Natural Bang

Ignorance is not an argument and misinformation is never a rebuttal, yet sadly a lot of theists and science denier have been using these to boost their rumpus against rationality. Hmmm… is this what they mean when they say “Faith begins when reason end?”

Take this as an example. 

Most Christians I encountered in Facebook still cannot comprehend a naturalistic explanation of how the universe existed – uhhh… it is impossible for the universe to appear without the act of my God.

Really huh?

According to this Facebook Christian debater, it’s impossible that from “nothing” will become “everything” and then he starts talking about the Big Bang and zeroes.  Wait? So, what’s the Big Bang got to do about nuthin? Well, for starters, obviously this Christian think that before the Big Bang was just a bunch of zeroes. 

Before the Big Bang, a typical Christian will call it nothing – The Bible calls it “In the beginning,” but the scientific community calls it as a singularity. 

So, is singularity “nothing?” 

What is nothing?

Typically, we define “nothing” as a value relative to zero. Empty, without any value, nill, zilch, zip, nada. So, before creation, God sits in nothing. I guess, God got bored looking at nothing so He created something. 

Nothing has no property – that’s so obvious! There are no reactions, no activities – because it’s nothing – it just doesn’t exist. So, is the singularity a “nothing?” That depends. If you call being without space, and without time as nothing. 

Then all of a sudden, BANG!

Fred Hoyle was the guy who coined the name “Big Bang” sarcastically, as a way of mocking it because he doesn’t like the theory. He said that it doesn’t explain why everything, gathered to a point, would suddenly and dramatically begin to expand. Yet thanks to him, we now know how heavier elements such as carbon, oxygen and the rest was created since it was not included in the Big Bang and… Wait? Going back to our story… The problem with Hoyle’s idea is the same as how typical Christian anti-science debaters imagine what the Big Bang is. The Big Bang is not an “explosion” of everything. It’s not a “dot” that suddenly burst releasing everything. It’s not a loud explosion (a BANG!) but more of a vast, sudden expansion of energy (matter), space and time. 

So what caused it?

Wait, how can it be caused if it’s “nothing?”

Well, because nothing is unstable.

From the studies presented by theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking, this “nothing” is known as a false vacuum and the "nothingness" of a false vacuum can and does spontaneously produce energy/matter. Oh, and by the way, a false vacuum is a situation in which a volume contains no particles or radiation and yet is not the state of minimum energy. 

Nothing and Quantum

In quantum mechanics, there is really no such thing as “nothing.” It’s something like this: An empty glass is not really empty. Matter molecules in the air inside the glass, water vapor, dust particles, you name it. That’s the same in a big empty space – energy, different invincible particles, atoms, radiations and speaking of atoms, there are more into atoms, smaller things (subatomic) like quarks, antiquarks, their antiparticles, to form all hadrons—the so-called strongly interacting particles that encompass both baryons and mesons, muon and neutrino. 

Not only do we enter the realm of the smallest when we talk about quantum physics, there is also a breakdown of common ideas – like cause and effect for example. In submicroscopic systems (the realm of quantum mechanics), the philosophical rule of cause and effect is violated. These submicroscopic particles acts at random: jumps, move, collides, decays, appearing then disappearing without any cause whatsoever.

So, just like these “uncaused” actions, the singularity expansion is an uncaused act – and the universe is the effect.

The Big Bang is a naturalistic explanation of the origin of the Universe, and since we are talking about science here, it’s not the only model that we have right now. We also have the Inflationary Universe. This theory states that the universe underwent exponential expansion during the first fraction of a second, before the linear expansion of the Big Bang. It solves many of the problems with the standard Big Bang model – oh and it’s another story.