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Do you believe a higher power created the universe, or do you believe in just the Big Bang?


This is the guy who came up with the Big Bang theory:

No, not the guy to the left with the wild hair – that’s just Albert Einstein. The guy to the right with the weird collar. Yes, Georges Lemaître was not just an astronomer, physicist and mathematician; he was also a priest.

He figured out his theory based on Einstein’s general relativity and figured out that the universe could not be stable and had to expand or contract. Based on the evidence from Edwin Hubble that the universe was expanding, then distances in the universe had to be shorter in the past. And if you extrapolate far enough back into time, you will reach a point where all distances are zero.

Ironically, nobody liked Lemaître’s idea, not even Einstein himself at first. It sounded too much like “let there be light” to them – Lemaître was after all also a priest. Heck, even the name “Big Bang” was invented to mock Lemaître’s theory!

But eventually, evidence won over the sceptics, and now everyone accepts the Big Bang theory no matter if they believe in gods or not. Those who do believe in at least one god sees the Big Bang as how their god created the universe – the answer to the silent “how” following “in the beginning, God created the Heaven and the earth” (or equivalent creation myth in their religion).

The exceptions are a minority of mainly US Evangelical Christians who reject anything which contradicts their literal interpretation of their holy book, and some fringe scientists who reject Einstein’s general relativity.