The Big Bang

The so-called "Big Bang" and the expanding universe are completely compatible (as far as they go) with traditional metaphysics.

The manifestation of the material (or any other) universe is always depicted as radiating out from the Centre, which is Itself without either motion or extension, being necessarily unmanifest. In physical terms, one would therefore expect the beginning of the universe to be a sudden expansion from a literally infinitesimal point, and one would expect it to continue to expand until its final dissolution (referred to in the Angelic Hymn as "The Night of Destruction" and by modern physics as entropy).

Whether these hypothesised phenomena correspond to the "actual physical facts" or to the symbolic accuracy of our ordained perceptions is a question which must be left open. In the end, there is probably no real distinction between the two things. The "actual physical facts", as our earthly experience and the Newtonian physics of the school textbooks teach us to imagine them, transpire, in the higher reaches of modern physics, to be no more than a faith in the universal applicability of mathematics, the axioms of which are no less inborn and "unprovable" (in empirical terms) than those of metaphysics.

The "Big Bang" theory cannot account for the existence of either matter or form (some theories suggest that matter "exploded" through from a negative or anti-matter universe, but even such a theory only takes the question a step back leaving us to wonder where the negative universe came from) for these are questions which material science is, by definition, powerless to answer; just as plane geometry cannot envisage the pen which draws its figures because to do so would involve the third dimension, and it would cease to be plane geometry.

However, if material science acknowledges its own inherent limitations and does not purport to be giving "an explanation of the origin of the universe" but merely a description of its procedure, then the "Big Bang" and the expanding universe would seem to be entirely accurate descriptions and are much as any metaphysicist would expect them to be.



Science

Creationism

Relativity and the Speed of Light

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