20th December 2025 Question box

OK, tonight’s question:

What’s the story of the beginning on the universe? God creating it? Or the big bang?

Thanks for that question. Well, the bible is very clear that God created the universe. It’s there in the first verse: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth,” (Genesis 1:1). And it’s a fact accepted by every believer that we meet in the bible, including Jesus. He talked about events: “…from the beginning, when God created the world, until now…” (Mark 13:19).

So what about “the big bang?” Look, let me preface all this by saying that I am not a trained astro-physicist… but here’s what I’ve been able to figure out: The modern theory we know as “the big bang” was first put forward by a Catholic priest about 100 years ago, while he was a Professor of astrophysics in a Catholic University. His theory built on the work of Albert Einstein, and it’s based on the idea that the universe is expanding; that is, space and time itself is stretching out …And OK if the universe is expanding, then what if you work backwards from where we are now? Well, you’d reach a point called “the singularity.” Here’s a quote from two more recent physicists, Barrow and Tipler (who, I understand are not Christians). They say: “At this singularity, space and time came into existence; literally nothing existed before the singularity, so, if the Universe originated at such a singularity, we would truly have a creation…” Very interesting! Though, notice there’s an “if” in this sentence. As I understand it, Big Bang theory relies on a whole lot of assumptions, including that assumption that 95% of the energy in the universe is “dark energy” that we have never seen or measured…

But, it actually seems that this theory poses more problems for atheists, than it does for Christians. It may be that we don’t need to choose between creation and Big Bang; they might be two different ways of describing the same thing. I do remember a preacher once saying something like: “when God said: ‘let there be light,‘ and light shot out from his mouth at 299 million metres per second, it was probably a fairly big bang.” Not that I’m saying the Big Bang theory is correct. This theory is only 100 years old, and it may be that 100 years in the future, it’s all been disproven, and they are working on some other idea. Who knows!

What I’m certain of from the bible, is that God created the heavens and the earth, and whatever happened, happened because of the creative power of God. But exactly how He did that, and how we measure the time it took to do that… I’m happy to let the astro-physicists keep researching. And I’ll be interested to know what they discover.

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This question was originally answered in our evening service on 24 August 2025. I’ll aim to post another question and answer next week. You can read about how our question box works here.