Big Bang Cosmology and the Beginning of the Universe

Until the early twentieth century, the scientific default was an eternal, steady-state universe. Einstein's 1915 general relativity, combined with Edwin Hubble's 1929 measurement of galactic redshift, implied that the universe was expanding. Tracing the expansion backward led Georges Lemaître to propose a "primeval atom" origin. The 1964 discovery of the cosmic microwave background by Penzias and Wilson decisively confirmed a hot, dense early universe.\n\nThe Borde-Guth-Vilenkin theorem (2003) further showed that any universe with an average rate of cosmic expansion greater than zero cannot be past-eternal, regardless of the specific cosmological model. Even multiverse hypotheses do not escape the requirement of an absolute beginning for any inflating region.\n\nThis convergence does not constitute proof of biblical creation. Genesis 1:1 does not require Big Bang cosmology to be true, nor does Big Bang cosmology require a creator in a logically necessary sense. What it does do is remove the "eternal universe" alternative that many materialist cosmologies implicitly relied on, and re-open questions about what caused or grounded the beginning. In this sense, twentieth-century science is more hospitable to a bounded-universe reading of Scripture than nineteenth-century science was.