Proposed Defeaters to the Big Bang Standard Cosmological Model---Part 2: The Oscillating Universe One of the most theologically significant implications of the Big Bang theory is that the universe had an absolute beginning. This comports very well with the biblical view that God created the heavens and the earth. In order to avoid a universe with a finite past and, consequently, the need for a theistic cause, alternate theories have been proposed. One such theory, once entertained by Einstein but currently out of favor, is the Oscillating Universe Model. This states that the universes expansion will slow and then gravitational forces will bring the entire universe back to a singularity in what has been described as The Big Crunch. The theory states that the universe will then again expand and repeat this cycle forever into the future has it has always done in the infinite past. Unfortunately, this theory has a number of things going against it. First, there seems to be no end to the universes expansion. In 1998, data clearly indicated that the universe is not only continuing to expand but that the expansion is accelerating. Most scientists concede the high likelihood that the universes future will be endless expansion into a cold, dark end (The Big Chill instead of the The Big Crunch). Second, if the universe did oscillate, the Second Law of Thermodynamics limits the number of cycles because a closed system such as the universe continues to lose useful energy to entropy even through multiple cycles. Going further into the future, each successive cycle will run out of useful energy. With that in mind, if the universe had existed eternally from the past, then we would have run out of energy an infinitely long time ago. Third, thermodynamics predicts that projection into the past leads you to a universe that has smaller and smaller cycles until, at some point in the finite past, you come to a singularity. Thus, even if the universe oscillated, you cannot have an eternally existing universe in the past. One of the next areas we will discuss in Sunday School at 9:15am in Room 303 will be philosophical arguments to show that the universe could not have existed in the infinite past. Join us! ....and stay tuned for Part Three for the last main theory against the Big Bang!
Posted on: Wed, 12 Mar 2014 04:12:46 +0000
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