In the previous article, we saw that evolution does not explain the beginning of life or the universe. That leaves the next obvious question: what does science say about the beginning itself?
People who believe in God have long believed that the universe had a real beginning because it was created by God. The Bible says it plainly: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” But for a long time, influential thought argued for something very different. The universe was treated as eternal. For centuries, that stood as one of the clearest points of tension between belief in creation and belief in an uncreated cosmos.
The old idea of an eternal universe
In the 4th century B.C., Aristotle taught that the world was eternal, stretching indefinitely into the past and the future, and that line of thought shaped later thinking for centuries. Even after modern science began to grow, that older way of thinking did not disappear quickly.
By the early twentieth century, that same idea still appeared in cosmology. In 1917, Einstein applied general relativity to the universe as a whole and built a model on the assumption that the universe was static. To keep it that way, he introduced the cosmological constant. Later, after the evidence for expansion grew stronger, that decision came to be remembered as a major mistake.
How that view began to break
The shift came when scientists followed Einstein’s equations more fully and compared them with what astronomers were seeing. Those equations did not match a static universe. They suggested a universe that could change on the largest scale.
Then came one of the key turning points. In 1929, Edwin Hubble confirmed that distant galaxies are moving away from us. The farther away they are, the faster they appear to recede. Once that was established, the logic changed.
What the Big Bang says
That is where the Big Bang enters the story. Georges Lemaître was one of the first to propose this idea, arguing that if the universe is expanding, then tracing that history backward points not to an eternal, unchanging cosmos, but to an earlier, denser, hotter beginning. The phrase “Big Bang” was added later, when Fred Hoyle used it while criticizing the theory.
In simple terms, the Big Bang theory says that the universe began in an extremely hot, dense early state and then expanded. As it expanded, it cooled. Over time, matter formed, then stars, galaxies, and the larger structure of the cosmos. A simple way to picture it is this: imagine a tiny speck or dot, and then imagine that tiny beginning expanding into the vast universe. That is only a simple picture, but it helps.
The discovery that confirmed the view
The change became even stronger when scientists discovered the cosmic microwave background. This is often described as the leftover glow from the early universe. It gave scientists a way to study the early universe more directly rather than only reason about it from a distance.
Later studies made that picture even stronger. COBE, WMAP, and Planck studied this ancient radiation in increasing detail and helped establish the modern picture of a hot early universe that expanded over time.
Why this matters
This matters because it marks a major shift in the history of thought. For centuries, many scientists treated the universe as eternal. But over time, modern cosmology moved away from that older picture and toward the conclusion that the universe had a real beginning.
Science and Scripture tell the same story in different languages. Genesis begins, “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” Centuries later, the discoveries of science now echo that same truth: there was a beginning. But when we probe further — what was before that beginning, and why it happened — science admits it does not have the answer, while the Bible clearly and consistently states that behind that beginning stands an intelligent Designer whom we call God.
