Did It All Start with the Big Bang? And What Difference Does That Make for the Meaning and Purpose of Our Lives?

I have written about "The Big Bang Theory"--the popular television show that ran on CBS from 2007 to 2019.  Every episode began with a clever theme song that ended with the line: "It all started with the Big Bang."

Is that true?  The brief answer is: We don't know.  

We don't know because the earliest history of the universe is beyond what we can observe.  Whatever is beyond any possible observation cannot be known to exist or not to exist.  Asserting its existence is a matter of belief or faith, not a matter of scientific knowledge.  It's an assertion of religion (or revelation) not of science (or reason).  Here I agree with physicist Sabine Hossenfelder's insistence that scientific models of reality must always be tested against observational evidence because otherwise they are just speculative stories that are more like religion than science (Hossenfelder 2022).

What difference (if any) does this make for how we think about the purpose of our lives?  The brief answer is that we must choose between at least two alternatives.  We can believe in a divinely caused Big Bang that can support a moral cosmology that gives our lives a divinely appointed purpose that might include eternal life after death.  Or we can recognize a moral anthropology that gives our lives a human purpose in satisfying our natural desires--such as the desire to understand the universe, which can be expressed either as a desire for religious understanding through Revelation or a desire for intellectual understanding through Reason.

If human beings are to be free to pursue these alternative ways of life and to debate their relative merits, people must have the religious and intellectual liberty secured in a Lockean liberal open society that allows for freedom of thought and expression.  The kind of freedom that is manifest even in some popular culture such as the "Big Bang Theory" television show.

THE BIG BANG?

Human beings wonder about their origins.  They want to know where they came from.  They ask about not only their ancestral and social origins but even about the origin of everything.  That's why every human society has stories about how all things came to be as they are.  Commonly, they are religious stories about how divine beings brought the world into existence.  "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth."  So declares the first verse of the King James Bible.

But what exactly does that mean?  And is it true?  Some theologians have said that God created everything ex nihilo (from nothing).  But others have said He created everything ex materia (from some preexisting material).  Some have said God created only one universe--the one that we live in.  But others have said that He might have created other universes, perhaps even an infinite number of them.

Some philosophers and scientists (like Aristotle) have said that there was no need for divine creators because the world was eternal as composed of eternal matter and thus had no beginning and no end.  But others (like Lucretius) have argued that the world has arisen spontaneously from the random motion of atoms without any need for divine intervention, and that atomic flux would eventually dissolve every world and create a new one.

Thomas Aquinas defended the orthodox Christian doctrine that God did indeed create everything from nothing.  But he admitted that this could not be scientifically demonstrated.  "It is by faith alone do we hold and not by any demonstration that can be proved, that the world did not always exist. . . that the world began to exist is an object of faith, but not of demonstration or science" (ST, I, q. 46, a. 2).

But then when Georges Lemaitre (a cosmologist who was also a Jesuit priest) first proposed a Big Bang theory of the universe, Pope Pius XIII pointed to this as a scientific demonstration of the divine creation of the universe from nothing.  Lemaitre himself, however, criticized the Pope for failing to see how this scientific theory had nothing to do with the Christian doctrine of creation, which could be believed by faith but not known by demonstration.

As I have indicated in my essays on the Big Bang, the scientific theory of the Big Bang has been invoked by some people (like William Lane Craig) to prove that God exists and by other people (like Stephen Hawking) to prove that God does not exist.  I have argued that both are mistaken.  

Craig states his argument as a syllogism:

 1. If the universe began to exist, then there is a transcendent cause which brought the universe into existence.

2. The universe began to exist.

3. Therefore, there is a transcendent cause which brought the universe into existence.

There are good reasons to doubt that those two premises are really scientific statements rather than affirmations of religious faith.

The first premise is not "obviously true," as Craig says, because while we all have experience of how natural causes work within the universe to bring things into existence, we do not have experience with how transcendent causes work outside the universe to bring the universe itself into existence. 

Consequently, while the "principle of sufficient reason"--that for everything there must be a causal explanation--might hold true for our ordinary experience of how things work within the universe, this principle does not necessarily apply to what things are like outside the universe, because none of us has ever stood "outside the universe" to see if the principle of sufficient reason holds true there.  Standing "outside the universe"--experiencing the transcendent or the supernatural--is a matter of religious imagination that is beyond our empirical experience of the world and thus beyond empirical science.

Therefore, the first premise of Craig's syllogism might be a statement of religious faith, but it is not a statement of scientific truth.

The same can be said about the second premise.  "The universe began to exist."  What exactly is being stated here?  There are two possibilities.  The universe began to exist out of nothing.  Or the universe began to exist out of something. 

Craig's argument requires that he equivocate between these two different statements.  The universe began to exist out of nothing is the Christian theological doctrine of creation ex nihilo.  But, then, this would deny Craig's claim that this premise is "religiously neutral."  In fact, that the universe began to exist out of nothing is not a scientific statement at all, because there is no human observational experience of absolute "nothing" that would make the study of "nothing" part of empirical science.  I even doubt that any of us really understands what we're saying when we talk about absolute "nothing," because it's beyond ordinary human experience.

And yet scientists like Stephen Hawking do speak about how the Big Bang could have come from "nothing" without any need for God.  His explanation is that "the laws of nature we call quantum mechanics" tell us "that not only could the universe have popped into existence without any assistance, like a proton, and have required nothing in terms of energy, but also that it is possible that nothing caused the Big Bang.  Nothing" (Hawking 2018, 34-35).  Far from the Big Bang proving God's existence, as Craig claimed, Hawking claimed to have shown that since nothing caused the Big Bang, God does not exist.

Hawking appeared five times on the "Big Bang Theory" show as the one scientist that Sheldon most admired.  He playfully mocked Sheldon, but he also recognized his brilliance.  Nothing was said about Hawking's atheism.

Notice that in his argument for atheism, Hawking had to assume at the origin of the universe the reality of the laws of quantum mechanics and of quantum vacuum states.  That's not nothing!  That's something!  Notice also that Hawking had no explanation for where those laws of physics came from.

Moreover, Hawking's model for the origin of the Big Bang is only one of many Big Bang models that scientists have proposed over the past 30 years.  By some counts, there are over two dozen such models (Afshordi and Halper 2025).  Some physicists say our universe is one of infinitely many universes, and each one is a bubble in a rapidly expanding quantum fuzz.  Others say the Big Bang started from the hot gas of tiny, vibrating strings.  Others say the Big Bang was a bounce of a collapsing universe into an expanding one.  Others say the universe is always in a state of eternal inflation.  In this video, Phil Harper gives the top ten answers to the question of what happened before the Big Bang:

Remarkably, in the end, it doesn't matter which model you choose because you end up with the same outcome--the universe that we live in today.  That it doesn't matter which story you believe points to a fundamental problem: there is no data to tell us which model is right.  The reason for that is that the fundamental constituents of nature are either too small, too far away, or too far in the past to be observed directly by us or indirectly through our instruments, and thus nature's secrets are buried so deep or so far away that we have no way to test our theoretical speculations about them.

Below is a sketch of the limits on the scale of human observational experience of nature.  At the small scale, microscopes have extended our experience beyond our visual reach, and the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has extended our reach even deeper.  We have gone from scales of centimeters to millionths of a millionth of a millionth of a centimeter.  But we have reasons to believe that the fundamental constituents of nature that string theory attempts to describe lie at a distance scale 10 million billion times smaller than the resolving power of the LHC.  At the cosmic scale, telescopes have extended our experience of the astronomical universe; but no telescope will ever look beyond our universe's cosmic horizon and see the other universes assumed by the multiverse hypothesis.  The white area is the range of scales within human experience.  The grey area is outside that range.  You can click on the image to enlarge it.

Notice that the limit of the observable universe at the right end of this scale is the cosmic microwave background.

The oldest light we can see is the cosmic microwave background, emitted nearly four hundred thousand years after the hot Big Bang some 13.8 billion years ago.  It is almost perfectly uniform, with tiny variations in temperature at 1 part in 100,000, which are shown as red (hot) and blue (cold) spots.  This is the most important store of data for early-universe cosmology.  Multiple satellites with telescopes have studied these fluctuations.  Shown here is the most recent map produced by the European Space Agency's Planck satellite probe.

This illustrates how we can make and use technical instruments (such as telescopes) to extend the range of our observational experience of nature.  But it also illustrates the limits on how far that extension can go. 

When Aristotle explained his theological cosmology of a geocentric universe in De Caelo ("On the Heavens"), he admitted that it was hard to study the heavenly bodies--the stars, the sun, the planets, and the Moon--because "we have very little to go on, and we are placed at a great distance from the phenomena that we are trying to investigate," and "very few of their attributes are perceptible by sense experience" (286a7, 292a15-b25).  

So when Galileo defended his Copernican heliocentric system, he argued that Aristotle would have been persuaded by the evidence that Galileo had gathered from his telescope because Aristotle would have welcomed the use of the telescope to extend the range of human observational experience of distant planets and stars.

In the 400 years since Galileo, telescopes have become more powerful; and sending telescopes into space has expanded the depth of their observational power.  So that now we have stunning images of deep space from the James Webb Telescope and images of the cosmic microwave background that take us back over 13 billion years into the history of the universe.  But notice that the image of the cosmic microwave background is dated at four hundred thousand years after the Big Bang.  It's not clear that we will ever get any closer than that to the Big Bang, or to whatever there might have been before the Big Bang, which might forever be beyond our range of observational experience.  

Consequently, it will be impossible to test our models of the Big Bang against observational data, which will mean that our models will be little more than speculative origin myths that rest on belief or faith rather than scientific knowledge.

COSMIC PURPOSE?  HUMAN PURPOSE?

Asking about the origins of the Cosmos might seem like a very abstract kind of questioning that doesn't have much to do with ordinary human life.  But in fact it's one of the fundamental questions that we must ask as we try to make sense of our lives.

Must we believe that in the beginning God created the Universe and created man in His image if we want to give some cosmic meaning to our lives?  If this Divine Creator cares about us and for us, and if He endowed us with a knowledge of His moral law as an eternal standard of right and wrong to guide our moral life, and if He promises to help us live according to that moral law, or to save us from our sinful flaws, and then to reward those who love Him with eternal life, doesn't that give us a cosmic purpose to our lives?

But if we believe that in the beginning the universe arose through some impersonal process of natural evolution of matter and energy, and if eventually we somehow emerged as but blips of complexity in that uncaring universe, then how can we believe that our life has any meaning if there's no purpose to it?

Or should we see that even if there is no cosmic purposefulness in our lives grounded in the moral cosmology of a divinely created universe, there is a natural purposefulness in our lives grounded in the moral anthropology of our natural human desires?  Even if we live in an uncaring universe, we care for ourselves, and we strive to satisfy our natural desires.  Perhaps that is what makes our lives meaningful.

And so, for example, all human beings have some natural desire to understand the universe and their place in it.  This began when natural selection favored species that made correct predictions about their environment, and then organisms became increasingly better at understanding nature, until the evolution of the human cerebral cortex reached a point where human beings could understand their world by probing deeply into nature through intelligence, symbolism, and observation.

But then this natural human desire for understanding could be expressed either as a desire for religious understanding or a desire for intellectual understanding.  Human beings moved by the desire for religious understanding could imagine that they and their universe were created by a supernatural Mind analogous to the human mind.  Human beings moved by the desire for intellectual understanding could imagine that they and their universe were created by natural laws of evolution.  Some human beings can be theistic evolutionists who believe that God originally created the laws of nature and then allowed the universe to evolve naturally according to those laws, while occasionally intervening miraculously in that natural history to reveal Himself to human beings.

The tension between the natural desire for religious understanding and the natural desire for intellectual understanding is manifest in the Reason/Revelation Debate.

THE REASON/REVELATION DEBATE IN "THE YOUNG SHELDON"

Much of "The Big Bang Theory" revolves around Sheldon and his life story.  He grew up in East Texas in a Southern Baptist family that struggled to understand him because he was a child prodigy with an IQ of 187, who used his intelligence to make scientific arguments against religious belief.

From 2017 to 2024, CBS broadcasted a spin-off prequel--"Young Sheldon"--about Sheldon's childhood in the 1980s and 1990s.  The theme of scientific cosmology as supporting atheism against religious belief continued in this show.  

Pastor Jeff is the minister of the Southern Baptist church where the Cooper family goes every Sunday.  The young Sheldon is determined to show everyone that he can use science to refute Pastor Jeff's religious beliefs by arguing that the Bible's story of Creation is denied by the evidence for the natural evolution of the universe and human life.

One example of this conflict between science and religion is the third episode of the second season (airing on October 4, 2018) entitled "A Crisis of Faith and Octopus Aliens."  This episode begins with the Cooper family attending church on a Sunday.  Pastor Jeff is delivering his sermon, and suddenly Sheldon raises his hand to ask a question.  He challenges Pastor Jeff to tell him what God would look like in an alien planet inhabited by octopuses.  Would God look like an octopus?  Jeff struggles to answer.

Then, that Sunday afternoon, Sheldon's mother Mary receives a phone call and is told that the 17-year-old daughter of her friend Stephanie Hanson had died in an accident.  Mary and her husband George go to the funeral.  Throughout the week, Mary is troubled by the question of why an all-good God would torture a good Christian like Stephanie by killing her innocent child.  She talks with Pastor Jeff, but he cannot give her a satisfactory answer.

On Saturday night, Mary takes her mother to a bar named "Lucky's Place," where they drink and play billiards.  She tells her mother about her religious struggle and how this has depressed her mood.  She is drunk, and she is driven home by her mother.  Her husband George takes her to bed.

The next day, Sunday, she does not go to church, and she does not say a prayer at the family dinner.  Her husband and children are shocked to see these signs that she is doubting her faith in God.

Later, in the evening, Sheldon comes out to the front porch of their house to talk with her and attempt to comfort her.  Here's the scene:

Notice that even though Sheldon is an atheist, he makes a scientific argument for the existence of God based on the "fine-tuning" of the universe.  The strength of gravity must be mathematically precise--neither too strong nor too weak--to make it possible for the universe to exist as a place where human life can emerge.  Isn't it unlikely that that could be just an accident?  Doesn't this logically suggest the need for God to design the precise conditions that make the universe and life possible?  Sheldon indicates that he is still an atheist, but he does see this as a scientifically logical argument for religious belief.

Mary responds by saying that her problem with God is not a matter of logic in her head but what she feels in her heart.  Sheldon then makes another argument that might appeal to her heart.  In a world of over five billion people, how likely is it that I would have the one woman who is a perfect mom for me?  Mary is moved by this, and she thanks God for giving her Sheldon as her child.  In the voice-over, the adult Sheldon tells the viewers that he didn't tell his mom that he shouldn't have to share credit with God for making the argument that comforted her.

One of the YouTube clips of this scene has a comment from "B Sharp" about Sheldon's first argument:  "I love Young Sheldon, and this is a sweet moment.  However, Sheldon is using the fine-tuning apologetics argument, which is fallacious.  The universe wasn't created for humans.  Humans evolved to exist in this universe."

One could also respond in a similar way to Sheldon's second argument.  That a son loves his mother is not an unlikely event that requires some supernatural intervention, because parent-child bonding is an evolutionary adaptation of human nature.

But then what if evolved human nature includes a natural desire for religious understanding--for transcendence and transcendent meaning?  This emotional desire is not based on pure logic, and therefore it cannot be refuted by logical argument.  And, therefore, as Rebecca Goldstein has shown, the emotional longing for religious transcendence prevails over scientific reasoning, particularly when science faces fundamental mysteries in the universe that cannot ever be explained by reason alone; and thus Revelation cannot be refuted by Reason.  Perhaps this is what Mary Cooper meant when she pointed to what she felt in her heart.

Nevertheless, the fine-tuning argument is one of the best scientific arguments for God as the Intelligent Designer of the universe.  Christian astrophysicists like Owen Gingerich and Deborah Haarsma like to invoke this argument.  And yet, I have written some posts indicating the flaws in this line of reasoning.

It is not really clear, for example, that scientific cosmology shows that the universe is precisely fine-tuned for life, and particularly human life.  Most cosmologists agree that the universe will come to an end, and that all life will be extinguished.  Consider one line in the theme song for "The Big Bang Theory":

"It's expanding ever outward, but one day it will pause and start to go the other way, collapsing ever inward, we won't be here, it won't be heard.  Our best and brightest future that it'll make an even bigger bang!"

Does the end of the universe in a Big Collapse mean that far from being fine-tuned for life, the universe has been fine-tuned for death?  Or should we have faith in those eschatological religions that promise us eternal life after death?

In a liberal open society, we are free to openly debate such questions--even in popular television shows--without fear of persecution.

And in that debate, one of the big questions for us will be:  Did it all start with a Big Bang?

REFERENCES

Afshordi, Niayesh, and Phil Halper. 2025. Battle of the Big Bang: The New Tales of Our Cosmic Origins. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Hossenfelder, Sabine. 2022. Existential Physics: A Scientist's Guide to Life's Biggest Questions. New York: Viking.