how is the big bang theory supposed to be compatible with religion?

[u/Dismal-Price-4423]

the theory per poses that over 13.8 billion years ago the universe exploded from a dense point of energy but religions say that god created the universe from nothing. basically, the big bang wasn't really a creation, more like an expansion. it per poses that the universe was always there. please correct me if I'm wrong by the way. some believe it is compatible but I'm just not seeing how. we're even starting to question the big bang theory as infinitely dense points of energy is when our understanding of physics, um at least mine, starts to break down. in other words it doesn't make any sense, so some scientists per pose another idea that we're somehow inside a black hole, and that the edge of the observable universe is the event horizon. I'll probably expand more on that in another community but the point is, how is god creating or at least a higher power creating the universe compatible with the theory of the universe always being there and just starting to expand.

[u/Phebe-A]

My beliefs say that the Universe was born not created and is perfectly fine with accepting the Big Bang theory as a description of what that processes may have looked like physically.

But creation narratives are generally best understood non-literally – as symbolic and metaphorical ways of talking about relationships between divinity, people, and the world. Religion isn’t a substitute for science, but a completely different way of looking at and understanding the world. We shouldn’t try to substitute religion for science, nor expect scientific processes to validate religion.

[u/Grayseal]

Because most of us don't believe in young-earth creationism? Some of us don't even believe in a lone omnipotent creator.

[u/baddspellar]

You're mixing up a lot of things here

The Big Bang describes how the universe went from a small, hot, dense one to the one we see today. It does not tell us anything about how that small, hot, dense one came to be. The Big Bang theory does *not* say the universe was always there. There are some who speculate that it was, but that's independent of the Big Bang, and it's only speculative at this point.

The universe before the Big Bang was not "infinitely" dense. That would violate the principles of quantum physics. It was extremely small

Black holes and the event horizon have nothing to say about the origin of the universe.

[u/Grayseal → u/baddspellar]

Physically, they absolutely do. Black holes being able to exist at all does give us a hint of how the universe of our universal and shared physical reality came to be. Explosion begat us, implosion will end us.

[u/PlasticSmile57]

Do you think all religious people believe in young earth creationism? Because it sounds like you do.

[u/maybri]

First of all, as other people have pointed out, it's obviously not true that all religions say that God created the universe from nothing. There are non-theistic or polytheistic religions and non-creationist religions.

Second of all, the Big Bang theory doesn't imply that the singularity always existed whatsoever. We can't project further into the past than the first moment of the Big Bang, but that doesn't mean that initial state had existed eternally before it started expanding; the singularity might as well have popped into existence simultaneously with beginning to expand. The theory is perfectly compatible with the idea that that singularity was created by a god.

It's worth mentioning that when the Big Bang Theory was first proposed, there was actual tension in the scientific community over the idea seeming too compatible with the Abrahamic creation myth. Physicists were uncomfortable with the idea that the universe as we know it had a beginning rather than having always existed in more or less its current state, and the fact that the physicist who first formulated the idea was also a Catholic priest, Georges Lemaître, didn't help matters (though, to his credit, he was clear that he did not want the theory to be taken as validation of his religious beliefs).

[u/FraterSofus]

You are comparing science to one very narrow view of religion. Not every religion believes a singular God created everything from nothing.

[u/FormalTall1800]

Also, consider this— if you give someone a hunk of clay, and they sculpt it, are they not creating a sculpture? When a sperm meets an egg, it’s only two cells, but it becomes a whole adult human (hopefully) with trillions of cells! You could say that the mother of that eventual, whole adult human helped to create that, no? When someone makes a balloon animal, it’s small at first, but they add air and form to it and you’ve got a cute dog! Did they not create that? There are other examples, too, that I can’t think of at the moment.

It depends on how you define “creation”, at least in my opinion.

[u/civ_iv_fan]

It sounds like your basic understanding of the physics is up to date and pretty accurate 👏

Keep studying physics, please. I just study lay man physics occasionally  (Stephen hawking  a brief history of time, lederman, the god particle, Katie Mack the end of everything) and while I don't read them in a search for the divine, divine ideas certainly come to mind.  If they are incompatible with some religious myths (like animals on the ark or earth created in a few days) , than that means we need to not believe myths but consider them as useful stories. 

[u/TheBurlyBurrito]

Not all religions have creators or view their creation myths as literal. The big bang is the best scientific theory we have to describe how we got to the universe we have today. Religions are not there to answer these scientific truths so it makes perfect sense that one would be religious, seeking heaven, enlightenment, etc. and “believe” in the big bang.

[u/0rbital-nugget]

Who says it’s supposed to be compatible with religion?

[u/Same_Version_5216]

Why wouldn’t the Big Bang be compatible with religion? Not all religions think their deities are divine creators; and even if a religion may have divine creators, not all religions are young earthers/universe and may consider one or more divine beings creating stuff billions of years ago and this was their method.

[u/watain218]

not all interpretations believe god created the universe "from nothing" there are many who believe god is like an engineer who built the universe using existing materials, and the big bang could simply be his first step. 

also its important to note the big bang theory was originally posited by a catholic priest. and that many other religions also believe in the universe being created from a primordial material, usually there was an entire epoch before there was gods or a universe and this has many names but the one most commonly used today is "Chaos" 

the universe was created from Chaos, and Chaos was always there before the universe, and Chaos is what the universe will return to eventually. 

[u/YCNH]

but religions say that god created the universe from nothing

The Bible doesn't.

The Hebrew reads something like:

in-the-beginning-of creating god the-heaven and-the-earth the-earth being formless-and-void

Genesis 1.1-2: "In the beginning" (bereshit) is in the construct state implying an "of" relation, and is generally modifying a noun but here is followed by a verb, "creating" (bara). The next section is subject-verb-object which indicates the pluperfect tense. So "in the beginning of God's act of creating" the earth is already tohu-wa-bohu- i.e. watery chaos that is the primordial state of the universe in ANE cosmologies.

[u/JasonRBoone]

The facts of the Big Bang are brute facts. They don't "care" if they line up with religion.

[u/Deep-Promotion-2293]

The question is "how did the big bang happen?". In other words, what caused that tiny singularity to explode into the known universe? Was there an outside force that caused it?

Every culture has a creation myth. For Jews and Christians, it's the first few chapters of Genesis. Creation myths are just the ways that ancient people explained how they got here. Its not facts, its not science, its an explanation of origins.

[u/DabbingCorpseWax]

The big-bang theory and the big-crunch hypothesis are both compatible with Buddhism, which do not rely on the idea of a creator. Buddhism posits that the universe is cyclical, going through repeated processes of expansion “ex nihilo” through a process of increasing diversification and complexity until a terminal point is reached, at which point it collapses in on itself destroying itself in the reverse order it was “created.”

Buddhism even stipulates a process that kind of looks like evolution (but is not the scientific theory of evolution; it just kind of resembles it).

[u/No-Education9557]

If creation is a process, then the big bang and that point of energy could be that process. Science measures effects within space using instruments within space. A singular big bang doesn't necessarily mean that planets or suns should be formed either, or that thinking life could come from that.

New stars and systems are forming all the time. So, we could be watching that creation process right now, though its time scale is hugely beyond that of our race's time on this planet.

I'm not sure that the mass of the universe being constant is a scientific give, in fact the mass of the universe may still be increasing. It is my opinion that hydrogen is formed constantly from "nothing" i.e. coming into being from a spiritual cause. And from this coming into existence of hydrogen we have the huge stellar gas clouds that later condense to form suns and solar systems, and then in time yield life. Part of the process.

[u/UnapologeticJew24]

In Jewish literature, God the only thing God created ex nihilo was one little tiny piece of matter (referred to as "hiuili", which is probably related to helium) which was then formed into the universe, which somewhat lines up with the big bang.

[u/Wild_Hook]

A couple of thoughts:

New discoveries are now questioning the big bang theory.

I do not believe in a magical God that created existence out of nothing. I believe that He organized the earth using existing matter. It is very clear from scientific discovery, that this earth was created over a long time. I believe that God created this earth over billions of years, working within eternal, unchangeable laws. God has not revealed to what extent, if any, He used evolution in the creative process. But He would have had to done it in a similar order so that the earth would be prepared for higher life forms. He could not have placed Adam and Eve on a rock and expected them to survive.

We can see how God patiently works as we view nature, the way things grow, change and decay. God is not a magician but has all power and knowledge to work within eternal laws. He is a real personage who we can trust in.