Two thousand feet below Lake Erie, in an old salt mine near Cleveland, physicists are seeking the end of the universe. Meanwhile, thousand of miles away on a desolate mountain top at Mauna Kea, Hawaii, other scientists are building a gigantic, 400 inch telescope hoping to view the beginning of the universe. Many nations and various private foundations have spent colossal sums of money to further these experiments. Why? The answer is astonishing!
The Ultimate Understanding
Over the last 20 years, advances in theory and fact have led the worldwide community of physicists to believe that the beginning and the end of physics is imminent! It is possible that the observations that will be made on the Hawaiian mountain top and in the bowels of the abandoned salt mine will close out the book on physics. These events are of profound interest to all faithful Bible students.
While modern physics is full of complex equations and abstruse theoretical concepts, it is really a search for the simple underlying principles that govern the universe. It has been the quest of physicists, from Galileo and Newton down to our own age, to provide a simplified explanation of the physical universe.
The key questions physicists seek to answer are: Where did the universe come from? how will it end? These are the same questions that might be posed by the diligent Bible student. As we shall see, the Bible provides superior answers. While physicists can observe the physical universe as it is and answer the question of how it works, they can never answer the question — Why? That answer is in the word of God. As one physicist recently noted: “Though science may explain the world, we still have to explain science … If physics is the product of design, the universe must have a purpose, and the evidence of modem physics suggests strongly to me that the purpose includes us.”
With these thoughts in mind, let us see what the Bible and physics have to say about the beginning and end of the universe.
How Did It All Begin?
Moses recorded that: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth” (Gen. 1:1). The Bible opens with these words and forthrightly lays before our eyes the claims of the eternal God, that all things we observe in the universe about us are due to His creative spirit. Scientists found this idea of a “created” universe difficult to accept. It was more comfortable to believe that the universe was eternal. This avoided the need to postulate a creation and inevitably a creator. It was also assumed that the universe had to be infinite or else Newton’s law of gravity would be violated.
No Beginning?
The physical arguments behind these ideas are simple to understand. Newton’s law of gravity states that bodies of mass have a mutual attraction. Hence, if you throw a ball in the air it eventually is attracted back to the ground. Similarly, all heavenly bodies exhibit this mutual attraction.
The earth attracts the moon and the sun attracts the earth-moon system. The force that prevents the earth, sun and moon from collapsing into each other is derived from orbital velocity. This orbital force exactly balances gravitation, keeping these heavenly bodies precisely in place. In the universe all the stars and galaxies have a mutual gravitational attraction and scientists reasoned that if the universe were not infinite in dimensions, then this mutual force would lead to eventual collapse. Therefore, they concluded the universe had to be infinite so that the attractive force at any point in the universe was exactly canceled by the pull of other heavenly bodies further away, thus preventing gravitational collapse. Physicists further reasoned that if the universe was infinite in size, it must have always existed since they could not conceive of an intermediate state.
A Wrong Conclusion
This is all well and good using the ideas of Newtonian physics; the only problem is that it is totally wrong! Physicists should have been able to understand the error in this logic if they had read and believed their Bibles. The Bible never says the universe is eternal; rather it plainly says only God is everlasting: “Who (God) only hath immortality;” “LORD .. ever thou hadst formed the earth and the world, even from everlasting to everlasting, thou art God” (I Tim. 6:16; Psa. 90:1,2).
What Did Galileo Discover?
How physicists formed their current views on the nature of the universe is a fascinating story which began with Galileo. In 1609, Galileo became the first man to peer at the wonder of the heavens through a telescope. The vistas thereby opened were truly incredible. With the naked eye it is only possible to see roughly 2,000 stars; with Galileo’s simple scope, millions could be viewed. Today, with modern optical instruments, assisted by sophisticated image enhancing electronics, it is possible to see tens of billions of stars and galaxies.
Galileo was staggered at what he saw and to this day scientists have continued to be awed by the vastness into which they peer. But a phenomenon they have observed has made them realize that Newtonian physics did not have all the answers. Physicists now believe that the universe is neither infinite nor eternal.
A Beginning
The first hint of this came about by the work of Albert Einstein in his General Theory of Relatively. Curiously, through a mistake in the original calculations, one of the most important physical features of this theory had almost been ignored, namely, that the universe had what physicists call a singularity. In laymen’s terms, the theory predicted that there was a beginning!
By the time this was realized, the work of the astronomer Hubble had experimentally shown that the galaxies in the heavens had some remarkable properties. First, he proved that our solar system belonged to a star cluster called the Milky Way. This was called an Island universe or galaxy. He further proved that there were tens of billions of other galaxies all with the remarkable property that caused them to speed headlong away from the observer on earth. The further away from us a galaxy appeared to be, the faster it was moving away from us. It was as if the entire universe wanted to get away from us as fast as it could.
The Big Bang
One can construct a simple model of the universe by imagining a balloon with buttons fastened all over the surface. The buttons represent the galaxies and the balloon the total space of the universe. Now if the balloon is blown-up, it expands and all the buttons (or galaxies) move away from each other. If an observer was placed on any one button on the surface of the balloon, then as the balloon expanded it would appear that all the other buttons were moving away from the observer. The model implies an initial starting point. At one point all the galaxies must have been condensed down to a very small local region and an enormous explosion caused them to fly apart. Ever since, they have been moving away from each other. This Einstein-Hubble model has been called the “Big Bang.”
Physicists were slow to accept the idea of the “Big Bang.” This model was unacceptable to many scientists who saw the universe as some gigantic mechanistic engine that had always existed. Furthermore, they assumed everything came from this “engine” by the statistical workings of pure chance. Once a singularity is introduced, pure chance is no longer the only operative cause in nature. The idea of a “Big Bang” being responsible for the creation of the universe was first proposed in the 1920’s. This concept remained a controversial idea, competing with other ideas on the nature of the universe for almost four decades. Then something happened in the early 1960’s which completely ended the argument.
Evidence for the Big Bang
Two physicists working at Bell Telephone Laboratories in New Jersey were having trouble with noise in radio antennas designed for receiving signals from space satellites. These two scientists built better and better antennae and receiving equipment, but try as they might there was a persistent background radiation that they simply could not eliminate.
Careful analysis eliminated the possibility of the interference coming from any source on our planet earth and showed further that the background noise was isotropic, i.e. no matter which direction in space they probed the noise had the same characteristics.
What they had found was the background radiation left over from the “Big Bang” which their calculations estimated must have occurred 12-18 billion years ago. In effect, they found the afterglow of the “Big Bang.” These results were in good agreement with theoretical calculations based on the General Theory of Relativity. Penzias and Wilson won the Nobel prize for this discovery. There was no longer any doubt in the mind of physicists that the universe had been created.
The Origin of the Organic World – Part One