So then, I’ve admitted I believe in Evolution. So the obvious conclusion from most people I know (but not most people reading this) is “So that means you believe the whole universe started from nothing?”

Well, no. But I do believe there was a big bang.

The rapid expansion of the universe from a chaotic beginning is assured. The question now is what set it off, not whether or not it happened. That’s a pretty bold statement to some, I’m sure, but it’s not one that I take lightly. It’s not that I’m speaking of this out of simple faith but rather out of simple observation. We look into the sky every night and we see stars and galaxies that are so far away from us that we could not see them if the universe wasn’t extremely old already. Light travels at a constant and these things are far far away. To put this into perspective, this picture takes up a space in the sky that could be covered by your finger.

Obviously, it’s old. And it’s expanding, and it continues to expand (and even accelerate). But there’s more to it than just seeing it expand because the further we look out into the universe the further back in time we’re looking. When you look at that link above you have to realize that the oldest known galaxies we’ve ever seen are in there as distant red points of light. Whole galaxies that are so far away that they’re just red dots that continue to speed away from us at speeds that can hardly be expressed in terms humans understand. And behind it all, past all of that pretty light, we see this:

This is everywhere we look, everywhere. In fact, it’s not just everywhere out there, but here too. When you get static on your TV, you’re seeing this in the snow on your screen. This is a radiation that exists everywhere throughout the universe, even in empty space. How did radiation get everywhere? Because the explosion that created it was everywhere!

You take these things together and you take the years of observation and calculation and there’s really only one conclusion that makes any sense. The universe started in a big hot flash of expansion (not an explosion, but expansion). It didn’t go boom, it inflated like a balloon. It continues to inflate like a balloon. And we can see the hot breath pushing it out.

Of course, we don’t know everything about it, we can’t answer all of the questions. Could it be that God said “let there be light” and there was a big flash of everything that started off at a single point? Sure. But does that mean we should stop looking to see if there was another explanation? No, not at all. If anything, searching for what started the big bang is the search for God. If they find a god, then they find one, if they don’t, then they don’t. The universe doesn’t abide by our desires and wishes. If anything, it constantly finds it fun to remind us of how unimportant we are to it.

And Carl Sagan up there once said it himself. If we were to find that there was a god that created it all, we’d then have to ask the next question of where that god came from. Then we’d be back on the search all over again. Sometimes, this is frightening for people because it means we may never know the absolute truth to everything. They’re comforted by the idea that they know it all and that they don’t have any unanswered questions.

But me, in terms of the origin of the universe, I’m not bothered by not having all of the answers. In fact, I’d go so far as to say I’m honored such an amazing bat-shit event eventually led to my existence. Every atom in my body is as old as the universe itself on some level, was once a part of the stars, and if that god did say “let there be light”…

That light was us.