Three questions without scientific answers

Although I have spoken about some of these things in other posts, I’ll put together here three questions that, for now, don’t have a scientific answer, and perhaps never will.

• Did the universe begin to exist at the Big Bang, or was there something before? This controversy is much older than many think. Three quarters of a millennium ago, Thomas Aquinas wrote this in his Summa Theologiae (Part I, Question 46):

It cannot be proven by demonstration that the world has not always existed.

In other words, according to Aquinas, the question of creatio originans (that the world had a beginning) cannot be solved by human reason. It should be noted, however, that creatio ex nihilo (the fact that the world was created) would be within the reach of reason. In other words: reason would let us reach the conclusion that the universe was created, but we cannot prove that it had a beginning.

Did the universe have a beginning?

Georges Lemaître

This question has fascinated scientists since 1931, when the Belgian astronomer, physicist and priest Georges Lemaître formulated the theory of the primordial atom, which since 1950 was known as the Big Bang theory. According to this cosmological theory, as the universe is expanding, if we move back in time we must come to a point (13,800 million years ago, the cosmologists tell us) when it would have gone through a singularity, with a volume tending to zero, while pressure and density would tend to infinity. Could this have been the beginning of the universe?

In 1951 Pope Pius XII, in a speech to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, said the following words:

A mind illuminated and enriched by modern scientific knowledge, calmly evaluating this problem, is led to break the circle of a matter entirely independent and autochthonous, either uncreated, or because it has arisen by itself, and to rise to a creative Spirit... It seems really that present science, by jumping back over millions of centuries, has succeeded in being witness to that primordial “Fiat lux”, when out of nowhere burst forth, together with matter, a sea of light and radiation, while the particles of the chemical elements split and were reunited into millions of galaxies