The Big Bang Had a Beginning

For most of history, scientists assumed the universe had always existed. No beginning, no end — just eternal matter in motion. That was the default position.

Then the 20th century arrived and changed everything.

In 1927, a Belgian priest and physicist named Georges Lemaitre (yes, a priest) proposed that the universe was expanding from an initial point. Most scientists thought he was wrong. Einstein himself told Lemaitre: "Your calculations are correct, but your physics is atrocious."

Then in 1929, Edwin Hubble confirmed it — galaxies are moving away from each other. The universe is expanding. And if you rewind that expansion like a film, everything converges to a single point. A beginning.

This was a serious problem for many scientists. Astronomer Robert Jastrow (an agnostic) wrote: "For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries."

The Big Bang is not just about an explosion. It is about the beginning of everything:

• Space itself began
• Time itself began
• Matter and energy began
• The laws of physics began

This is not matter expanding into existing space. Space itself came into existence. There was no "before" the Big Bang because time did not exist yet.

This leads to one of the oldest and most powerful philosophical arguments:

1. Everything that begins to exist has a cause
2. The universe began to exist
3. Therefore, the universe has a cause

Premise 1 is basic logic that everyone operates by. Premise 2 is now confirmed by modern cosmology. The conclusion follows necessarily.

And whatever caused space, time, matter, and energy to exist must itself be spaceless, timeless, immaterial, and incredibly powerful. Philosopher William Lane Craig has pointed out that this description sounds remarkably like God.

This is the most common objection, and it is actually straightforward to answer. The argument says everything that begins to exist has a cause. If God is eternal — never began to exist — then he does not need a cause.

"But that is special pleading!" Not really. Something has to be eternal. Either the universe is eternal (disproven) or something beyond the universe is eternal. The question is not whether something is eternal — it is what is eternal.

In 1965, Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson accidentally discovered the cosmic microwave background radiation — the afterglow of the Big Bang, still detectable everywhere in the universe. They won the Nobel Prize for it.

Penzias later said: "The best data we have are exactly what I would have predicted had I nothing to go on but the first five books of Moses, the Psalms, and the Bible as a whole."

In 2003, three physicists proved mathematically that any universe that has been, on average, expanding throughout its history must have had a beginning. This applies even to multiverse models. Physicist Alexander Vilenkin said: "All the evidence we have says that the universe had a beginning."

The universe had a beginning. Modern science confirmed what Genesis 1:1 said thousands of years ago: "In the beginning..."

The real question is not whether the universe started. It is who — or what — started it.