Chapter 1 · Is anyone there?
In the beginning.
Has the universe always been here, or did it begin? For most of history, many great thinkers said it had always existed. The Bible's first sentence says it had a beginning, and a Maker:
In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.
Tap a date to see it happen.
- Aristotle argues that the world had no beginning.
- Einstein adds a term to his equations to hold the universe still and unchanging.
- Edwin Hubble shows the galaxies are rushing apart. The universe is expanding.
- Georges Lemaître, a physicist and a priest, proposes the universe began from one “primeval atom.” Arthur Eddington calls the idea of a beginning “repugnant.”
- Fred Hoyle, who defends an eternal universe, names the rival idea the “big bang” on BBC radio. The name sticks. His theory doesn't.
- Two Bell Labs scientists pick up the faint glow left over from the hot, dense early universe. It wins them the 1978 Nobel Prize.
- Satellites map that glow across the whole sky. NASA's COBE finds the faint ripples that later grew into galaxies, and its two lead scientists win the 2006 Nobel Prize. WMAP and Planck map it in finer detail and date the beginning to about 13.8 billion years ago.
Today. Galaxies are flying apart.
Rewinding: the galaxies crowd closer and closer together.
Further back, the universe is so hot and dense that it glows. That glow is still in the sky today.
The beginning. Space, time, and matter all start here.
Scientists noticed. Arno Penzias, who shared the Nobel Prize for finding that glow, said the data were “exactly what I would have predicted, had I nothing to go on but the five books of Moses, the Psalms, the Bible as a whole.” Robert Jastrow, the founding director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies and a self-described agnostic, ended his book on the Big Bang like this:
For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance, he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.
Science can follow the universe back to its beginning, but it can't tell us who began it. Everything that begins to exist has a cause, so whatever caused all space, time, and matter must stand outside them, with the power to bring them into being. Genesis 1:1 gives that cause a name: God. Christians disagree about how long ago the beginning was, but not about who made it.
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