Introduced by Richard Peachey

The paragraphs below are excerpted from an article appearing in The Globe and Mail, Oct. 24, 1998, p. D5. The article, by Gregg Easterbrook, was based on his book Beside Still Waters: Searching for Meaning in an Age of Doubt. (Observe that although this writer appears to accept the Big Bang view, he eloquently exposes the innate absurdity of that concept!) [Bold print in the quotation indicates emphasis added.]

“Suppose you accept the Big Bang theory of the origin of the universe. Here’s what you believe, roughly, according to the model proposed by Alan Guth, a physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

“You believe that, once upon a time, all the potential of the cosmos — all the potential for a firmament of 40 billion galaxies at last count — was packed into a point smaller than a proton. You believe that within this incipient cosmos was neither hypercompressed matter nor superdense energy nor any tangible substance. It was a ‘false vacuum’ through which coursed a weightless, empty quantum-mechanical probability framework called a ‘scalar field.’ You’re probably not clear about what a scalar field is, but then neither are most PhDs.

“Next, you believe that, when the Big Bang sounded, the universe expanded from a pinpoint to cosmological size in far less than one second — space itself hurtling outward in a torrent of pure physics, the bow wave of the new cosmos moving at trillions of times the speed of light.

“Further, you believe that, as subatomic particles began to unbuckle from the inexplicable proto-reality, both matter and antimatter formed. Immediately, these commodities began to collide and annihilate themselves, vanishing as mysteriously as they came.

“The only reason our universe is here today is that the Bang was slightly asymmetrical, its yield favouring matter over antimatter by about one part per 100 million. Because of this, when the stupendous cosmic commencement day ended, a residue of standard matter survived, and from it the galaxies formed. That is to say: You believe that a microscopic, transparent, empty point in primordial space-time contained not just one universe but enough potential for 100 million universes.

“It’s wise to take the Big Bang hypothesis seriously, since considerable evidence weighs in its favour. The galaxies are expanding away from one another as if they had once been in the same place, then hurled outward; the interstellar void is slightly warmer than absolute zero, suggesting the universe was once superheated by something much stronger than the output of stars; the earliest nebulae appear to be composed of precisely the mix of elements that Big Bang calculations suggest.

“Yet, for sheer extravagant implausibility, nothing in theology or metaphysics can hold a candle to the Bang. Surely, if this description of the cosmic genesis came from the Bible or the Koran rather than the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, it would be treated as a preposterous myth.“

For further reading:

“The ‘Big Bang’ Explains Nothing!” <http://www.creationbc.org/index.php/the-big-bang-explains-nothing/>

Eric Lerner. 2004 (May 22). “Bucking the big bang.” New Scientist 182(2448):20. This position statement, signed by hundreds of non-creationist scientists, is available for viewing and signing at <http://blog.lege.net/cosmology/cosmologystatement_org.html>.

Jason Lisle. 2003. “Light-travel time: a problem for the big bang.” Creation 25(4):48f. <http://creation.com/light-travel-time-a-problem-for-the-big-bang>

“Creation, Evolution, and Speed-of-Light Problems” <http://www.creationbc.org/index.php/creation-evolution-and-speed-of-light-problems/>