a guide to them is to visit my website (click here and here).
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Footnotes:
1. “Effects of red shifts on the distribution of nebulae”, Astrophysical Journal 84, 1936, p 554
2. The Structure of the Universe in Light of Our Research, Berlin: Springer, 1921, p 40, translated by R. Monti in SeaGreen 4, 1986, p 32–36
3. “Additional test of the assumption of a stationary state in the universe”, Zeitschrift für Physik 106: 1938, p 633–61
4. “On the red shift of spectral lines through interstellar space”, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 15, 1929: 773–79
5. E. Hubble and R. C. Tolman, “Two methods of investigating the nature of the nebular red-shift”, Astrophysical Journal 82, 1935: 302–37
6. as 1., p 517
7. as footnote 2, pp 639–40
8. Quantum Worlds Beyond the Atom, talk at Theosophical Society London, November 5th 2006
9. Creating the Soul Body, Inner Traditions, 2008, p 136, p 137
