What do we mean by the phrase “in the beginning?” In terms of logic, from the earliest times when people could think, both men and women eventually had to grapple with three of the hardest questions and greatest imponderables of all time:
- Has the universe always existed?
- Did it have a beginning?
- Finally, if there were “a starting point”, what existed before?
Different religions and philosophies came up with different answers. Religions in general shared the idea of “a starting point” but even today people are conceptually overwhelmed by such matters. Early peoples could not come up with a coherent rational answer that would make sense but there was a “logical” way out: the starting point occurred because of a Creator endowed with supernatural powers.
“Problem solved”, as they say, even though it left much unanswered. However, since “God” could (by the new definition) “do anything” there was no longer any problem that couldn’t be solved; there was no longer any conundrum that could not be explained; there would never be a need for a physics-based (materialistic) answer to such questions, the very concept of which was not in existence at the time and would not be appear for many far-flung centuries into a very distant future.
New questions might arise for skeptics and non-believers: From where did God get the physical material to create the universe? Was it not possible that natural phenomenon had natural answers? For the new faithful, however, it no longer greatly mattered to try and come up with a comprehensible answer in such a context.
God was omnipotent and God willed the universe into existence. Of course, true believers ended up giving God many human-like qualities to make this happen. It took the Lord six days to make everything (which suggests some kind of “work” was going on) and indeed, like a good laborer anywhere, He tired out and so on the 7th day he rests to admire his handiwork. Makes sense for humans but for a Supreme Being?
Why would an Omnipotent God tire Himself out? What was He doing in the process of creating the universe that made him feel tired? And it still doesn’t answer the question, from where did the material come? There’s a reference to mud for Adam; from where did that mud come?
Well, one can say God “thought” it into existence, but how? How can something that doesn’t have a physical reality as we think of ordinary things—objects, desks, tables, animals, trees, people—create things that do? How do we get something from nothing, whether natural or divine?
The Big Bang Theory addresses some of these questions and conundrums. For reasons we need not go into here, the “steady state” idea of an eternal universe (as having always existed without beginning or end) has been largely–some would say thoroughly–discredited in the 20th century. It is no longer high up on the scientists’ list of possible answers and whether it has enough pop left to ever make a comeback is anybody’s guess but for now seems highly unlikely.
That leaves the scientific theory that the universe must have had a beginning, which turns out to be the Big Bang. And as for the question, what existed before then, the answer is: the question itself is no longer proper or makes sense. Yes, it’s hard; these physics fellows don’t do math like you and me. It takes some time getting used to this new line of thinking, but everything in our universe came into existence with the Big Bang: there was no “before” in other words!
Now if such thinking is hard to grasp even today (with a growing body of scientific research to support this view), try to imagine what it must have been like for prehistoric men and women to try and grapple with such imponderables many millennia ago!
The only thing an instinctive rationalist and materialist could have surmised is that there was a physical answer possible—that stayed within the bounds of natural physics—but what that answer was would remain virtually impossible to discover by reasoning alone. It would be many millennia before science could produce evidence for the Big Bang Theory in an Einstein-revised world.
In the meantime, those choosing religious belief as the end-all-and-be-all found themselves sitting smug and pretty: not only did they have an answer for First Cause but they had constructed a tautology that had an answer for just about everything.
And so the human race, which divides up into two or more camps on so many issues and in so many ways, was about to do it once more: religion and science were to begin a competition that would last through every generation down to our own day and time.
Now many people might say, there was no real competition, don’t you know? Religion triumphed just about everywhere when science did not exist or was too puny to make much headway against theology. There is some truth to this point of view, but it is not the whole truth.
There was science, even if people did not yet recognize it as such. Everything that people did on a daily basis that dealt with cause-and-effect, manipulation and objects and measurement of land, farming and husbandry, was a form of early science.
In any event, during the last thousand years a search for answers that did not always depend on God for every answer got underway; universities were founded, experiments tried, new theories offered.
In the last 500 years, the new currents of experimental research began to flow faster: Galileo and Newton in the 1600s and 1700s, the Renaissance, weights and measures, the periodic table, the scientific nomenclature for all living things, and so much more began gathering momentum.
In the last 200 years and concurrent with the Industrial Revolution, Science became an ever greater force in its own right. Even in terms of the relatively recent theological history of the last 5,000 years (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) “Science” is a very late entry in the competition of approaches available to take to understand the world around us.
As it turns out, though a late entry in the race, Science is also a very powerful runner and with a few great strides, soon presented itself as a legitimate and viable alternative to the religious views that dominated mankind’s history for so many centuries up, through the Middle Ages and into the Modern Era.
Old habits are hard to break—indeed, perhaps impossible to break, but nevertheless there are now many generations of individuals born after the Scientific Revolution who have more than one way to perceive the world. Religion is no longer the only game in time: the Theory of the Big Bang has arrived!
(Darwin would have been pleased)
