The Big Bang Theory

By Michael W. Lodato

I’m aided here by some insights from a book titled Father Joe.  It kind of supports the skepticism I’ve always had about the Big Bang Theory, which if you start picking at it is as loopy as any other creation myth.

First there is the claim that the super-dense lump of matter that exploded was the size of a baseball, (referred to as a “singularity”), not a golf ball or a softball or a grapefruit?  And how did this baseball create within a very short time 98% of all the matter in the universe that is over a trillion light years across.

And what about time? It is generally accepted that the big bang occurred over 13.7 billion years ago.  Wasn’t that instant an actual moment in time, a specific date?  Maybe, using our measurement of time in recent times, you could place the big bang on a specific day of the week, let’s say Tuesday.  How then could you say that before the big bang, time did not exist, there was no Monday that preceded that eventful Tuesday?  If there was an after, there must have been a before.  The book asks:  Was the big bang theory really very different from Bishop Usher’s calculation the creation of the universe began on October 22, 4004 B.C. that none of us believe?

And what about the claim that the baseball sized singularity contained not just matter, but also space, time, and energy in what we now call the universe?  If energy did not exist, how did it explode?  What did it mean that after the initial bang, the singularity spewed space as well as matter through nothingness so that the material universe would have somewhere to spew through?  Didn’t “creating space out of nothingness” sound like semantic nonsense?  And if there was nowhere before that, where was the singularity the instant before it exploded?  When was T=O, zero time, the instant when all this was supposed to take place?  Was T=O a non-moment that existed before time began?  If so, when did time begin?  The instant after T=O?  If so, what started time ticking?

To make matters worse, there is the claim that there had been a previous universe which had blown apart just as ours is doing, reaching its outer limit (?) and then somehow collapsed back down to a baseball and started all over again.  That would make our big bang not a birth but a resurrection. And let’s not start with “parallel” universes.  I don’t want to go there.

And how about another creation theory of an inexplainably motivated deity slapping the universe together in a Judeo-Christian workweek?