Big Bang Cosmology and the Beginning of the Universe

At Bell Labs in Holmdel, New Jersey, Penzias and Wilson were calibrating a 20-foot horn antenna and could not eliminate a background noise of about 3.5 K at 4080 megacycles per second. It was the same in every direction, at every hour, in every season. They evicted a pair of pigeons and scrubbed the horn; the hiss stayed.

From Aristotle to the early twentieth century the default scientific assumption was an eternal cosmos. A physical beginning was regarded as a religious idea, not a scientific result. That default was abandoned on evidence, not argument.

Robert Jastrow, founding director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies and by his own description an agnostic, closed God and the Astronomers (Norton, 1978) with the image of the scientist scaling the mountains of ignorance, pulling himself over the final rock, and being greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.

Allan Sandage — Hubble's successor, the man who spent his career measuring the expansion rate — told the New York Times in 1991 that it was his science that drove him to the conclusion that the world is more complicated than science can explain.

It establishes that the observable universe has a finite past in its present configuration, and that the transition left physical evidence still measurable today. That is the point Genesis 1:1 asserts and that eternal-universe cosmologies denied.

It does not, by itself, establish the mechanism, duration or sequence of the creation week. The standard model's chronology — an age near 13.8 billion years — is derived by extrapolating present expansion and decay rates backward under the assumption that they have held constant. Creationist cosmologies accept the beginning and the evidence for it while disputing that assumption; D. Russell Humphreys's Starlight and Time (Master Books, 1994) and John Hartnett's later relativistic models are the best-known attempts.

So two things are true at once. The evidence for a beginning is strong and it is exactly what Scripture asserted while the scientific consensus said otherwise. The chronology attached to that beginning is a separate question resting on separate assumptions, and it is properly argued on its own ground.

Genesis 1:1 — In the beginning — a claim about time itself having a start.

Hebrews 11:3 — The visible was not assembled from previously visible things.

Isaiah 40:26 — The host of heaven is called out by number and by name.

Psalm 102:25-26 — The heavens are the work of His hands and they shall wax old as a garment.

Isaiah 42:5 — He created the heavens and stretched them out.

Romans 1:20 — The invisible things are understood by the things that are made.