One of the more comedic trends of modern history is the taking of bad science and turning it into moderate to good television. Such is the case with the big bang theory, the evolutionary explanation for the origin of the universe. Its name has been borrowed by a popular television series about a group of smart people. Having never seen the television show, I cannot vouch for its merits. However, having examined the science of the big bang theory, I can comment on its validity. This article will discuss what the science behind the big bang theory is and why it fails as an explanation for the origin of the universe.
The big bang theory is somewhat of a misnomer. Evolutionists claim that the theory is not an explosion in the sense that a hand grenade is explosive. Rather the theory refers to the incredibly rapid expansion of the universe from a tiny, nearly non-existent dot of energy, and matter. Once this tiny dot began to expand, it did so rapidly, some believe far faster than the speed of light, due to the pressure of having all the matter in the universe pent up inside. This tiny dot is known as a singularity. Exactly how this singularity came into existence is unclear, even to evolutionists. The rapid expansion of the universe would have produced tremendous amounts of heat which should have been spread throughout the universe by means of radiation. Temperatures are not expected to be identical throughout the universe The rapid expansion produced three elements which supposedly would later give birth to all the other elements. Those elements are hydrogen, helium and lithium. However, it would take 13 billion years for the galaxies and stars to form, as the three mother elements slowly fused into elements up to iron. There is a lot more complicated science involved than can be explained in this article but the above is a very basic overview of the theory evolutionists propose to account for the origin of the universe.
Evolutionists do acknowledge that there are problems with the big bang theory. Probably the most obvious one they acknowledge is that it conflicts with the first law of thermodynamics. The first law of thermodynamics states unequivocally that matter and energy cannot be created or destroyed. The Big Bang creates both. Further it struggles with the law of entropy, which states that everything tends to progress from order to disorder. Creating whole galaxies, stars, planets and so on is definitely a progression towards order, rather than away from it. However, there are other problems with the big bang theory, which evolutionists frequently gloss over.
One of the first problems with the big bang theory is the orbit of certain planetary moons and even some galaxies. Moons such as Triton, the largest moon of Neptune, orbit the planet in a retrograde fashion. This means that it orbits the opposite direction of Neptune. Other moons spin in a retrograde fashion as well, as does the planet Venus. This is not limited to planetary bodies however. Entire galaxies spin in reverse to the majority of galaxies in the universe. This is a huge issue because, were the big bang true, the expansion would have caused galaxies and planetary bodies to all rotate the same direction, due to the rush of energy forcing them outwards. The fact that some spin backwards challenges the big bang theory. A second problem is the flatness problem. The big bang theory predicts that the universe will be largely spherical. However, observation from cosmologists tells us that the universe is largely flat, rather than a three dimensional sphere. A third problem is the horizon problem. If the big bang were true and the universe extended from a central point, then we would not expect to see a universal temperature. However, no matter where cosmologists look, the observe a close to universal background temperature. This is a huge challenge to the big bang theory since not enough time has theoretically elapsed for the temperature to stabilize across the universe. A final problem is that of dark matter. Dark matter is supposedly the energy that holds the universe together but has never been observed, yet the big bang theory claims that nearly 90% of the known universe is made of dark matter. Incidentally, dark does not mean color here; in this sense it refers to an unknown variable. Thus evolutionists essentially made up a whole class of energy because they needed it to fit with their theory. Needing something to make a theory work does not equate with its existence, unfortunately for the evolutionist.
One final thought which challenges the big bang theory. The theory demands that a singularity somehow come into existence so it could rapidly expand outward. This begs a very serious question. Where did the singularity come from? The singularity has to have an origin of its own somewhere and somehow in the depths of space. Evolutionists have no explanation for its origin, something they freely admit. Yet there must be a naturalistic one if the big bang, and by extension evolution, is true. Without an explanation for the singularity, the big bang theory fails as true science. Of course, being that most it is modeled using computers anyway, this is hardly surprising. Computer programmers have a saying “GIGO” or “Garbage in, Garbage out”. In other words, what you put into a computer determines what you get out of it. Thus when evolutionary assumptions are fed into a computer, it should come as no surprise when that computer spits out information in line with those assumptions.
The Big Bang theory is replete with problems that vary from galaxy sized, to universal. Since no one observed the big bang and thus no one has observational evidence of its occurrence, it would be best to relegate the theory to the realm of bad hypothesis and try to find a new, more workable theory, or simply accept that Creation is the truth.
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With any scientific theory there are going to be open, unanswered questions, or science would stop. Despite the fact that there are plenty of open research questions to do with the Big Bang, it explains far more of what we see in the universe than any other model. The way you’ve described the open problems make them seem far more major than they really are.
The First Law is not really an issue, thermodynamics is not a theory we expect to be fundamental, it’s very unlikely that the laws of thermodynamics held true in the early stages of the universe.
Now it’s no issue that we see order in the universe despite the second law because systems like planets and stars and galaxies are not closed systems. It’s only in a closed system where entropy has to increase. The universe is a closed system and so it’s entropy is on the whole increasing, but it’s not an issue that there are small spots in it that are becoming more ordered. In fact, entropy actually increases faster when there are ordered things around. Despite the sun having more order, it is far outweighed by the rate at which the Sun produces entropy in the form of heat. In it’s lifetime a Sun will produce far more net entropy than if the Sun did not exist.
Retrograde rotation is not an issue either, planets and galaxies collide and when they collide they will change each other’s state of rotation. There’s no issue here. In fact we think that the universe should have no overall angular momentum which means that we should expect galaxies to spin in opposite ways.
The flatness problem is queer as opposed to a problem. It’s puzzling why the universe is so flat, but the Big Bang model admits a flat solution, so it’s certainly not evidence against the Big Bang
The Horizon problem is actually an issue, but once again it isn’t evidence a Big Bang model, it has meant that we’ve had to adjust the model to include a period of inflation.
Dark matter is also not a problem for the Big Bang. We have observed dark matter, just indirectly. We know it’s there because of the gravitational effects it has, the only question about it really is what kind of particles are responsible. But there are many possibilities that have been proposed, the problem comes from the fact dark matter is difficult to experiment on and get data from, hence why we can’t say yet what it actually is.
“Where did the singularity come from” is not a question that you can meaningfully ask about with respect to the Big Bang model. “Where did it come from” implies that there was a time before the Big Bang when there was no universe. But there is no such time! Time is a part of the universe and without the universe there’s no meaningful sense in which you can ask “what happened before it”. I have a more detailed explanation of why the universe doesn’t have a beginning here: https://platosrealm.blog/2018/08/29/why-the-universe-had-no-beginning/
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First of all, thank you for the response. I apologize it took me a while to respond because your comment had a link in it, WordPress flagged it as spam. You highlighted some very interesting issues. The Big Bang Model is actually fatally flawed in a lot of ways, many of which I detailed in the above article.
You’ve attempted to simply wave away the 1st and 2nd laws of thermodynamics which seems very cavalier. There is no observable way to determine whether the laws were operating in the past. However, it seems quite logical that they would have been operating. In fact, the Big Bang relies heavily on the 1st law to explain how the energy of the explosion of the singularity created matter so dismissing it out of hand does not help at all. As for the second law, it appears you have arbitrarily redefined it. The 2nd law of thermodynamics dictates that entropy increases everywhere within the system. It does not go the other way without outside influence. Adding energy won’t help because, without guidance, adding energy increases disorder.
Your comments on retrograde motion are interesting. Has anyone ever observed planets or galaxies colliding and producing retrograde motion? Its a serious question because to the best of my knowledge this has not been observed. If it hasn’t been observed, which I suspect is the case, then the retrograde motion problem remains. It cannot be dismissed without observation.
The horizon problem is actually a massive problem. Many physicists and astronomers who favor the big bang have gone on record and said so, including Paul Steinhart. This is because inflation is actually outside the realm of even quantum physics. There is no reason for inflation to start, speed up, slow down, or stop once it gets started. The whole thing is arbitrary math.
Questioning where the singularity came from is a perfectly valid question, one Big Bang cosmologists ought to be asking. We ask it for everything else in science. The law of causation demands that there is a cause for nothing exploding and creating everything. Also, did not mention this in the article, but how can an explosion happen if there is no space to put it in? Do you see the mental gymnastics involved in these cosmologists have to do to make this work?
The logic of the Big Banf also leads to some incredibly strange things like multiverses and Boltzmann Brains. Look those up some time. This is the kind of logic the Big Bang must use to get us here.
See this is the ultimate problem. The Big Bang Cosmologists start with man’s word, I start with God’s Word. Genesis tells me how God made the universe. I don’t need to do mental cartwheels to explain the universes’ origin. The Big Bang Cosmologists do.
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No worries about the response time, it’s good to get an intelligent discussion going. You raise good points against the ones I raised, but in most cases I feel they do not cause problems.
I can accept that it may seem cavalier, but my point is not that the 1st and 2nd laws definitely don’t hold, but that there is a reasonable chance that they don’t, and hence they do not present an immediate problem to the Big Bang. Physics is still developing a theory that can deal with the conditions at the Big Bang, so my point is that it is premature to say that the Big Bang violates the 1st and 2nd laws because we don’t yet have a good physics at the moment of the Big Bang.
There is actually one theory proposed that deals with the 1st law issue, one can view potential energy in the universe as being a form of negative energy that precisely cancels out the positive matter energy in the universe. This would mean that one needs no energy input for the Big Bang. This idea may seem tenuous, and I grant you that the laws of thermodynamics are a puzzle for the Big Bang, but they are not fatal flaws, there are plenty of options physicists have to resort to.
I’m afraid I can’t argue against you concerning the second law without just flat out disagreeing with you. The second law is exactly as I’ve stated it https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_law_of_thermodynamics the first sentence here is “The second law of thermodynamics states that the total entropy of an isolated system can never decrease over time”, there is no requirement that the entropy must increase everywhere in the universe. In fact, every subsection of the universe itself is not an isolated system, so entropy can decrease anywhere in the universe, so long as overall the entropy of the universe (which is an isolated system as far as we know) increases.
I don’t know specific case studies of galaxies merging, but it’s easy to show from the conservation of angular momentum that objects can collide and end up spinning opposite ways, just try it with two footballs or something if you want a physical demonstration.
In any case it’s not true as you originally said that “were the big bang true, the expansion would have caused galaxies and planetary bodies to all rotate the same direction, due to the rush of energy forcing them outwards.” If this were true, then the universe would have a net, non-zero angular momentum, which we actually know is not the case.
As I said, I agree with you the horizon problem is an actual problem, but it’s a puzzle, not a fatal flaw. It is in need of a physical explanation – inflation is the most promising candidate, but this is still an open problem. There’s nothing to say we can’t solve it though, we just haven’t managed to yet.
Asking where the singularity came from is not a valid question, in the same way that it doesn’t make sense to ask what’s north of the north pole. Causation is a concept that only makes sense in the current era where time behaves as it does and the laws of physics are what they are. At the singularity, time will almost certainly act strangely and new laws of physics will come into play that will almost certainly not allow you to apply the law of causality in that way.
I’m afraid to say it but “how can an explosion happen if there is no space to put it in?” demonstrates a lack of understanding about the Big Bang model. The Big Bang is not an explosion in the conventional sense, it is not a load of matter exploding outwards in space. The thing that is doing the “exploding” is spacetime itself. The size of space grows, the matter isn’t just expanding out into pre-existing space, the entire universe, space included, expanded at the Big Bang and is expanding today.
I’ve written a lot about multiverses in their various guises and have studied them extensively. Multiverses are not particularly strange (well, to be accurate there are a wide range of different kinds of multiverse, some strange, some not), we have many different theoretical models of them, the problem with multiverses is finding experimental evidence for them.
I’ll admit I do need to read up more on Boltzmann brains, it’s an argument that’s resurfaced again recently that I haven’t encountered for a while.
Personally I think you’ve got it the wrong way round. Cosmologists begin with looking at nature. We look at what’s around us and let the universe tell us how it began. Theists start with man’s word – you take it on a man’s word that Genesis is god’s word.
Thank you for your time and the stimulating discussion.
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