What Happened Before the Big Bang?

A BBC documentary with this title was aired on SBS-TV in Australia in April, 2012. In it, several cosmologists discus ‘the unthinkable’—perhaps the big bang was not the beginning of everything after all. It seems that scientists have discovered a new law. Well, not actually new—just one that has been treated as if it didn’t exist for the last half century or so by ‘big-bangers’ such as Stephen Hawking, Roger Penrose, Paul Davies, Edwin Hubble, et al, namely the law of Cause and Effect.

The program explains that the concept of the big bang¹ postulates that “everything we see in the universe today—us, trees, galaxies, zebras—emerged, in an instant, from nothing. And that’s a problem. It’s all effect and no cause.” We are then given five different explanations from five different scientists concerning what this cause may (or may not) have been.

Prof. Michio Kaku and the meaning of ‘nothing’

Dr Michio Kaku is Professor of Theoretical Physics at City University, New York. He asks: “How can it be that everything comes from nothing?” His solution: “If you think about it a while, you begin to realise it all depends on how you define ‘nothing’!”²

 

We are then shown a huge NASA vacuum chamber, the largest in the world—the nearest we can get to a state of nothing, but which still has dimensions (‘nothing in 3D’), and through which light can pass. Prof. Kaku tells us: “I think there are two kinds of nothing. First there is something I call absolute nothing: no equations, no space, no time, no anything that the human mind can conceive of, just nothing. Then there is the vacuum which is nothing but the absence of matter.” 

The host then comments: “Prof. Kaku’s version of nothing is the perfect vacuum where on the face of it there is only energy. But in a perfect vacuum, energy sometimes transforms itself temporarily and briefly into matter. It is one of these tiny explosions that might have been going on and ended up in the big bang.”

Prof. Kaku: “So for me the universe did not come from absolute nothing—that is a state of no equations, no empty space, no time; it came from a pre-existing state—also a state of nothing. Our universe did in fact come from an infinitesimally tiny little explosion that took place giving us the big bang, and giving us the galaxies and stars we have today.”   Continue at Russell Grigg

The Limits of Science

The kind folks at Evangelical Press sent me this book to review: Is God Past His Sell-By Date by John Blanchard.  It is a shorter version of his award-winning Does God Believe in Atheists?  The former is around 230 pages while the latter is around 650.  Is God Past His Sell-By Date is intended for skeptics, people who doubt or question the Christian faith, the existence of God, the person/work of Jesus, and so forth.  The book mostly deals with creation, humanity, evil, science, suffering, and the gospel.  Even though I’m not a skeptic, this book helped me think through some of my own doubts and questions I have about life in general as well as the Christian faith.  At the end of each chapter there is a short testimony written by different Christians who used to be skeptics.  I appreciated these testimonies; they were “real life” examples of how God brings people out of doubt and into [the] faith.

One section that stands out for me is where Blanchard discusses the limits of science (p. 64-5).  Drawing on several scientists themselves, he lists the following limits (which I’ve edited for the sake of space):

1) Science can tell us nothing about why the universe should have come into being.  It cannot answer the question that Stephen Hawking asked (and could not answer himself): “Why does the universe bother to exist?”   Keep Reading...