Scientists once believed, as did the ancient Greeks, that the universe had no beginning. The view proposed by Genesis of a beginning to time and matter was seen as a naïve myth. The Genesis Creation may have made a nice bedtime story for children, but most people had believed since the time of the Greek philosopher Aristotle that the universe is static and eternal, without beginning. Twentieth century scientists including Hermann Bondi, Thomas Gold and Fred Hoyle called this the “steady state” theory of the universe.

Gradually, though, this view began to change. Measurements from specially built telescopes, especially the one used in California by Edwin Hubble and Milton Humason, had revealed that the universe is expanding. They reported this amazing fact in 1929, less than a hundred years ago. Space, they discovered, is actually stretching, something like a balloon getting bigger by the rubber expanding, even though no new rubber is added. The difference between space and rubber is that eventually the balloon pops, but not space. Space, we believe, can stretch forever.

Then in 1965, two American scientists, Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson, monitoring a giant antenna in New Jersey designed to detect natural radio emissions from the Milky Way, made a discovery that shocked the world! The antenna was receiving a faint scratchy signal from the emptiness of space where no signal should be. At first, they thought the “static” they were hearing came from pigeons roosting on the antenna; but the noise remained, even after they live-trapped all the birds and cleaned off the antenna. For a time, the researchers were puzzled. No matter which direction they pointed their telescope, there it was, the noise. In time, they realized the noise filling the entire universe was coming from very, very weak radiation, now called the cosmic background radiation (CBR).

Another scientist, Professor Jim Peebles, told them that this CBR was actually the echo of light beams, the energy of the Big Bang Creation. It was so very weak because all that hot energy of the Big Bang in the tiny first speck of space at the creation was now diluted in the huge stretched out space of today’s universe.

The discovery of the CBR coupled with the knowledge that the universe is expanding proved there had been a beginning. Why? Because if the universe is getting bigger day by day, then going backwards in time, the universe would have been smaller than today, and even smaller the day before, and years before and eons and eons before. Smaller and smaller and smaller, like the air going out of a balloon. Go back far enough in time and the entire universe, everything, comes to a point. That point brings us to the moment of Creation that we call the “Big Bang.” Science came to realize, only about forty years ago, a truth the ancient Bible recorded thousands of years ago: there was a beginning!

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by Dr. Gerald Schroeder and Kelly Walker