Channel Five, 7.30 pm, Monday 5 th January 2004
A commentary by Paul Garner
The Big Question is a new series being broadcast as part of Channel Five's Science Season. In the first programme, ‘How Did the Universe Begin?', Professor Stephen Hawking gave viewers a brief introduction to the Big Bang theory. With images of a Bible open at Genesis chapter one, we were told that most religions, Christianity included, had claimed the universe to be very young – but the evidence of the fossil record had forced the abandonment of this view. By the early 1900s, most scientists believed in an infinitely old static universe – i.e. one that had no beginning. However, two crucial pieces of evidence came to light during the twentieth century that challenged this view of the universe.
First, there was the discovery by Edwin Hubble in the 1920s that the other galaxies were receding from the Milky Way – and those that were more distant were receding more quickly. This meant the universe was not static. If this relative motion of the galaxies were traced backwards, it pointed to a time when the universe was smaller and denser than today.
Second, there was the discovery by Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson of the cosmic microwave background radiation – the ‘echo' of the Big Bang – that had been predicted by George Gamow twenty years earlier. Hawking referred to this discovery as “one of the most important in the history of science”.
Viewers were told that galaxies formed as the universe expanded and cooled from its hot, dense beginnings. As the first stars used up their nuclear fuel, they exploded in supernovae, scattering the heavier elements forged within them out into space. These eventually coalesced into other stars and planetary systems. “You, me, my wheelchair”, said Hawking, “are made of stardust.”
What triggered the Big Bang? American physicist Alan Guth proposed a solution. The rapid expansion of the early universe (inflation) was caused by a strange type of matter that was self-repelling – unlike ordinary matter that is self-attracting (what we describe as gravity). However, there was an outstanding problem. Guth's theory of inflation predicted a smooth universe with an even distribution of matter. But the universe is clumpy – how did the clumps (galaxies) originate?
In 1982, Hawking and colleagues proposed that there must have been small fluctuations in the temperature of the fireball that seeded galaxy formation. The existence of these ‘ripples' was apparently confirmed by the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) – and with this observation “the last piece of the jigsaw fell into place”.
Hawking expressed his confidence that scientists had, for the first time in human history, successfully explained how the universe came about. It was spontaneously created out of absolutely nothing. Our universe is, he declared, nothing special or significant – in fact, it is probably one of many such universes. However our universe has spawned intelligent life that can ask the question: where did we come from? If the universe had been only slightly different, there would have been no-one around to pose the question.
So what are we to make of this first programme in The Big Question series? It was all of a piece with other populist television ‘science' – strong on visual imagery and inventive camera-work but not actually telling us very much. But no matter: the intention was apparently not to explain science to the public but to tell them that there is no serious question about the Big Bang theory. This was a religious – not a scientific – broadcast. The format allowed no critical engagement with the evidence or its interpretation and certainly no room for dissenting voices. Anyone wanting to find out how science really goes about answering big questions needs to look elsewhere.
While the recession of galaxies and the existence of the background radiation are consistent with the Big Bang theory, The Big Question did not acknowledge that most observations can be explained in more than one way. Although the Big Bang theory is dominant today, a host of alternatives have been proposed. 1Contrary to the widespread myth that science is neutral and objective, it is clear that religious and philosophical beliefs play an important role in which theories are favoured or rejected. This brings us to an important point: the Big Bang theory does not seem compatible with Scripture. Although there are some similarities between the Genesis account and the Big Bang theory, there are also some obvious differences. The Big Bang theory requires billions of years, while the Bible says that creation was accomplished in six days. The suggestion that the biblical days were really long periods of time does not help, because the order of events is also significantly different. According to the Bible, the sun, moon, and stars were made on the fourth day after the creation of the earth. However, according to the Big Bang theory, most stars formed before the earth, and the sun and moon at about the same time as the earth.
Finally, the Big Bang does not solve the problem of ultimate origins. Hawking would have us accept that universes just appear spontaneously out of nothing, but the question of ‘how?' was never really answered. According to David Darling, astronomer and author, writing in New Scientist (14 th September 1996), how you get “something” from “nothing” is the biggest deal of all:
“Don't let the cosmologists kid you on this one. They have not got a clue either… ‘In the beginning', they will say, ‘there was nothing – no time, space, matter, or energy. Then there was a quantum fluctuation from which…‘Whoa! Stop right there. You see what I mean? First there was nothing then there was something…and before you know it they have pulled a hundred billion galaxies out of their quantum hats…but there is a very real problem in explaining how it got started in the first place. You can't fudge this by appealing to quantum mechanics. Either there was nothing to begin with, in which case there is no quantum vacuum, no pre-geometric dust, no time in which anything can happen, no physical laws that can effect a change from nothingness into somethingness: or there is something, in which case that needs explaining…No, I'm sorry, I may not have been born in Yorkshire but I'm a firm believer that you cannot get owt for nowt. Not a Universe from a nothing-verse…”.
See John Byl, God and Cosmos: A Christian View of Time, Space, and the Universe, Banner of Truth, Edinburgh, 2001. Byl writes (p.74): “Currently there is no cosmological model that offers a simple explanation, in terms of well-established physical laws, of all the observational data. With the recent advent of the Hubble Space Telescope, and other remarkable advances in electronic instrumentation and computing, we are on the verge of a new era in astronomy. A proliferation of new, more reliable data on distant parts of the universe can be expected in the next decade. No doubt future observations will resolve some current problems while at the same time raising new ones, leading to the development of new cosmological models that differ significantly from current big-bang cosmology. It is therefore prudent not to equate any current cosmology with the actual history of the cosmos.”
