Did A Supernatural Explosion Create the
World?
THE DISCOVERY THAT the world had a beginning is mind-boggling. Yet this verdict does not come from theologians; rather it comes from an international jury of scientists. Using only physical evidence, they say that the world actually began.1 The belief is based on empirical facts that were uncovered by modern science, and these facts teach that the world actually "began."2
Think about it! There was a "time" when time didn't exist.3 Neither was there any "space." But if there was "nothing," where did we come from? How did it happen? And who or what was behind it? As intriguing as these questions may be, a deeper question looms. The purpose of this chapter is to inquire whether the beginning of our universe was natural — or supernatural.
The Dilemma
If there were a beginning, then we have a dilemma because of the First Law of Thermodynamics. This First Law has been the object of considerable thought since it was first introduced to the world by William Kelvin and Rudolf Clausius. It forbids a natural process from bringing something into being from nothing.4 This constraint was mentioned in an earlier chapter. How can a natural process bring something into existence out of nothing? Since the answer is it can't, many scientists have understood the First Law of Thermodynamics to teach that everything in the universe is eternally old. This was the law that inspired the older "steady state" theory of the universe, and for over a century it was understood to mean that the world has been here forever. But does the First Law really teach that our world has been here forever? The answer is no — and the reason for this is found in what the law actually says.
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The First Law teaches that a natural process cannot bring into existence something out of nothing. If the First Law is correct, which seems to be the case, and if the universe had a beginning, which seems to be scientifically accepted, then one conclusion is that something unnatural created the universe.5 If the world didn't result from a natural process, then it came from an unnatural process.
The thought that the universe may have originated supernaturally is unsettling to many people.6 Yet, taken at face value, this conclusion is consistent with the total sum of evidence before us. Modern understanding of astrophysical data collected over the past fifty years or so has illuminated a profoundly important insight concerning the origin of the world. When objectively viewed, we see two complementary truths:7 (1) Our world had a beginning, and (2) natural processes do not create things out of nothing. A supernatural birth satisfies them both.
But the story doesn't end there. A third element has been added. There is now reason to believe our universe came into existence out of nothing! This latest conclusion comes from recent modifications of the older Big Bang Theory — something beyond particle physics — known as the New Inflationary Theory of the Universe. However, to understand what these new insights mean, it will be helpful to first outline the scientific work that is presently underway on an international scale to unify all of nature, and which helped give birth to the New Inflationary Theory.
Scientists throughout the world are developing "Grand Unification" theories.8 These exotic rules embrace all of nature; they link the forces surrounding the atom with those that control the stars; they tie together both the smallest and the largest things in the universe. The theories also help to explain the bewildering list of over two hundred atomic particles uncovered in the past several decades.9 In addition, they provide insight into the results of high energy experiments. For the first time, we've begun to predict and explain what we see.10 Thus, confidence is growing in the foundation on which the new Grand Unification theories are being developed.
The Grand Unification theories laid the groundwork for the New Inflationary Theory,11 a new theory developed to resolve certain unanswered questions associated with the older Big Bang.
There are at least three of these questions. The first relates to the transmission of signals from one part of the universe to another. How did different parts of the universe communicate just after it began? Scientists call this enigma causality.
The second concerns the "shape" of the space-time fabric of the universe. What made it lose its curvature so quickly and survive longer than an infinitesimal fraction of a second? This problem is known as the flatness question.
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The third deals with the way that the stars are distributed throughout space. Why does matter cluster to form galaxies? This question is called homogeneity.
The New Inflationary Theory answers the first two questions and it promises an answer to the third12 through an exotic idea called "quantum fluctuations"13 (a new insight into cosmology about which more is said below). A quantum fluctuation can be thought of as a bubble such as appears in a pot of boiling water.
The New Inflationary Theory also gives us insight into the basic stuff from which the world was created. Unlike the Big Bang Theory, this one tries to tell us something about the raw material from which the universe was born.
In the Big Bang Theory, our hands were tied because we could not go back in time to the actual beginning. A small impenetrable interval of time, called a "Planck time," separated us from mathematically seeing the true beginning. Thus, we could never hope to know how the universe came into being. We could never see back to the true beginning. But the New Inflationary Theory frees us from this limitation and gives us a picture of the universe from the moment it unfolded. Were we to condense its implications into one sentence, it would be this: The universe seems to have come into existence out of nothing. That's right; out of nothing.
It's staggering to think that the entire universe began from nothing.14 Yet there's something even more startling: The Bible revealed that knowledge thousands of years before man ever made or conceived of a telescope. The first verse of the Bible teaches that there was a beginning to the world, and that it came into existence ex nihilo (out of nothing).15 The implications of this are so profound that attempts have been made to explain it away, using the idea of quantum fluctuations, the belief that the universe just popped itself into existence. However, that notion is totally inadequate. A quantum fluctuation no more explains the existence of our universe than does a bubble in boiling water explain the stove that heats it. Let's see why a quantum fluctuation cannot make a universe.
Nature's Free Lunch
Natural processes do not pop things into existence out of nothing. To explain the fact that things do exist, however, a few writers have tried to get around the obvious implications of a supernatural creation by saying that there may be one natural process through which we can get something from nothing.16 That process is what I've already referred to as a quantum fluctuation. The basic idea is that, at times, Mother Nature is disposed toward handing out a "free lunch." But, figuratively speaking, when we open the bag to eat this lunch we find that the bag is empty.
Our mathematical descriptions of the physical world do suggest that quantum fluctuations are real. However, no one knows in any basic way what
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they are or why they exist. This is an example of our having assigned a label to something that no one truly understands. There is nothing wrong with doing this provided we realize that a quantum fluctuation is more of a tag placed on a mathematical result, than an explanation of how something came to be. The idea that a quantum fluctuation evolved into our universe is an imaginative guess; it certainly is not rooted in scientific fact. Ideas of this kind are energized by a philosophical prejudice toward materialism. Appendix 1 contains additional discussion for readers with a technical background.
In trying to describe quantum fluctuations, the most we can say with any confidence is that they represent a natural process that temporarily borrows energy over time intervals that are imperceptible. This is not because of the practical limitations that ordinarily exist when we measure things, but because what occurs within such an interval is, in principle, inaccessible to an observer. This truth is connected with a fundamental result of quantum physics commonly known as the uncertainty principle.
The mathematical picture can be visualized by imagining a pot of water that's about to boil; but the pot and the water are both growing larger and larger. In this picture, a quantum fluctuation can be thought of as a bubble that forms at the bottom of the pot. The quantum mechanical equations allow these bubbles to pop into existence from the vacuum of space, and then to grow larger and larger.17 However the New Inflationary Theory requires the pot and its water to grow so fast that, figuratively speaking, no bubbles ever reach the surface of the water. This means that although, in principle, quantum fluctuations can occur, cosmological constraints disqualify them from becoming our universe.18
Thus quantum fluctuations do not explain how the universe exploded into existence out of nothing. We are again left with the glaring conclusion that since our world did begin, and since the First Law disallows a natural process from creating things out of nothing, it indicates that our world's birth was not natural, but instead had a supernatural beginning.
However, another problem remains for those who attempt to explain the origin of the universe in terms of natural laws. This problem is more serious than anything thus far discussed. All of our knowledge of natural processes comes entirely from information that has been acquired after the universe came into being. It is therefore illogical to presume the existence of originating processes that are defined only in terms of a universe they are alleged to
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have created. How can the validity of such processes be defended? One must argue for their existence in a vacuum void of the world that gives them meaning! Thus to believe in such processes is a matter of faith, not science. The initial conditions that gave birth to our world belong to a realm separate from the natural laws that controlled how the universe unfolded. This distinction is rarely given the attention it deserves. At the moment of explosion, our world appears to have been tuned to a precision of over fifty decimal places. Can we hope to ever understand this miraculous event? The difference between initial conditions and the laws of nature is that whereas the latter we hope to understand more and more, the details of the former will remain far from our knowledge. Not only is this distinction true for the conditions that attended the creation of our world, but it speaks to every event we may yet experience.
Summary
The First Law of Thermodynamics is considered by many to be the citadel of science, and it warrants a prominent role in our belief regarding origins.19 However, regardless of what we may read or hear from time to time, the demonstrable fact remains: Natural processes neither annihilate material things out of existence, nor do they bring into existence observable things out of nothing. For example, we entrust jewels to a safe deposit box because we are confident that natural processes will not cause them to disappear, and we shop in supermarkets because we're sure that natural processes will not by themselves create food on our table. The First Law teaches that natural processes do not bring things into existence from nothing. But since things do exist, and since scientific data teaches that the universe did begin, it means that it was not born from anything natural. Thus, recent scientific discoveries argue for a creation that was supernatural.
Chapter Four || Table of Contents
1. Trefil J. The Moment of Creation (1983) Scribner's. Ne'eman Y. Tenth Texas Symposium 375:15.
2. Boynton P. et al. Phys Rev. Let. (1968)21:462. Dicke R. & Peebles P. Astrophys. Jour. (1968) 154:891. Puzanov V. et. al. Soviet Astron. Jour. (1968) 11:905. Weinberg S. (1977) & Wilson R. (1979) ibid. Ch. 1.
3. Waldrop M. Science (1984) 5(1):44 Jan/Feb. North J. The Measure of The Universe (1965) Clarendon (Oxford).
4. Trefil J. Space Time Infinity :213. Kuhn T. The Essential Tension (1977) Univ. of Chicago. Mehra J. The Physicist's Conception of Nature (1973) Dordrecht. Gamba A. Nuovo Cimento (1955) 1:358. Misner C. et. al. Gravitation (1973) Freeman (20:460).
5. Rowe W. The Cosmological Argument (1975) Princeton Univ. Press.
6. Edwards P. & Pap A. ed. Mod Intro Philos. (1965) Free Press.
7. These truths are the result of cosmological data and understandings that are intertwined with the quantum relativistic foundations of twentieth-century science.
8. Ne'eman Y. ibid. Stecker F. Tenth Texas Symposium 375:69. Kaufman W. ed. Particles and Fields (1980) Freeman. Kolb E. & Turner M. Nature (1981) 294:521.
9. Polkinghorne J. The Particle Play (1980) Freeman.
10. Trefil J. From Atoms To Quarks (1980) Scribner's.
11. Guth A. Eleventh Texas Symposium on Relativistic Astrophysics Annal. NY Acad. Sci. Evans D. ed. (1984) 422:1 Mar 23 Waldrop M. Science (1983) 219:375. Davies P. The Sciences (1983) 23(2):32 Mar/Apr.
12. Trefil J. Ibid. :221.
13. Atkatz D. & Pagels H. Phys Rev. (1982) D25:2065.
14. Zeldovich Y. Soviet Astronomy Let. (1981) 7:579. Vilenkin A. Physics Let. (1982) B117:25.
15. Simpson C. The Interpreter's Bible (1952) 1:467 Abingdon. Harris R. et. al. Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament (1980) Moody 1:127 (#278), Keil C. & Delitzsch F. Commentary On the Old Testament (1981) Eerdmans 1:46. Henry M. Matthew Henry's Commentary 1:2.
16. Harrison E. Cosmology (1981) Cambridge University Press Brout R. et.al Annal of Physics (1978) 115:78, Tryon E. Nature (1973) 246:396.
17. Even if quantum fluctuations produced edgeless, four-dimensional blobs (closed hyperspheres) as some suggest, it is pure speculation to suppose that natural laws inflated one of them into the universe in which we live.
18. Quantum fluctuations can produce edgeless hyperspheres of the ordered phase that inflate, but they cannot "percolate" into the ordered phase in which we live because the exponential expansion exceeds their nucleation.
19. Harms R. et.al. Tenth Texas Symposium 375:178.
