God Vs The Big Bang: Why Not Both?
In a recent discussion I stated that I believed in the “Big Bang”. The other person then said, “That means that you don’t believe in God”.
I don’t understand why believing in the Big Bang means that I’m anti-God.
I was tempted to say that if he would answer one question I have, I would be willing to continue the discussion. That question is this:
If God is all-powerful and capable of anything, why do you think He was not capable of creating the universe and everything in it by using what is called by scientists, “The Big Bang”?
The Big Bang theory says that the universe was created from an explosion of energy that spread outward from something called a “singularity”. A singularity is the super dense center of a Black Hole. Through a process called “inflation”, that energy was released in an instant and spread outward at the speed of light, in a form that was pure energy that condensed later into matter and light.
The book of Genesis says, “In the beginning, … darkness was on the face of the deep”. Nothing in the universe is “deeper” or “darker” than a “Black Hole”. Allowing for differences in language in the translation, the two statements say the same thing. God then says, “Let there be light”. Science says that the first thing to come from the Big Bang was pure light when the first sub-atomic particles were formed.
In fact the main, and perhaps only, difference from the Genesis version of creation and the Big Bang is the time scale. The book of Genesis says it took place in a day. Science says it took about 100,000 years before the first light and atomic particles appeared.
That difference can be explained.
Albert Einstein proved in his “Special Theory of Relativity” that space and time are linked into one entity that cannot be separated, called “space-time”. Science says that in the Big Bang, space expanded outward from a point, and is still growing at the speed of light. That is easily proven by observing the most distant objects in the sky, the distant galaxies. The further we look, the faster they are moving away from us. It isn’t the galaxies that are moving. It is space itself, still expanding from the beginning.
My explanation for the “First Day” in Genesis, is that time, being linked to space, would have expanded along with space, and is still expanding. That is why Einstein said that if we could travel at the speed of light, time would stand still. It would happen because we would be “catching up” with the expansion of the universe, in space and time.
In the first 24 hours of God’s time, time would have been expanding so much that a day would spread out over millions, perhaps billions, of years. As the universe continued to expand, the expansion of time in our particular region of space slowed down to the rate that we now measure it.
2nd Peter, 3:8 says, “But, beloved, be not ignorant of this one thing, that one day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day.”
If God can do “anything” as most fundamentalists propose then it is not “Anti-God” to say that He could have created the universe through a process that we now call “The Big Bang”. The problem is that some people of faith want to say that God could only have acted in the way that they imagined it to take place. That limits God to doing things “their way” or not at all. We must be careful that we don’t put “limits” on God’s power or His will to use it any way that He chooses.
