Contrary to what a lot of people still prefer to claim, science and faith actually have a lot in common. Hugh Ross is a renowned astrophysicist and Christian apologist who frequently speaks about how the Bible actually spoke about scientific facts long before scientists discovered them. He is also a firm believer in the idea that the Bible spoke about the Big Bang, meaning the prevailing theory in the scientific world that explains how the Universe was born.
In one of Hugh Ross’s books, in which he tries to reconcile both science and the Christian faith, he brings some solid arguments that the Bible actually taught the Big Bang long ago when no scientist was talking about such a theory. Without aiming to recreate the text of Hugh Ross’ books, I will try to find some of the most important arguments in favor of the idea that the Bible taught the Big Bang first.
First of all, we need to understand that the Bible was written in a rudimentary language in order to make the majority of people understand it. In other words, if you are expecting to see notions such as atoms, singularity, time and space, elementary particles, quarks, or molecules in the Bible, that is wrong from the start. With that out of the way, let’s cut to the chase:
The Universe came from ‘nothing’
Science teaches us that before the Big Bang, there was nothing, or at least that’s the basic assumption since there’s apparently no way to find out what existed before the singularity that went ‘boom.’ Surprisingly or not, the Bible also tells us that God created the Universe from nothing. In the very first Bible verse from Genesis 1:1, it says “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” In this case, “the heavens and the earth” refers to the Universe, the totality of our physical existence.
If that’s not convincing enough, take a look at 2 Maccabees 7:28:
“I beseech you, my child, to look at the heaven and the earth and see everything that is in them, and recognize that God did not make them out of things that existed.”
In other words, both the Bible and science agree that the Universe came from nothing. This also fits in with the Big Bang Theory.
The Bible admits the everlasting expansion of the Universe
Since the Big Bang, the Universe has kept expanding. It even expands faster and faster due to the dark energy. In fact, the Big Bang wasn’t actually a ‘bang’ in the literal sense of the term; it was the beginning of the expansion of the Universe itself. That’s science teaching us all these. However, scientists discovered only a hundred years ago that the Universe is expanding thanks to the observations of the American astronomer Edwin Hubble.
But if we take a look at what the Bible was teaching us hundreds or even thousands of years ago, meaning long before the observations of Hubble, we can easily find out that the Universe is indeed expanding. There are 8 verses in the Bible that speak very clearly about the expansion of the Universe in a rudimentary form, referring to it as a “stretching of the heavens.” Some of those verses are Isaiah 40:22, Isaiah 48:13, Isaiah 45:12, Isaiah 51:13, Job 9: 8, and Jeremiah 10:12.
How could someone who wrote a book hundreds of thousands of years ago possibly know about the expansion of the Universe, meaning long before the observations of Edwin Hubble? Also, how could someone know long ago that the Universe came from nothing when the general perception among scientists just a hundred years ago was that the Universe had no beginning at all? The Bible surely hit the nail on the head at least in those two areas, reconciliation perfectly with what modern science teaches us.
Of course, in the end, you may still choose to be a skeptic and say that the text of the Bible is too vague to support the Big Bang Theory, and that people just try to adapt it in order to seem as if those two worlds reconciliate. Even if you choose to believe that, it’s a fact that the Big Bang Theory was first proposed by a Belgian priest known as Georges Lemaitre.
