Cosmology

For most of our maybe 250,000 years as a species, people were aware only of their local environment. Eventually, as trade networks grew, they started to gain a dim awareness of distant lands, and by the time of classical Greece they knew that the earth is roughly spherical, although they were largely unaware of what lay beyond the Middle East and the steppes of Asia. (Alexander of course expanded their knowledge and drew the central Asian empires into the orbit of Greece.)

But it was not until Galileo's time, in the late Middle Ages, that some people began to believe that the earth was not at the center of the universe. Nevertheless, even if the earth does orbit the sun, people continued to believe that the universe was purposely designed to provide a habitat for humans, by a God who continued to be intimately concerned with our affairs.

The truly radical disruption happened when Edwin Hubble discovered the reality of the universe -- uncountable billions of galaxies, each containing hundreds of billions of stars, racing away from each other into an unimaginable void. Continuing observations and calculations, combined with deepening understanding of the underlying structure of reality through physics, eventually led to the calculation that about 13.8 billion years ago, the universe was compressed into a point of infinite density and temperature, which then suddenly started to expand and cool. Once it had cooled enough for atoms to form, the only elements that existed were hydrogen, helium, and a small amount of lithium, hence life was impossible. But the primordial gas contracted under the weight of gravity into stars, in which nuclear fusion ignited when their cores became hot enough, and heavier elements were forged. When some of the first generation of stars ultimately exploded in Novae, star systems of the second generation contained these heavier elements. Our solar system is of the third generation, and so our planet has enough carbon, oxygen, and other elements necessary to life.

This is a very brief sketch, but it's enough for our purposes. I recall the words of one cosmologist to the effect that the more we learn, the more pointless it seems. And from the human standpoint it is indeed pointless. This story is unsatisfying to many people. The though of us as just a momentary bag of chemicals in a thin layer of slime on a grain of dust in that vast, cold emptiness of time and space just doesn't work. But cosmologists are quite sure that the story they have discerned is broadly correct.

However, they most definitely do not claim to know everything, or even a tiny part of all there is to know. They do not claim to know why this happened, why the history and laws of the universe are what they are, or even why there is something rather than nothing. They think about these questions, and they propose possible pathways to answers, but they are far humbler than preachers who claim to know everything that matters, even though they have no evidence for their beliefs whatever.

It doesn't work to say that God made the Big Bang happen. In the first place, you would still have to explain where God came from. More to the point, whatever you mean by God in this context it is very definitely not the God of the Old Testament, the New Testament, the Koran, the Book of Mormon, the Upanishads, or any other religion. Just making up a silly story to explain what we don't know is no answer. For now, we just have to live with the mystery.