In a recent Breakpoint commentary, John Stonestreet writes: “You’ve likely heard of the Big Bang Theory. You may not have known that until last week that we had no direct evidence of it.
“Maybe now we do. As reported in Discovery News, ‘Scientists found…a key polarization, or orientation, of the microwaves caused by gravitational waves…miniature ripples in the fabric of space.’
“The presence of such ripples, they explain, is exactly what we’d expect if the universe had begun with a Big Bang. The key word is begun. You know, as in, ‘In the beginning.’
“As recently as the mid-20th century, the scientific consensus on the universe’s beginning was that it had no beginning. The reigning theory, called Steady State, or the idea that the cosmos always existed and always would, went kablooey in the 1940s and ’50s when exposed to new evidence, such as cosmic microwave background radiation.
“This suggested an explosive beginning, in which the universe as we know it expanded suddenly from an infinitely tiny point of matter and energy called a singularity. The nickname Big Bang quickly stuck, and most astronomers and physicists have been referring to it as a matter of fact ever since.
“So what existed before the Big Bang? Well, scientists tell us that’s a nonsensical question, because the Big Bang didn’t just give birth to the material universe, but to time and space themselves. Not only was there no what, why and how logically prior to this event; there was neither when nor where.
“What if there was a Who? That’s the question Leslie A. Wickman raises at CNN.com in a piece titled, ‘Does the Big Bang Breakthrough Offer Proof of God?’
“‘(T)his new evidence,’ she writes, ‘strongly suggests there was a beginning to our universe. If the universe did indeed have a beginning, by the simple logic of cause and effect, there had to be an agent—separate and apart from the effect—that caused it. That sounds a lot like
“The late NASA astrophysicist Robert Jastrow put it still more eloquently. Taking evidence for the Big Bang as a given, he remarked in a 1982 interview with Christianity Today that, ‘Astronomers…have proven, by their own methods, that the world began abruptly in an act of creation to which you can trace the seeds of every star, every planet, every living thing in this cosmos and on the earth.’
“They have found that all this happened as a product of forces they cannot hope to discover. That there are what I or anyone would call supernatural forces at work is now, I think, a scientifically proven fact.'”