How best might we relate cosmology and theology? Many today urge that we take the beginning of the universe at "t=0" as direct support of the creation of the world as described in the Bible. This sort of position has surfaced to a varying degree by groups otherwise differing widely: evangelical and conservative Christians, religiously open scientists and educators, various denominational leaders and church spokespersons, main-line theologians, and so on. It is similar to the "conflict" model in that it assumes there can be a direct link between a specific scientific theory, like cosmology or evolution, and a specific theological view, such as belief or unbelief in God the Creator.

Unlike the conflict model, the direct support model has some attractive features. Clearly there is something religiously evocative about the idea that the universe may have had a beginning according to science. If we start with faith in God as the Creator of the universe, we can greet the beginning of the universe with a profound sense of recognition: the universe, like, us, had a beginning, and it too may have an end.

My concern, however, is not with the way in which science can give language to piety but with the way in which scientific results might be taken as the basis for faith. This concern is fed from a number of sources. First of all the doctrine of creation should not be truncated to a single claim, namely that creation had a beginning. Instead creation ex nihilo includes the continuing existence of the universe and the laws of nature, as we have already seen. Hence it is fair to search for new meaning for theology in the context of science, but we should not reduce theology to a single scientific argument.

There are a number of arguments for the existence of a creator which depend, at least in part, upon the notion that the universe had a beginning. Some apologists appeal to Big Bang cosmology to support that notion. For instance, according to Christian apologist Phil Fernandes:
The big bang model also teaches that the universe had a beginning. In 1929, astronomer Edwin Hubble discovered that the universe is expanding at the same rate in all directions. As time moves forward, the universe is growing apart. This means that if one goes back in time the universe would be getting smaller and smaller. Eventually, if one goes back far enough into the past, the entire universe would be what scientists call "a point of infinite density." This marks the beginning of the universe, the big bang. (Fernandes 1997:96)
It is perfectly understandable that Fernandes and many others would make such an argument: as far as I can tell, similar expressions were commonplace among scientists and science writers long before religious apologists picked them up. However, the argument is in fact unworkable. In saying so, I am not saying anything novel or unorthodox; rather, I am just repeating what cosmologists have long known yet somehow failed to communicate adequately to the public, as much as they may have tried. I will try to explain myself in the rest of this paper. The details may sound technical on a first reading, since I will make reference to general relativity and quantum mechanics, but I ask the reader to bear with me: the main point is actually quite schematic, and I believe it should be understandable to anyone.

Question:

I recently was told by some physicists whom I had the chance to interview for a paper that the standard big bang model of the universe does not include a singularity anymore. That may have been the case twenty five years ago, they said, but nowadays physicists say that the big bang extends only back to Planck time. Can you PLEASE clarify the confusion I’m having on this?

Now in one sense that’s true. The standard Big Bang model needs to be modified in various ways. For example, the model is based on Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity. But Einstein’s theory breaks down when space is shrunk down to sub-atomic proportions. We’ll need to introduce quantum physics at that point, and no one is sure how this is to be done. That’s what your physicists meant when they said that the Big Bang extends back only as far as the Planck time. (That, by the way, is no new realization; everyone always knew that General Relativity breaks down by that point.) Moreover, the expansion of the universe is probably not constant, as in the standard model. It’s probably accelerating and may have had a brief moment of super-rapid, or inflationary, expansion in the past.

But none of these adjustments need affect the fundamental prediction of the standard model of the absolute beginning of the universe.

something of a watershed appears to have been reached in 2003, when three leading cosmologists, Arvin Borde, Alan Guth, and Alexander Vilenkin, were able to prove that any universe which has, on average, been expanding throughout its history cannot be infinite in the past but must have a past space-time boundary.

The first case involves an infinite contraction prior to the singularity, followed by our current expansion. The second case postulates an unstable initial state followed by an inflationary expansion. The third case imagines a contraction followed by a super-expansion fueled by ‘dark’ energy, with the universe breaking into a multiverse. The fourth case postulates two mirror-image, inflationary expansions, where the arrows of time point away from the cosmological singularity. Jim shows that these highly speculative models are all either in contradiction to observational cosmology or else wind up implying the very beginning of the universe they sought to avert.

The prediction of the standard model that the universe began to exist remains today as secure as ever—indeed, more secure, in light of the Borde-Guth-Vilenkin theorem and that prediction’s corroboration by the repeated and often imaginative attempts to falsify it. The person who believes that the universe began to exist remains solidly and comfortably within mainstream science.