by Michael Peyton

Created on: August 14, 2009

In answering the question "how the heck did we get here?" the big bang is a small part of the puzzle but since "big bang or big man?" was the original subject of debate, that is where I shall begin. I hope to show that the big bang theory describes the most probable beginning of our universe given the current evidence provided by science.

According to the big bang model the universe began as an infinitely small singularity which exploded and began expanding outward. It is described by Stephen Hawking in his book A Brief History of Time: "At the big bang itself the universe is thought to have had zero size, and so to have been infinitely hot. But as the universe expanded, the temperature of the radiation decreased." According to a timeline of the big bang found in The Big Bang Theory: What it is, where it came from, and why it works by Karen C. Fox, 1 million years after the big bang, matter started joining together to form stars and eventually galaxies.

There is much evidence to support the big bang theory. The largest and most well known piece of evidence is the fact that the universe is expanding. It was Edwin Hubble who first discovered that the universe is expanding through studying redshifts. The redshift is caused by the Doppler effect. Light consists of waves and the color of light is determined by its wavelength. If an object is moving away from us the wavelength is increased causing it to shift slightly to the red end of the visible light spectrum. By contrast an object moving towards us would be shifted slightly towards the blue end of the spectrum. By measuring the spectra of different galaxies, Hubble was able to determine not only that the universe was expanding but also the rate at which these galaxies were moving outwards. The expanding universe coincides with the idea of the universe originating with an explosion. There is other evidence for the big bang but to introduce it would require detailed scientific explanations and jargon and I'd rather not bog this article down with such things.

There are those who would like to argue that a creator god could have caused the big bang. The big bang model clearly does not need a god to function. If you believe that everything must have a creator then you cannot exclude god from that rule and we wind up with the infinite regress problem. If everything must have a creator then what created god? What created the thing that created god? There is no evidence for or against the idea of a creator god thus

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