 |
 |
 |
||||||||||||||
 |
 |
|||||||||||||||
|
|
God's Universe? | |
|||||||||||||
|
The following is taken from Buttneeked_Countryboy2's Blog...a link to this blog can be found on Page 4 of this entry. Life's ultimate question: Does God exist? Has the universe always existed, or, at some definite point in time, did it have a beginning? It is on this question that much of the argument of a Creator God rests. After all, if the universe has always existed there clearly is no need for a being or outside intelligence to design and create it. On the other hand, if the universe came into being at a precise, specific time, something must have caused it to come into being. Scientists are not in accord as to whether the universe had a beginning. A few still believe it's possible it has always existed. British physicist Stephen Hawking explains why: "So long as the universe had a beginning, we could suppose it had a creator. But if the universe is really completely self-contained, having no boundary or edge, it would have neither beginning nor end...it would simply be 'A Brief History of Time'." But this concept is no longer the dominant scientific view. Most scientists now accept that the universe began suddenly and at a specific point in time. Discovery of a Beginning: In the early 1900's, astronomers discovered a phenomenon known as red shift- that light from distant galaxies is shifted toward the red end of the color spectrum. Astronomer Edwin Hubble realized this meant that the universe is expanding. He discovered that galaxies and clusters of galaxies are moving away from each other in all directions. To envision this revolutionary discovery, imagine dots of ink on the surface of a balloon you are blowing up. As you inflate the balloon, the spots move further from each other in all directions. Hubble and other astronomers found that galaxies throughout the universe are speeding away from each other in the same way. They also found that: the farther a galaxy or cluster of galaxies is from us, the faster it is retreating. What Hubble had discovered was that the universe is expanding outward everywhere he looked. The discovery was revolutionary, considering up until this time most astronomers assumed that any motion by galaxies was simply random drift. Other astronomers and physicists subsequently confirmed Hubble's observations and conclusions. What could this mean? John D. Barrow, professor of astronomy at the University of Sussex, England, explores in his book, 'The Origin of the Universe', the fascinating question of how space, matter and even time began. Of the expansion of the universe, Barrow writes: "This was the greatest discovery of twentieth-century science, and it confirmed what Einstein's general theory of relativity had predicted about the universe: that it cannot be static. The gravitational attraction between the galaxies would bring them all together if they were not rushing away from each other. The universe can't stand still. "If the universe is expanding, then when we reverse the direction of history and look in the past we should find evidence that it emerged from a smaller, denser state that appears Big Bang." In other words, what astronomers concluded they were seeing was the aftermath of an unimaginably powerful event that hurled matte r and energy outward in all directions to form the known universe, thus the name "Big Bang." In reality, what they were observing was the fact that the universe had to have a beginning. |
|
||||||||||||||
|
|
|
||||||||||||||
 |
 |
 |
||||||||||||||
|
|  |
|
