Ann:
It is true that a growing number of physicists are searching for something that would explain the Big Bang.
I myself have problems with this search, however:
(1.) The “arrow of time” represented by increasing entropy is better explained if the cosmological system does not pre-date the Big Bang; otherwise, we have to ask how a pre-expansion universe at a lower state of order got into a higher state (the point of the Bang). That requires recourse to energy-sources from outside our space-time, and now we’re talking miraculous intervention all over again.
(2.) This is acknowledged by scientists who think in higher dimensions (e.g. string theorists) and they’re willing to allow for a collision of “branes” in a higher-dimensional “bulk” to be the source *of* our space-time from *outside* our space time. This allows them to posit something outside our universe, but something which is decidedly Not God.
And they might be right! But they have no proof from which to say so, for, as Douglas Adams humorously observed, one can’t “fire missiles at right-angles to reality.” One can’t interact with that which is outside our space-time in any meaningful way. No experiment is possible. The preference of a Materialist for a purely material First Cause outside our space-time is just that, a preference. He LIKES it more than the notion of a Personal Cause.
Which is, I think, the origin of all of these “What Caused The Big Bang” theories. Hubble himself didn’t like the notion of the Big Bang; he and others have always complained that it smacked of divine intervention. And they’re right, so let’s not be surprised if they go looking, with a certain feverish intensity, for any alternative!
And you know what? One day they may find one (one that they can experimentally demonstrate, I mean, not just one they can pleasantly imagine), and it STILL won’t matter to the whole Theism/Atheism argument. It really won’t. Because whatever they find either has Causality in space-and-time as events in our universe do, or it is, itself, miraculous. And if it has Causality, then we’re back to searching for a First Cause, all over again.
Scientists are our friends. Seriously! Sure, I know, they keep making philosophical pronouncements on the basis of scientific discoveries, thereby demonstrating that, however professionally trained they are as scientists, they’re often rank amateurs at philosophy. But everyone has character flaws. Is it any surprise that the character flaw most endemic to some scientists, is that of being a know-it-all?
Let us then be who God made us to be, and be as forgiving and tolerant of the character flaws of others as we can. Even if it’s Darwin, Dawkins, or Derbyshire.
