Sometime in the late 1920’s, and I’m not sure if the pope at that time even knew about the theory. Frontier science by necessity moves slowly, most of the time.

Yep, it’s an interesting paradox, it’s like putting the line of code that starts a program, inside the program itself. The line will never be read because the program has to run in order to execute the line that starts the program. You would think it would be a completely useless program, but here we are.

One explanation i read long ago is thta an empty universe is perfectly predictable so the Big Bang resulted from the Uncertainty Principle.

This is the same mindset agnostics have about the supernatural

"eh, by definition can't be understood, no point in worrying about it"

The theory doesn't say that the universe was gathered together and then started to expand at some point. The theory only goes back to a time when the universe was very dense and hot and already expanding rapidly. Before that, we simply don't know, because we don't have a theory of quantum gravity.

Sorry kid. We have lots of theories. But we do not know. If, in your travels, you meet some entity that does, we'd like to know. Worship costs extra.

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I don’t think our minds are capable of knowing and/or understanding how the universe came to be… But I have to ask, why do religious people (I’m not calling you out, OP) think science needs to have an answer, but when asked where an omnipresent/omnipotent creator came from, they think it’s okay to say “He just has always been.”

Who knows how it all happened. I wish we could know, and maybe it was some inexplicable god, but we need to leave religions beind.

I wanted to give your comment the lightbulb award but I don't have enough karma 😔

Great thought and very well articulated.

We don't know what came before the Big Bang, or if there was anything before it. It's also possible that there was no "before" because space-time as we know it may not have existed prior to the Big Bang.

To me, it's just a difference in mindset. Science recognizes the limits of what we know, tries to quantify what we know we don't know, and seeks to learn and understand the things we don't yet know. Religion often uses "God" as a catch-all to explain everything we don't know. To paraphrase NDT, this makes God an ever-receding pocket of ignorance. I'm ok with that.

What I'm not ok with is dismissing scientific findings in favor of accepting a storybook explanation on faith alone. One of the key tenets of the scientific process is that your hypothesis must be disprovable. The requirement to accept things on faith is antithetical to that idea, you can never disprove the existence of God. That alone makes the case for God's existence extremely weak to me. We can however disprove the creation story in Genesis if we're examining it literally. It's easily provable that the universe existed for more than a handful of days prior to humans. It's provable that life on earth existed for millions of years prior to humans. It's provable that light existed in the universe for billions of years prior to the existence of earth, life, and humans.

I don't take much issue with people holding their own personal religious beliefs, but I don't think it should override what we can observe about the world by hard evidence. I think religious texts that reference creation or history better serve as metaphors or parables than literal truth. It does also make me uncomfortable that children raised in religion are often taught to accept these stories as literal fact on faith alone- I think it hinders critical thinking and curiosity, and leads to a populace that is gullible and prone to accepting false narratives in ways that are more directly damaging to society.

I may have digressed a bit there, but to directly answer your question, I "believe" in the Big Bang to the extent that it is the best explanation of the earliest point in the existence of our universe based on our current knowledge. I am open to, and even expect within my lifetime, that the theory of the Big Bang may be modified as we gain further knowledge, or even thrown out completely if we are presented with contrary information. That's how we examine the world scientifically, my "belief" in the Big Bang is not unshakeable and I don't see changing my views based on new information as some kind of assault on my beliefs or admission of defeat. Rather, any new information that refines or changes our understanding is a victory. If God descends from the heavens tomorrow and publicly states that he created the universe exactly as is detailed in Genesis, and that all of the contrary evidence was falsely put in place as some kind of test of faith, I will readily accept it. I just feel the need to clarify "belief" in things I can observe, measure, touch, etc from "belief" in the context of taking something entirely on faith with no testable evidence. Have you ever heard of the idea of "Last Thursdayism?" It's sort of a thought experiment, that the entire universe and everything within it came into existence last Thursday, and everything you know of the time before that is just false memory you were created with. It seems silly on its face, but there's no way for you to disprove it. How is that any less valid an origin story than Genesis? Because it wasn't written on some old scrolls in the desert? How do you even know the scrolls or the desert existed before last Thursday? You could test the age of the scrolls with radiocarbon dating, but that method can also be used to disprove the Genesis story. You could present geological evidence that the desert is more than a week old, but I can present geological evidence that the earth is older than 6,000 or 12,000 or however many years old the Bible says the earth is this week. I'm not trying to mock your beliefs, just attempting to demonstrate that fairly comparing the theory of the Big Bang to a religious creation story is impossible, it's apples and oranges. You can compare the creation story of one religion to another, or even to any made up idea like Last Thursdayism, but even then you'll find it difficult to make realistic conclusions about which is more valid. Are we basing it on who wrote it? How long ago it was written? How many people believe it? None of these measures really indicate that one is more or less valid than the next.

I find it hard to believe that you've "looked it up" but don't know about the science behind it. Do you not have Wikipedia on your internet?

It is one thing to have questions or even doubts about the theory. It's another thing to claim to be unaware of what the theory is, or what evidence has been offered to support it, when there are multiple excellent sources of information on the topic that are easily found and presented for a non-specialist audience.

Actually, when the Big Bang became the predominant cosmological theory in the 1960s, some criticized it as being too much like Biblical Creation. Scientists follow the evidence and dont care if the evidence supports a religious idea or not.

I’m assuming the ) got edited in after your comment?

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I’ll take a different approach for you. No matter how the universe came to exist, it’s pretty unbelievable. It’s almost impossible to fathom that the universe just came from nothing (which I believe is what you’re suggesting). But to me it’s equally unfathomable that there was just always a universe. And if you objectively think about it, it’s just as unfathomable that there is a higher power that created it all. Whatever the origin of the universe is, it’s too crazy to even comprehend. So just because it seems really wild that the Big Bang happened, any other explanation is equally as wild and bizarre. However if you’re talking about the actual big bang and not necessarily the origin of the universe, there’s mountains of scientific evidence to suggest it’s what happened, as I’m sure you can see in the other comments.

Sorry for my ignorance 😅 I feel like you explained it here, but are these colors real?

I’m not sure why you can’t be religious and also agree that the Big Bang happened. They don’t seem to be mutually exclusive in any way, other than that people say they are.

I am 41. I just hope so much they figure it out before I die. Hell I’ll settle for just figuring out the dark matter thing.

Exactly this.

My understanding was always that the Big Bang itself was the problem. That the specific features observed during the Big Bang don't match up with what they should be given what we know about physics. It's just a "we look in our telescopes and see this happen, we don't really know why".

So any new irregularities that JWST can find would likely be super helpful in figuring out why the Big Bang behaved the way it did, and could potentially lead to new physics as a result.

That was a well rounded answer. Respect. 🍺

“Fuck! I didn’t even make anything! How did it explode??”

It'll always be a conundrum. Enjoy the in between!

"What time was before time?" Is a nonsensical question. What happened before the big bang is the same question said in another way. It's equally nonsensical.

Worst first day on the job ever

Interesting. When did he put forth this theory and what was the Pope's reaction?