The question I have, as an atheist, is do you think that the Big Bang theory is incompatible with belief in god? Because there are many christian scientists who do subscribe to it.
I’ve been lurking here for a few weeks, and felt it was an opportune time to jump in.
First of all, I am an atheist, but more towards the agnostic end of the spectrum; I lack belief in God, I don’t reject that God, by some definition, could not exist, but simply that I don’t see the need for God to exist.
That all put aside, I think there needs to be some clarity on what cosmologists and physicists mean by the Big Bang. You will note a bit of a disclaimer by any researcher when discussing the Big Bang or inflationary theory; and that is that these interlinked theories deal with the
observable universe.
That’s not to say that scientists won’t hypothesize about the entire universe. It doesn’t seem an unreasonable assumption that the unobservable parts of the Universe don’t behave by the same physical interactions as the parts we can see, but as we can’t see those other regions of the Universe, it remains at best an educated guest.
There are a number of highly speculative models of what came “before” the Big Bang (if that even makes sense, I’ll touch on that in a moment). The Big Bang might have been an event localized to what we call the observable universe, and thus not an, ahem, universal event. It could be that our universe is a “baby” universe formed out of another universe. Our universe could simply be a sort of daughter universe, or brane, of a metaverse. Again, these are all speculative, and brane theory is largely built out of string theory, which remains highly controversial, and while an interesting mathematical model, may actually have nothing at all to do with the actual Universe itself.
For myself, I have to accept that while the Big Bang is the origin of the observable universe, nothing beyond that can be proclaimed as any of fact, provisional or otherwise. That the observable universe was once much denser and much hotter, and then began to expand and cool (become less dense), is a much a “fact” (a dangerous and loaded word, to be sure) as anything in science is a fact.
I’m not even sure that the notion of “before” even has any meaning if you’re talking about the origin of the Universe. Causality certainly applies
within the Universe, but to try to extend that beyond the beginning of the Universe may in fact not even make sense (as Stephen Hawking famously said, it’s like asking what’s north of the North Pole).
In that light, I simply do not accept the Prime Mover argument (that the Universe needed someone or something to kickstart it). If one insists on Prime Mover logic, then it creates an sort of infinite regression, in which I can answer “What started God?”, to which a theist would reply “Well, clearly there needs to be an Eternal uncaused entity”, and I will then invoke Occam’s Razor, declare that if some entity can in fact be uncaused, I will remove the entity that I have no evidence for (God), and apply this attribute of being uncaused to the Universe itself.
What I won’t do, of course, is pretend that my logic is science, or somehow backed by science. All the science, at this point at least, has to say is that the observable universe was once very hot and very dense, and then began to expand and cool.
