At the present time, that is. Some pre-60’s opponents of the Big Bang were non- or anti-religious.
At the present time, that is. Some pre-60’s opponents of the Big Bang were non- or anti-religious.
Actually, the term “Big Bang” was coined as derision of the theory. The theory was given good initial elucidation by a Catholic cleric. It was derided because the presumption was that it was merely invented to “permit” the existence of God–not the case, actually. The theory was developed by a highly-skilled cosmologist who happened to also be ordained–that it did not “disprove” his religion is essentially gravy.
An “advantage” of a steady-state model was that it excludes any possibility of God as Christianity posits Him. Christianity requires a definite beginning to the universe.
It was the eminent cosmologist and steady-state supporter Fred Hoyle who coined the orginally derisory term ‘big bang.’
In your opinion. Though it is an opinion that is similar to those of various people who participated in the debate at the time.
However, other positions were possible and one example is William McCrea. He was both a prominent steady-state theorist and a devout Anglican, who publically linked his scientific views with his religious ones about a Creator who was “revealed in the person of Christ”.
Well, Anglicanism has a talent of stretching doctrine far beyond what anyone else would consider stretchable. This is the same group that permitted Spong to flatly deny the Resurrection and still be a Bishop therein. Evidently, the Resurrection of Christ is no longer Anglican doctrine, or at least it’s so unimportant to them that they have no problem at all with one of their own Bishops publically denying it. Thus, I’d say that “devout Anglican” has an incredible amount of leeway for shoehorning any old belief wanted in.
Nearer the mark to say that the Episcopal Church in the USA is scared to death of a heresy trial, and will put up with anything sooner than risk the bad publicity.
Now, now, be careful. Bashing the various Anglican derived churches is a job for other boards, and is not related to the op. (No, I’m not Anglican or Episcopal, and probably couldn’t even spell them if not for the previous posts!)
Forty2, General Relativity and various astrophysical theories (such as those describing stellar evolution) predict that given the current conditions of the universe, the universe was a singularity when t=0. (In fact, if memory serves, Hawking showed that any time evolving solution to the GR equations must either evolve from a singularity or to a singularity.) It is important to remember, however, that no one thinks GR holds near singularities. At some point, a more quantum theory of gravity takes over - at some size so small compared to you that the only comparison I can think of that would mean anything is the size of the nucleus of an atom compared to the size of the current universe. We just don’t know what the theory is yet. It may be that there is an initial time at which the universe was created; it is unlikely that the universe has gone through a series of big bangs and big crunches. Hawking used to postulate that time is a circular coordinate. That is, that you can no more go before t=0 than you can go further north than the north pole. However, there has never been much evidence for that, and I don’t believe he currently espouses that view.
So, to not answer one of your questions, no physics can not explain how, or why, an infinitely dense point suddenly expanded to become the universe. Yet. Asking such questions, attempting to answer them in an observationally testable manner, and performing those tests is what science is all about. The fact that the answer is not known does not invalidate the whole theory, any predictions within the intervening time frame, nor the fact that the universe is more than 10 billion years old.
The creation of galaxies, galactic clusters, and larger structures is a topic of current research. There is no problem predicting the formation of such structures, but there is also no definitive answer, yet. Such an answer must await a better understanding of “dark energy” and “dark matter”.
Even if you wish to ignore what someone believed merely because they were an Anglican, there are other examples of contrary positions.
Indeed, while naturally not a supporter of steady-state theories, Georges Lemaitre doesn’t seem to have thought there were any theological implications of cosmological models with no apparent beginnings. His earliest attempts at constructing models using solutions of GR were very explicitly ones where a universal expansion emerged from an equilibrium state of indefinite duration. When he came to propose the “primordial atom” model, it was much the same story. He obviously identified the observed processes of our universe as the consequences of the decay of this atom. But he also thought that there were no singularities lurking in the “early” stages and saw no reason to conclude that there was any sort of “sharp” beginning here. Thus he carefully emphasised that the decay of the primordial atom wasn’t necessarily the start of the universe and hence possibly the Creation. That was an issue entirely separate from arguments in physical cosmology.
In a talk at the 1958 Solvay conference, he was quite explicit about the possible implications of his scientific ideas:
For, while he believed that theology and science would tend to the same goal, he also believed that they were distinct endevours that should be kept distinct. Scientific preferences weren’t to be dictated by theological arguments. When Pius XII applauded big-bang cosmology and rejected continuous creation in an address in 1951, Lemaitre privately objected to the Vatican (though largely on the grounds that the Pope had overstated the scientific case for the former). He seems to have succeeded, for Pius toned down his subsequent references to the issue.
I culled both example from Cosmology and Controversy (Princeton, 1996), Helge Kragh’s really rather good history of the debates surrounding the rise and fall of the steady-state theories. Well worth reading.