by John O'Neill

Created on: December 28, 2010

The Differences Between Scientific and Metaphysical Truths

For centuries, physical scientists have sought the truth about the origin of the universe and what caused it. The results of their research so far has taken them to within one one-hundreth of a second from the beginning of time, space, matter and energy. Earth-based and space-probe scientific explorations of 20th and early 21st centuries have discovered evidence to support a theory about the beginning of the universe and its history from that point to the present time. Even now, scientists using the Large Hadron Collider at the European Centre for Nuclear Research under the French-Swiss border are striving to discover the Higgs Boson, supposed by some to endow other fundamental particles in the universe with mass, so essential to explaining the nature of gravity. The Hadron Collider is designed to smash the tiny particles of matter together at incredible speeds so that scientists can observe the extreme energies, micro-black holes and other phenomena that supposedly occurred during the first millionths of a second after the big bang – a quantum leap beyond the current limit of a hundredth of a second.

Scientific discoveries between 1920 and the present have shown beyond a reasonable doubt that the universe had a finite beginning, before which there was no space, no time, no matter, no energy. The Big Bang theory states that the universe appeared out of nowhere about fifteen billion years ago as a singularity. Singularities are invisible zones of incalculable heat and density now thought by scientists to exist at the core of black holes (invisible areas of extreme gravitational pressure) in the known universe. All matter and energy now in the universe was concentrated at incalculably high temperatures and gravitational compression within this primordial singularity the infinitesimal size of a mathematical point, which appeared suddenly and began to expand and cool. Scientists haven’t been able to explain exactly how, when or why it appeared; but they’re sure that building blocks of everything in the known universe, including the stuff of our bodies, were in that singularity.

According to British astrophysicists Stephen Hawking, George Ellis and Roger Penrose, with the appearance of that first singularity, time and space had a finite beginning corresponding with the origin of matter and energy. The singularity didn’t appear in time and space; time and space began with the

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