I recently published a two–part essay on the unfathomable origins of the universe proposed by the Big Bang thesis of the creative moment. According to this standard model of the beginning and complex workings of “everything that is,” the universe did not arise from a “location” with dimensional parameters since the Big Bang is understood to have created the universe with its full complement of laws, forces, matter, energy, space, and time. It is the source of everything, even space and time. Nothing can “emerge” unless there is already a measurable tensor matrix to emerge into. In other words, Creation cannot occur or “emerge” outside of space and time.
The Big Bang appears to create as many problems as it solves, which is why many laypersons and scientists are skeptical of its theoretical validity and of its auroral instant. There is the question of whether the Big Bang is even a convincing scientific theory. How could the universe suddenly appear on a virtual background? Bjorn Eckberg contends in Scientific American that today’s multilayered theoretical edifice of the Big Bang may turn out to be inherently flawed, a confusing mix of fictional beasts invented to uphold the model.
Perhaps we should simply admit defeat and, as the prophet Micah urged, “humbly walk with thy God.” Perhaps we should accept the biblical account in Genesis, though I myself am somewhat skeptical. An act of faith, however, is not an act of superficial and unexamined belief.
Nuclear physicist Russell Humphreys, for example, is a creationist who upholds the inerrancy of the Biblical account of Creation. In Starlight & Time, an unabashed romp in the fields of speculation, he has attempted to solve the paradox of starlight crossing millions of light-years in an infant universe. He has challenged the Big Bang theory with a six-day creation period by pointing to the time-dilation model in the General Theory of Relativity. The gravitational distortion of the early cosmos means that a few of our calendar days would have been available for light to travel the enormous distance to Earth. “God makes the universe in six days in the earth’s reference frame [but] light has ample time in the extraterrestrial reference frame” to close the temporal and physical expanse.
Humphreys conceives the universe as bounded rather than edgeless, as it would have to be in order to avoid the zero-energy theory, the notion that the positive energy of all mass in the universe is precisely balanced by the negative potential energy of the gravitational field. A boundless universe would yield mathematical problems that are not easily domesticated. Rather, in a bounded universe, there would be a center of mass, a net gravitational force, and the “time-distorting effect of gravity on a massive scale. Distant objects in the universe could age billions of years in a single day of your time.”
Humphreys’ conceptual model of the creative process is backed by some rather formidable metric tensor sequences in a differential manifold capturing the coordinate invariance of curved space geometry. This operation describes the formation of the universe in a “white hole.” He explains that “the physics is that of a universe-sized white hole with a shrinking event horizon and matter expanding out of it,” which he proposes arrived on Earth during the fourth day when God created the sun, moon and stars.
As mentioned, the effects of the General Theory of Relativity permit for gravitational time dilation. “Billions of years would elapse in the distant sky, allowing light from the galaxies to reach the earth within one ordinary day of earth’s time.” It is an ingenious theory which, Humphreys admits, “is not yet well enough developed to make detailed quantitative predictions. But the bottom line is simple: God used relativity to make a young universe.”
Astrophysics professor Antoine Bret shows that Humphreys’ analysis is wrong. For Humphreys, the earth apparently sat inside a massive spherical shell, or white hole, where the gravitation potential slows time down. But the problems are multiple. Young Earth Creation (YEC) is neither observable nor repeatable; therefore YEC cannot be reputably scientific. How did the spherical shell form? There is no equation for that, apart from the fact that white holes are theoretical constructs and have never been observed. Separated points inside the shell will still be separated precisely as they were at the start, even billions of years later; the math regarding the expansion of space inside a white hole is inapplicable. As C.S. Lewis stated in God in the Dock, “Science twisted in the interests of apologetics would be sin and folly.”
The upshot is that the Biblical account of Creation is a parochial narrative that semaphores toward a mystery beyond words and outside the limitations of human thought but does not rule out a Divine origin for the Creation, which is no less “absurd” than any other theory, including the origin point of the Big Bang. Maybe early Christian theologian Tertullian was on to something when he allegedly uttered those fateful words, Credo quia absurdum — I believe because it is absurd. It’s a test.
Isaac Newton, Srinivasa Ramanujan, Max Planck, Albert Einstein, Abdus Salam, Arno Penzias, Charles Townes, Freeman Dyson, Sir John Polkinhorne, Erwin Schrödinger, among many, many others, were all God-inspired, finding their belief compatible with their scientific practice. As was C.S. Lewis who saw no antagonism between science and God. I am very fond of astrophysicist Bernard Haisch, who, in The Purpose-Guided Universe, remarks, “An integration of scientific and spiritual concepts will of necessity come about eventually.” To which I reply: Amen.
