The Emergence of the Big Bang Theory
Before the twentieth century, it was easy for many scientists to imagine a universe with no beginning and no end. An eternal cosmos felt like the simplest option: if the universe had always been here, then the hardest questions could be postponed indefinitely. No origin to explain. No reason to ask why anything exists at all. And for those committed to a godless cosmos, the appeal went deeper. No beginning meant no moment that looked suspiciously like creation, and the universe could be treated as a closed system, answerable only to itself.
(*The following is an excerpt from “Does the Universe Paint God Out of the Picture?” by Luke Baxendale. This is part two of four in the book)
Then the twentieth century arrived and dismantled that quiet confidence. Observation after observation began to point in a single, unsettling direction: the universe is not static, not timeless, not serenely self-contained. It expands. It evolves. And, most famously, it carries a faint afterglow, the cosmic microwave background radiation, like residual heat from an early, hotter state. Piece by piece, the evidence pushed cosmology toward a story with a universe that seemed to have a past, and that past looked uncomfortably like a beginning.
That shift carried a philosophical sting. Naturalistic cosmology typically treats “nature” as all that exists: no outside, no beyond, no external agent. But on that view, a true beginning is conceptually awkward. Such a beginning implies an initiating cause for the universe, yet it’s hard to see how that cause could be situated within the universe itself. It would be unexpected, then, for the universe to have a beginning at all. After all, if the universe had a starting point, where could that cause possibly reside? Surely not within the very system that was supposedly being brought into existence.
So what, exactly, forced scientists to rewrite the universe’s origin story, and what did they see that made the eternal cosmos finally collapse?
The story begins with Albert Einstein and his equations of general relativity in 1915. These field equations, which are ten interconnected differential equations describing the curvature of spacetime, painted a picture of reality that Einstein himself found disturbing. The mathematics showed unequivocally that the universe must be either expanding or contracting; a static cosmos was mathematically impossible.
This revelation troubled Einstein, so he performed what he later called his “greatest blunder”, adding a cosmological constant to his equations. This fudge factor acted like an anti-gravity force, perfectly balanced to keep the universe static. But the mathematics remained unsettled.
In 1922, Russian physicist Alexander Friedmann took Einstein’s equations at face value and discovered they naturally described three possible universes: expanding, contracting, or oscillating. His Friedmann equations showed that if the universe contained matter, it simply couldn’t remain static. He calculated that everything we observe could have emerged from a state of infinite density (what would later be called the singularity).
But Friedmann’s work was ignored, dismissed as mathematical curiosity with no physical relevance.
History repeated itself when Belgian priest Georges Lemaître independently solved the same equations in 1927. Lemaître went further, proposing that our universe expanded explosively from what he called a “primeval atom”—a single quantum of energy containing all the matter and energy that would ever exist. He even calculated that this expansion would leave behind detectable radiation, cooled by billions of years of cosmic expansion.
Again, the scientific community largely ignored this radical idea. But unlike Friedmann, Lemaître was about to get observational backup.
Night after night, at the 100-inch Hooker Telescope on Mount Wilson, Edwin Hubble gathered the faint light of galaxies so distant they barely registered. He measured, compared, and checked again, until a pattern refused to go away. Those galaxies weren’t fixed in place. They were receding—each one sliding away from the others. The universe, it seemed, was expanding.
Hubble’s breakthrough began with a subtle clue hiding in plain sight: redshift. Light arriving from distant galaxies looked slightly redder than it should, and Hubble realised he was seeing a cosmic version of something you already know. When an ambulance races away, its siren drops in pitch. In the same way, when a source of light is moving away from us, its waves get stretched, sliding toward longer, redder wavelengths. That stretching is the Doppler effect written across the sky.
Once you can measure the shift, you can turn it into a speed. And once you can estimate a galaxy’s distance, you can compare the two. Hubble did exactly that. He gathered galaxy after galaxy, plotted the data, and watched a pattern snap into focus: the farther away a galaxy was, the faster it was receding.
The graph pointed to something bigger than galaxies simply flying through space: space itself is stretching. Picture a rising loaf of bread: the raisins do not need to “push off” one another to separate. As the dough swells, every raisin sees the others drifting away, and the most distant ones pull away fastest.
This idea of an expanding universe was a game-changer. If the universe is expanding, scientists wondered, then in the past everything would have been closer together. Extrapolate far enough back, and you arrive at a moment when all matter and energy were compressed into an unimaginably dense and hot state, affirming Lemaitre’s calculations.
The next turning point came in 1964 when Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson accidentally discovered the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation while working on a radio antenna at Bell Labs. Initially mistaking it for interference caused by pigeon droppings in their equipment, they soon realised they had stumbled upon something extraordinary: faint thermal radiation left over from the Big Bang itself. This “afterglow” of creation provided proof that the universe had emerged from a hot, dense state billions of years ago.
The discovery of the CMB cemented the Big Bang Theory as the leading model for our cosmic origin. It also silenced alternative ideas like Fred Hoyle’s steady-state model, which proposed an eternal universe with no beginning or end. The irony is that it was Hoyle himself who first called Lemaître’s theory the “Big Bang” in a 1949 radio broadcast, meant as a dismissive nickname, but it stuck and became synonymous with one of science’s most popular theories.
[Photo of Lemaître & Einstein]
The Big Bang implies a genuine starting point for our universe. Picture the universe like the surface of a balloon. As you deflate it, every point on that surface draws closer to every other point. Run that “deflation” all the way back and, in the mathematics, the distances between all locations collapse toward zero. That’s the sense in which physicists say the universe had a beginning. As Stephen Hawking put it, “at some time in the past… the distance between neighbouring galaxies must have been zero.”[i] This moment of convergence marks not only the start of the universe’s expansion but also, in many ways, the birth of spacetime itself.
If time begins there, then there is no earlier moment to point to, no timeline you could rewind, even in principle. Asking what happened before the Big Bang is like asking what lies north of the North Pole: the question assumes a direction that spacetime simply doesn’t provide. In Einstein’s picture, space and time come as a single package, so an origin for space is, at the same stroke, an origin for time.
This naturally raises the question: what triggered it all? The Big Bang theory doesn’t actually tell us why or how the universe came into being. It simply describes the universe’s early evolution from a hot, dense state and chart its aftermath, pointing to a cosmos that is not past-eternal.
As this picture took hold, it began to shift the thoughts of many scientists. This new understanding of our origins sent shockwaves through the esteemed halls of science, philosophy, and theology departments. For many, the unsettling implication was that a beginning to the physical universe invited fresh consideration of something beyond physical reality, consequently reviving the God hypothesis.
Allan Sandage, renowned as one of the twentieth century’s greatest observational astronomers, stunned his peers by revealing his newly found religious conviction, crediting the scientific evidence of a “creation event” for the significant shift in his worldview. He solemnly declared, “Here is evidence for what can only be described as a supernatural event. There is no way that this could have been predicted within the realm of physics as we know it.”[ii] In Sandage’s view, something transcending the material realm must have contributed to the universe’s birth. He continued:
“I find it quite improbable that such order came out of chaos. There has to be some organising principle. God to me is a mystery but is the explanation for the miracle of existence, why there is something rather than nothing.”[iii]
The theological implications of a universe with a beginning were quickly recognised and opposed by many. Physicist Sir Arthur Eddington OM FRS, for example, responded, “Philosophically, the notion of a beginning of the present order is repugnant to me. I should like to find a genuine loophole. I simply do not believe the present order of things started off with a bang… it leaves me cold.”[iv]
Hawking and Ellis: Extending Singularity Theorems to the Origin of the Universe
Since the late 1960s, further developments in theoretical physics have supplied additional support for the idea that the universe had a beginning. Roger Penrose and Stephen Hawking played a central role in making these theoretical advances.
During his PhD research, Stephen Hawking came across the work of physicist Roger Penrose, who was investigating the physics of black holes. Black holes are regions in space where matter is so densely concentrated that even light cannot escape the gravitational pull. Thus, the name “black hole.” Penrose’s theorem showed that when a big enough dying star collapses under its own gravity, it can form a black hole with a singularity at its core, a point where the known laws of physics break down. Penrose’s work proved these singularities aren’t just sci-fi stuff. Theoretically, they can happen.
Now, here’s where Hawking saw a connection. If Penrose’s work could explain singularities in black holes, could the same idea apply to the universe itself? If you rewind cosmic history, the universe’s mass becomes increasingly concentrated, curving spacetime more tightly as you go further back. Hawking theorised that this process would eventually lead to an ultimate limit: an infinitely tight curvature corresponding to vanishing volume—a singularity. This singularity, he argued, marked the beginning of spacetime and the starting point of the universe’s expansion. Hawking showed that, given such a finite termination point for light and time in the past, “there will be a physical singularity… where the density and hence the curvature (of the universe) are infinite.”[v]
Building on these ideas, Hawking and Penrose collaborated to develop mathematical proofs linking Einstein’s general relativity to the concept of a cosmological singularity. In 1973, Hawking extended this work alongside physicist George Ellis. Their collective research demonstrated that Einstein’s equations implied a singularity at the very beginning of spacetime. This finding provided strong mathematical support for the Big Bang Theory.
In classical general relativity, an expanding universe is past geodesically incomplete, i.e. there’s a boundary where the spacetime description breaks down. By definition, this initial state isn’t part of regular spacetime and can’t be located by a “where” or “when,” making it indescribable within current classical physics. It’s not just empty space (which is still something), but the absence of anything spatial, temporal, or material. Hawking and Ellis put it plainly— “there is a singularity in the past that constitutes, in some sense, a beginning of the universe.”[vi] British physicist Paul Davies captured this idea succinctly in 1978:
“If we extrapolate this prediction to its extreme, we reach a point when all distances in the universe have shrunk to zero. An initial cosmological singularity, therefore, forms a past temporal extremity to the universe. We cannot continue physical reasoning, or even the concept of spacetime, through such an extremity. For this reason, most cosmologists think of the initial singularity as the beginning of the universe. In this view, the Big Bang represents the creation event; the creation not only of all the matter and energy in the universe, but also of spacetime itself.”[vii]
General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics: A Barrier for Singularity Theorems
How confident can we be in the Big Bang Singularity theory? Well, here’s where things get a little complicated. General relativity, one of the most well-tested and reliable theories in modern physics, excels at describing the big everyday stuff—planets, stars, galaxies—but it begins to falter when we zoom way, way in, down to the smallest levels of reality, the world of quantum mechanics.
Quantum mechanics is the science of the teeny-tiny world: the subatomic particles that make up everything around us. But this world is beyond weird. Light and electrons, for instance, can behave as both particles and waves depending on how they’re observed. Energy can fluctuate unpredictably. It’s a world of possibilities and probabilities, nothing like the neat and smooth spacetime described by general relativity.
The problem is that these two worlds—big and small—don’t easily reconcile. General relativity doesn’t account for quantum effects, and it’s not clear how quantum mechanics connects to the large world we experience. Bridging this gap is one of physics’ biggest challenges.
Many physicists believe that solving this problem will require a quantum theory of gravity. Such a theory would combine the large-scale elegance of general relativity with the bizarre, microscopic world of quantum mechanics. If we ever crack this code, it could revolutionise our understanding of the universe’s earliest moments and might even refine, or completely replace, the idea of a singularity at the beginning of time.
No one has figured out this unified theory yet. And if history is any indication, scientific progress tends to raise more questions than answers, so there’s unlikely to be a single “final theory” that explains everything.
For now, we’re left with a paradox: general relativity works brilliantly on cosmic scales but falters when we rewind the clock to the universe’s first fraction of a second. Hawking, Penrose, and Ellis highlighted this limitation in their work on the cosmological singularity. They noted that general relativity allowed them to trace the universe’s history back with confidence only to a point where its radius of curvature measured somewhere between a trillionth of a centimetre and a billion trillion trillionth of a centimetre. At such an incredibly tiny scale, it’s understandable why they considered the universe to be, for all practical purposes, a spatial singularity. As they put it, “such a curvature would be so extreme that it might well count as a singularity.”[viii]
So, while the Big Bang Singularity theory is a strong framework that implies a beginning to the universe, it remains partially incomplete without quantum effects fully integrated.
Doubts From Inflation Cosmology
Many scientists over the years have tried to outmanoeuvre the idea of a cosmic starting point. One of the earliest and most intriguing alternatives to the Big Bang Theory came from astrophysicists Hermann Bondi, Thomas Gold, and Fred Hoyle. They proposed the “Steady State Model,” a theory that envisioned the universe as eternal, with no beginning and no end.
The Steady State Model also embraced the observation that galaxies are moving away from each other but offered a clever twist to avoid a beginning. According to this model, as the universe expands and galaxies drift apart, new matter is continuously created to fill the gaps. This constant creation of matter would form new galaxies, keeping the overall density and structure of the universe unchanged over time. In essence, they imagined a kind of cosmic recycling system that had always been in motion, sidestepping the need for a definitive starting point.
For a while, the Steady State Model felt like a real contender. But by the 1960s, mounting observational evidence began poking holes in it. For one, if the Steady State Model were correct, galaxies of all ages should be evenly distributed throughout the universe. Instead, astronomers found that younger galaxies are clustered farther away, a clear indicator that the universe evolves over time—hardly the eternal, static scene Bondi, Gold, and Hoyle had in mind.
Another attempt to sidestep the universe’s origin was the “oscillating universe” model. This idea suggests that the universe undergoes endless cycles of expansion and contraction, avoiding a definitive beginning. Various versions of this model have been proposed over the years, including one by Polish physicist Jaroslav Pachner, who attempted to avoid the “big bangs” and “big crunches” associated with singularities. In his model, the universe expands but eventually slows down and contracts due to gravity, reaching a minimum size without collapsing into a singularity, thanks to mechanisms like negative vacuum energy buildup that cause a bounce. The cycle then repeats indefinitely, creating a singularity-free, oscillating cosmos.
However, the oscillating universe model lost favour primarily because of the pesky issue of entropy. The second law of thermodynamics dictates that entropy (or disorder), always increases in a closed system like the universe. In an oscillating universe, this means each cycle would have more entropy than the last, causing each subsequent cycle to last longer. Think of a bouncing ball: each bounce is lower and shorter than the one before it, as energy is lost. Similarly, the oscillating universe’s cycles would expand and contract at progressively slower rates. Running this model in reverse, earlier cycles become progressively smaller and shorter, so the model still points to a finite past rather than an infinite sequence of identical cycles. This, combined with other evidence like the observed acceleration of the universe’s expansion, led scientists to largely abandon the oscillating universe model in favour of the Big Bang model.
Even so, theoretical progress in the late 20th century also complicated the standard Big Bang narrative. In the 1980s, physicists like Alan Guth, Andrei Linde, and Paul Steinhardt, proposed that shortly after the Big Bang, the universe went through an ultra-brief but supercharged growth spurt called “inflation”. This works through a hypothetical energy field called the inflaton that trapped the early universe in an unstable, high-energy state. This “false vacuum” had negative pressure, which, counterintuitively, creates repulsive gravity rather than attractive gravity. The result was a short exponential expansion.
Inflation was attractive because it helped resolve major puzzles. It addressed the horizon problem by explaining how widely separated regions could share nearly identical properties, and it diluted large-scale curvature so effectively that the universe would appear strikingly flat on observable scales. Now while early inflationary models still pictured a definite beginning, later developments, especially Linde’s “eternal chaotic inflation,” led to a more expansive idea: inflation never ends everywhere. Instead, it continues in some regions and repeatedly spawns “bubble” universes, with our observable universe being just one such bubble within an eternally inflating multiverse.
The underlying mechanics are that the field responsible for inflation undergoes random quantum fluctuations. These fluctuations cause some regions of space to stop inflating and form new bubble universes, each with its own unique properties and potentially distinct laws of physics, while other regions continue inflating indefinitely. In this framework, our universe emerged from a quantum fluctuation in a pre-existing region of the spacetime continuum. While some parts of this vast multiverse may stop expanding and contract, inflation ends at different times in different places. Consequently, there are always regions that continue to inflate, with universes like ours being eternally produced. Linde argues: “each particular part of the [multiverse] may stem from a singularity somewhere in the past, and it may end up in a singularity somewhere in the future.”[ix]
At first glance, that sounds like a recipe for avoiding any absolute beginning. Even if our bubble has a beginning, perhaps the larger inflating background has always existed. In the 1990s, that possibility led Arvind Borde and Alexander Vilenkin to ask whether an inflating spacetime can be extended indefinitely into the past—whether it can be “past eternal.” Within a decade, Borde, Vilenkin, and Alan Guth (one of the original proponents of inflation) arrived at a startling conclusion: the universe must have had a beginning, even if inflationary cosmology is correct.
BGV Theorem
Back in 2003, physicists Borde, Guth, and Vilenkin dropped a bombshell with their paper, “Inflationary spacetimes are not past-complete,” introducing the Borde-Guth-Vilenkin (BGV) theorem. The core idea is that if a universe (or any spacetime) has been expanding on average throughout its history, then it cannot stretch infinitely into the past. In simpler terms, an expanding universe like ours must have had a beginning.
The appeal of the BGV theorem is that it reaches its conclusion without leaning hard on the fine details of particle physics or the precise nature of cosmic energy. Instead, the theorem is rooted in the geometry of spacetime itself, focusing on something fundamental: the paths that particles and light follow, known as geodesics. It’s a bit like studying the structure of a highway system without needing to know the types of cars driving on it. The theorem asks: how do these paths behave over time in a cosmos that’s expanding?
At the heart of the BGV theorem lies the concept of the average Hubble parameter (Hav), which measures how fast the universe has been expanding over time. The theorem states that in any universe where this average expansion rate is positive (Hav > 0), spacetime must be “geodesically incomplete” in the past. This means the paths particles or light follow simply can’t be extended infinitely backward in time, thereby implying a kind of cosmic boundary where it all began.
To help you understand, imagine watching a time-lapse video of a crowd of people at a train station. At any given moment, you notice that people are moving away from each other on average, i.e. the crowd is spreading out. Some individuals might momentarily move closer together, but overall, the gaps between people are growing. Now, suppose you want to rewind this video to see where everyone came from. If the crowd has been spreading apart on average throughout the entire video, then running the footage backward means people must be getting closer and closer together. Keep rewinding far enough, and eventually you’ll reach a point where the crowd was tightly packed together in a smaller space, and perhaps all squeezed near the entrance. You can’t rewind forever because eventually you hit that starting point where everyone was bunched together.
This is essentially what the BGV theorem demonstrates for inflationary cosmologies. If spacetime has been expanding on average, so the separation between freely moving particles or light rays keeps increasing, then run those trajectories backwards and they must converge. Push far enough into the past and you hit a limit. The paths simply cannot be extended any further. In that sense, an expanding universe cannot be past-eternal. It runs into a past boundary, a beginning in the only sense the maths will allow.
Borde, Guth, and Vilenkin have shown that all cosmological models featuring expansion, including inflation cosmology, multiverses, and the oscillating and cosmic egg models, are subject to the BGV theorem. Consequently, Vilenkin argues that evidence for a beginning is now almost inescapable. As he explains: “With the proof now in place, cosmologists can no longer hide behind the possibility of a past-eternal universe. There is no escape; they have to face the problem of a cosmic beginning.”[x]
The Impossibility of an Infinitely Old Universe
Whether the universe had a beginning is not only a scientific question but a philosophical one as well. One fascinating line of argument challenges the possibility of an infinite past by suggesting that an actual infinity of events is impossible to complete.
Here is the basic idea. Think about counting numbers: you start with 1, then 2, then 3, and keep going. No matter how long you count, you’ll never actually reach infinity. You’re always adding one more, which means the total number is growing but still finite. This is called a “potential infinity”—it’s never-ending in theory, but it’s not something you can ever fully realise.
Now put that idea on a timeline. Mark the present as 0. Yesterday sits at −1, the day before at −2, and so on. If the universe had no beginning, the timeline would stretch infinitely into the past. But if there were an infinite number of moments before now, how could we have ever arrived at today? It would be like trying to count from negative infinity to zero.
We can bring this idea to life with another thought experiment: Imagine a soldier about to fire their weapon. Before pulling the trigger, they need permission from the soldier behind them. But that soldier also needs approval from the one behind them, and so on, in an endless chain of soldiers. If no one is the first to give permission, would the initial soldier ever fire? Of course not. This highlights the problem with infinite regress: If arriving at the present required completing an endless sequence of prior events, the present would never arrive.
David Hilbert captured the underlying suspicion memorably: “The infinite is nowhere to be found in reality. It neither exists in nature nor provides a legitimate basis for rational thought… the role that remains for the infinite to play is solely that of an idea.”[xi] While infinity is a useful concept in mathematics and can make certain equations tractable, it is less clear what it should imply about the physical world, or whether nature ever realises anything like an actual infinity. That tension is one reason I remain sceptical that the universe could be infinitely old.
The Cosmic Dawn: Naturalism’s Conundrum
Let’s draw the threads together. Did the universe have a beginning? Now, I’m wary of speaking with certainty about events billions of years in the past, especially when we struggle to piece together human history from just a few thousand years ago. Still, the lines of evidence we’ve just traced seem to point to a universe with a finite past. Here is a quick, plain summary of the main considerations:
- The Second Law of Thermodynamics: According to this law, the amount of useful energy in the universe is irreversibly decreasing. If the universe were infinitely old, all its useful energy would have been exhausted by now. However, since there are still abundant sources of useful energy (such as the sun), it is logical to conclude that the universe is finite in age. This means that there was a starting point when the universe’s energy was introduced from an outside source that precedes the laws of thermodynamics. If the universe had existed throughout an actual infinite past, it would have reached an equilibrium state an infinite number of days ago.
- The Big Bang Theory: According to the Big Bang, the universe began expanding from an extremely dense and hot state, supported by the observed redshift of distant galaxies and the cosmic microwave background radiation (CMB).
- The Hawking-Penrose-Ellis Singularity Theorems: These imply that classical general relativity cannot be extrapolated back indefinitely: it predicts a past limit, often interpreted as evidence for a beginning.
- The Borde-Guth-Vilenkin (BGV) Theorem states that any universe that has been, on average, expanding throughout its history cannot be past-eternal and must have a boundary in the past.
- Philosophical argument (the “no traversing an actual infinite” worry): if the past had no beginning, there would be infinitely many earlier moments, so getting to today would require passing through an infinite number of events, and that seems impossible.
From a surface level, this poses a basic problem for naturalism. Naturalistic explanations typically work by appealing to physical laws, processes, and entities operating within the universe. But if the universe is the totality of physical reality, then nothing within that totality can be the ultimate explanation of why the totality exists in the first place. Put differently: if spacetime, matter, and energy had a beginning, then those tools do not stand “outside” the universe ready to do explanatory work. It’s circular reasoning to invoke natural processes to explain the origin of nature itself. This isn’t a gap that more physics can fill; it’s a conceptual boundary where naturalistic explanation reaches its limit. This suggests that any adequate explanation for the universe’s origin must point beyond naturalism to something non-natural or, dare I say, transcendent.
The Hawking and Penrose singularity theorems sharpen the issue. Roughly speaking, they show that, under physically reasonable conditions in general relativity, you cannot wind spacetime back indefinitely into the past. In the simplest expanding-universe models, turning the clock back drives the density and curvature upward without limit, hinting at a ‘beginning’ where classical physics stops being a reliable guide. If that picture is even approximately right, then the usual naturalistic tools, particles, fields, and physical processes, cannot be assumed to exist “before” spacetime itself. It suggests there was no earlier material state within spacetime to appeal to. In that limited sense, it parallels the idea of creatio ex nihilo, or “creation out of nothing material”.
Of course, some will hope that quantum gravity, a bounce cosmology, or a multiverse framework will eventually supply a fully naturalistic origin story. But this hope relies on speculation about discoveries that haven’t been made and may never arrive. While confidence in scientific progress is reasonable in many contexts, here it functions more like an article of faith. Relying on yet-to-be-made breakthroughs to rescue naturalistic assumptions risks the same “argument from ignorance” often criticised in religious contexts. The critique cuts both ways. When the evidence points to a possible conceptual constraint on naturalism rather than a simple lack of information, it can be reasonable to explore non-naturalistic explanations as a straightforward response to what the data seems to indicate.
The Resurgence of the God Hypothesis
The Judeo-Christian tradition has long held that the universe was brought into being by God, and this belief naturally predicted that evidence of a cosmic beginning would eventually be discovered. Does this point to something beyond the physical universe? Could it support the case for a Creator? Let’s avoid rushing to hasty conclusions, but at the same time, let’s not be too quick to dismiss the possibility.
Firstly, let’s consider the initial argument put forward by Stephen Meyer:[xii]
- Major Premise: A Judeo-Christian belief in a divine creator implies the universe had a beginning
- Minor Premise: We have evidence that the universe had a beginning
- Conclusion: We have reason to think that the Judeo-Christian view of the origin of the universe and its affirmation of a divine creator may be true
This syllogism suggests that the Big Bang Theory provides epistemic support, although not deductive proof, for the hypothesis of Judeo-Christian theism. It’s a fascinating start, but it’s far from a slam-dunk argument.
The cosmological argument for the existence of a creator was first proposed by one of the greatest medieval polymaths, Al-Ghazali, a twelfth-century Muslim from Persia. He argued that the universe must have a beginning, and since nothing begins to exist without a cause, there must be a transcendent creator of the universe. We can summarise his argument in three steps:
- Whatever begins to exist has a cause
- The universe began to exist
- Therefore, the universe had a cause
The argument is logically tight, but there’s room to refine and improve it. First, let’s break it down and look at each step more closely.
Premise One: Whatever Begins to Exist Has a Cause
The cosmological argument begins with a claim most of us accept almost without noticing: things do not simply pop into existence from nothing. To say the universe “just appeared”, or that the Big Bang “just happened”, runs against the standards of explanation we rely on everywhere else.
In ordinary life we instinctively look for causes. If coconuts fall from a tree, we point to gravity, wind, or someone shaking the trunk. If a long line of dominoes topples, we ask what tipped the first one. That simple intuition shapes how we investigate the world and sits at the heart of the cosmological argument’s first premise.
Following this logic, it’s perfectly natural to approach extraordinary claims, like miracles, with a healthy dose of scepticism. However, there’s a glaring inconsistency if a sceptic dismisses something like the virgin birth of the son of God as implausible, yet readily accepts the idea of the virgin birth of the universe. Even if the notion of divine creation seems far-fetched to some, an uncaused beginning of everything is arguably more taxing on the rational imagination.
Premise Two: The Universe Began to Exist
The second premise, which we have already established, is that the universe began to exist. We have derived this view from general relativity and the development of the Big Bang Theory, supported by the Second Law of Thermodynamics, the Hawking-Penrose-Ellis Singularity Theorems, the Borde-Guth-Vilenkin (BGV) Theorem, and a philosophical argument regarding the illogical notion of traversing an actual infinite number of past events.
Premise Three: The Universe Had a Cause — Exploring its Characteristics
In the Kalam Cosmological Argument, the third premise is meant to follow straightforwardly from the first two. If everything that begins to exist has a cause, and if the universe began to exist, then the universe has a cause. On the face of it, that looks like a clean syllogism.
Even so, not everyone is persuaded. Philosophers and scientists such as Daniel Dennett and Stephen Hawking have suggested a more radical line: that the universe might be self-caused, or in some sense self-explanatory. On that proposal, the cosmos is not just the phenomenon we are trying to explain but the source of its own explanation. That can sound deep at first, but in everyday terms, can anything really bring itself into existence, or explain its own beginning, without the explanation quietly sneaking in what it’s meant to account for?
Think about it this way: imagine “X” bringing “Y” into existence. We naturally assume “X” exists in order to bring “Y” into existence. So if we say “X” created “X,” we’re assuming “X” exists in order to bring “X” into existence. That’s logically incoherent as we’re essentially saying, “Allow me to assume ‘X’ already exists, and I’ll explain how ‘X’ then came into existence in a world in which ‘X’ already existed.”
Once that option is set aside, the discussion naturally shifts. If the universe really does require a cause beyond itself, then the pressing question isn’t whether there is a cause, but what sort of cause could do this kind of work. Is it best understood as a conscious agent, a divine mind, a law-like structure, or something more impersonal still? To make Al-Ghazali’s argument more robust, we need to move from “the universe has a cause” to the more discriminating question: what properties would any adequate cause of the universe have to possess?
The first property seems almost unavoidable: if there is anything like an “ultimate” explanation for why the universe exists, it can’t be “because of an endless chain of earlier explanations.” An infinite series of causes—each one explained by a prior cause—never arrives at an explanation of the series as a whole. As an explanatory strategy it perpetually postpones the very thing we’re asking for.
That suggests (at least tentatively) that the causal story bottoms out somewhere. Even if the spacetime continuum has some earlier physical precursor, and even if that precursor has its own deeper explanation, the impulse to avoid an infinite regress pushes us toward a terminus: something that is not itself caused in the way ordinary things are caused. Call it an “uncaused first cause” if you like, though the label matters less than the role it plays in the argument.
At this point you could argue back: isn’t calling the first cause “uncaused” a bit too convenient? Why not keep applying scepticism evenly and refuse that move? I think the right response is to admit the cost. An uncaused cause is a metaphysical mystery. But an infinite regress is not merely mysterious; it threatens to make explanation impossible in principle. If the choice is between “there is a stopping point we don’t fully understand” and “there is no ultimate explanation to be had,” the stopping point can seem like the lesser intellectual price to pay.
If there is such a first cause, another property follows fairly naturally. The cause of the universe cannot be just one more item inside the universe. Causes are distinct from their effects, and the universe (at least as typically described) is the totality of spacetime, matter, and energy. So whatever explains the existence of that totality would appear to be, in some sense, beyond it: not located in spacetime, not composed of matter, not dependent on energy. This is what people usually mean by “transcendent,” and it would apply even if we enlarge “universe” to include any multiverse-like ensemble that began to exist and therefore still calls for an explanation.
This is also why “the laws of physics did it” doesn’t quite land as a final answer. Laws describe regularities: how systems behave given that the systems exist. They don’t obviously function as a creative source of being. A simple analogy helps. The rules of chess can tell you which moves are legal once a board and pieces are already in play, and they can even let you forecast how a position will change if a player makes a certain move. But the rules themselves don’t move the pieces. They don’t choose to begin a game, set up the board, or bring the whole arrangement into existence. In the same way, physical laws look fundamentally descriptive rather than generative: they constrain and summarise the patterns we observe, but they don’t, by themselves, supply the “engine” that produces a world for those patterns to govern. Later in the book we will explore this notion in greater depth.
Of course, someone might reply that the relevant “laws” operate in a deeper physical substrate: call it a higher-dimensional space, a pre-spacetime field, or something else. That may push the question back a step, but we still have to ask why that deeper arena exists at all, and why it has the power to generate a universe like ours. If our spacetime has a genuine beginning, then the final explanation can’t be something that already presupposes spacetime in order to operate. So, whatever the ultimate cause is, it seems to be independent of space and time rather than merely one more process happening within them. That sounds abstract, but if we’re asking about the origin of spacetime, some abstraction is hard to avoid.
A further problem arises if we treat the first cause as purely impersonal, like an automatic set of necessary and sufficient conditions. If a cause is genuinely sufficient, then once it obtains, the effect follows immediately and inevitably. A complete deterministic cause doesn’t “wait”; the moment the full cause exists, the effect should exist as well.
That creates a tension. If the first cause were eternal and impersonal, and if it were sufficient for the universe, then the universe would be eternal too, because an eternal sufficient condition would yield an eternal effect. Yet contemporary cosmology points toward a beginning. Even if you stay cautious about the details, you can’t get a temporal beginning from an eternal, automatic cause. What we seem to need is something capable of asymmetrical relationships: existing as cause without the effect being co-present.
One way to relieve that tension is to consider a different kind of causation, one in which the cause can exist without its effect being co-present. That immediately nudges us away from purely mechanical sufficiency and toward something more like agency. An agent can have the power to act without always acting; the agent’s existence does not entail that the action has already occurred.
This is where volition matters. If the first cause is personal in the minimal sense of being able to choose, then a beginning makes more sense. The causal power can be real and present without the universe existing eternally alongside it. The universe would exist because the agent acted, not because impersonal conditions mechanically switched on and had no option but to produce a universe.
Does that point toward consciousness? The only kind of agency we directly know from the inside is conscious agency. We form intentions, deliberate, and make decisions that initiate causal chains that would not otherwise occur. That being said, consciousness itself remains deeply puzzling, and it would be reckless to pretend we understand how an ultimate consciousness would operate. Still, as an explanatory proposal, a personal first cause offers something impersonal mechanisms struggle to provide. It offers an intelligible route from an “eternal” ground to a world with a beginning, without treating the beginning as a brute and unexplained oddity.
None of this amounts to a knock-down proof. It is better understood as an inference to what seems, among the main alternatives, a plausible explanation. It avoids the explanatory stall of infinite regress, it resists treating laws as if they create what they merely describe, and it offers a coherent way for a timeless cause to produce a universe with a beginning. The key idea is intentional action rather than automatic necessity.
So, the picture that emerges has a fairly consistent shape. The first cause appears to be:
- Uncaused;
- Immaterial;
- Timeless;
- Spaceless;
- Immensely powerful;
- Volitional;
Taken together, these features point to more than a vague “something beyond.” They at least resemble what many people have historically meant by God: the uncaused, spiritual, transcendent, immensely powerful intelligence that is the ultimate source of all being. In Christian thought, the physical world is neither self-originating nor ultimate. It is contingent—real, orderly, meaningful, but dependent. On that view, matter and time are not the deepest layer of reality; they are better understood as the creative expression of an underlying Mind.
One possible way to conceptualise this is to envision God existing alone without the universe, as changeless and timeless. God’s free act of creation is a temporal event, simultaneous with the universe’s coming into being. Thus, God is timeless without the universe and in time with the universe.
This kind of argument cannot produce the sort of certainty we get in mathematics. We’re weighing different explanations to see which makes better sense of the evidence we have. For me, this comes down to two central observations: the universe’s beginning aligns with what we might expect if God exists, and the Judeo-Christian understanding of God resonates with the required qualities for the universe’s initial cause.
I’m not alone in seeing these connections. Several prominent scientists have made similar observations. Arno Penzias, the Nobel laureate who discovered cosmic background radiation, put it this way regarding the Big Bang: “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.”[xiii] Similarly, George Smoot, another Nobel Prize winner, remarked on the Big Bang ripples observed by NASA’s COBE Satellite, asserting that “there is no doubt between the Big Bang as an event and the Christian creation notion of creation from nothing.”[xiv] Quantum chemist and Nobel Prize nominee Henry F. Schaeffer III also concluded that “A Creator must exist. The Big Bang ripples and subsequent scientific findings are clearly pointing to an ex nihilo creation…”[xv]
These observations recall the words of NASA astronomer Robert Jastrow, who 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 mountain 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.”[xvi]
The Atheist’s Query: “But Where Did God Come From?”
In The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins famously challenges the logic of invoking God as the ultimate explanation for existence. His critique is simple and pointed: if everything must have a cause, why should God get a free pass? To claim that the universe requires a creator but the creator himself needs no explanation seems, at first glance, like special pleading. Who made the Maker?
But the actual philosophical claim isn’t that everything needs a cause—it’s that everything that begins to exist requires one. This distinction matters enormously. Under many standard cosmological pictures, the universe has a finite past (or at least a boundary to past time in the sense relevant to our physics), which makes it a candidate for “began to exist” and therefore for needing an explanation beyond itself.
Think about the mechanics for a moment. Whatever triggered the universe into being can’t be trapped within system it’s creating. It cannot be another spacetime event sitting inside the very timeline it is meant to produce. Causes, as we usually experience them, occur earlier than their effects. But “earlier than the beginning of time” is not a location on the timeline, because the timeline is what is in question. A useful illustration is an author and a novel. The author is not one more character inside chapter one, waiting for chapter two to happen. In that limited sense, the author stands “outside” the story’s time, even though the author can still be the reason the story exists.
This is why the concept of an eternal, timeless cause makes philosophical sense. Not eternal in the sense of “lasting forever,” but eternal in the sense of existing outside time entirely. Thomas Aquinas, for example, argued that time simply doesn’t apply to God. He’s not a being who has been around for eons; he stands beyond such measurements altogether. While we’re bound by past, present, and future, perhaps every moment is simultaneously “present” to God. On that view, asking “What explains God’s existence, if anything?” misfires, because it assumes God belongs to the category of things that come into being at some time. The claim is not that God gets a convenient exemption, but that the question only fits things that have the relevant feature: beginning.
That leads into the notion of a “necessary being,” meaning something whose existence does not depend on prior conditions in the way contingent things do. The motivation here is to avoid an infinite regress of explanations that never arrives at anything that can actually do explanatory work. If every explanation depends on a deeper one, and that dependence never bottoms out, then the whole chain can feel like it is suspended from nothing. A necessary reality is proposed as a terminus, not because we are tired of asking questions, but because we have reached a different explanatory category where “made by what?” is not the right kind of question.
This is also where I want to be candid about the challenge. “Timeless existence” isn’t something we can readily picture, because all our thinking is trained on change, sequence, and the steady tick of before-and-after. I can see why it might sound like a way of protecting God from scrutiny by placing him in a special category. But if time itself is part of what began, then asking what came “before” the source of time is likely a category mistake. So yes, the idea can feel like a stretch, but that is not the same as calling it meaningless or self-contradictory. It just reflects the limits of creatures bound by time trying to comprehend what lies beyond it.
The Doctrine of Creation
We’ve examined the evidence for the universe’s beginning, explored what kind of cause could bring it into existence, and considered how a timeless God might relate to our temporal reality. These aren’t just abstract philosophical puzzles; they connect directly to how Christianity has historically understood creation itself.
Why does anything exist at all? Throughout history, thinkers from vastly different traditions—Plato, Aristotle, medieval Islamic scholars, and Christian theologians—arrived at a surprisingly similar conclusion: the universe can’t explain itself. Physical laws need a lawgiver. Order requires an ordering intelligence. Despite their disagreements about almost everything else, they converged on the idea that something beyond the physical realm must account for why there’s a physical realm in the first place.
The biblical writers saw this clearly. Moses warned the Israelites against worshipping created things, i.e., the sun, moon, stars, or any part of the natural world, because doing so confused the gift with the giver. The prophets hammered this point home: bowing to any element of creation while ignoring its Creator was, in their view, deeply foolish. As the Psalmist put it bluntly, “The fool says in his heart, ‘There is no God’” (Psalm 14:1). Christianity doesn’t traffic in fantasy when addressing these fundamental questions; it offers a framework that takes both reason and revelation seriously.
This doctrine of creation has always been philosophically radical. It rejects eternal dualism, which is the idea that matter and spirit have always coexisted without explanation. It challenges philosophical materialism, which insists that physical stuff is all there is and that consciousness somehow emerges from unconscious particles. It stands against various New Age philosophies that dissolve the distinction between Creator and creation. And it contradicts Gnostic-inspired views that treat the material world as inherently corrupt or evil. Genesis portrays creation as good (flawed by human rebellion, yes, but fundamentally purposeful and benevolent).
And here’s what makes this particularly relevant: the cosmological evidence we’ve gathered over the past century seems to fit the theistic picture. The universe had a beginning. Physical laws display a mathematical elegance that Wigner called “unreasonably effective.” None of that amounts to a proof of God, and serious scientific and philosophical disputes remain at each stage. Even so, when theism and atheistic naturalism are set side by side, theism can look like a more natural fit for a cosmos with an apparent origin and deep mathematical regularity.
The practical implications matter too. If the universe is God’s creation rather than divine in itself, then nature deserves our respect and care, but not our worship. We’re called to be stewards, not slaves or exploiters. Genesis 1:28 tasks humanity with governing the earth responsibly, which means neither treating it as disposable nor elevating it above human flourishing. This strikes a balance that extreme environmentalism and exploitative industrialism both miss: creation has value because God made it, and we have the responsibility to manage it wisely because he entrusted it to us. Christianity doesn’t just offer abstract theology; it provides a coherent account of why the universe exists, why it’s intelligible, why it permits life, and what our role within it should be. That’s not a bad foundation for making sense of reality.
[i] Hawking, S. A Brief History of Time, 49.
[ii] Meyer, S.C. Quotes are from transcription of a private film of Sandage’s remarks at “Christianity Challenges the University: An International Conference of Theists and Atheists,” Dallas, Texas, February 7-10, 1985.
[iii] Sandage, A.R. As quoted in Wilford, J.N. ‘Sizing up the Cosmos: An Astronomers Quest’, New York Times (12 Mar 1991), C10.
[iv] Luminet, J.-P. “Lemaître’s Big Bang,” lecture given at Frontiers of Fundamental Physics 14, Aix Marseille University, Marseille, France, July 15-18, 2014, 10. Retrieved from https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1503/1503.08304.pdf (accessed November 14, 2020).
[v] Hawking, S. ‘Properties of Expanding Universes’, 105.
[vi] Hawking, S., & Ellis, G. The Large Scale Structure of Space-Time, xi.
[vii] Craig, W.L. (pp. 101-102). Quoting Davies, P.C.W. “Space-time Singularities in Cosmology,” in The Study of Time III, eds. Frase, J.T., Lawrence, N., & Park, D. (Berlin: Springer, 1978), 78-79.
[viii] Hawking, S., & Ellis, G. The Large Scale Structure of Space-Time, 96, 363.
[ix] Linde, A. (November 1994). The Self-Reproducing Inflationary Universe. Scientific American.
[x] Vilenkin, A. Many Worlds in One. (2006). New York: Hill and Wang, 176.
[xi] Hilbert, D. On the infinite. Mathematische Annalen (Berlin), 95, 161-190 (1926).
[xii] Meyer, S.C. The Return of the God Hypothesis: Three Scientific Discoveries Revealing the Mind Behind the Universe – January 1, 2019, 244.
[xiii] Browne, M.W. Clues to Universe Origin Expected. New York Times, March 12, 1978.
[xiv] Smoot, G. (1993). Wrinkles in Time.
[xv] Schaeffer III, H.F. Science and Christianity: Conflict or Coherence?
[xvi] God and The Astronomers (1978). Currently published by Reader’s Library and updated as recently as 2000.
