The Big Bang theory was invented in 1931 by the Belgian priest Georges Lemaître, through the backward application in time of the Hubble-Lemaître law, discovered by Lemaître in 1927 and independently by Hubble in 1929. Indeed, if most galaxies are moving away from one another, because of the expansion of the space separating them, billions of years ago they must have been much closer, and at the limit all the visible universe would have shrunk to a point. We believe today that this happened about 13.8 billion years ago.
In 1948, George Gamow, Ralph Alpher and Robert Herman made two predictions that should be fulfilled if the Big Bang theory were true: the mass of the universe should consist of about 75% hydrogen and 25% helium; and there should exist a cosmic background radiation with a temperature of about 5º Kelvin. Other cosmologists, however, took this theory as a joke, and to make fun of it they gave it the name Big Bang, which although not quite appropriate, has remained fixed, perhaps forever.
In 1951, Pope Pius XII heard about the Big
Bang theory, and at first may have believed that science had proved creation,
but apparently Georges Lemaître dissuaded him, for in a 1952 speech to the
International Astronomical Union, Pius XII said this:
Science, while progressing by leaps and bounds,
will never be able to answer the final questions, such as the origin of
everything.
Skeptical cosmologists, meanwhile, had
developed another cosmological theory, the
steady-state theory, which avoided the initial singularity at
the cost of renouncing the principle of conservation of energy. In 1956, the
British astronomer Raymond Littleton stated in one of his books (The modern universe) that he preferred this
theory to the Big Bang theory in order to escape the need to
accept God and the creation. At that time, the situation seemed clear to some
scientists: if the Big Bang theory were correct, creation would
be inescapable and science would have proved the existence of God.
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| Robert Jastrow |
During the 1960s, the two predictions made
in 1948 were experimentally verified and became surprisingly
accurate predictions. Thus, during the 1970s the Big Bang
theory became the standard cosmological theory, and the steady state theory was
abandoned. In 1978, astronomer Robert
Jastrow, chairman of NASA's Lunar Exploration Committee, wrote this in his
popular book God and the Astronomers:
[The scientist] has scaled the mountains of
ignorance… as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of
theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.
At that time, atheist scientists were
devastated: their ideology, which is based on the assertion that God does not
exist, seemed to be crumbling. However, forty years later, they have managed to
instill in a large part of the population, which knows almost nothing about
science, the idea that the Big Bang theory proves that God does
not exist. How did they achieve this?
- By
arguing that the Big Bang was not the true beginning, and the
universe would have arisen as a quantum fluctuation of a previous vacuum. To
say this, they rely on Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, and to be able
to apply it, they claim that the total energy of the universe is zero.
This statement is not scientific, because (at least for now) it is
impossible to prove it. On the other hand, by saying this, they have
merely displaced the problem, which becomes: where did this vacuum come from? To disguise the
question and give the impression that they have all the answers, rather
than talking about the vacuum, they call it nothing;
a philosophical aberration, for nothing does not exist and
nothing can come out of nothing.
- By
inventing a plethora of multiverse theories
without scientific validity, whose objective is to try and give an answer
to the fine-tuning problem:
the discovery that the physical constants of our universe seem to have been
adjusted in a critical way to make possible the existence of life. In
previous posts I have shown why none of these theories can solve the
fine-tuning problem.
- By
using the predominantly atheistic mass media to spread among the unwary
and unprepared public the false idea that the Big Bang
theory, instead of being a problem for atheism, actually favors it.
I have entitled this article The hijacking of the Big Bang because I don’t
think it’s fair to resort to lies and misrepresentations to convince people
that some ideas are better than others. These are the typical deceptive and
manipulative procedures used by Joseph Goebbels, Hitler's propaganda minister.
Of course, this position is neither scientific, nor philosophical, for it does
not try to convince by means of reasoning and arguments, but with mantras and
slogans.
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Manuel Alfonseca
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