Episode Details
Back to EpisodesEscaping the Beginning? Part One with Astrophysicist Jeff Zweerink
Description
Moses knew it long before any of the best minds in physics and cosmology knew it. And what did Moses know? That "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth."
Just a hundred years ago, the sciences of the heavens had stumbled across what appeared in the mathematical and observational data as evidence that our universe did in fact have a beginning.
But like Moses, philosophers and theologians of earlier centuries understood our universe to have had a beginning. But the burgeoning skepticism of the 18th-century Enlightenment philosophy led many to believe the universe could be explained without God.
Faced with what many thought was a reversion back to religion and philosophy, modern cosmological science stood face-to-face with the possibility our universe did in fact have a beginning.
This was a radically new idea in the contemporary sciences of the universe. To consider the universe as not only expanding but as having a beginning was, to say the least, not a bit unsettling. How could this be?
The best minds have been brought to bear on the question of the origin of our universe. And many alternative models and explanations have been offered that attempt to circumvent a beginning of the universe and thus once more eliminate God from the picture.
Our special guest on the next two episodes of Good Heave