Did There Have To Be Nothing?: Cosmology and Creator

Regardless of what you believe, the opening scene of Genesis has deeply beautiful imagery: over the chaotic darkness at the beginning of all things, a spirit sweeps out. Order and light are brought to creation through a word, through breath. Unlike other Ancient Near Eastern myths upon which the Genesis creation story is apparently based, where storm gods battle violently for dominance over the primordial chaos, the already dominant God of the Hebrew Bible need only speak creation’s order into existence and deems it good.

It is a lovely, comforting, and, when seen in the right light, challenging tale, but because of the climate of conflict between science and religion, the question quickly rises whether the creation of the universe in Genesis should be taken literally or whether it can be proved by science. But as fascinating and important as questions of myth and scripture may be, they can be set aside for the moment and saved for the next post. For now, we ask, does the creation of a universe require a God?

The Science

None of us were around at the beginning of all things, but scientific investigation of astronomical data can give us some clues about what may have happened in the earliest ages of the universe. The most important piece of data is that when we look out into the far reaches of space, we find that all distant galaxies are moving away from us. The universe is expanding.

This fact, implied by discoveries of Edwin Hubble (building off the work of Henrietta Swan Leavitt) and a consequence of the Einstein field equations of general relativity, leads us to think backwards-- if the universe is expanding now, it must have been smaller, hotter, and more dense in the past. But it’s not just the matter in the universe (the stars and gas and dust) that’s expanding; space itself is getting bigger. This leads astronomers to think that at some point in the past, all the matter in the universe and the entire fabric of spacetime must have been concentrated in a singularity. And how did that singularity turn into everything we see today? With a big bang, of course.

The Big Bang theory results from taking the theory of General Relativity and running it backwards (extrapolating backwards in time), leading to an infinitely dense, infinitely hot singularity. The “big bang” part of the theory is the inflationary period that this singularity underwent, beginning the universe as we know it. Spacetime underwent an incredible expansion (getting bigger by a factor of 10^26) in an incredibly short period of time (10^-32 seconds). Fascinating things happen with the fundamental forces of the universe in these early fractions of a second, but we want to pick up the story about 379,000 years after the big bang, when the universe first becomes transparent. Up until this point, it’s been too hot for the photons (bits of light) that have been bouncing around among the particles of matter, to do anything other than bounce from particle to particle. At 379,000, recombination happens and the photons are free to escape. There is light. And we have a picture of that light:

Microwaves mean something different than quick-cookers to NASA

This is an image of the Cosmic Microwave Background, observational evidence for the Big Bang. You can think of it as a baby picture of the universe, the earliest light we can see. Using blackbody radiation, the different colors in the image translate to different temperatures, but the differences in temperature are actually tiny: thousandths of a degree. Astrophysicists think that these tiny changes in temperature reflect microscopic differences in the quantum foam at the time of the big bang, expanded out to huge scales during the inflationary period. From these tiny variations, matter grouped together in some places and not in others, and the first stars and galaxies formed. Eventually, after billions of years, the cloud of dust and gas from which our Sun and solar system would form began to collapse and, billions of years after that, our solar system had formed more or less into the structure we see today and the Earth had cooled enough for liquid water oceans to form and life to begin.

The Issue

That’s creation as far as scientific theorization on observable evidence has been able to describe it. It should be noted that both Einstein and Hubble objected at first to the idea of an expanding universe and its implications. The Big Bang theory wasn’t always as acceptable to people, scientists and laity alike, as it is today. But, as it’s gained more or less universal acceptance, questions about the beginning of the universe have changed and they hinge on a question science has difficulty answering: what was there before the Big Bang?

The short answer is that we don’t know. The equations of General Relativity stop producing sensible results just before the proposed initial singularity so, without a breakthrough in theoretical physics, we may never be certain from a scientific perspective. In fact, the question itself may not be a sensible one: time as we understand it began with the big bang and so, properly speaking, there isn’t a “before” the big bang to talk about. Faith traditions such as Christianity that affirm creatio ex nihilo (creation out of nothing) might say that God created the universe, spacetime, matter, and the laws which govern the universe, so before the big bang, if that is how God created the universe, there was nothing. (Interestingly, you might have noticed that is not necessarily what the Genesis account affirms; it suggests instead that in the beginning, when God began creating, God swept out over the deep (primordial chaos), which may have already existed.) But creation out of nothing means that there must have been an initial creative act that originated outside the universe itself, namely for the Christian, in God.

Recently though, with advances in astrophysics and quantum mechanics, an argument can be made that the universe doesn’t need a creator at all, the key being found in Einstein’s other famous equation, E=mc^2. Energy and matter are two sides of the same coin, says Einstein. That realization, combined with the probabilistic laws of quantum mechanics, led physicists to speculate that on the quantum level, particle-antiparticle pairs pop in and out of existence, “borrowing” energy from the universe to come into existence as matter before annihilating and turning back into energy. This creating of matter from the underlying energy found evidential proof in Hawking radiation. So, if particles are popping into existence out of empty space, why not a whole universe, or multiple universes, as some suggest? Lawrence Krauss unpacks and expands on this idea in his popular book, A Universe from Nothing, as he explains that “nothing” as many understand it is a false concept, that actually, empty space still contains an underlying energy and tendency toward “something.”

A Better Question

The current debate over whether we need a God to explain the existence of the universe hinges on the definition of “nothing:” is empty space truly “nothing” or is spacetime itself “something”? If so, where did spacetime come from? That question may seem at first that an easy rebuttal to Krauss’ argument that creation can come from nothing, but that line of inquiry opens up again questions about the laws of nature and their origins-- if God has always existed, why couldn’t have spacetime? Perhaps spacetime and the laws that govern our universe have always existed--after all, doesn’t the Christian believe that there is something beyond pure material physics about our world anyway? Why should we get to make God out of reach of full scientific explanation but not the beginning of the universe?

So if we can't prove or disprove God with the big bang, where does that leave us? When talking about the beginnings of things, or anything really, it reminds us of the cruciality of considering the right questions. Certainly, there’s merit in developing firmly held conclusions and defending your positions about creation. But it is nowhere near as simple to defeat atheist arguments about the origins of the world as is sometimes portrayed, nor is it necessarily possible to “disprove” Christian claims of a creator God. It’s not a clear-cut issue how the universe began, even, as we mentioned, from just looking at the Bible or science. One doesn't replace the other. So rather than asking yourself the near impossible question, “At the beginning, was there something or nothing?” you might ask, “Did there have to be nothing in order for God to be Creator?” That is a question, we would suggest, really worth considering.