the universe had a beginning however, as most believed since Aristotle’s time that the universe had always existed. The motivation for believing in an eternal universe was the desire to avoid invoking divine intervention. Conversely, those who believed that the universe had a beginning, used it as an argument for the existence of God, as the first cause, or prime mover of the universe. If one believed that the universe had a beginning, the obvious question was – “What happened before the beginning?” (Stephen Hawkins, 2007).
The Big Bang Theory
Identifying the exact date and time of the origin of the universe sounds quite incredible to me, but the dominant scientific theory of the origin of the universe today is the “Big Bang” theory – which specifically indicates a point in time that the universe began. According to the Big Bang theory, the universe was created approximately 13.7 billion years ago from the random, cosmic explosion (or expansion) of a subatomic ball that hurled space, time, matter and energy in all directions. Everything – the whole universe — came from an initial speck of infinite density (also known as a “singularity”). This speck (existing outside of space and time) appeared from nowhere, for no reason, only to explode (start expanding) all of a sudden. Over a period of approximately 10 billion years, this newly created space, time, matter and energy evolved into remarkably-designed and fully-functional stars, galaxies and planets, including our earth.
In other words, everything that we see, hear, taste, touch, and smell today was created in a single micro-second by a fraction of an atom that instantaneously exploded the four known forces of nature – gravity, electromagnetism, and