Excepted from our series “The New Scientific Evidence that Points to the Existence of God – Part 1.” Edited for publication. See our store at jashow.org to order this entire series.
Dr. John Ankerberg: Yes. So, the whole idea that the universe began at some time was on the table. And all of a sudden, Albert Einstein comes along, and he develops his general relativity theory that implied that the universe had a beginning. Explain how general relativity, which has to do with gravity, how that implied the universe all came back together.
Dr. Stephen Meyer: Right. Well, Einstein actually developed his theory prior to these observational insights of Hubble. He was a little bit after after Vesto Slipher, but before Hubble. And his theory, this is late 19-teens, was called general relativity, and it was a theory of gravity. It was the idea that massive bodies actually curve or warp the fabric of space, or what he called space-time. Because in Einstein’s theory, space and time were connected in very important ways.
Dr. John Ankerberg: I love the way you put this in your book, because I’d never thought about space this way. You know, we think about space as, you just drop something and it goes, choo, it’s never going to stop. But Einstein had the idea of, think about it as a mat that gymnasts are,...
Dr. Stephen Meyer: Yes, like a bowling ball on a trampoline. If you put the bowling ball on the trampoline, it will cause the trampoline to curve.
Dr. John Ankerberg: And the other objects that are like that would keep on piling up.
Dr. Stephen Meyer: And then, yes, if you put some tennis balls around the edge of the trampoline, they’d roll towards the center. So, Einstein conceived of space as having a curvature that was produced by massive bodies.
Now, that’s a pretty interesting idea that was verified or confirmed by a number of observations in astronomy, and it is currently our best theory of gravitation. But it also had implications for the origin of the universe. Because if the only force at work in the universe is gravity, then the universe should have collapsed back on to itself as all of space would become curved around the matter of the universe. And as the matter attracted to other matter, everything would curve into a giant black hole.
But we don’t live in that kind of a universe. Instead, we live in a universe where there’s actually empty space between bodies. So Einstein realized that in addition to gravitation, there must be an outward pushing force in opposition to gravitation that accounts for the universe as we see it, which is a universe with empty space. And that implied a dynamic principle in the universe, something that was pushing things apart or expanding, causing the universe to expand, which again got back to this idea of a beginning.
Now, Einstein didn’t like that idea, because it raised these big philosophical and even theological questions about what might have caused the universe to begin. And so he posited that this outward pushing force, his, what he called the cosmological constant, was of such a precise order,… it had such a precise value or strength, as to exactly balance the inward pull of gravity. So the push outward and the pull inward were exactly balanced. And that way he was able to portray the universe as static, not having a beginning nor moving towards an end.
Dr. John Ankerberg: Yes. Two things that we’ll try to make… that are hard to understand in one way, but easy in another way. He wanted to deny that there was a beginning point to the universe. And he used that equation by putting a number in there that made the universe to be static. He fudged, in other words.
Dr. Stephen Meyer: Yes, he fiddled with the value of the cosmological constant in order to get the two forces to exactly balance so he could portray the universe as static. And this again underscores the remark of Robert Dicke that an infinitely old universe would relieve us of the necessity of explaining the origin of matter at any finite time in the past.
Dr. John Ankerberg: It also shows bias in science.
Dr. Stephen Meyer: Well, sure. Einstein had a worldview, a point of view that at the time he was trying to preserve. And his own theory seemed to challenge the worldview, and so he fiddled with the equations. But to his great credit, he later came around. And there’s a wonderful story, there was a Belgian Catholic priest physicist named Georges Lemaitre. And on a taxicab ride in 1927, going to a famous physics conference called the Solvay Conference, Lemaitre put Einstein into the picture about the redshift evidence, and explained what Hubble and Humason had discovered. And he also explained that Einstein’s own equations most naturally implied a dynamic universe, that this fudging that he had done was very ad hoc from a physics standpoint.
Dr. John Ankerberg: Right.
Dr. Stephen Meyer: And the universe, even with the fudge, wasn’t really static. Any slight perturbation in the orientation of matter would cause a collapse or an expansion. So, as a result of that conversation and a later one he had with Eddington, Einstein went out to Southern California and viewed the redshift evidence for himself with Hubble. And there’s some famous newsreel footage where Einstein is peering through the telescope. It’s a famous, famous shot. So two weeks later he gives an interview to the New York Times, and tells the reporter that Hubbell and his colleague Humason at Caltech have proven that the universe is not static. And later he admits that his attempt to circumvent the conclusion that the universe had a beginning by gerrymandering his own equations of general relativity, was, quote, “the greatest blunder of my life.” And later he came to accept that the universe had a beginning.
Dr. John Ankerberg: It had a beginning. And right away people, scientists, didn’t like that. All the way down through history, you find that people didn’t like some of the things that were proposed. And so, we developed this whole thing of philosophy, of how do you figure out philosophically which theory is correct? What were some of the alternatives? We’ll talk about that theory a little later on, but the fact is, what were some of the theories that were proposed to counter what Einstein said?
Dr. Stephen Meyer: Right. In 1927, Lemaitre was able to synthesize the implications of Einstein’s theory of general relativity, which most naturally implied a beginning, with the observational evidence. And that became known as the big bang theory. So Lemaitre is really the father of the big bang theory.
But Sir Fred Hoyle, a great British astrophysicist, and two colleagues, Hermann Bondi and Thomas Gold, formulated an alternative theory known as the steady state. They were trying to preserve Einstein’s original idea. And they said, yes, it’s true that the universe is expanding, or appears to be expanding, but they said that process could have been going on forever, infinitely into the past. And they proposed that, just as kind of an assumption, that space must have a constant density of matter in it. So, as it’s expanding now, then the density would go down because there’d be less matter per unit volume. And that stretching of space would cause new matter to pop into existence. So they proposed a kind of continuous creation of matter ad infinitum, infinitely forward into the future. And that process, they said, had been going on infinitely back into the past. So they attempted to get rid of the beginning, but by still accounting for the evidence of an expanding universe.
Dr. John Ankerberg: Yes. I remember being in graduate school and hearing about that, and it seemed like the view that scientists were pushing very hard.
Dr. Stephen Meyer: I actually had a chance to speak with Hermann Bondi my first year as a student in Cambridge. He sat down in front of me and started asking me questions about my research. And then I asked him about the steady state. And he said, well, he said it was a great idea. The only thing wrong with it, it was completely wrong. He said it didn’t meet the evidence.
So the steady state theory fell into disfavor among scientists by the mid-1960s. And since that time, most physicists and astronomers and cosmologists have accepted that the universe did indeed have a beginning. And Arno Penzias, interestingly, one of the scientists who discovered the cosmic background radiation and who later received a Nobel Prize for his role in that discovery, later said that “The best data we have are exactly what I would have predicted if I had nothing to go on but the first five books of Moses, the Psalms, and the Bible as a whole.”
And, of course, the first words of the Bible are, “In the beginning.” So the theistic view of the origin of the universe is that it had a beginning. And I think that’s very significant if we think back to that quotation we started our discussion with today from Richard Dawkins. Because he says that the universe has exactly the properties we should expect if at bottom there’s no purpose, no design, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference. In other words, the universe looks as it should if materialism were true, scientific materialism was true.
Dr. John Ankerberg: It shoots his theory down.
Dr. Stephen Meyer: But it does. What we have instead is what you would expect on a theistic view, not a materialistic or naturalistic view which denies the beginning. Materialists, after all, have long said that, as Carl Sagan once said, “The universe is all there is, and all there was, and all there ever will be;” the universe is eternal and self-existent.