The age-old faith-science debate may be coming full circle, but the culprit phenomenon suggesting Genesis may have been right about the universe?s creation is still spinning around out there.
Actually, the universe ? Albert Einstein?s space-time continuum ? is expanding, and at an ever-increasing speed, according to the latest thinking.
“The big bang fits in with Judeo-Christian ideas that there was a creation event,” said Ray Villard, news chief at the Baltimore-based Hubble Space Telescope Science Institute, which is conducting pioneering research into the force ? the so-called dark force ? thought to be propelling the universe?s accelerated expansion. “So I?m a little amused that some [religious] people have a problem with it.”
“It?s very allegorical, the opening sentences of Genesis,” Villard continued, “for basically the big bang says that there was nothing, there was no space [prior to itself]. Somehow, spontaneously, the universe came into creation … In fact, if we said that all our observations indicated the universe were infinite, that would be more of a problem for the Judeo-Christian.
And an infinite universe gets you into all kinds of trouble.”
And for none other than Einstein, it did just that.
The famous physicist, whose landmark general theory of relativity prompted contemporary Russian mathematician Alexander Friedman and Belgian Catholic priest Georges Lemaitre to postulate an expanding universe as counterpoise to gravity?s collapsing effect, resisted the findings, believing in an infinite, static universe.
But when American astronomer Edwin Hubble actually calculated galaxy recession velocities through telescopic Doppler measurements in 1929, Einstein recanted and embraced Lemaitre?s deductions.
The theory, however, was not generally accepted until 1964, when sensitive enough instruments for detecting one its predicted effects ? lingering ambient radiation from the initial creative event, or “singularity” ? discovered telltale cosmic microwave background radiation throughout the known universe.
Now the theory that some 13 billion years ago an infinitely dense, infinitely hot, infinitely small entity suddenly expanded to create time and matter in a twinkling is regarded as the best explanation of how the universe began.
Which begs the question: What sired the singularity and its derivative natural world ? a supernatural one, a God?
“The existence of God is proven not by science as such,” insisted Father Frank Haig, a Jesuit and emeritus professor of physics at the Loyola College of Maryland, “but when you step back from science, and ask [Einstein?s] question: Why is science possible; why does the [universe] make sense? Why is the universe transparent to human intelligence?”
