Is the Big Bang scientific proof that God created the universe? Does the Big Bang agree with Genesis 1:1 in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. This is a very important, fascinating topic and my guest today is astronomer and astrophysicist Dr. Hugh Ross, who received his PhD in astronomy from the University of Toronto and did post-doctoral research on quasars at Caltech. He’s the author of many books that we will introduce along the way and let me start off by asking you: what is the Big Bang?
Well the Big Bang model is the idea that the universe is traceable back to a beginning, not just the beginning of matter and energy but a beginning of matter, energy, space and time and how the universe continuously expands from the beginning and expands at the just right rate to make life possible and even advanced life possible at this moment in the universe.
All right we’re going to tell you more in a moment. Let me introduce the whole concept of the Big Bang to our audience here by showing you a clip from Hugh’s beautiful movie documentary“ Journey toward Creation”. Watch this.
We are passengers on a controlled and purposeful explosion as if we are microbes riding on a piece of shrapnel from an exploding grenade. All of the universe’s matter and energy, even space and time came into existence in a single moment. But far from a chaotic explosion, this initial blast seems to have been finely tuned as if it has been designed to benefit us in our tiny planet. Today, our knowledge of the heavens and the earth and the forces influencing them is greater than that of all previous generations combined and our sense of wonder grows with each new revelation.
Now the Big Bang is a mind-blowing thought, a concept and it it has astonished the astronomers but take us back, how did you get to the point of figuring out the Big Bang happened and what are some of the proofs along the line that established that this is basically what took place.
Well a very beginning of the scientific discovery was Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity. When you solve his equations, it takes you back to a beginning of the universe. Before that astronomers thought the universe was infinitely old. This showed a beginning and then Lemaître in 1927 a Roman Catholic priest and an astronomer, he came up with the idea that continuous expansion of the universe again from those same equations of general relativity. And then astronomers actually observed the galaxies to be expanding away from one another. Then after that astronomers did more and more detailed observations of that expansion. They were able to predict that the universe very long ago must have been incredibly hot and this would leave a signature, a background radiation upon the universe and it was predicted in 1948 that that temperature would be about five degrees above absolute zero, which at the time was considered to be impossible to detect. But by the 1960s we had radiometers that could actually pick that up and that was a Nobel Prize won by Penzias and Wilson was a discovery of that cosmic background radiation from the creation event. The light of creation became visible and that’s the Coby experiment in 1992 – a satellite that was sent up for the very purpose of discovering those temperature fluctuations. And when they found the temperature fluctuations, they were at the level they expected. They were in the right places that they expected and this is why they call this a discovery of the century and not of all time and how looking at the face of God because it gave us that confirmation that the Big Bang Theory was not only correct in general but was correct in detail.
Since 1992 that story’s continued where we’ve made more and more precise measurements not only the cosmic background radiation but of the geography of the distribution of galaxies in the universe and of the expansion history of the universe and now we have a far more detailed model of the Big Bang creation event and its history subsequent to that than we had say in the 1960s and 1990s has given us greater and greater confidence that the Big Bang model is correct and therefore that there’s this agent beyond space and time that created it and not only created it but carefully fashioned it so the life would be possible in the universe.