2 - The Universe: How it Was Created and Why

… and books that told me everything about the wasp, except why.  - - Dylan Thomas

In this post: A brief history of how science has viewed the Universe and its creation. How science has advanced and religion, for the most part, has not.

In his great poem “A Child’s Christmas in Wales” Dylan Thomas writes of the gifts he received, among others a book about wasps. He would, perhaps, have been more interested in knowing why wasps exist, and why (as opposed to how) they sting.

Like that book, science has told us a lot about perhaps the greatest gift of all, the Universe within which we live. However we have little to go on when we deal with the issue of purpose and the answer to the question “why?” Our understanding of how it probably originated, a complex description of which is encapsulated in the phrase “the Big Bang,” leaves all the “why” questions unanswered. Why was there a singularity? Why did it bang?

The first thing that science hypothesizes as having happened in our Universe is that it banged into existence. It makes sense, therefore, that our search for meaning must begin with querying how that happened.

Was there absolutely nothing before the Big Bang, neither energy nor matter? The science of physics denies that something can self-create “ex nihilo” (out of nothing). So scientists conjured up a hypothetical Big Bang singularity, the content of which was everything in our Universe, so compressed that it occupied infinitely little space, and the explosion of which was the Big Bang. But where was the singularity, given that there was no Universe to contain it?  And who or what created the singularity if there was nothing else but it?

Humans have been trying to understand the origin and structure of the Universe almost since we became human.  One of most influential attempts was recorded in about 150 CE, when the Greek astronomer Ptolemy wrote a 13-volume description of the Universe as it was understood at the time. The model was Earth-centric, with everything circling a spherical Earth in a highly complex pattern. Although the model saw the planets of the Solar System as individual objects with their own movements, almost everything outside of the Solar system was still part of a fixed structure, often referred to as the firmament, that circled the Earth.

This model dominated for more than a thousand years before it was seriously challenged by science. It might well have been overturned much earlier, except Christianity ruled much of the world at that time and was viciously fundamentalist. Few philosophers or scientists chose to promote other ideas when burning at the stake was a likely outcome for anything deemed heresy.

In the 15th century Nicolaus Copernicus took up that challenge. He launched the Copernican Revolution, beginning with a new model in which the earth circled the sun rather than vice versa. Nonetheless, the Universe would remain — in our scientific understanding — infinite, until the Big Bang theory became the generally accepted model of the Universe.

After Copernicus, the reflecting telescope was developed in the 16th century by Leonard Digges, who also proposed that the stars were not attached to a single firmament, but were distributed throughout a universe that was infinite in extent. To a large extent, therefore, Digges was the discoverer that our Universe is an enormous realm, composed of billions of galaxies, each with billions of stars, many of which are accompanied by one or more planets. During the following 400 years or so, starting with the local solar system and expanding ever outwards, the Universe was probed and subjected to analysis, using ever-improving telescopes and other tools. Great scientists such as Brahe, Galileo, Kepler, Halley, Titus, Doppler, Pickering and Planck, and, of course, the giant Isaac Newton, were among the hundreds of astronomers, physicists and mathematicians who advanced our knowledge of the new realm.

By the beginning of the 20th century, cosmologists of all stripes had turned their attention well beyond our world to the entire Universe. It was the whole Universe that was created, not just Earth, we discovered, and not just Adam and Eve, but perhaps other intelligent beings in millions of other locations in the Universe. Most theologians had no problem extending their God’s scope to the Universe and beyond and expanding the act of creation to include the entire Universe, although they did have a little more difficulty with the idea of other Adams and Eves.

However, the basic religious paradigms that had formed in earlier days had not disappeared. The miracles of the scriptures, the prohibitions, the mythologies and the wording of the prayer books remained mostly the same. Although secularism (the dis-entanglement of religion and state) has progressed well in North America, Europe and other countries, and science has continued mostly un-harassed, in most religious institutions the prayer books continue to refer to “God in heaven,” angels abound, disproven myths are presented as fact and petitionary prayers are still recited. Little wonder that our youth tend to become skeptics and drop out when they are able to overcome their parents’ dissent.

There are many questions about ourselves and the purpose of our existence, but the question that appears to best serve as a starting point for answering them, through science or religion, remains: How were we created, and why?

If you are a theist, “why“ becomes your big question, because you are assuming there was an intelligent creator and it's reasonable to expect that there has to have been some sort of motive for the act of creation. It’s easier if you are an atheist because then you merely have to answer the “how,” but you have a lot to explain because you are confined by the laws of physics as we know them.