Can you dismiss the resurrection if you believe in the big bang?

If I, as a scientist, said I believed the big bang theory was true based on the extant evidence, no one would be particularly surprised. 

But what if I were to say I believe it is possible for someone to be created out of nothing, to die, and be resurrected from the dead? Would you be as tolerant of my view? Would you think me a worse scientist for believing that this is possible? 

There are many good reasons to believe that the big bang is true. It is a hypothesis which explains measurable phenomena in the universe, such as the fact that the universe is expanding and the lingering background frequency consistent with the aftermath of an explosion which we can measure. But there are also some questions surrounding the big bang theory which have yet to be addressed – it remains a theory, after all, not a theorem. In other words, there are scientific laws which the big bang theory challenges. Similarly, there is a lot of historical evidence which supports the birth, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, on which the Christian faith hinges. Surprisingly, the scientific laws that the resurrection challenges are the same ones that the big bang challenges. 

I want to make a case to you that you can’t have your cosmic cake and eat it: you can’t make a case for the big bang being true while dismissing the resurrection. 

There was nothing, then there was something

I always enjoyed learning about astronomy in school and would sometimes find myself at 3 am roaming through articles about black holes, black matter, and other astronomical concepts. However,  I still remember finding my class on the big bang theory decidedly odd, and this had nothing to do with my physics teacher's uncanny resemblance with Eddie Murphy. Rather, I found the religious fervour with which he spoke about the beginning of the universe to be unnerving. It reminded me more of sitting through sermons in church, and less of sitting through a science class. I intellectually disengaged quite rapidly, opting to doodle on the edges of my textbook. 

“There was nothing in the universe. And then, suddenly", he paused for dramatic effect, "there was something.” He went on, explaining that this new something was in chaos and disorder – and then it began to become more ordered: compressed into a cosmic egg, the theory was that this egg contained the raw materials behind every molecule that makes up every star and galaxy, every animal and plant, making up my brain cells and yours. 

At the time, I had to admit that there was something poetic about this narrative, but that was just it - it was a narrative. Of course, he presented evidence supporting the big bang, but saying that in the beginning of the universe out of nothing there was something because of events which could never be replicated seemed like a big leap of faith. In fact, it was a similar leap of faith to many theories that the world was created out of nothing by a divine all powerful being. It was equally impossible to replicate - it just moved the problem of ‘creation’ from a whole, complete and complex creation to the creation of the building blocks of the universe, but the question of who or what caused this remained.  

Reassuringly, I found out later that physicists have also wondered about these questions. For example, the Boltzmann brain is a thought experiment which suggests that it is more likely for a brain to spontaneously form, complete with a memory of having existed in our universe, rather than for the entire universe to be formed given our understanding of thermodynamics. For there to be a sufficiently long time for random fluctuations to cause particles to be formed out of nothing with any structure or degree of complexity, then surely a human brain could be formed in such a way. By definition, a single human brain would be a small subset of the universe - making it even more possible to occur spontaneously than the entire universe. In other words, the scientific assumption that is necessary for the big bang – that something can be made out of nothing – makes it equally possible for there to be someone out of nothing. This very requirement of matter springing into existence out of nothing to commence the big bang, also would make it possible for a new human to be formed spontaneously, say, in the womb of a young, virgin girl without sexual intercourse or medical intervention. 

Boltzmann was not the first person in history to talk about brains (or people) being made out of nothing. One of the claims of Christianity is that Jesus was not conceived conventionally, but that a virgin girl gave birth to a healthy man. Something or, more correctly, someone came out of nothing. Although refuting the evidence that Jesus was a real person is challenging from a historical perspective, a more common argument against the virgin birth is that it is not an accurate account. There is a historical issue with this, and that is that multiple biographical accounts of the life of Jesus Christ agree on this point, and these accounts are some of the most reliable documents in history based on available number of copies and how old these manuscripts are [1]. But there is also a scientific element which must be considered here. If you believe the big bang is possible, that all of the matter of the universe was formed out of nothing, then why would the belief that one single ‘Boltzmann embryo’ was formed in a single point in history be incompatible with the natural world as we know it? 

Out of chaos, there was order

The first shot in Coldplay’s music video for The Scientist appears to be entirely conventional – lying on a mattress and breaking the fourth wall Chris Martin gazes at the camera and sings a song about irreversible heartbreak, of longing to go back to the start. It is only when through a strange manoeuvre the watcher realizes that the video is challenging physics: he stands in a way which challenges gravity, walks backwards through a strange basketball game and skilfully skips backwards onto steps he cannot see. Up until this point, you think that this may just be clever props or remarkable body training. It is only when Martin sits in a crashed car which gets ‘uncrashed’ - shattered glass being restored to the window and all - that you are convinced this is no trick of a skilled singer, but is a video played backwards. Our mind gets confused, because it appears he is still singing in our timeline, even as all other events occur in a reverse timeline. 

But why is the reverse car crash the one thing that convinces us that this scenario is impossible to occur in the timeline presented by the video? This is because we intuitively understand the second law of thermodynamics. Put simply, the second law of thermodynamics states that the amount of entropy (i.e. disorder) in a system will always increase in a closed system. The only way to decrease entropy in a system is to perform work in it, which means applying external work to create order within the system. 

In our day-to-day life, we tend to assume that the universe is a closed system and that entropy will generally increase. Once wood catches fire and burns into ashes, we do not expect that cooling down the temperature will restore the ashes to wood, because the energy from the wood has been irreversibly dissipated into the universe through the process of burning. In other words, chaos has increased in the system. Similarly, we don’t expect shards of glass to knit themselves back together into a car window without a human gathering the glass, melting it and reshaping it into a window. We believe that for order to be restored, someone needs to perform work in the system. 

This is why it is so unintuitive for us the assumption that for the big bang to have occurred all the matter in the universe needed to transition from a state of chaos to a state of order, densely compacted into a cosmic egg building up energy. This is a standing challenge to the big bang theory since, under the reasonable assumption that the universe is an isolated system, there are two main ways that this level of order could be achieved. The first is if an agent or entity external to the system performed work in the system to bring order, a view which is incompatible with an atheistic and exclusively materialistic worldview. The second possible scenario is if the universe is perpetually oscillating between expansion and contraction, order and chaos, like a spring which was pulled down hard and is now oscillating until it stabilizes itself. However, this hypothesis again only moves the goal post further back and cannot address how this process began in the first place. With the big bang theory, there is the assumption that the universe is in a trajectory from more chaos to less chaos, and this is in conflict with the evidence we have of how the second law of thermodynamics works.  

While we tend to think of the second law of thermodynamics within the realm of the physical sciences, it also extends to the biological sciences. In fact, this is also largely responsible for the ‘mystery’ in the mystery of life. 

A major function of most living and biological systems is to maintain an environment that can perpetuate life regardless of external challenges, such as changes in temperature, energy and resource availability. Biological systems regulate what goes in, what goes out and how to manage the available resources to maintain itself and continue functioning. The name of this function is homeostasis, and it is essential for life to exist. Translating this into the language of physical sciences, life by definition requires keeping the second law of thermodynamics under control within certain boundaries. A living system must be capable of keeping entropy under control in an autonomous fashion. Maintenance of life is work in a system. If this fails and gene expression and splicing becomes noisy, proteins become misfolded, cells multiply without any regulation, resource availability and resource demand are out of balance, this is when there is the onset of disease and, ultimately, death. 

We usually think about death in terms of the things that we can see and measure, such as when someone’s blood circulation ceases and they stop breathing. Perhaps at a stretch we might even consider brain death, when brain function ceases, regardless of the state of health of the body. But the reality is that there is a long process happening at the level of cells and molecules once your blood stops pumping through your veins. The same way that your phone can still account for the change in time even after the battery ‘runs out’, your cells still have remnants of oxygen and energy which allow certain processes to occur. Genes are still transcribed and proteins are still expressed for several days after blood ceases to be pumped through your veins. But, if these processes are happening for so long after the heart stops beating, why do we consider death irreversible? One big problem is that even as these processes are occurring, with decreasing energy availability, these processes become increasingly noisy, inaccurate and disrupted. On a molecular level, chaos ensues. Or, perhaps more accurately, there is an increase in entropy in the bodily system. 

Therefore, when considering the big bang and the resurrection, we are faced with the same scientific challenge. In both cases we have a system with chaos – for the former, the universe, for the latter a human body – and spontaneously the entropy within this system decreases. If matter formed spontaneously out of nothing, it is statistically more probable that this matter will come into existence in a disordered fashion. Similarly, a body which completely failed at maintaining homeostasis is one of the more chaos-rich biological systems out there. And yet, for the big bang to occur and for a body to become resurrected, both events require a decrease in entropy. How plausible is it that the work to bring order not only could be applied to a body, let alone to every cell and molecule in disarray to bring it back to life? In contrast, how plausible is it that the work to bring order not only to one body but to every molecule in the universe would spring the universe into existence? 

Therefore, if we are willing to consider it possible for the amount of entropy of the entire universe to be decreased preceding the big bang, the decrease in entropy of one single human body is a much smaller scientific challenge. Empirically, all the molecules of that one body would have been contained within the cosmic egg, making it a small subset of the entire universe – and, therefore, less work would be required to be applied to the system. 

For both events, there could even be one same explanation: that there is an agent outside of the universe capable of applying work in the system to bring order. In one case, God in an act of creation. In the second, God in an act of resurrection. 

Tick, tick, boom

At one point, suddenly, this hot, dense cosmic egg expanded. Boom. The universe. 

One question remains, however. If this is an explosion, where did the spark come from? What caused the shift in the state of the cosmic egg, from compression to expansion? 

To my surprise, as I tried to explore this question I found out that this is a question still unanswered and that is still being explored in the realm of physics. The theory I cited earlier – that the universe is oscillating between expansion and compression – remains as one possibility. Personally, I find this an interesting theory, but an unsatisfactory explanation as the question remains, how and why did the spring get pulled in the first place? 

An alternative theory from physics which may be relevant looks at what was around the cosmic egg – was the explosion more of an external pull from something else? This is what dark energy is proposed to be, a mysterious entity which was first theorized in 1998. One of the attractive aspects of dark energy is that, together with the big bang, it gives a possible explanation as to why the universe is expanding faster over time – a well documented observation reported simultaneously by two different teams of astronomers  which conflicts with the theory that the expansion of the universe is accounted for entirely by the aftermath of the big bang. The combination of the explosion of the big bang pushing matter out and dark energy pulling this matter, causing it to expand at an accelerating rate, seems attractive in terms of what we can see and measure. Curiously, it is theorized that dark energy makes up 70% of the universe, but no one has ever seen or measured it, even though there is abundant evidence for it. 

My conclusion in speaking to physicists about this is that there is still a large degree of mystery surrounding the question of what, why or who caused this shift in state during the big bang. This question may well lie further in the field of philosophy or even theology rather than physics. While I cannot give a conclusive answer as to what caused this shift, what I want to focus on is that in one point in time an event occurred for which we currently have no explanation, and which had rippling effects across the cosmos. We have robust theories about what happened after this event - as matter divided and cooled entire planets and galaxies were formed, they themselves now exerting gravitational pull on other bodies and the laws of planetary motion swing into action. Time itself began. As the planets cooled, conditions in one of these planets were suitable for supporting life – a degree of fine tuning of multiple constants inherent to the universe landed precisely where they would need to be for life to be possible [2]. Ultimately, from mystery, there was life. 

We are very happy to live with this mystery, this huge gap in physics. Most people with any scientific interest claim to believe in the big bang. And yet, we use a much stricter measuring stick with Biblical accounts than we use for scientific theories. The thought of a dead body coming to life is absurd, mythological and naïve. 

But for one moment, imagine this with me. At one point in time, in a dark tomb cut into the rock a body was lying still for three days. By this time, all gene expression had ceased. No biological process could be sustained anymore. Death on the level of the organism, of the cells and of the molecules had set in. The integrity of all RNA transcripts was lost. But suddenly, in one mysterious moment, the entropy within this body in every cell decreased. Gene transcription began again. Cells started producing ATP, moving, communicating and repairing themselves. A heart began to beat and lungs filled with stagnant air, where the smell of putrefaction may have lingered. Christians believe that in that single mysterious moment something which we don’t fully understand changed about the fabric of the universe. A man in first century Israel was dead one moment, and came alive the next, and it recreated the world. The big bang may have been the first singularity in this universe. But the resurrection may have been the second. 

The big bang and the resurrection are singularities

For one moment, let’s hold the origin of the universe and the resurrection side-by-side. Let us set aside in both cases the question of ‘why’, and reconsider the evidence supporting both events. In the first case, the expansion of the universe consistent with the big bang has been thoroughly validated with X-rays from galaxy clusters, measurements of the large-scale structure of the universe, detection of the cosmic microwave background. This means that even though there remain questions about the precise mechanics and details of how the big bang occurred, this still is a reasonable hypothesis. This is why the big bang could be considered as a singularity, an event which took place once and cannot be reproduced and did not occur according to the existing laws of nature.  

On the other hand, what is the evidence that we have that Jesus Christ was born, lived, died and resurrected? The historical evidence of Jesus existing is difficult to refute, as he is one of the people in history for whom we have the most documented accounts. But what about who he claimed he was? Here we have a man who claimed to be the son of God, who said he came to this world to bring a new order, to restore justice, to bring healing, and to make things right. When Jesus walked into the world, life expectancy was around 30 years old and infant mortality rate was at least 50% [3]. Since then, we have developed medicine so that life expectancy in the UK is 78.6 for males and 82.6 for females [4], and infant mortality rate is 0.39% [5]. We have developed vaccines, antibiotics, gene therapy, the list goes on. It sounds, to me, like a world where healing has broken through. 

Now let’s look at justice: in the world Jesus walked into baby girls were discarded in dumpsters for the unforgivable crime of not being a boy. Widely respected philosophers like Plato and Aristotle said that any child that was not healthy should be equally disposed of quietly [6,7]. It was a world where slavery, misogyny and racism were the norm, rather than the exception. A man raping a woman or another man that was below his station was seen not only as acceptable, but expected. We have a long way to go on many of these fronts, but the evidence is that we are now in a better place than we were in the 1st century. I could go on – equality, progress, freedom, kindness. In fact, historians and writers like Tom Holland and Glen Scrivener have indeed gone on exploring these themes, and make a compelling case for the impact of Christianity on modern values and culture [8,9]. Ultimately, when I look at the society we live in following the birth of Jesus Christ and the consequences of Christianity, it looks indeed like signs of a new order in the world which is consistent with what Jesus spoke about. Like the big bang, the evidence is that this singularity of God himself coming into the world happened in one moment and has continued to have effects throughout history. 

Unlike the big bang, however, with Jesus we actually have a different type of evidence that we can also look to. We have eye-witnesses and extensive historical records of his life and death. Not only do we have records of who Jesus was, what he did, but we know that the people who walked most closely with him were so convinced that he was the son of God, that they were all either executed or exiled because they refused to deny what they had seen. One author contrasts this with the attempted cover-up associated Watergate scandal:

"I know the resurrection is a fact, and Watergate proved it to me. How? Because 12 men testified they had seen Jesus raised from the dead, then they proclaimed that truth for 40 years, never once denying it. Every one was beaten, tortured, stoned and put in prison. They would not have endured that if it weren't true. Watergate embroiled 12 of the most powerful men in the world-and they couldn't keep a lie for three weeks. You're telling me 12 apostles could keep a lie for 40 years? Absolutely impossible."

-Charles W. Colson

Perhaps, like with the big bang, there still is a great deal of mystery surrounding Jesus’ life, death and resurrection – why did he need to come? Why did he need to die? What was the mechanism by which his death impacts our lives? Why did resurrection changed the world? But, ultimately, especially within scientific fields we know that to make progress we often need to be willing to tolerate living with some questions about the exact details. Having some working models and concepts that are to some extent undefined (such as dark matter), or even areas we know are largely unexplored until we are ready to explore them further is part of research and learning. Similarly, in the Christian faith, there are indeed many unknowns. As a Christian, I still have many questions about the whys and the hows, but the extant evidence is sufficiently compelling that I, like many other intellectuals and scientists, am willing to live by its answers even if I still have and am exploring its many unanswered questions.

Living with unanswered questions and mystery are not the mark of an uneducated mind, in fact, it is a necessary part of doing science. If you believe that the big bang is true, then you already believe that all the scientific laws challenged by the resurrection have been challenged before. You live with mystery and unanswered questions around the origin of the universe, and you still choose to believe that the remaining evidence for the big bang is enough. You cannot make a case for why the big bang is true without also making the resurrection possible. Both of these events claim to be singularities – unique, out of this world events, with both of them challenging conventional scientific laws. 

Ultimately, I would argue that both of these events have had cosmic consequences of equivalent scale: the first, by springing the universe into existence, the latter by giving it significance. 

References

[1] Can we trust the gospels? Peter J Williams, Crossway, 2018

[2] A fine-tuned universe: the quest for God in Science and Theology, Alister E. McGrath, Westminster John Knox, 2009

[3] The Impact of Jesus in First-Century Palestine - Textual and Archaeological Evidence for Long-standing Discontent, Rosemary Margaret Luff, Cambridge University Press, 2019

[4] National life tables - life expectancy in the UK: 2020 to 2022, https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/lifeexpectancies/bulletins/nationallifetablesunitedkingdom/2020to2022

[5] Child and infant mortality in England and Wales: 2022, https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/deaths/bulletins/childhoodinfantandperinatalmortalityinenglandandwales/2022

[6] Republic, Book 5, p. 460d, http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0168%3Abook%3D5%3Apage%3D460, quoted in Scrivener, 48

[7] Politics, Book 7, Section 1335b, quoted in Scrivener, 48

[8] Dominion, Tom Holland, Little, Brown, 2019

[9] The Air We Breathe, Glen Scrivener, The Good Book Company, 2022