Uncaused Light -- God as a "stop-gap"?

In the book "Letters and Papers from Prison" Dietrich Bonhoeffer writes: "It has again brought home to me quite clearly how wrong it is to use God as a stop-gap for the incompleteness of our knowledge. If in fact the frontiers of knowledge are being pushed further and further back (and that is bound to be the case). Then God is being pushed back with them, and is therefore continually in retreat."

In one of his essays in "Creation and Fall" written in 1933 Bonhoeffer breaks his own rule. In his concluding remarks regarding Genesis 1:14-19 he raises the "old rationalistic question" of how light could be created in day 1 and the sun not until day 4. Where did this "uncaused light" come from? Bonhoeffer discusses this apparent paradox and concludes by saying: "The light per se of the creation, the light which lay formless over the formless darkness, is bound to form, to law, to the fixed, to number; but it remains in God, it remains God's creation, and never itself becomes calculable number."

The "never itself becomes calculable number" part of his statement appears to be wrong. Bonhoeffer reasonably assumed that the specifics of the creation of the universe would be forever inaccessible to science. What he could not have anticipated was that fifteen years later, based on the principles of Einstein's general relativity, George Gamow would publish a model for the creation of the universe. This theory postulated:

1. Light could not travel any appreciable distance in the initial years of the early universe because any emitted photons were immediately reabsorbed by the ionized matter around it.
2. About 400,000 years after the Big Bang the universe had cooled enough for matter to "condense" into neutral atoms. This transition allowed light to freely travel throughout the universe. Because the universe was exceedingly uniform at that point (formless) this shift occurred concurrently throughout.
3. Gamow calculated that these freed photons from this transition would still be continuously arriving at the earth, "cooled" by the subsequent expansion of the universe to an equivalent black body temperature of about 5 degrees above absolute zero.

In 1948 when Gamow made this 5 degree prediction the technology did not exist to prove or disprove it. However in 1964 two physicists testing their new microwave receiver pointed it at the sky. They expected to measure just the self-generated noise of their equipment. Instead they found that no matter where in the sky they pointed they measured more noise than they could explain. At first they attributed it to pigeon crap in their antenna. But eventually they established it was photons from the cosmos, arriving with an equivalent temperature of 3.5 degrees --the light from the Big Bang. Recent satellite based measurements have refined that temperature to 2.725 +- 0.02 degrees (really!)

The light of creation that illuminated the universe for almost ten billion years before our own sun ignited has been given a number.

Meditations on a speck of sky

When I first saw this Hubble Space Telescope picture I was impressed by its beauty and the claim in the associated article that at least 1500 galaxies were contained in the image--which only covers about 0.00000025% of the sky. However, what really surprised me was the assertion that the picture would look very similar regardless of where the telescope was pointed, as long as there wasn't something "close" in the way (e.g. the Milky Way or its neighbors). To me this implied that either our galaxy is at the center of the universe (unlikely and rejected by astronomers), or I didn't know what the hell was going on.

A couple of years later I can report that this “every direction looks the same” assertion does make sense to me--although some aspects still make my head hurt. The reasons for this apparent "center of the universe" view relate to the physics of the Big Bang. A couple of key points:

• The Big Bang was not an explosion in space. There was no space before the Big Bang and no time. The Big Bang not only created all the matter in the universe, it also created the framework (space) to hold it, and the time to run it.
  
• In the Big Bang's very early phases the universe expanded much faster than the speed of light. It was space, not matter or light that was expanding so the Einsteinian speed limit was not violated. This early hyper expansion, called the inflationary phase, ended when the universe was about a meter across. One of the resulting effects was that matter, which was caught up in the expansion, became very evenly distributed throughout the universe. By the way, the spot where you are now sitting was inside that meter wide universe.
  
• Because it started out so evenly distributed, even when matter eventually got around to clumping together into galaxies the large scale uniformity of the universe was preserved. The result is that our view of the far away universe looks the same in all directions.

As I learned about the beginnings of the universe as defined by the current, general relativity based theories, there was an unexpected harmonizing with Biblical accounts of creation. As Dr Hugh Ross points out , the most common description used in the Bible for the creation of the heavens (11 times) was that they were “stretched out”. For example: "This is what God the Lord says--he, who created the heavens and stretched them out" Isaiah 42:4 It is inspiring to me that these 2000+ year old words can be re-interpreted from formerly puzzling passages into respectable descriptions of the formation of the universe as astrophysics now describes it.