The standard cosmology is the universe started with a big bang about 13.7 billion years ago. But many people are under the mistaken idea the big bang is an argument against the existence of God or against the concept of a designer who formed the universe. Not true. While the big bang is not absolute proof of the existence of God or a designer of some type, it is absolutely compatible with the concept of a creator God or Designer.
Simply stated — If there was a big bang, there has to be a Big Banger.
The better we understand the science behind the big bang, the better we understand how the big bang supports the concept of a pre-existing designer or creator God.
The Law of Conservation of Energy says energy and matter are neither created nor destroyed. This is the most important reason why so many scientists in the 19th and early 20th centuries believed the universe always existed.
Albert Einstein’s theory of General Relativity, published in 1916, led to a revolution in physics, astronomy and cosmology. Using General Relativity, physicists theorized the universe must be expanding. Logically, if the universe is expanding, then it was smaller in the past. If you run the movie backward far enough, then the universe must have had a beginning.
A Catholic priest, astronomer and professor of physics named Georges LeMaitre introduced Big Bang theory in a 1927 paper titled The primeval atom. This paper was published two years before the Edwin Hubble paper describing his observations of the expanding universe. Initially Einstein did not like LeMaitre’s theory, but after Hubble’s paper was published Einstein, Arthur Eddington and others were persuaded by Big Bang Theory. Some holdouts, including Sir Fred Hoyle, were still not convinced.
With the discovery of Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) radiation in 1965, Big Bang Theory has convinced nearly everyone the universe had a beginning. The discovery of CMB radiation is described in the excellent book by Robert Jastrow titled God and the Astronomers.
So where did all that energy and matter come from? Who or what caused the Big Bang?
Before trying to answer that question, it is interesting to note that about 1,000 years ago an Islamic philosopher named al-Ghazali formulated this argument:
Whatever begins to exist has a cause.
The universe began to exist.
Therefore, the universe has a cause.
His argument (or a variation) was picked up by Bonaventure, then Locke and Kant among others. The problem was until science could prove the universe had a beginning, the argument lacked power. But now that the big bang is well-supported by the evidence and has become the standard cosmology, the argument gains tremendous strength. Therefore, based on current science it is quite reasonable to believe in the existence of creator God or universe Designer.
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