Since around 1980 cosmological interest has shifted to the first ten
million, billion, billion, billion, billionth of a second (10-43
second) of the universe’s history, when the developing universe was so small as
to be significantly affected by quantum theory. Stephen Hawking records that he
was at a conference at the Vatican in 1981 at the end of which:
the participants were granted an
audience with the Pope (John Paul II). He told us that it was all right to
study the evolution of the universe after the big bang, but we should not
inquire into the big bang itself because that was the moment of Creation and
therefore the work of God. I was glad then that he did not know the subject of
the talk I had just given at the conference - the possibility that space-time
was finite but had no boundary, which means that it had no beginning, no moment
of Creation.
The physicist continues, ironically, ‘I had no wish to share the fate of
Galileo...’ However, Hawking has ventured various theological comments much
more extreme than any uttered by Galileo, most famously that:
So long as the universe had a beginning,
we could suppose that it had a creator. But if the universe is really
completely self-contained, having no boundary or edge, it would have neither
beginning nor end: it would simply be. What place, then, for a creator?
To understand Hawking’s new idea for a universe with no beginning see the
Hawking-Hartle proposal for the early universe. See also theological
responses to quantum cosmology.
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Contributed by: Dr. Christopher Southgate
Source: God, Humanity and the
Cosmos (T&T Clark, 1999)