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FINDING GOD ON THE SCIENCE CHANNEL
By T Blogger | July 2, 2010
While channel-surfing the other evening I came across a fascinating bit of educational television on The Science Channel. It was one of a series of programs called “Through the Wormhole”, narrated by Morgan Freeman, whose marvelous voice has spoken in movies as both the president of the U.S. and God Almighty. I figured I ought to listen. This particular episode featured the progression of the development of various theories of cosmology. First was the “Big Bang” theory. I am not a physicist or a cosmologist, or even an amateur astronomer, but I “get” the Big Bang. The Bang was the beginning. Before The Bang there was nothing, and after The Bang there was something which expanded into everything.
What seemed to cause much consternation among the great thinkers (I mean no sarcasm here) featured on this program was the inability of the Big Bang followed by expansion theory to answer the simple question, “What about before the bang?” Cosmologists have wracked their brains for decades to come up with an answer to that question, because it is possibly the most important cosmological question Science can ask.
To attempt to explain how there could have been a transformation from nothing to everything, several theories have been advanced. The latest of these is “M Theory”. I do not pretend to understand very much about M Theory, or the String Theories it purports to account for. Suffice it to say that it involves eleven dimensions and subatomic particles that are so small that they cannot now be measured, and in fact will probably never be measurable. But the real “meat” of the theory, as applied to the question “how did nothing become everything?”, is a disappointing cop-out. M theory proposes that there is no beginning and no end — there is only the constant shifting of the state of the universe. The irrefutable value of these theories lies in their being useful in explaining how the various forces and matter in the universe work. They do not, however, answer the Big Question.
I am not a Christian, Jew, or Muslim, but watching those scientists struggle with the inadequacies of their complex theories to answer a fairly simple question, I realized there is another theory in a very old book that at least addresses the Big Question:
In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void…
© 2010, Tom Weeks
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