The origin of the Universe — the beginning of everything — is one question where scientific and religious narratives sometimes get blurred. This is not because they approach the problem in the same way; clearly they do not. It is because the question being asked of both is the same. We want to know how everything came to be. We want to know, because otherwise our story would be incomplete. We are creations of this Universe, and the story of the Universe is fundamentally our story, too.
There is no question that modern cosmology and astronomy have produced a remarkable narrative of the Universe’s early history. But can science really provide an answer?
Like you and me, the Universe has a birthday. We know that it started 13.8 billion years ago, and we can describe with confidence how the young Universe evolved starting from a hundredth of a second after the Big Bang, although there are a few important gaps in the history we have yet to fill.
That knowledge is a phenomenal achievement. But the question that lingers is how close to the source science can get.
The history of life
Things quickly get complicated if we persist with the birthday analogy. You and I have parents. Our parents also have parents, and so on. We can trace this continuity back to the first living entity, what we call our last common ancestor — probably a bacterium that lived over 3 billion years ago.
Once we find that ancestor, we face another tough question: How did this first living entity come to be if there was nothing alive to birth it? The only acceptable scientific explanation is that life must have come from nonlife. It arose at least 3.5 billion years ago from the increased complexity of chemical reactions among the biomolecules present in primordial Earth.What about the Universe? How did it come to be if there was nothing before?
If the origin of life is mysterious, the origin of the Universe is infinitely more so. After all, the Universe, by definition, includes all there is. How can everything come from nothing?
Science’s job is to develop explanations without recourse to divine intervention. We use the laws of Nature as our blueprint. This limitation makes it a huge conceptual challenge for science to describe the origin of the Universe. This problem is known in philosophy as the First Cause. If the Universe emerged by itself, it was caused by an uncaused cause. It kicked into existence without a source to precede it. Science operates within clear conceptual boundaries. To explain the origin of everything, science would need to explain itself. And to do this, we would need a new mode of scientific explanation.
The story of the Universe cannot start on the second page
Current descriptions of the origin of the Universe rest on the two pillars of 20th century physics. The first pillar is general relativity — Einstein’s theory that gravity is due to the curvature of space caused by the presence of mass. The second pillar is quantum physics, which describes the world of atoms and subatomic particles. Combining the two is quite reasonable, given that in its infancy the whole Universe was small enough for quantum effects to be important. Current models of the origin of the Universe — from string theory to loop quantum gravity to quantum cosmology to a Universe that bounces between expansion and contraction — use the bizarre effects described by quantum physics to explain what seems to be unexplainable. The issue is to what extent they can truly explain the First Cause.
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