A Singular Error

Victor J. Stenger

For Reality Check in Skeptic Briefs March 2009.

Draft of Wednesday, January 28, 2009.

In recent years Christian apologists have blatantly misled the public by claiming that no conflict exists between science and religion and that modern science actually has dramatically confirmed biblical teachings. For example, in his recent book What’s So Great About Christianity?, Dinesh D’Souza writes,

In a stunning confirmation of the book of Genesis, modern scientists have discovered that the universe was created in a primordial explosion of energy and light. Nor only did the universe have a beginning in space and time, but the origin of the universe was also a beginning for space and time. If you accept that everything that has a beginning has a cause, then the material universe has a nonmaterial or spiritual cause.

Every culture has its creation myths and the Bible has no monopoly on those stories. Furthermore, the story in Genesis bears no resemblance to that of modern cosmology. It has Earth created before the sun, moon, and stars. Actually Earth formed eight billion years after the first stars. The Bible can hardly be credited with predicting the expanding universe described by the big bang when it depicts the universe as a firmament with Earth fixed and immobile at its center.

D’Souza’s main claim, however, is that the big bang showed that the universe, including space and time, began as a singularity of infinitesimal size and infinite density. Although this idea has been discussed for years in the literature, theists generally refer to a mathematical proof by cosmologist Stephen Hawking and mathematician Roger Penrose published in 1970. They showed that Einstein's theory of general relativity implied that the universe we observe was once a "singularity," an infinitesimal point of infinite mass. Theologians then argued that space and time themselves must have begun at that point.

However, twenty years ago Hawking and Penrose agreed that a singularity did not in fact occur. Their calculation was not wrong as far as it followed from the assumptions of general relativity. But those assumptions had not taken quantum mechanics into account. In his blockbuster bestseller, The Brief History of Time, which came out in 1988, Hawking says: “There was in fact no singularity at the beginning of the universe.”

D’Souza has glanced at Brief History, mining quotations that seem to confirm his preconceived ideas. He quotes Hawking as saying on page 53, “There must have been a Big Bang singularity.” No such statement can be found on page 53, although a similar statement does appear on page 50. Apparently D’Souza lifted the statement out of context and gave it precisely the opposite meaning to what Hawking intended. Hawking was referring to his calculation with Penrose. Here is Hawking’s statement in full:

The final result was a joint paper by Penrose and myself in 1970, which at last proved that there must have been a big bang singularity provided only that general relativity is correct and the universe contains as much matter as we observe. [Emphasis added].

Hawking continues on page 50:

So in the end our [Hawking and Penrose] work became generally accepted and nowadays nearly everyone assumes that the universe started with a big bang singularity. It is perhaps ironic that, having changed my mind, I am now trying to convince other physicists that there was in fact no singularity at the beginning of the universe—as we shall see later, it can disappear once quantum effects are taken into account.

Now, twenty years later, the consensus of cosmologists, including Hawking and Penrose, is that there was no singularity at the start of the big bang.

This means that time did not necessarily begin with the bug bang and the universe could extend back in time with no limit. But even if we grant that the universe had a beginning, this does not imply that it had a cause. D’Sousa refers to me: “Physicist Victor Stenger says the universe may be ‘uncaused’ and may have ‘emerged from nothing.’” He scoffs, “Even David Hume, one of the most skeptical of all philosophers, regarded this position as ridiculous . . . Hume wrote in 1754, ‘I have never asserted so absurd a proposition as that anything might rise without cause.’”

Hume can be excused for not knowing quantum physics in 1754, but D’Sousa cannot today, over a century since its discovery. He is wrong in his assertion that everything that begins must have a cause. According to conventional interpretations of quantum mechanics, nothing “causes” the atomic transitions that produce light or the nuclear decays that produce nuclear radiation. These happen spontaneously and only their probabilities are determined.

While we cannot say exactly how our universe came to be naturally, several completely worked out scenarios are published in reputable journals. This fact alone refutes any claim that a supernatural cause was required to produce the universe. While the origin of the universe is still a gap in scientific knowledge, we have no need to fill that gap with God.

Victor J. Stenger is adjunct professor of philosophy at the University of Colorado and emeritus professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Hawaii. He is the author of eight books. His next work, Quantum Gods: Creation, Chaos and the Search for Cosmic Consciousness, is scheduled to appear this Spring. His website is at http://www.colorado.edu/philosophy/vstenger/.

A Singular Error

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