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The Big Bang, the Beginning, and Creation

If the universe had a beginning, does that mean it was created?  And if it does mean that, can we look to the science of cosmology to settle the question of God’s existence?  Many people, both theists and atheists, think so.  Some religious people refer to the Big Bang as “the moment of creation.” And for their part, many atheists think that if science could  show that the Big Bang wasn’t the beginning of the universe and that the universe had no beginning but had always existed, it would prove that there was no moment of creation and therefore no Creator.  But is it really that simple?

At first glance, it seems that the Bible itself equates beginning and Creation.  Genesis 1:1 says,

“In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” ¹

But even though this verse affirms both a beginning and creation, it does not actually say that they mean the same thing.  In fact, they don’t.

To say that the universe had a beginning is merely to say that its history had a starting point a finite time ago, rather than stretching infinitely into the past or going around in a loop. On the other hand, in Catholic theology, to speak of the universe being “created” is to say that it depends for its existence upon God, who is the source of its being. The Catechism of the Catholic Church, in explaining Genesis 1:1, treats beginning and creation as distinct components of its meaning. It says,

“Three things are affirmed in these first words of Scripture: The eternal God gave a beginning to all things that exist outside of himself; he alone is Creator … [and the] totality of what exists (expressed by the formula ‘the heavens and the earth’) depends on the one who gives it being.”  (CCC290) [Emphasis added.]

Although “being created” and “having a temporal beginning” are distinct ideas, many theologians, philosophers, and ordinary people throughout history have seen them as connected in a necessary way.  For example, the great 13^th century Franciscan theologian St. Bonaventure believed that each implies the other: the universe being created implies that it has a temporal beginning and the universe having a temporal beginning implies that it is created.² However, his contemporary, St. Thomas Aquinas, famously disagreed, seeing the two notions as logically independent of each other.  In particular, St. Thomas believed that God could have created a universe that had no temporal beginning had He chosen to do so.³ In St. Thomas’s view, we only know that the universe has a temporal beginning because God revealed that fact to us in Scripture; whereas it is possible to know with certainty that the universe is created even without divine revelation by the natural light of human reason.

At first sight, it might seem that St. Bonaventure was obviously right and that St. Thomas’s idea makes no sense.  How could God create a universe that has no temporal beginning?  After all, when a human being makes something, that thing begins to exist when it is made.  A painting begins to exist when the painter finishes painting it.  A symphony begins to exist when the composer has finished composing it.

In other words, how can God be the “cause of being” of the universe if the universe has always existed?  To answer this, it may be helpful to consider the following analogy.  Imagine a piece of paper being illuminated by a lamp. One can imagine that the paper has existed for infinite time and has been illuminated by the lamp for all that infinite time.  In that case, the illumination of the paper would have no temporal beginning, but it would always have had a source or cause, namely the lamp.  Although the paper has always been bright, it has at every moment been dependent on the lamp for its brightness.  By analogy, even if the universe had always existed, it would have been dependent for its existence upon God at every moment of its existence.

Of course, being illuminated is one thing, and existing is another.  So let us use another analogy to see why beginning and creation are distinct ideas.  A piece of music has an internal sequence, measured by beats or notes.  The beginning of a symphony is the set of notes located first in that sequence, whereas the creation of the symphony is the conception of the entire symphony in the mind of the composer.  The composer is the reason that there is a symphony at all.  In a sense, he or she is the “cause of its being” as a work of art.  I say, “in a sense”, because human beings do not “create” and give being in the way God does.

Similarly, a novel has an internal sequence of words.  The beginning of the novel consists of the first words in that sequence, whereas the novel’s creation takes place in the mind of the novelist.  In other words, the beginning or opening of something has to do with its sequential  internal structure, whereas its origin in the sense of the ultimate cause of its existence has to do with its relationship to something (or someone)  else.  If one were to ask why a certain novel exists, it would be rather silly to point to its first words.  Rather one should point to its author.  Indeed, there could be a novel whose plot went around in a circle and which was even printed on a scroll that looped around: it would have no “first words,” and yet it would necessarily have an author.  The same would be true if there were a novel that had an infinite number of chapters, with no first and no last chapter: it would still need an author (though obviously it could not be a human author).  In a similar way, if one asks why the universe exists, one should not to point to the Big Bang or whatever the first events in the history of the universe were; rather, one should point to the mind of its divine Author.  And even a universe that was either cyclical or infinitely old would still require such an Author.

Divine Creation is the act by which God confers being upon the universe and all that it contains. As St Thomas Aquinas put it, “God is to all things the cause of being.” ⁴ God’s creative act is the reason that the universe is a real universe, one that actually exists, rather than just a possible, hypothetical, or fictitious universe.  Creation is the conferring of reality.  It follows that God equally creates all real things and events whenever and wherever they are located within the internal spatio-temporal structure of the universe.  God is the source of being of the chair on which you are sitting right now.  This is analogous to the fact that a composer is equally the source of every note of his or her symphony and that a novelist is equally the source of every word of his or her play.

God’s creative act, therefore, is not something that happened once upon a time, a long time ago.  Being an act of the divine will, it has no location in space and time.  It is a single, eternal (i.e., timeless) act by which God wills the existence of the whole universe and all of its parts from its beginning to its end.  Admittedly, Genesis 1:1 speaks of God creating “in the beginning.”  And theological tradition also distinguishes God’s act of creating at the beginning from his act of “conserving things in existence” later.  But theological tradition also says that this distinction is based on how things look from our time-bound perspective and is only verbal or notional rather than real.  According to Catholic theology, God’s act of creating and his act of conserving are really one and the same eternal act.

The foregoing is the traditional Christian understanding of divine “creation.”  And from it one can draw the following important conclusion: physics can have nothing to say about the creation of the universe, even though it may be able to tell us a lot about the physical events that happened in the universe at or near its temporal beginning.

Some religious people think that the physical events at the temporal beginning of the universe must have been miraculous in the sense that they cannot be described by or accounted for by natural science or that they violated the laws of physics.  This notion may be due in part to the fact that cosmologists often speak of the universe having had an “initial singularity.” What they are referring to is the fact that if one attempts to describe the development of the universe from its earliest moments using Einstein’s theory of gravity, but ignoring quantum mechanics, one finds that there must have been a “first instant of time” at which various physical quantities were infinite, including the temperature, the density of energy, and the “Riemannian curvature” of spacetime.  Because of these mathematical infinities (or “singularities”), the equations of physics would break down at that point.  It is known, however, that it is invalid to ignore quantum mechanics when energy density and spacetime curvature are as large as they must have been very near the time of the Big Bang.  Many fundamental physicists expect (for good physics reasons) that if quantum mechanics were properly taken into account in describing events near the Big Bang it would be found that there was no initial singularity where physical quantities were infinite or mathematically undefined and that the equations of physics applied perfectly well.

And, as far as theology goes, there is no reason to expect otherwise.  Just as one would expect the first sentences of a novel to obey the same laws of grammar and syntax as the later sentences, one would expect the events at the beginning of the universe to obey the same physical laws as the later events.  It would be absurd to suggest that if the laws of grammar apply at the beginning of a novel it means the novel has no author.  It is equally absurd to suggest that if the laws of physics apply at the beginning of the universe it means the universe has no Author.

And yet, many atheists make exactly that argument, including the late Stephen Hawking toward the end of his life.⁵ He suggested that the full equations of physics (whatever they turn out to be) may require the universe to have a temporal beginning and also describe the physical events that unfolded at that beginning.  That much is perfectly reasonable, but Hawking went further to assert that this would render a Creator superfluous.  The answer to this is quite simple and (strangely enough) was given by Hawking himself many years earlier.

In his 1988 bestseller, A Brief History of Time, Hawking noted that a theory of physics is “just a set of rules and equations,” and then famously went on to ask, “What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe?  The usual approach of science of constructing a mathematical model cannot answer the question of why there should be a universe for the model to describe.” ⁶ But that is precisely the question that “creation” has traditionally been thought to answer.  And what Hawking was saying in 1988 was that the “usual approach of science” — which is still its approach — “cannot” give an answer to it.

This point can perhaps be made clear by another simple analogy.  One may possess a book that contains the rules of a game, such as chess or baseball — let us say, chess.  Those rules describe the various kinds of things that can happen in a chess game, under what circumstances they can happen, how one thing causes another thing, and so on.  They even tell you that chess games have a beginning and how they begin (i.e. with the standard opening position) and how they can end (i.e. with checkmate, or stalemate, or three-fold repetition, or by the 50-move rule, or one player resigning, or the players agreeing to a draw).  But those laws of chess in no way can tell you whether any actual game of chess is being played, has ever been played, or ever will be played.  The rules could be describing merely hypothetical, possible, or fictitious games.  A mere set of rules does not have the power to make real the events they describe.

Just as the rules of chess describe how a chess game would begin, but do not cause there to be any actual chess games, so too the rules of a possible kind of universe — the mathematical equations that would govern one — may describe how a universe of that type would begin, but could not cause there to be an actual universe of that type.  The laws of physics have no power to create universes in the sense of giving reality to them.

If it is asked why there is any universe at all, there are two logically consistent answers.  One is that there is some ultimate “cause of being.”  That is the theist’s answer.  The other is that there is no cause or explanation of it; the existence of the universe is just a “brute fact.”  That is the atheist’s answer.  But what makes no sense whatever is to say that the laws of physics are a third answer.  At the end of the day, one must decide whether the theist’s answer or the atheist’s answer — or rather the atheist’s non-answer — is more intellectually satisfying and reasonable.

The Beginning: was there one?

Now let us turn to the factual question: did the universe have a temporal beginning?  Do we know?  And, if so, how do we know?  What do we know from divine revelation? What do we know from philosophical reasoning? And what do we know from empirical science, especially physics and cosmology?

First, revelation.  The Church has traditionally understood Genesis 1:1 as teaching that the world has a temporal beginning.  Both the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 and the First Vatican Council in 1870 spoke of God created the universe “ab initio temporis” (“from the beginning of time”).  And, as we saw, the Catechism of the Catholic Church treats it as something revealed.

What about philosophy?  If we turn to the pagan philosophers of ancient Greece, including Aristotle, we find that they generally believed that the world had always existed in some form.  However, some later philosophers have believed that such a “past infinite” universe is a philosophical impossibility.

This is claimed, for example, by the proponents of the so-called “Kalam argument” for the existence of God.  The most well-known modern proponent of it is the Protestant philosopher and apologist William Lane Craig, who traces it back to the 11^th century Islamic philosopher Al-Ghazali.  The Kalam argument purports to show philosophically (a) that the universe must have had a temporal beginning and (b) that any entity which has a temporal beginning must have a cause outside of itself, and therefore the universe must have a cause outside of itself.

Several medieval Christian philosophers were also of the view that a finite age of the universe can be proved philosophically.  A notable example is St. Bonaventure.  It is worthwhile to examine a couple of his arguments.  One of them used the method of “proof by contradiction,” which proves a proposition to be true by showing that denying it leads to a contradiction.  So let us suppose that the universe is infinitely old.  St. Bonaventure put this in terms of there being an infinite number of past “days.”  If that were the case, he said, then there would have to be some particular past days that were infinitely long ago.  But the day after such an infinitely-long-ago day would clearly also be infinitely long ago — as would the day after that, and the day after that, and (by mathematical induction) all subsequent days.  Therefore, the passage of days, one day at a time, could not ever have led from that infinitely-long-ago day to the present day.  That would mean, however, that the supposed infinitely remote “past day” was not really in “our past” at all, which is to say that we have arrived a contradiction.⁷

A very clever argument, but fallacious.  The false step in the proof is right at the beginning: the past can have infinite number of past days without any particular past day being infinitely in the past. This is just the familiar mathematical paradox that while there is an infinite sequence of natural numbers (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, etc.) every particular natural number is finite. So even if the past had an infinite extent, all particular past times were a finite time ago.

Another argument made by St. Bonaventure was that because each day that passes increases the number of past days, the past must be finite, as it is impossible to “increase infinity.” ⁸ This too is a mathematical fallacy.  One of the many things that I find very impressive about St. Thomas Aquinas is that he recognized that these arguments were not valid and correctly explained why.⁹ Of course, this is somewhat obvious to us today, but we have the advantage of living after 19^th century mathematicians such as Bernard Bolzano and Georg Cantor clarified thinking about infinite sets and infinite numbers.  St. Thomas not only rejected St. Bonaventure’s arguments, but said that he was unaware of any philosophical argument that the past had to be of finite extent that had “absolute and necessary conclusiveness.” ¹⁰

This may surprise some people who have heard of St. Thomas’s “First Mover” argument for the existence of God.  When most non-philosophers hear about this argument, they imagine that what St. Thomas was thinking of was something like a row of falling dominos where the motion of each domino is caused by the prior motion of the domino that struck it.  The idea, supposedly, was that there had to be a first falling domino — or, more generally, a “first mover.”  The reason being, supposedly, that it makes no sense for such a temporal sequence of past causes to “proceed to infinity.”  This is not a very convincing argument, and most modern philosophers and scientists would regard it as simple-minded.

But, whatever one thinks of it, it is not what St. Thomas’s had in mind.¹¹ In fact, he explicitly discussed this kind of argument and rejected it.  He did not use dominos as an example, but male ancestors, with a man being begotten by his father, who in turn had been begotten by his father, and so on.¹² St. Thomas said he saw no reason why such a sequence of fathers begetting sons could not proceed to infinity in the past.  He called such causes that followed one after another in time “non-simultaneously acting causes.”

St. Thomas’s “First Mover” argument involved what he called “simultaneously acting causes” and was much more subtle. My purpose here is not to explain it, but to note that the expression “first mover” tends to mislead modern readers.  In the first place, “move” for St. Thomas (and Aristotle) meant any kind of change, not just what we ordinarily mean today.  But more importantly, what St. Thomas meant by “first” in this context was not first in a temporal chain of events, but rather first in a certain kind of explanatory chain.

St. Thomas based his argument on the idea that it makes no sense for certain kinds of explanatory chains (as distinct from a merely temporal chains) to “proceed to infinity.”  We can get some sense of why this idea might be reasonable by using an example from mathematics.  In a mathematical proof, one proves a proposition by showing that it logically “follows” from some “prior” propositions, which in turn are shown to follow from other propositions that are prior to them, and so on (where, of course, “follow” and “prior” are meant logically not temporally).  Such a proof has to start somewhere, with some propositions that are either stipulated to be true or are self-evidently true.  If, instead. the “prior” propositions in one’s proof kept going back in an infinite chain or “infinite regress,” one would not have succeeded in proving anything. Every proposition in the infinite chain could be false!  One needs something that stands “first” in the proof, whose truth guarantees the truth of everything that follows.

I have brought up St. Thomas’s “First Mover” argument to warn against the common misunderstanding of it and to emphasize that St. Thomas saw no “compelling” purely philosophical reason why a temporal sequence of events couldn’t extend infinitely into the past.  I think most contemporary philosophers and physicists also see no reason for this and therefore would not find step (a) of the Kalam argument very persuasive.  I should note, however, that recently there have been some very clever attempts to strengthen step (a) of the Kalam argument, using more sophisticated versions of one of St. Bonaventure’s arguments that might  not suffer from the same defects.

So, what is the upshot?  Can purely philosophical reasoning give a definitive answer to the question whether the universe had a beginning?  Like St. Thomas, I am not convinced that it can, but there are some smart philosophers who think otherwise.

What does physics say about a Beginning?

Until the mid-twentieth century, it seemed to many scientists “unscientific” to say that universe had a beginning.  For example, the Nobel-Prize-winning physicist Walther Nernst declared that “to deny the infinite duration of time would be to betray the very foundations of science.” ¹³ One reason was that the law of conservation of energy seemed to say the total quantity of energy in the universe cannot change, and so it must always have existed and must continue on forever.  Similarly, the laws of chemistry seemed to imply that the total number of atoms cannot change.  That is why the Nobel-Prize-winning chemist Svante Arrhenius said that the idea of the universe having a beginning was “at variance with the present-day state of science, according to which matter is immutable.” ¹⁴

However, in 1927, the Belgian physicist and mathematician (and also Catholic priest) Georges Lemaître proposed the idea that universe is expanding according to a law that is now called the Hubble-Lemaître Law,  and a few years later proposed what is now called the Big Bang theory of cosmology.  It is now fairly certain that about 13.8 billion years ago there was indeed a “Big Bang.”  In the standard Big Bang theory, the Big Bang was the beginning of the universe, and indeed of time itself.  (For physicists, time, like space, is a feature of the physical universe, so that there is no such thing as a “time before the universe began”. In the standard Big Bang theory, therefore, it would make no sense to ask what was happening 20 billion years ago — there is no such time.)

We do not know for sure, however, whether in fact the Big Bang was the beginning of the universe and of time.  There are speculative ideas in cosmology according to which the universe had a pre-Big Bang history.  Can we tell by observation whether this might have been the case?  It is hard to see how, for if anything did exist before the Big Bang, the Big Bang itself would almost certainly have wiped out any decipherable traces of it.  But even supposing this were not the case, it is hard to see how we could tell by observation alone whether whatever preceded the Big Bang extended infinitely into the past.  The reason is a fact already mentioned in connection to St. Bonaventure: even if the past were infinite in extent, all particular past events would have been a finite time ago.  Thus, any particular past event that we can observe happened a finite time ago.  There is therefore no way to see, just by looking at past events, whether the past was infinite or not.

If not by observation, can the question be resolved by theory?  Probably not definitively.  Despite what some may have thought in the 19^th century, the law of conservation of energy (also known as the first law of thermodynamics) does not imply an infinite past.  However, there is an argument that the second law of thermodynamics (the laws of entropy)  implies a finite past.  The second law of thermodynamics is regarded as making impossible so-called “perpetual motion machines”, i.e. machines that run for infinite time without an external input of energy and without running down or wearing out.  But a universe that has an infinite past is like such a machine.  And, in fact, most attempts to construct physics models of the universe that are past-infinite run afoul of the second law of thermodynamics.  Another theoretical argument against a past-infinite universe is a theorem proved in 2003 by Arvind Borde, Alan Guth, and Alexander Vilenkin.¹⁵  Roughly speaking, it says that any universe that is (on the whole) always expanding, cannot be traced back into the past without eventually running into either an edge of space-time or a realm where Einstein’s theory of gravity in its classical (i.e. non-quantum) form no longer applies, and therefore where our current notions of space and time break down.  However, neither the second law of thermodynamics nor the Borde-Guth-Vilenkin Theorem rigorously settles the question of a temporal beginning of the universe.

One speculative model for a past-infinite universe that does not run afoul of the Borde-Guth-Vilenkin Theorem is that the universe is described by a solution of Einstein’s equations of gravity called “de Sitter spacetime,” a schematic sketch of which is shown in this Figure.  If we take time to be running from left to right, as indicated by the blue arrow, then in this scenario, the universe shrinks in size for infinite time, reaches a minimum size, and then expands for infinite time.  Because such a universe is not always expanding (on the whole), the Borde-Guth-Vilenkin Theorem does not apply.  Some atheists have put this cosmological model forward as showing that past-infinite universes are possible, thus vitiating the argument for a beginning and therefore (they think) for a Creator.

It should be noted, however, that this scenario as just described is a bit of a fake.  If the blue arrow is the direction of time, then entropy should increase (or at least never decrease) in that direction.  But that assumption, it turns out, would lead to a problem with the stability of the universe during its contracting phase.  One way to resolve that problem is to assume that entropy increases in both the directions indicated by the red arrows in the picture, so that entropy is at a minimum when the size of the universe is at a minimum.  But, according to how the “arrow of time” is understood in contemporary physics, that would mean that the arrow of time would also be in the directions indicated by the red arrows.  In other words, what one really has here, in effect, is a pair of universes with oppositely-directed arrows of time, joined “back to back” at the point where each is of minimum size.  And that juncture is really the “beginning” of time for both universes, with each of them expanding as it moves away from that beginning into its own future.  In other words, even in this scenario the universe is really not “past-infinite.”

As this example, illustrates, it is not easy to construct consistent, plausible, and realistic models of the universe that have no beginning.  So, while that is not a definitive argument, one can say that given everything we know today it seems much more likely that universe had a beginning that that it didn’t.  Of course, many scientists would have said the opposite in the 19^th century, so some caution is in order.

Conclusion

In conclusion, it seems most likely that the universe had a temporal beginning.  That would certainly be a vindication for something that is a traditional teaching of Christianity and Judaism, and contrary to what the pagan philosophers of antiquity believed as well as to what many modern atheists have preferred to believe.  But the most traditional and most fundamental metaphysical argument for a Creator, namely the necessity of a “source of being”, does not depend on whether the history of the universe was past-finite or past-infinite, as St. Thomas Aquinas importantly emphasized.

References

1. Some have argued that this verse should be translated differently, for example as “In the beginning when God was creating the heavens and the earth, … .” That would not affect the issue beging discussed here.
2. Frederick Copleston, A History of Philosophy (Image Books edition, 1962) Vol. II, Part 1, p. 293.
3. ibid.
4. God is to all things the cause of being. Add reference.
5. Stephen Hawking, The Grand Design (New York: Bantam Books, 2010), p. ??
6. Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes (London: Bantam, 1988), p. 174.
7. Frederick Copleston, A History of Philosophy (Image Books edition, 1962) Vol. II, Part 1, p. 294.
8. ibid., p. 293.
9. In Summa Theologiae Pars 1 art. 46 q. 2 ad 6, St. Thomas responds to the false premise that a past-infinite universe must have some particular days that are infinitely far in the past, by saying: “But whatever past day is assigned, from that day to this one there was a finite number of days, which were able to be passed through.” He also answers these arguments in Summa Contra Gentiles, bk. II, ch. 38.
10. St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles, bk. II, ch. 38, trans. James F. Anderson (South Bend, IN: Univ. of Notre Dame Press, 1975) Vol. 2, p. 112-114.
11. Etienne Gilson, The Christian Philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas, trans. L.K. Shook (Notre Dame, IN: Univ. of Notre Dame Press, 1994), pt.1, ch. 3.
12. St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles, bk. II, ch. 38.
13. Walther Nernst, quoted by Robert Jastrow in God and the Astronomers (New York: Norton, 1992), p. 104.
14. Svante Arrhenius, quoted in “The Proofs for the Existence of God in the Light of Modern Natural Science” (Address of Pope Pius XII to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, November 22, 1951), par. 47. (http://www.papalencyclicals.net/Pius12/P12EXIST. HTM)
15. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borde%E2%80%93Guth%E2%80%93Vilenkin_theorem