Both the Bible and modern science agree that our universe had a beginning. The real question is does the Bible support the prevailing majority view of most scientists today that a Big Bang brought our universe into existence.
Well, first let’s look at just what is the Big Bang theory. According to the website, Space.com: “The Big Bang Theory stands as the most widely accepted explanation for the origin of the universe. According to this theory, the universe began as an infinitely small, hot, and dense point, which rapidly expanded and continued to stretch over 13.7 billion years. This initial period of rapid inflation set the stage for the vast and still-growing cosmos we observe today.”1
We are supposed to believe that this “infinitely small, hot, and dense point,” somehow rapidly exploded into our amazingly huge, complex, and orderly expanding universe. The scientists, who accept the Big Bang theory, basically extrapolate backwards to the distant past, where an initial pool of mindless molecules, somehow through a myriad of unknown processes, eventually transformed inanimate matter to the most complex things in the universe – human beings; 14 billion years later.
While I am not a scientist, I have a very hard time accepting this, “so-called” scientific theory, for several reasons.
First, our scientists, who can’t predict the weather, with much certainty, one week into the future, want me to trust them, that they can know how our universe started 14 billion years ago. Not only that but the track record of science and its theories, on so many things, have constantly had to be revised as new information comes to light. In my humble opinion, the never-changing Scriptures, not the ever-changing theories of science, should be the lens we use whenever it comes to the study of origins.
Second, the well-respected retired American neurosurgeon, Dr. Ben Carson, shared the first of two great dilemmas for modern science when he stated: “I find the big bang, really quite fascinating. I mean, here you have all these highfalutin scientists and they’re saying it was this gigantic explosion and everything came into perfect order. Now these are the same scientists that go around touting the second law of thermodynamics, which is entropy, which says that things move toward a state of disorganization.”2 Explosions, my friends, don’t create order, but for the Big Bang to be true, it must totally contradict the second law of thermodynamics!
And third, is the second impossible dilemma for scientists and this concerns how can inanimate matter create life. For you see in order to have life we need the basic building blocks of a cell – protein molecules. And here is where the rub comes in for our Big Bang friends. For we know that DNA relies on proteins for its production but proteins rely on DNA for their production. So, the question arises which came first, proteins or DNA? Clearly one must already be in existence for the other to be made. This impossible dilemma can’t be solved through man-made logic but only by an all-powerful God who created both DNA and proteins together. I ask you to ponder your choices.
Based on my above three reasons, I choose to believe that the Big Bang is nothing more than a Big Dud.
1 What is the Big Bang Theory? | Space
2 Benjamin Carson: I find the big bang, really quite fascinating. I mean, … | Citatis
Well said!
Unfortunately there are misguided Christian apologists who try to conflate Big Bang/Evoltuion and Divine Creation and give it the name theistic evolution. They claim that God used the Big Bang over billions of years to fashion everything we see in the Universe! To me this this is both both bad science and bad theology.
Explosion Theology vs. Word Theology:
An Apologist’s Sunday night extravaganza…
Geez, I can’t take a few days off without the elder and celebrated Apologist blowing the roof off the concerta.. oh well.
Curt’s piece lands a clean punch: the universe has a beginning, and the real fight is over whether that beginning is ultimately personal (God’s Word) or impersonal (matter + time + chance).
By the numbers:
1) Agreement on “beginning” is not agreement on “meaning.”
Curt starts in a place Christians should not be shy about. Both Scripture and mainstream cosmology speak of a universe with a starting point.
See, a beginning alone does not tell you who began it, why it began, or what it’s for. Science can describe a timeline. Science cannot supply a teleology. A thermometer can tell you the temperature. It cannot tell you why you should love your neighbor.
2) “Explosion into perfect order” is the heart of the offense, even if the word “explosion” is rhetorical. Curt quotes the standard Big Bang description: an initial hot, dense state followed by rapid expansion.
His critique is aimed at the story people smuggle in: an impersonal event “somehow” generates not just matter and motion, but coherence, law, stability, and eventually mind.
Even if someone insists, “It wasn’t an explosion like TNT,” the deeper question still stands, with a raised spiritual eyebrow:
Where did the intelligible order come from?
Matter does not author laws. Laws describe behavior; they don’t create the existence that behaves.
3) Entropy: science doesn’t get to preach disorder and then sell you spontaneous ultimate order as the origin story.
Curt leans on the Ben Carson quote for a reason. It highlights a real tension in the popular-level telling of origins.
Now, a careful scientist will say, “Entropy doesn’t forbid local order.” Fair enough. But that doesn’t rescue the deeper problem. It just moves it.
Local order can exist in a universe with overall entropy increase.
But the initial conditions still matter. You need an extraordinarily “set table” for the universe to be life-permitting in the first place.
And you still need an account for why the cosmos is law-governed, mathematically intelligible, and stable enough for anything like chemistry, biology, or rational minds.
So Curt’s point survives the technical pushback. Materialism doesn’t merely need time. It needs a miracle it refuses to name.
4) Curt properly presses the “life” problem, but he blends two questions that materialists prefer to keep separate.
Big Bang = “mindless molecules” = human beings.
Strictly speaking, cosmology (origin/expansion of the universe) is not the same as abiogenesis (origin of life). But blending them is strategically fair because the average “Big Bang explains everything” pitch is exactly that: a one-stop-shop worldview.
That worldview has to do more than make atoms. It has to explain Information, Meaning, Consciousness, Moral obligation, and Reason itself (including the reason used to argue for materialism). I like big words with Capital Letters.
If your worldview saws off the branch of rationality it’s sitting on, it’s not a worldview. It’s a preview of Humpty Dumpty. Hope it doesn’t hurt too much at landing.
5) Protein vs DNA: Curt names the “chicken-and-egg” dependency correctly, and the information problem is the real Elephant in the room.
Curt states the dilemma plainly — DNA and proteins appear mutually dependent, so “which came first?”
Biology has proposed workarounds. People mention things like RNA acting as both information carrier and catalyst. Those proposals don’t magically produce coded information and integrated systems by accident.
This is the core apologetic pressure point.
You don’t get meaning out of matter unless meaning was already there in the source.
Christians aren’t embarrassed to name that source: God who speaks. Not merely force. Not merely law. Word.
Genesis doesn’t present creation as God “assembling” stuff after the fact. It presents creation as God calling reality into being with intelligible command. That maps disturbingly well to what we actually find in life: instruction, code, translation, and ordered function.
Finally,
6) Curt’s conclusion (“Big Dud”) is intentionally sharp. Less about mocking science and more about rejecting the worldview piggybacking it.
His verdict forces the reader to drive into a fork in the road.
I say, let ’em crash. Take that fork and eat your dinner.
To any pastor or apologist, origins are not neutral trivia. They shape whether we believe we are accidental, owned by nobody, accountable to nothing,
or
created, purposed, totally accountable to a personal God.
That isn’t “science vs faith.” That’s two faiths competing. Faith in a personal Creator, or faith that impersonal processes can eventually manufacture persons, purpose, and moral truth.
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If explosions create perfect order, my junk drawer should have assembled itself into a filing cabinet by now, and my blender owes me a love letter.
Nicely Done, Mr. Blattman.