The Expectations
One of the most dramatic discoveries in the history of science is that the universe began in an explosion that took place about 15 billion years ago. The evidence for this “Big Bang Theory” has become so strong in the last thirty years that it is no longer seriously questioned. Now, if it is true that the Big Bang was the beginning of time itself, as at least appears to be the case, then one of the central beliefs of Jews and Christians has been confirmed, and one of the assumptions that had prevailed among scientific materialists has been overthrown.
Where did these beliefs and assumptions come from? For Jews and Christians, belief in a beginning comes from the very first words of the Bible: “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” There are really two ideas contained in this statement. The first is that the universe had a beginning in time, or in other words that it has a finite age. The second idea is that the universe was created by God. Most people tend to think that the first idea is contained in the second: if the universe was created, then surely it must have had a beginning too. There is a lot to be said for this way of thinking. Certainly, most things in our experience seem to confirm it. For example, if we know that some object was made by a human artisan, then we also know that it had a beginning.
However, this link between creation and beginning is not quite so clear when it comes to the creation of the universe by God as taught by Judaism and Christianity. In saying that God is the Creator of the universe, what is being said is that he is the cause of the universe, that he is the explanation of the fact that the universe exists. Now, if one thinks about it for a while, one can see that a thing can be caused without necessarily having had any beginning in time. For example, imagine that an object is illuminated by a lamp. The lamp is the cause or explanation of the object’s being illuminated. However, nothing in that fact tells us whether the lamp has been illuminating the object for a finite time or for infinite time. If the lamp has always been illuminating the object, then the illumination of the object had no beginning, but nevertheless it always had a cause.
It is not clear, then, from the assumption that God causes the universe to exist that anything can be proven one way or the other about whether the universe had a beginning. Philosophers have long argued about this. St. Thomas Aquinas, for one, believed that while the existence of a creator or “First Cause” could be proven philosophically, the universe having a beginning in time could not be. In his Summa Contra Gentiles, for example, he has a chapter entitled “On the arguments by which some try to show that the world is not eternal.”1 There he examines six such arguments, only to reject them all as “lacking absolute and necessary conclusiveness.” His view was that, while “it was entirely fitting that God should have given created things a beginning,” it was hypothetically possible for God to have created a universe that had no beginning in time. (For a longer discussion of the Jewish and Christian notion of Creation see appendix A.)
The real reason, then, that Jews and Christians believe that the universe had a beginning in time, is that they think that this has been explicitly revealed by God in the first words of Genesis: “In the beginning, …” Of course, as we have seen, many things in the Book of Genesis have been interpreted allegorically, even in ancient times. However, the assertion that there was a “beginning” is not one of those things. Jews and Christians have been virtually unanimous in understanding these words as teaching a literal, temporal beginning. In the year 1215, the Fourth Lateran Council declared that it was a matter of Christian faith that the world was created by God “ab initio temporis,” i.e., “from the beginning of time.”2
Not surprisingly, religious believers greeted the discovery of the Big Bang with satisfaction. Most scientists of the materialist stripe, on the other hand, were made acutely uncomfortable by the discovery, as we shall see later from some of their comments. Most materialists had expected that the world would turn out to be eternal, in the sense of having no beginning and no end.3 Why so? There are probably several reasons. One of them is essentially psychological. If something has always been around, then it is easy to take it for granted and not question its existence. But if something makes a sudden appearance, we naturally ask ourselves why.
When my oldest son, Thomas, was two years old, one evening I pointed out to him the bright yellow orb of the moon hanging low in the sky. The moon was a novelty for him, and he promptly asked me, “Who put it up there?” Of course, adults know that astronomical bodies were formed by gas and dust condensing gravitationally. But if I had told my son that, he could have raised the question of who put the dust, the gravity, and the space there. He could have asked, in short, “Why is there a universe at all?” Seventy years ago, had he and I been around back then and had he asked that question, I might have been able to silence him with the reply, “The universe has always been here.” What made the Big Bang Theory unpleasant for some people, I suspect, is that it took away that answer.
This brings us to a more philosophical reason for the discomfort many materialists have with the idea that time had a beginning. Scientific materialists tend to think of the explanation of things entirely in terms of finding the physical processes or mechanisms that produced those things. Of course, this is a perfectly good mode of explanation, and it has served very well in the physical sciences. As noted in chapter 3, the Scientific Revolution was made possible by the fact that physicists and astronomers abandoned more philosophical modes of explanation in favor of “mechanistic” ones. Before that, scientists had gone in for “teleology,” that is, explaining the behavior of things in terms of the goals or ends that they were seeking, or the purposes they served. This works pretty well for people and animals, but proved to be an unproductive way to think about inanimate objects.4 Physical objects are not seeking a certain kind of future, rather they are driven by forces and events in the past and present.
The materialist therefore tends to feel that the explanatory job is done when he can give an account of the physical processes by which the present state of affairs arose out of some past state of affairs. As long as he can trace the chain of physical causation farther and farther back in time, he is satisfied. If the universe is infinitely old, then each physical event that ever happened had a past out of which it grew and in terms of which it can be explained. Of course, such a scheme of explanation is not really complete. The reason that it is not is well stated by astrophysicist P. C. W. Davies in his book God and the New Physics:
Suppose horses had always existed. The existence of each horse would be causally explained by the existence of its parents. But we have not explained yet why there are horses at all—why there are horses rather than no horses, or rather than unicorns, for example. Although we may be able to find a [past] cause for every event … , still we would be left with the mystery of why the universe has the nature it does, or why there is a universe at all.5
The point being made by Davies is somewhat subtle, however, and is easily overlooked. It is all too simple for one who has narrowed his intellectual vision and who is interested only in chains of physical causation to be misled into thinking that materialism affords a complete scheme of explanation of reality. He can maintain this illusion as long as he is able to keep his nose down on the trail of past physical causes. This is why the idea of an eternal universe is comforting to him: if time had no beginning then the trail he is doggedly pursuing will never run out, he can follow it ever deeper into the past and thus forestall indefinitely the point at which he must face the more fundamental questions of why the universe has the nature it does and why it exists at all.
In any event, the historical fact is that Jews and Christians believed in a beginning of time, while scientific materialists strongly preferred the idea of an ageless universe.