The Science of God - how a lover of physics found the truth in Christianity

Chapter 11

The Big Bang is one of my favorite theories about the origins of the universe. A) because I believe it and B) because it's the equivalent of saying "Presto!" in a magic show. Presto is the magic word. It makes things happen. Without Presto, no magic.

Of course, once we advanced past the age of 8, we knew that Presto didn't do anything. The magic was all an illusion. Something else was going on behind the scenes. 

Such as it is with the Big Bang. The inquisitive among us will raise our hands and say, "But what was there before the Big Bang?"

A good teacher will say, "We don't know."

And there's the problem. One cannot dismiss any theory if "We don't know" is an answer to any of the unknown variables. Once we insert "We don't know," any option is on the table. I'll refer back to an earlier statement: if we can assume there is no God, the real answer to the origins of the universe would be equally unbelievable. 

So how do we answer that question? What was there before the Big Bang? 

As always, we are forced to revisit what we do know. What we do know is that energy cannot be created or destroyed, only transferred from one form to another. Thermodynamics does not allow for another option. There is no Presto! in thermodynamics.

So what was there before the Big Bang? Energy. That's all we can relatively sure of. All the energy in the universe. Don't try to grasp that. Take a billion suns and calculate the energy as their mass times the speed of light squared. You're not even a small percentage of being close to the actual value.

All that energy. Just swirling around in nothingness. What are the possibilities?

I don't know. No one does.

Give that we all agree that we don't know, any suggestion is viable.

So I'll leave you with this question: can all the energy in the universe converge to create what we would now consider intelligence? Or does it need flesh and bone first?