Does Big Bang’s “Smoking Gun” Actually Converge with Biblical Creation?

Just a few weeks ago, the New York Times published an article titled “Space Ripples Reveal Big Bang’s Smoking Gun”.  As is usually the case, I find this very interesting for reasons well beyond science.  I’m not one of those evangelicals who poke at science as such – science is my background and my bent.  I do, however, frequently see reasons to poke at the attempts of science to reach into areas which are beyond scientific inquiry.  This article makes me think about the topic again, and about the limitations of science.

Alan Guth was one of the first physicists to hypothesize the existence of inflation, which explains how the universe expanded so uniformly and so quickly in the instant after the Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago.  Rick Friedman for The New York Times

Science is very good at the “how”, but very poor at the “why” of the way things are.  For instance, science can describe atomic forces very accurately, but it can’t tell you why those mass forces exist in the first place.  Science can go deeper and deeper into its description of those forces – from atoms to subatomic particles (electrons/protons/neutrons) to elementary particles (quarks/bosons/leptons) to who-knows-where in the future.  But science can’t explain why the particles exert forces to begin with.  Science can describe "how" in ever greater detail, but it can’t explain "why".

This is where the Bible and science often collide.  Both describe “the what” – for example that the universe and planets came into existence.  Both explain “the how”, though from different vantage points.  Scripture describes “the how” from a theological perspective.  Science describes “the how” from a natural perspective.  Science looks at natural processes and hypothesizes based on what is observable today to explain the past or predict the future.  Scripture claims truth by Divine revelation, a source of information which is normally beyond scientific testability.  This is where some of the collision takes place.

Science, by definition, can only postulate from observable data.  If data isn’t observed, future outcomes can’t be predicted nor can past data be explained.  Unless every event in the history of the universe is available for observation, science will always be limited in its conclusions.  Science uses data observed in basically the last fifty to one-hundred years to understand everything that has happened in the existence of the universe.  Consider one example:  by measuring the speed and distribution of galaxies, the abundance of certain cosmic elements (hydrogen, helium, and lithium) and background microwave radiation, astrophysicists have calculated the universe to be 13.7 billion-years old.  That’s sampling data from just 50 out of the last 13,700,000,000 years to describe them all.  It’s almost like having no data sample at all.

To make this a little more understandable, consider this analogy:  suppose you blacked out and later regained your senses while riding in a rickshaw on a backstreet in Tokyo.  Suppose you had no idea how you got there, and you wanted to scientifically figure out how long you’d been gone.  Suppose you knew that it was 6500 miles to Tokyo.  Keeping things analogous to how we calculate the age of the universe, further suppose you only have the ability to measure your speed during the last 50/13,700,000,000^th of your trip, which turns out to be about the last one-ten-thousandth of a second.  During that last ten-thousandth of a second, you were traveling at about 2 miles per hour in the rickshaw.  Scientifically, this is all you know about how you got there.  Based only upon the observable data and using the principles of uniformity of natural processes, you would scientifically calculate your travel time to Tokyo as:

6500 miles / 2 miles per hour =3250 hours (or about 4.5 months)

In reality, you really had been gone less than a day as you flew from the US to Tokyo.  Your infinitesimally small data collection window had radically skewed reality because the entire trip had not occurred at your observed speed of 2 miles per hour.  Your limitation of data availability to only that which was observable to you at the end of the process was your source of error. 

Sweeping claims of knowledge based on a limited data window can lead to enormous errors.  Astrophysicists like Alan Guth admitted that cosmic matter and energy distributions did not fit the uniform expansion predicted by the Big Bang theory.  That’s when Guth postulated his theory of “inflation”.  It basically said that if the governing processes of the universe weren’t steady over time – that if natural processes initially were much faster than any descriptive model of physics available to science – then the discrepancies with Big Bang data might be explainable.  Guth said that there could be some peculiarities in radiation at the edges of the universe which might show that, initially, the universe operated under different physical laws and expanded in ways we can’t observe today.  That is exactly what this NY Times article says some astrophysicists believe they have now found.

I find this really interesting.  On the one hand, science will claim that when the Big Bang model didn’t fit the data, it looked for (and found) an alternative explanation that did fit the data.  On the other hand, for over half a century, science claimed that their flawed model did explain the universe simply because they had nothing better.  It actually took faith in non-uniform processes (violating fundamental assumptions of science) to explain why the science couldn’t explain the universe.  The theory proposes accepting that there was much in the beginning of the universe we do not understand and that does not follow observed and known processes.  So science postulated some non-science: a theory that something completely out of step from natural uniform processes was operating (though to be fair, it's when scientific theory fails to explain that it realizes it has something wrong, as in this case). 

What’s my point in all this?  Cosmic inflation sounds a lot like faith in God to me.  “In the beginning, God created the heavens…”  The revealed message of Scripture says that God created something out of nothing.  It seems to imply that this happened very quickly - instantaneously.  It would follow that things which seem very old (based on processes we measure today) could actually be in their infancy if processes happened much more quickly in the past.  I find it interesting that this is the very point of this article.  In this instance, science and Scripture seem to agree.

P.S.  Scientists may point out that I have unfairly described their position.  "Just because we don't understand those initial processes now doesn't mean we won't in the future.  Science always marches forward."  Fair enough, but it doesn't change the main point.  We only know what we can see, and that just ain't all the information.  We may peel the onion back to understand another layer, but there is always more to this infinite onion of understanding.  Science will never understand the universe fully nor get to "the why".  Only One who was there at the beginning knows that!