The “Big Bang” Is Not Theology-Neutral

From Lesson 30 of the Biblical Framework Series

Charles Clough

Russell Humphreys, Starlight and Time. It’s a fascinating little book. Let me just summarize it here. What Dr. Humphreys discovered, first of all, is that the Big Bang theory is largely misunderstood through the usual illustrations.

What I want to do with this weather balloon is to illustrate a thing that Humphreys points out about the Big Bang cosmology. Often times you read in a book that the universe was a ball, it was condensed down to a point and it just exploded and became a bigger, ever expanding ball. I was taught that, and most of the illustrations in a science book teach that. But what Dr. Humphreys realized is when he started talking to the real guys in relativistic theory, that’s not what the Big Bang is talking about. The Big Bang is not talking about the universe shaped in the form of a sphere and blowing up like a balloon. It’s more sophisticated than that. What the Big Bang is talking about is imagine you are a two-dimensional creature, living in the rubber of this balloon. That’s your world; you’re living in inside the surface of the balloon. You don’t see the balloon; you’re living inside the rubber. Now what the Big Bang is saying is as this balloon inflates, I’ve drawn a series of green points on the balloon; I’ve given a series of points on the balloon. What happens to the points on the balloon when I inflate the balloon? All the points move away from each other at equal distances at equal rates, no matter where you draw the points, they all expand away from each other in the same way. What the Big Bang says is if you are an observer living two-dimensionally inside the rubber and you’re able to look this way and that way, what do you see? Everything moving away from you. That’s what the Big Bang is saying.

Why do I belabor this point? I want to show you something. If you look at the surface of this balloon, and think about it for a minute, where’s its edge? If you are a creature living inside the rubber, imagine you’re a little tiny ant or mite, and you dig your way through this rubber, you can go travel anywhere in the surface, you can’t get out of the surface, you can’t go inside the balloon, you can’t go outside the balloon, but you can go anywhere you want to inside the surface. Is it or is it not possible for you, eventually to come back where you came from? You can. You could travel from one of these points inside the rubber all the way around the balloon and come back to the point you started. That’s called a finite model of the Big Bang. And that’s the idea in the theory, you’ll see it propounded, where you can take a rocket ship with sufficient fuel and you’d eventually come back to where you came from, by proceeding in a straight line in the universe. Somehow you’d come back on yourself.

The other alternate theory of the Big Bang is that instead of a balloon we have a plate that is infinite in extension, that’s becoming more infinite in extension. What do both ideas have in common? This is the discovery Humphreys made and I think it’s a profound discovery. Both the balloon and the plate have no edges, these are both surfaces where there’s no edge to it. In other words, if you’re an ant you go around inside this thing, you never experience an edge. Can you ever experience an edge in that surface? And if you have an infinite thing you’re never going to experience the edge either. Great ideas usually come from very simple questions. After studying that Dr. Humphreys made the point, he said what’s so interesting is why is it that every cosmology starts off with the assumption the universe has no edges. Why is that? Can’t we conceive of the universe with an edge? Why is it that EVERY, get this and underline it, EVERY cosmology today starts with the initial condition that the universe doesn’t have an edge.

So Humphreys began to say why do you guys believe that? Oh, it’s because of the cosmological principle. What’s the cosmological principle? The cosmological principle is that the universe can’t have edges because if it did, and we were out on a starry night and you looked in that direction, and I looked in this direction, and the earth were, say, closer to one edge than the other, what would we see as far as star density? We would see less stars toward the edge side of the sky than the other side. But as a matter of fact, we don’t observe that. Star density is the same wherever you look. So they say, obviously the universe doesn’t have an edge because if it did, the star density wouldn’t be the same. Ah, but says Humphreys, you forgot one option, there’s a way out of this. The way out is if the earth were at the center of the universe wouldn’t it be true that you could look in any direction and see the same star density? Of course.

What does Genesis say? What does the Genesis narrative teach? It teaches that first there was the earth, in verse 1-2, the earth was without form and void. What did God do on the 2 second day? The first day He made light, what did He do on the second day? He made the heavens out from the earth. The Hebrew word is the Raqyia‘, to be expanse, God expanded it out. [Gen. 1:6, “Then God said, Let there be an expanse in the midst of the waters, and let it separate the waters from the waters. [7] And God made the expanse, and separated the waters which were below the expanse from the waters which were above the expanse; and it was so. [8] And God called the expanse heaven.”] And it wasn’t until the fourth day that He populated the domain with stars. What Humphreys is saying is that the reason cosmologists believe in a boundless universe is theological.

Look at the quote on page 120, “The idea of the earth being at the center of the universe… strongly smacks of purpose and is thus unpalatable to most theorists today, who prefer to believe in a universe run by randomness. So it is simply assumed,” get this sentence, an important sentence coming up here. “So it is simply assumed there is no center and no boundary.” Do you ever read that in Newsweek Magazine? Did you ever get that in a lecture in college? Amazing observation, that at the very start, we’ve talked heavily in this course over the months about presuppositions, now you’re observing one operate. Do you want to know why we’re all screwed up over here? Ask yourself where do we start? We started over here with a boundless universe. Why do we pick a boundless universe? Because if we didn’t, the only way we could explain star density is to have the earth at the center. Oh, we couldn’t have that, that’d make the earth important. So we’ve eliminated that one right away, so that leaves the only other possibility, my model has got to begin with an unbounded universe.

What Humphreys points out is that once you start with an unbounded universe you crank it through all the mathematical hairy mess of general theory of relativity and come out with a Big Bang. Once you’ve started there you’re going to wind up with a Big Bang, if the theory of relativity is correct. So Humphreys decided to play a little trick, he said I’m going to submit a different set of initial conditions to the general theory of relativity and watch what happens now. So he submitted, not a boundless universe, he submitted a ball of water two light years in diameter, which he computed using the known mass of the universe and converting all the molecules and atoms that are thought to be in the universe to H2O, put in a ball, two light years together, a sphere. And what Humphreys says, and I’m doing no justice to it, doing it this fast, but I just want you to see the big idea, that on the second day, God took parts of that mass, and He did this, He spread out the heavens, and everywhere, in the Psalms and everywhere else you read, O God, Thou hast thrown out the heavens and Thou hast expanse… the very word.

But what does the sixth day tell you, at the end of the text in Gen. 2, what is the famous reference that we said you wanted to keep your eye on the end, the last sentence, where it goes into the seventh day. What does it say God ceased from doing? He ceased from His works, He stopped, so He’s no longer doing this. This is a once for all action, and what Humphreys does is, he has an expanded universe, not an expanding universe, and expanded universe. Ah, you say, but still Dr. Humphreys, you haven’t explained the universe’s age.

Ah but Humphreys says, yes I have, because the theory of relativity has a little clause in it. The general theory of relativity believes in something called time dilation, and it means that when gravity decreases, time speeds up. For example, you can take a clock at sea level and put another one in Colorado where the National Bureau of Standards clock is, and they do not run the same. One is subject to stronger gravitational field than the other, and there’s a minutia of difference. What happens to the gravity as God expands all this mass that was once local out through the massive size of the universe, what do you suppose happens to the force of gravity. It decreases. What do you suppose happens to an observer who is riding the wave of the expansion? This guy is riding a rocket ship on the day that God expanded, a little angel, he’s got his pocket watch, so God says expand, and he walks away from the earth. What is he observing? Two angels, one guy sits back on the earth and he’s got radio contact with this guy, they’re both clocking this. It turns out that the angel that is going like this at the front end of the edge of the universe is expanding out, his clock is speeding up like crazy. This guy sees a lapse of only 24 hours. So the light now begins to come back to us and has been coming back to us from that work of God when He expanded the universe.

I won’t fill in all the details except to point out some lessons learned here. This man worked on this for 10 years, believe me the math in the general theory of relativity is hairy, most of us will never get close to it, even those of us who have studied math, coordinate transformations, tenser theory, all kinds of stuff gets involved in this. But it turns out, isn’t it remarkable that if you change one little starting point, the massive difference that happens. What does that teach you, even if Humphreys is wrong, what does that already teach you about the so-called facts that you’re being fed? It teaches you they’re very speculative and very vulnerable to large scale shifts based on small starting points.