The Universe Had a Beginning. So Who Started It?

The Universe Had a Beginning, and Science Resisted It

For most of recorded history, the dominant view among philosophers and scientists was that the universe had always existed. Aristotle thought so. So did most European scientists well into the twentieth century. The cosmos, in this picture, was eternal, steady and unchanging, a stage on which events happened but which itself had no story.

The Bible says otherwise. Its first sentence, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth,” describes a universe that had a starting point. For many centuries that claim stood on faith alone, and many scientists found it hard to take seriously. An eternal universe seemed simpler and more natural.

Then, in the 1920s and 1930s, the evidence began to change. A Belgian physicist, who was also a Catholic priest, worked out from Einstein’s own equations that the universe must be expanding, and that if it is expanding now, it must have been smaller, denser and hotter in the past. An American astronomer found that distant galaxies are rushing away from us. In the 1960s, two engineers listening for noise in a radio antenna picked up the faint afterglow of a hot, dense early universe. Today, satellites have measured that afterglow with extraordinary precision.

This article’s thesis is that the Big Bang was not a discovery that religious believers made. It was one that scientists made against their own expectations, and it ended up supporting the idea that the universe has a beginning. Some of the scientists who resisted it said openly that it sounded too much like creation, though historians disagree about how much that shaped the debate. Either way, the evidence moved in a direction that gives believers a fair reason to feel their tradition’s opening claim has held up.