Cosmology - In the Real Beginning
Cosmology will contradict theology only if a given theologian asserts something that is factually not true. It is entirely possible for a religious person to have beliefs that are not in conflict with science. However, that person would have to look at Biblical myths as metaphors that are not literally true. This essay will examine some of what is scientifically known which can be compared to Biblical myths. Young earth creationism with its literal belief in a six day creation by God has no evidence other than the imagination of someone who perhaps thought that God was speaking to him. In fairness to Christians, most are quite realistic on matters of settled science as discussed here.
It is known beyond a reasonable scientific doubt that the universe derived from a Big Bang that occurred roughly 13.7 billion years ago. NASA claims this estimate is accurate to within one percent. It was derived from several different studies of cosmic background radiation. Prior methodologies estimate the age at between 12 and 15 billion years. The oldest known stars were used to estimate the 12 billion year younger age.
The theoretical understanding of the Big Bang came in large part from Einstein’s theory of General Relativity developed in 1916. This theory replaced the prior theory of gravitation described by Isaac Newton. Space and time became interwoven together with matter in a way that has been extensively tested and confirmed to be superior to the theory of Newton.
Since there is no way to test "sacred text" pronouncements, they have to be accepted on "faith", which is defined in Christian text as hope without evidence. (1) Science requires theoretical predictions that can be tested against observation. What is predicted by the Big Bang?
A major finding confirming the Big Bang came from Edwin Hubble (1929) with his demonstration that other galaxies are receding from us at a speed that is proportion to their distance. The light waves from these galaxies were reduced in frequency (called red shift). The reduction is exactly predicted by the specific velocities away from us. We know that the whistle of a train will sound at a higher pitch when the train is coming toward us and lower in pitch as the train goes away from us. A similar change in frequency is predicted with the light waves from receding galaxies.
If we imagine going backward in time it is obvious that the galactic movements in the universe would reverse and all the matter would eventually have to come together. The initial state of the universe would include all of space and time in a volume much smaller than a single proton. All the points of our space expanded out from that one point.
Where was this single entity? Well, it would be at the tip of your nose, at the period at the end of this sentence, in the Andromeda galaxy and at every other point in space that now exists. This is hard to understand intuitively because any small thing that we encounter or think about is now surrounded by space.
There was no space outside the Big Bang. This is nominally consistent with the story in Genesis about the void but that story does not generate the testable theories of science and would be rejected for reasons described on this web site.
In the first second of our universe, most matter formed into raw protons, neutrons, electrons, anti-electrons (positrons), photons and neutrinos. Some neutrons would change into additional protons and electrons or combine with protons to create deuterium, a heavier form of hydrogen. The deuterium could then combine to form helium. This process has been modeled with known physics predicting that 24 percent of standard matter would become helium, a very small amount would become lithium and the rest would be hydrogen. The observed results agree very closely with theoretical predictions.
About three hundred and eighty thousand years after the Big Bang. the matter of the universe had cooled so that electrons could stick to protons forming atomic hydrogen. Prior to this, photons were easily scattered off the free electrons from the hydrogen plasma. The removal of the free electrons meant that the photons (light and related radiation) could travel unimpeded from the last point of scattering. This created a vast “wall of light” in the distant universe that is farther away than any other radiation that can be sensed with instruments. The distribution of energy predicted for such a wall of light is called black body radiation. The distribution of the photon energy has been measured at 34 points along the curve with results exactly agreeing with the black body radiation predictions from Big Bang theory.
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