The Big Bang cosmological model is in trouble, but its adherents, reluctant to abandon the theory, are busily attempting to shore it up:
A BBC documentary … was aired on SBS-TV in Australia in April 2012. In it, several cosmologists discuss ‘the unthinkable’—perhaps the big bang was not the beginning of everything after all. It seems that scientists have discovered a new law. Well, not actually new—just one that has been treated as if it didn’t exist for the last half century or so by ‘big-bangers’ such as Stephen Hawking, Roger Penrose, Paul Davies, Edwin Hubble, et al, namely the law of Cause and Effect.
The program explains that the concept of the big bang postulates that “everything we see in the universe today—us, trees, galaxies, zebras—emerged, in an instant, from nothing. And that’s a problem. It’s all effect and no cause.” We are then given five different explanations from five different scientists concerning what this cause may (or may not) have been.
— Russell Grigg, “What Happened Before the Big Bang?”, CMI, May 20, 2012
Prof. Michio Kaku would like to redefine “nothing” to mean something without certain attributes.
Prof. Andrei Linde wants to invoke the eternally-inflating multiverse hypothesis, which places the cosmos we live in somewhere among 10 to the power 10 to the power 10 to the power 7 universes.
Dr. Param Singh thinks our universe didn’t result from the Big Bang but is the fortuitous aftermath of a previous collapsing cosmos that underwent a lucky “big bounce.”
Prof. Lee Smolin believes that every black hole can give birth to a universe under the right conditions.
Dr. Neil Turok needs ten dimensions (plus time) and at least two pre-existing “branes” (membranes) that happen to collide with each other, the friction point of their intersection resulting in our cosmos.
Grigg’s summary:
Discerning viewers of this BBC program will have noticed several things:
1. Almost all the concepts of the big bang are now under attack by secular scientists, e.g. that everything came from nothing, that everything was once contained in a singularity, the beginning of time, the origin of the laws of physics.
2. All the ‘solutions’ to the problem of what happened before the big bang involve pre-existing universes or conditions, at least one of which is said to have existed for ever, despite the second law of thermodynamics (which says this is an impossibility).
3. The proponents of these ‘solutions’ provide no physical evidence whatsoever in support of their ideas.
4. Not one says how his postulated first universe came into existence. — Ibid.
Can this profusion of confusion about the Big Bang hypothesis be a fulfillment of G. K. Chesterton’s obiter dictum — “For when we cease to worship God, we do not worship nothing, we worship anything” — with “anything” being redefined as “nothing”?