The Bible declares, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” Yet as far back as 350 BC, philosophers like Aristotle believed the universe had existed forever. The fifth-century theologian, St Augustine, stated that he believed “the world was made, not in time, but simultaneously with time.”

Atheistic cosmologist, Stephen Hawking, stated that “the motivation for believing in an eternal universe was the desire to avoid invoking divine intervention to create the universe and set it going. Conversely, those who believed the universe had a beginning, used it as an argument for the existence of God as the first cause—or prime mover—of the universe.”

In 1917, as Einstein was developing his theory of relativity, he was horrified that his theory would describe a universe that should either be expanding or collapsing. So he introduced a variable called the cosmological constant, which eliminated such a possibility and fitted the concept of a static universe, since a static universe would not have the need to have a beginning.

As Einstein intentionally fudged his equation, one of his contemporaries, a Belgium astronomer and mathematician (as well as Catholic priest), George LeMaitre, immediately pointed out to Einstein that the “fudge factor” he introduced had caused his equation to become unstable. By 1927, George LeMaitre believed that the Jewish word “bara” (for creation) is meant for creation out of nothingness (ex-nihilo), and he proposed that the universe started from an infinitely dense but small “Cosmic Egg” exploding at the moment of the creation.

In 1931, American astronomer Edwin Hubble used the then largest 100-inch telescope to measure the distances and motions of the galaxies. He surprisingly discovered that the universe is expanding. After verifying what Hubble had discovered, Einstein admitted that his addition of the cosmological constant was the biggest “blunder of his life.”

In 1945, America’s Ukrainian-born physicist George Gamow was able to follow the lead of LeMaitre in predicting the existence of Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation resulting from the extremely high-temperature cosmic explosion. He was also able to give a full account of the presence of hydrogen and helium in the universe. These two contributions gave important theoretical support to the Big Bang theory. Yet this was not well received scientifically, and therefore took on the pejorative term “the Big Bang”—a term coined by Fred Hoyle, who, until his death in 2001, was an obstinate proponent of the much more widely supported rival theory of steady-state universe.

The atheistic philosopher Bertrand Russell openly declared: “There is no reason to suppose that the world had a beginning at all. The idea that things must have a beginning is really due to the poverty of our thoughts.” Mortimer Adler, the legal scholar and philosopher of Chicago University, in his book, How to Think About God, acknowledged that “So long as the universe had a beginning, we could suppose it had a creator.” In 1959, Scientific American polled America’s top scientists. Two-thirds responded that “there is no origin of the universe.”

The First Pair of Nobel Laureates Discovered the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation

In 1964 and 1965, Bell Labs’ radio astronomers, Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson, were using a large horn antenna to map signals from the Milky Way when they serendipitously discovered the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) radiation. This discovery offered strong evidence that the universe began with the Big Bang, which ushered in experimental cosmology.

In 1978, Penzias and Wilson were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in honor of their findings. Arno Penzias said, “The best data we have are exactly what I would have predicted, had I had nothing to go on but the five books of Moses, the Psalms, the Bible as a whole.” He also stated, “Well, today’s dogma holds that matter is eternal. The dogma comes from the intuitive belief of people who don’t want to accept the observational evidence that the universe was created—despite the fact that the creation of the universe is supported by all the observable data astronomy has produced so far. As a result, the people who reject the data can arguably be described as having a ‘religious’ belief that matter must be eternal. These people regard themselves as objective scientists.”

The Second Pair of Nobel Laureates Measured the Ripples of Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) Radiation

In 1989, the USA launched the Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) satellite, dedicated to measuring the CMB radiation of the universe that would help shape our understanding of the cosmos.

In 1992, the COBE research team announced that the satellite had discovered the predicted tiny ripples in the CMB radiation. The observations were “evidence for the birth of the universe.” Dr. George Smoot, the team’s leader, referred to these seeds for future galaxy super clusters as the “fingerprints from the Maker.” This also led Dr. Smoot to say, “If you’re religious, it’s like looking at God.” This discovery essentially silenced all the scientific critics of the Big Bang theory and helped change the course of future investigations into the origin of the universe. Stephen Hawking called this “the discovery of the century, if not of all time.”

In 2006, George Smoot and John Mather won the Nobel Prize in Physics for this discovery.

The Third Pair of Nobel Laureates Pointed Out the Existence of God Particle

On July 4, 2012, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, CERN, announced that they had captured the elusive “God Particle”—the particle that gives matter the mass that holds the physical fabric of the universe together. The search for the missing particle, dubbed as “the holy grail of physics,” was made possible with the 10 billion US dollar, 27-kilometer, Large Hadron Collider (LHC), which has finally proven—up to 99.999% certainty—that the God Particle (Higgs boson) actually exists.

Between 10^–12 second and 10^–6 second after the Big Bang, during Electroweak symmetry breaking and the quark epoch, as the strong nuclear force separates from the other two, particle interactions create large numbers of exotic particles, including W and Z bosons and the Higgs boson—which is believed to be the particle which gives mass to matter. This allows a universe made entirely out of Big Bang cosmic massless radiation to become a universe that has mass in its basic particles.

Hawking openly acknowledged that he lost a $100 bet that the “God Particle” wouldn’t be discovered.

Dr. Nathan Aviezer, an Orthodox Jew who is the former Chairman of the Physics Department of Bar- Ilan University, stated: “The story of the Big Bang resonates perfectly with the story of creation told in Genesis. Without addressing who or what caused it, the mechanics of the creation process in the Big Bang match the Genesis story perfectly. If I had to make up a theory to match the first passages in Genesis, the Big Bang theory would be it.

According to Genesis, the universe was created from a ball of energy and light that appeared suddenly from nothingness—exactly the same ball of energy and light described in the Big Bang theory. Throughout the centuries, creation ex nihilo was considered impossible, but today it is taken as scientific fact.”

(Dr. David Liang served for many years as Head and Thrust Leader of the Space Systems and Technology in the Canadian Department of National Defense [DND] and was responsible for all space-related research and development activities within the DND. An author of four books, Dr. Liang is a renowned international speaker on such topics as Apologetics, World Events and Bible Prophecy, and Personal Evangelism. He is currently the Missionary at Large of the Chinese Christian Mission [Canada]. Dr. Liang took early retirement in 2003 in order to give more time to Kingdom ministries.)