Davies' naturalistic explanation of the Big Bang ~ slide 1

Davies’ proposal for a naturalisticexplanation of the Big Bang

From Paul Davies. Superforce. 2nd ed. rev. NY: Penguin, 1996. Reprinted in Peterson et al, pp. 231 ff.

What caused the Big Bang? And what caused the “fine-tuning” of the expansion after the Big Bang? And what caused the uniform pattern of the expansion? These seem to be cosmic miracles. Some physicists say it is an “initial condition.”

Davies’ critique: This is not an explanation. Others propose that God caused it.

Davies' naturalistic explanation of the Big Bang ~ slide 2

Davies’ proposal for a naturalisticexplanation of the Big Bang

Davies proposes a naturalistic (scientific) answer to these questions. A cosmic repulsive force (the opposite of

gravity) The initial condition was a highly energized

vacuum Initial rate of expansion was very high -- Alan

Guth’s inflation -- and then slowed down. The P. of the Conservation of Energy was not

operative in the early stages of the expansion of the universe.

Davies' naturalistic explanation of the Big Bang ~ slide 3

Comments & criticisms of Davies’ proposal

Comments & criticisms Davies accuses physicists and theologians

who appeal to “initial conditions” and God of using ad hoc assumptions? Is he doing the same?

Is Betty & Cordell’s argument an argument for God as the only adequate cause of the Big Bang?

Davies' naturalistic explanation of the Big Bang ~ slide 4

Comments & criticisms of Davies’ proposal

Pope Pius XII in 1951 & Robert Jastrow in 1978 have argued for God as the cause of the Big Bang. Pope Pius XII in 1951: “With the same clear and

critical look with which it [the human mind] examines and passes judgment on facts, it perceives and recognizes the work of creative omnipotence, whose power, set in motion by the mighty Fiat pronounced billions of years ago by the Creating Spirit, spread out over the universe, calling into existence with a gesture of generous love matter bursting

Davies' naturalistic explanation of the Big Bang ~ slide 5

Comments & criticisms of Davies’ proposal

with energy. In fact, it would seem that present-day science, with one sweeping step back across millions of centuries, has succeeded in bearing witness to that primordial Fiat lux uttered at the moment when, along with matter, there burst forth from nothing a sea of light and radiation, while the particles of chemical elements split and formed into millions of galaxies. - Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 146.

Jastrow: “ . . . As he [the scientist] pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.” (God and the Astronomers [1978] quoted in Barbour 198)

Davies' naturalistic explanation of the Big Bang ~ slide 6

Comments & criticisms of Davies’ proposal

Cautions about this identification of the beginnings of the Big Bang (t = 0) with God’s creation Danger of God-of-the-gaps

argument This makes God one among

other causes in the universe -- a rather emaciated conception of God.

Davies' naturalistic explanation of the Big Bang ~ slide 7

Comments & criticisms of Davies’ proposal

A final caution about identifying t = 0 with God: the notion of God the Creator is compatible with a universe which has always existed or a universe created in time The assertion that God is the

creator is about dependence not beginnings from nothing (ex nihilo). John Polkinghorne