The Big Bang

When we look at the scientific evidence supporting the Big Bang theory, we should ask ourselves whether that supports or discredits the Christian worldview and understanding of Creation.

God's revelation is visible to us in both inspired revelation in scripture and in general revelation explained in Psalm 19:

The heavens declare the glory of God,

    and the sky above proclaims his handiwork.

Day to day pours out speech,

    and night to night reveals knowledge.

There is no speech, nor are there words,

    whose voice is not heard.

Their voice goes out through all the earth,

    and their words to the end of the world.

In them he has set a tent for the sun,

     which comes out like a bridegroom leaving his chamber,

    and, like a strong man, runs its course with joy.

Its rising is from the end of the heavens,

    and its circuit to the end of them,

    and there is nothing hidden from its heat.

                                                    (Psalm 19:1-6)

The age of the earth in a biblical Christian worldview is not necessarily as young as many believe. As I discussed in my earlier article Old Earth or New Earth? seven days of creation can be understood to be literal and yet support an old age for the universe as described below:

According to Einstein's theory of General Relativity, which has been bolstered by significant amounts of empirical study, the speed of light is a constraining factor that is essentially the fulcrum point of the balance between time and space.  We observe at the speed of light an expanding universe that began with a singularity where space and time emerged from a single point at which there was initially nothing and suddenly everything exploding and expanding into an unfathomably large and complex universe. Due to the doppler shift stretching the space through which light is traveling, when we look out billions of light years to observe the early universe we are looking across a greater distance than that same space stretched when the universe was much younger.  Careful calculations of the first several days of expansion and how far light would have traveled as the space was expanding and how much that space would have further expanded since then actually aligns to an age of 13.9 billion years.  The math is explained well in an article by Gerald Schroeder entitled simply The Age of the Universe.

The Big Bang theory emerged from the debate over whether the universe was infinite and static or finite and growing, which came into greater focus in the early 20th century.  Shortly after Albert Einstein first proposed his theory of General Relativity in 1915, he attempted to apply it to the universe as a whole in 1917 but found that he needed to add a "cosmological constant" to the equation in order to fit his assumption that the universe was static.  Later, after observations and models by Edwin Hubble and others regarding the doppler effect in astronomical observations led to what became known as Hubble's Law, contradicting the steady state theory, Einstein abandoned the idea of a cosmological constant.  The basic equations fit with the observations. Later, in 1964, observations of the cosmic background radiation provided further confirmation of the Big Bang theory, bolstered by even more precise measurements in the decades since. See History of the Big Bang Theory for more information. 

More recently, observations of gravitational effects that would require more matter than can be observed have led to theories about the presence of dark energy and dark matter which have led some to suggest that the cosmological constant may need to be introduced after all.  However, that would not necessarily spell the end of the Big Bang as describing rapid early and continuing expansion of the universe. The 2nd Law of Thermodynamics, which shows that in a closed system (of which the universe as a whole is an example), over time energy will move from warmer to cooler objects until a state of equilibrium is reached.  An eternal universe would have already reached such a state, which could be described as "heat death."  Naturally, God could be adding energy to such a universe, but a natural universe could not have always existed and still have energy.