Demythologizing the Big Bang

A lot of people probably imagine the Big Bang thus: First there is a compact ball of

undifferentiated matter/energy (this is what scientists call the “singularity”); second

the ball explodes; third, the explosion kicks of a process of self-differentiation that

has continued to the present-day. This image, in turn, seems to suggest that

everything that has come into being since the explosion is a subsequent

rearrangement of something originally contained in the initial ball.

If the popular image were accurate, then, the Big Bang would authorize or require a

materialistic ontology of the Whole.

Fortunately, we can distinguish between what we actually know about the Big Bang

and what the popular imagination associates with it. A careful cosmologist or

(astro)physicist would probably tell you that what we actuallly know about the Big

Bang doesn’t suffice to base an entire materialistic worldview on it. The popular

imagination is unfortunately not so careful.

Yes, the Big Bang may well have provided the universe with all the matter/energy it

would ever have. But even this fact--if fact it be--wouldn’t alter in the slightest the

truth, already discovered by Aristotle, that matter (and we can add: energy)

represents being-in-potency, not being-in-act. Granting, then, that the Big Bang

furnished the universe with all the available matter/energy, it wouldn’t suffice to

explain the actual existence of any of the things that have appeared post-Big Bang.

Here is one example: Rational consciousness, expressed among other things in

scientific truth-claims about the Big Bang, is either a rearrangement of matter or it

isn’t. There are plenty of compelling reasons for embracing the latter option. If,

however, rational consciousness isn’t just a rearrangement of matter, then the Big

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Bang doesn’t suffice to account for it--unless we are willing to say that what is less

(the initial ball, which is just compact matter/energy) can originate what is more

(rational consciousness) without the aid of some higher cause. But that is absurd. It’s

like saying that you can get a silk purse out of a sow’s ear.

The popular view of the Big Bang also tends to picture the initial ball as an

independent entity capable of autonomous existence and action. This picture is

wrong for many reasons. First, as far as science is concerned, the singularity is like a

concentration of state matter/energy. It’s like the stuff the present universe is made

of; it’s what Aristotelians would call a material cause. This doesn’t mean, however,

that it’s an agent that actually makes anything happen--much less cause the stuff

that it itself is to pass from an initial singularity to the expanding universe we live in.

The singularity can’t be both matter/energy and the agency that works on that

matter and energy, at least not at the same time and in the same respect.

This suggests a further difficulty. The singularity seems to be something both finite

and subject to change: Finite because its explosion has given us a finite amount of

matter/energy; subject to change, because it exploded. But nothing that is finite and

subject to change can be absolutely self-existent or self-explanatory. On the contrary,

it necessarily depends on a distinct source for its existence and intelligibility.

This dependence, furthermore, is in force so long as the finite, changing thing exists

and is intelligibile. It’s not a dependence that simply results from some prior event

on the time-line. No, this sort of dependence is given with the continuing influence

of the source. Which source, for its part, has to be excellent enough to give the

existence and intelligibility we find in the dependent thing--lest we be forced to

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claim, absurdly, that the less as such can produce the more without the aid of a

higher cause. The point is that the source we’re talking about is the higher cause.

You see where I am going: Every finite, changing thing depends for its being and

intelligiblity on a Creator, and it does so at every point of its existence, regardless of

the events or states that did or did not precede it in time and space. Clearly, this is

also true of the singularity preceding the Big Bang. It, too, was a creature. It’s getting

things completely backward to say, as one of my freshmen students once did, that

“the Big Bang created the universe.”

The Big Bang may have furnished the universe with all the matter/energy it would

ever have--but it did not cause that matter/energy to exist. The singularity preceding

the Big Bang did not cause it to exist, either. No, it was the Creator, and he alone,

who was responsible for that.