Genesis and the Big Bang (Part 5)

(Gen 1:3), “Then God said…”  God spoke the creation into existence, as is written ten times in the first chapter of Genesis, “God said.”   The creation remains in existence by the word spoken at the beginning.

“By the word of God the heavens existed long ago and the earth was formed out of water and by water…By His word the present heavens and earth are being reserved for fire, kept for the day of judgment and destruction of ungodly men,” (2 Pet 3:5-7).   

(Gen 1:3), “…Let there be light’; and there was light…”  The statement that light came prior to the formation of matter was thought to be inaccurate 150 years ago.  Conventional wisdom held that matter must exist to produce light.  However, the development of Einstein’s famous equation (E=MC²) demonstrated that matter and energy could be interchanged.

Believers have sometimes questioned the source of light before the creation of the sun and stars.  According to the Big Bang model, the original light came from the extremely high energy at the moment of creation that vaporized everything into light.  In the beginning, the universe was extremely hot, perhaps 1 x 10³² degrees Kelvin, too hot for any solid material to exist.  At the core of the universe, the high temperature and pressure reduced all matter to pure energy.  All was light, but this light was too bright (above gamma ray frequency) to be observed by the naked eye if witnesses had been present.  After approximately 300 minutes, the expansion of the universe cooled the average temperature down to approximately 100,000,000 degrees Kelvin.

As details of the Big Bang model were formulated, scientists theorized that some of the original light of creation was never converted into matter, but remained as light in the form of radiation.  All light has a corresponding temperature and the predicted temperature was 5° K, close to absolute zero.  In 1965, Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson, working at Bell Labs in Crawford Hill, New Jersey on an unrelated project, observed this Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) using a shoehorn antenna originally designed to communicate with the first satellites in space.  Penzias and Wilson measured the temperature of the radiation to be 3.5° K, confirming a critical prediction of the Big Bang theory.  Their discovery won the duo a Nobel Prize in Physics in 1978.