A Fine Tuned Universe

A Fine Tuned Universe

The other major quest for God might rightly be called the Cosmological Quest. The impetus for it started with Father Henri Joseph Édouard Lemaître. Lemaître was a Catholic priest who happened to be a brilliant Harvard and MIT trained astrophysicist. He never intended that his work in cosmology be part of any scientific question about God’s existence.

Working to apply Einstein’s theory of general relativity to the field of cosmology, he proposed what we now call the Big Bang. In a paper, published in Nature he called this “creation-like” event as coming from a "primeval atom." British cosmologist Fred Hoyle, a proponent of a static universe—the prevalent view at the time—found the idea so ludicrous that he derisively called it the “Big Bang.” Today, you would be as hard pressed to find a cosmologist who doesn’t agree with the Big Bang theory as you would be hard pressed to find people who believe the world is flat.

The Big Bang, which suggests that the universe started as a hot, dense, small spot, so hot and dense and small that those words make no sense of it, is now widely accepted as part of Guth’s inflationary theory which is not the same thing as his multiverse theory.