The hijacking of the Big Bang

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.

Is there energy in the cosmos?

Georges Lemaître

During the 1950s two cosmological theories entered in competition: the Big Bang, proposed by Georges Lemaître, and the steady state, proposed by Hermann Bondi and Thomas Gold. Although the second had to renounce the principle of the conservation of energy, the most sacred of physics, atheist cosmologists preferred it to the Big Bang, as it seemed to them that this theory required to accept God's creation. In the words of the English astronomer Raymond Littleton, in his popularization book The Modern Universe (1956):

A theory such as this [the Big Bang] that puts back creation to a singular instant in the remote past... to some minds it is an objection that it would imply the removal of the question of the origin of the material of the universe from the realm of science... This consideration does not of course mean that the explosion theory is necessarily wrong, but it puts the act of creation, as we might name it, beyond the reach of science.

In other words: Raymond Littleton objects to the Big Bang theory because it could force us to recognize the existence of a creative God. It cannot be said more clearly.