Tag Archives | Big Bang

Is There Room For God After Higgs Boson?

By on October 20, 2012 in News 24

Victoria Gill reports on a meeting of theologians and scientists to discuss a time before the Big Bang, for BBC News:

Now that the Higgs has finally been spotted – a scientific discovery that takes us closer than ever to the first moments after the Big Bang – Cern has opened its doors to scholars that take a very different approach to the question of how the Universe came to exist.

On 15 October, a group of theologians, philosophers and physicists came together for two days in Geneva to talk about the Big Bang.

So what happened when people of such different – very different – views of the Universe came together to discuss how it all began?

“I realised there was a need to discuss this,” says Rolf Heuer, Cern’s director general.

“There’s a need for us, as naive scientists, to discuss with philosophers and theologians the time before or around the Big Bang.”

Cern’s co-organiser of this unusual meeting of minds was Wilton Park – a global forum set up by Winston Churchill.

… Read the rest

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41 Percent of UK Don’t Think God Made the Universe (Highest Ever)

By on May 11, 2012 in News 26

Cosmic HistoryCaspar Melville writes at New Humanist:

A press release reaches us from Premier Christian Radio with the headline “UK’s belief that God created the Universe at an all-time low”. It reports the findings of a study conducted by ComRes for PCR (2054 were polled online across the UK in April), ahead of the conference, called “Unbelievable 2012″,  PCR are holding in London on May 26 at which “academics and scientists” from the US and UK will be arguing that contemporary cosmology indicates that God created the world.

The headline findings of the survey are that only 26% believe that God created the world, 41% said they didn’t believe this and 23% didn’t know or didn’t want to say. In what the press release describes as a “strange twist” fully 25% of those who identified as “Christian” did not believe that God was the cause of the Universe.

So, why would a Christian outfit be trumpeting numbers which show that the idea of a God-created universe is is decline, even amongst their own gang?

… Read the rest

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Stephen Hawking: God Was Not Needed To Create The Universe

By on September 2, 2010 in News 30


Stephen Hawking says the Big Bang was the result of the inevitable laws of physics and did not need God to spark the creation of the Universe — reported in the Telegraph:

The scientist has claimed that no divine force was needed to explain why the Universe was formed.

In his latest book, The Grand Design, an extract of which is published in Eureka magazine in The Times, Hawking said: “Because there is a law such as gravity, the Universe can and will create itself from nothing. Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the Universe exists, why we exist.”

He added: “It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the Universe going.”…

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There Was No Big Bang at the Start of the Universe

By on August 7, 2010 in News 13

Hubble_ultra_deep_field Alasdair Wilkins writes on io9.com:

A new theory explains the accelerating universe without invoking mysterious, unseen dark energy to account for the expansion. But it also gets rid of singularities, an unchanging speed of light … and the most famous astrophysical phenomenon of all, the Big Bang.

The observation of certain supernovas in the late 1990s led astronomers to the very unexpected discovery that the universe is expanding, and that the expansion is speeding up. There was nothing in the existing laws of physics to account for this, and so the only solution was dark energy — a mysterious force so named because we’ve never detected it, and yet it has to make up 75% of all the energy and mass in the universe for it to account for this cosmic acceleration. Also, the existence of dark energy weakens the supposedly inviolate law of conservation of energy, if not negates it completely.

… Read the rest

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