The 19th Psalm, attributed to King David, is one of the most well-known. “The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands. Day after day they pour forth speech; night after night they display knowledge. There is no speech or language where their voice is not heard. Their voice goes out into all the earth, their words to the ends of the world.”
Who hasn’t had the experience of gazing up at the splendor of the nighttime sky and wondering how the universe came to be? For Christians, this experience is a deeply religious one; the vast array of stars above are a testimony to the power and wisdom of the God who created all things. Yet many churchgoers do not fully recognize the degree to which the study of the heavens truly bears witness to the glory of God.
Most folks don’t realize that in the early part of the 20th century, it was the settled conviction of the scientific community that the universe was eternal and unchanging. Scientists who had no religious affiliation held that the cosmos had existed through endless ages past and would continue in perpetuity. This state of affairs represented a stark contrast to the first words of the book of Genesis: “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.”
The writer of the book of Hebrews asserts, “By faith we understand that the universe was formed at God’s command, so that what is seen was not made out of what was visible.” For Christians living in the early 1900s, belief in God’s creative power was indeed a matter of faith, finding very little scientific support. There were however some subtle hints – whispers you might say – which suggested that the universe had not always been this way.
The second law of thermodynamics states that the amount of entropy, or disorder, in a physical system always increases. Conversely, the amount of order in the cosmos is steadily decreasing. Another way of stating the second law is that energy irreversibly flows from hotter body to a colder one. Thus, the second law of thermodynamics suggests that the universe cannot be eternal, because the heat from stars would have long ago dissipated to colder regions around them.
The first law of thermodynamics is referred to as the law of conservation of mass and energy; it states that matter and energy can neither be created nor destroyed. Now it is quite true that matter and energy can be converted into one another. We experience this reality every day, as when nuclear fusion in the sun converts matter into spectacular amounts of heat and light. This process is governed by Albert Einstein’s iconic equation E = mc2, where E is energy, m is mass and c is the speed of light.
The second law of thermodynamics precludes an eternal cosmos. The universe must have had, not just a beginning, but a highly ordered beginning. Meanwhile, the first law of thermodynamics insists that nature itself is incapable of creation. All the matter and energy which the universe contains must have been created by a supernatural entity, a being who transcends the natural world itself.
Despite these compelling theoretical considerations, the scientific community in the early 1900s was firmly committed to the concept of an eternal, static universe – a cosmos which had always existed and would always exist in roughly the same form. This assumption would soon be dramatically shattered.
The tale begins in 1905, when Albert Einstein published one of the most important scientific papers of all time: his theory of special relativity. Prior to Einstein, the work of Sir Isaac Newton had reigned supreme over the world of physics. In his book Principia Mathematica, published in 1687, Newton had brilliantly formulated the laws of motion and gravitation. Einstein’s new theory represented a substantial departure from Newtonian mechanics.
But it wasn’t so much that Sir Isaac was wrong. On the contrary, Newton’s laws remain perfectly valid for the vast majority of physical interactions we witness today. Rather, Eistein’s new theory asserted that Newton’s ideas were incomplete. The theory of special relativity claims that Newton’s laws break down when applied to extraordinary situations involving fantastically high velocities. For instance, the theory of special relativity predicts that when an object approaches the speed of light, the object’s mass dramatically increases and that time itself slows to a crawl.
A decade later, in 1915, Einstein published his general theory of relativity, extending his insights to include the phenomenon of gravity. He showed that gravity was not an attractive force per se, but rather a consequence of the warping of space and time around a massive object.
Albert Einstein’s relativity theories were a scientific sensation & made him one of the world’s most recognizable figures. His ideas immediately solved a longstanding problem regarding the orbit of the planet Mercury. Relativity also predicted that the path of starlight would slightly bend as it passed by the mass of the sun. This bold claim was tested in 1919 by British astronomer Sir Arthur Eddington, who travelled to the Island of Principe off the west coast of Africa in order to observe a solar eclipse. The eclipse provided an ideal opportunity to precisely measure the starlight coming from beyond the edges of the sun. Sir Arthur’s measurements spectacularly confirmed Einstein’s prediction.
Since its publication, Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity has been rigorously tested and vindicated over and over again. But here’s the rub: the mathematical equations which Albert Einstein developed to describe general relativity implied that the universe must either be expanding or contracting. The theory would not allow for a static, unchanging universe. Einstein himself immediately recognized this fact. Yet, like virtually all scientists of that day, he was still wedded to the idea of an eternal cosmos.
When confronted by the implications of his own theory, Einstein published an additional paper in 1919 entitled “Cosmological Considerations on the General Theory of Relativity.” In this paper, Einstein proposed his notorious “cosmological constant”: a theoretical force which would stabilize the universe by counteracting the pull of gravity.
Alas, this alteration would not endure long. A Dutch astronomer named Willem de Sitter soon showed that even with the cosmological constant, general relativity still required an expanding universe. In 1922, a Russian mathematician named Alexander Friedmann also scrutinized Einstein’s equations, and independently proved that a static universe was virtually impossible.
This brings us to the fascinating figure of Georges Lamaitre. Lamaitre was born in Belgium and as a young man developed strong interests in both science and theology. He fought as an artillery officer in World War I and after the conflict was ordained as a priest in the Roman Catholic Church. But Lamaitre also pursued advanced studies in theoretical physics. For a time, he was a student at Cambridge under Arthur Eddington. Eventually he found his way to America, where he received his Ph.D. in physics from MIT. By 1925, Georges Lamaitre returned to Belgium and became a professor at the Catholic University of Louvain.
The Belgian priest studied Einstein’s relativity equations and recognized the compelling case for an expanding universe. He published a paper to this effect in 1927, but his work initially received little notice. It wasn’t until 1930 that Lamaitre’s insights came to light, thanks in part to his friend Arthur Eddington, who brought his ideas to the attention of Einstein and other cosmologists.
It was Georges Lamaitre who first embraced the concept of an expanding universe and pursued this thought to its logical conclusion. Lamaitre reasoned that if the cosmos was currently expanding, then the universe in the past must have been very much smaller. And if one went back far enough in time, there must have even been a moment when all the matter and energy of the universe was compressed together into a tiny bit of space which he referred to as the “primeval atom.”
Lamaitre deduced that the entire universe must have had a definite beginning, a moment when it sprang into existence. He proposed that the cosmos began as a tiny speck of unbelievably high pressure and temperature which subsequently expanded – or exploded if you will – until eventually it produced the universe we observe today. This notion represented the birth of what we now know as Big Bang cosmology.
Thus, the scientific world had begun to radically change its perspective. The idea of an eternal universe, existing on its own accord, was mortally wounded. On the ascent was a cosmos which had been called into existence, bringing to mind the ancient words: “By the word of the LORD the heavens were made, their starry host by the breath of his mouth.”
Awesome!