Did God Create The Universe?

Have you ever woken up with appreciation for the sheer beauty and wonder of the world and nature around you? I recently did, after having worked intensely on complex technological problems for the past weeks and months.

All this intense work has been stressing me out. But my sudden realization this morning that I did not create almost any of the wonderful things I enjoy in my life humbled me. My relatively low contribution to my own life lowered my stress while motivating me more to work on my technical challenges.

But the realization did not stop there; it made me wonder about where all of this stuff that we call world, nature, universe, etc., come from. Lo and behold, I am not the first human being to ponder upon this question (or its embryonic derivatives).

Thanks to generations of clever human beings who have lived before you and me, there is a wealth of information for us to dive deep into this topic, which is what I plan to do in this essay. If you are into this sort of a discussion, strap yourself in and enjoy the ride.

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Two Approaches that Seemingly Diverge on the Answer

For the sake of simplicity, let me rephrase the relatively complex set of questions related to this topic into a simpler (sounding) over-arching question:

“Where did our universe come from?”

Pick and choose your source of literature on this topic, and you will land on two traditional approaches to answering this question:

1. The religious approach

2. The scientific approach

The former acknowledges the human limitation of knowing the distant past and tries to find solace in the “belief” that there must be an intelligent maker (God) behind all of this.

The latter acknowledges the human limitation of knowing the distant past but tries to find solace in the “belief” that humanity can and will continue to challenge the limits of its knowledge.

Any discussion on the religious approach is on the philosophical side, which by nature, does not require a sense of progress over time. The scientific approach, however, continues to strive towards more knowledge about the past, and has been seeing continuous progress over time.

Going forward in this essay, I will be focusing more on the scientific approach and what it has enabled us to discover over the past 200 years or so.

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Theorising the Origins of our Universe

Our scientific journey in this essay begins with Jesuit priest Georges Lemaître, quite fittingly, a man of religion AND science. It was the 1920s, when Albert Einstein had revolutionalised classical physics with his theory of relativity.

Using Einstein’s equations as the basis, Lemaître theorized that our universe began with an explosion of sorts which caused matter to expand at a really fast rate. His calculations also suggested that our universe must still be expanding in the present.

Now, Lemaître might have been a man of religion, but he meant business when it came to physics. After having received his doctorate from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he was one of the first physicists to try to generalize Einstein’s equations.

Einstein, on the other hand, did not agree with Lemaître. He made the following remark about Lemaître’s work:

“Your calculations are correct but your physics is abominable.”

Einstein’s intuition was that everything in the universe had a life-cycle, except the universe itself, which just was and always will be. Note that at the limit of his knowledge at the time, Einstein’s intuition about the universe was remarkably close to a religious position.

All of this, however, changed with the observations made by astronomer Edwin Hubble at the Mount Wilson Observatory. He noted that galaxies at the edge of the observable space are all moving away, and seem to be accelerating at that. This observation aligned with Lemaître’s calculations and forced Einstein to famously reverse his position on the nature of our universe.

This meant that we came to know something more about the origins of our universe thanks to scientific enterprise. But in no way were we any closer to answering the question of “where” our universe came from. To get closer, certain notable discoveries had to emerge.

The Nature of Gravity

One of the notable points from Lemaître’s calculations was that for our universe to be expanding at the rate at which we were observing it to be (with the aid of an army of earth- and space-bound telescopes), ALL of the universe’s matter had to be compressed into a space that is unimaginably small; less than 10^(-15) metres in diameter.

If we assumed this to be the case, what could have caused the explosive expansion of this space? Gravity, as we had known it up and until that point was a one-way force. If you think about it, this is not the norm in classical physics; duality is the norm.

By that I mean that concepts come in polar opposite pairs; consider positive and negative, light and dark, high and low, etc. But gravity was different. It was “pull” only; unlike electromagnetism. Einstein’s discovery changed this understanding; his equations made repulsive gravity a possibility.

Alan Guth dug into this topic as a young postdoc and came up with a brilliantly detailed mathematical analysis. His calculations showed that if there were a specific type of energy field (named as the inflaton field) inside this unimaginably tiny space, and if it were uniformly distributed, gravity would in fact become repulsive and push outward with a bang; a rather big bang too!

This analysis led to a flurry of research about the big bang and the overarching topic of inflationary cosmology. But still, we were in no way certain about whether this is how it all began. Naturally, the scientific venture continued to believe that our limits of understanding could be pushed further.

The Cosmic Afterglow

I want to draw your attention to the part were Guth’s calculations required the inflaton field to be uniformly distributed. You see, this “uniformity” turns out to be a quirk of classical physics, which sort of approximates phenomena into perfect geometric entities.

But reality is different; perfect geometries do not necessarily exist. In fact, the very idea of certainty might be a myth. In 1927, the quantum mechanical uncertainty principle was discovered by German physicist Werner Heisenberg. I’m glazing over the details to keep this essay concise, but Heisenberg showed that the speed and position of a particle cannot be known at the same time with certainty. Either one would be possible, but not both.

This threw a wrench into the work of classical physicists, whose world was made of perfect geometries and absolute certainty. This meant that things were not as perfect/certain as they seem to be when we observe them at a quantum level.

These imperfections, when applied to the “uniform” inflaton field, resulted in quantum fluctuations within the field. The beauty of this is that these micro/quantum fluctuations would expand as the universe expands and would move more and more into measurable territory for human beings with time.

In the 1960s, Bell Labs researchers Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson, who were trying to research something else, discovered these fluctuations using their advanced telecommunication antenna. They noticed diffuse radiation spread throughout our space at just 2.7 Kelvin above absolute zero. This radiation came to be known as the cosmic microwave background radiation.

In more mainstream terms, if the big-bang would have indeed happened, it would have left a faint afterglow reverberating throughout the universe for a long, long time. And this is exactly what Penzias and Wilson had discovered after roughly 14 billion years after the event!

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Did God Create the Universe?

Let me go back to the moment when I woke up with appreciation for the beauty and wonder of our world and universe. This time, I am wide awake, and am in complete awe to realise that Einstein challenged status-quo about the nature of gravity, Lemaître used this to “compute” how the universe could have begun with a big bang, Hubble confirmed these calculations with astronomical observations, Guth analysed the requirements for the big bang, Heisenberg discovered the possibility of measuring and confirming if this requirement did in fact happen, and Penzias and Wilson discovered (accidentally), measured and confirmed exactly that. All of this happened within a span of roughly 200 years!

What a scientific journey it has been! But before we celebrate the big bang, we should ask a very important question:

Is big bang the only possibility that could have caused this rapid expansion?

The answer to that question is: no. There are other possibilities, and if you are curious enough, you could dive into academic research to realise that physicists can, in fact, rival science-fiction writers too. This includes the possibility of a higher intelligence being involved, by the way.

So, in a nutshell, we are not absolutely certain that big bang happened. But it is the best explanation we have got, given our observations and scientific knowledge so far. This might change if we discover evidence that points us convincingly in another direction.

In the end, science cannot answer with certainty the question of whether God created our universe. But it continues to strive to accumulate more knowledge that could eventually answer this question. In my opinion, even if science never manages to get there, the journey is worth all the effort!

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Reference and Credit: Brian Greene

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Further reading that might interest you: 

• Math Stories: A Strange Advanced Analysis Journey
• Why Does Science Love Simplicity?
• How To Understand The Mathematics Of Language

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