Through the 1920s, every major cosmologist believed the universe had always existed in roughly its present form — eternal, static, unchanging. This was the philosophical inheritance of Plato and Aristotle, twenty-three centuries strong. To suggest otherwise was scientific blasphemy.
Then in 1927, a Belgian Catholic priest with a doctorate in physics, Monsignor Georges Lemaître, published a paper claiming the universe was actually expanding. If it was expanding now, he reasoned, it must have been smaller in the past. Run the film backward far enough and you arrive at a single point — what Lemaître called the primeval atom — from which everything came. The universe, he was saying, had a beginning.
Two years later in 1929, Edwin Hubble at Mount Wilson observatory measured the light from distant galaxies and found that almost every one of them was redshifted — their light stretched toward the red end of the spectrum, which means they were moving away from us. The further the galaxy, the faster it receded. The universe was, in fact, expanding. Lemaître was right.
The English physicist Fred Hoyle, who hated the theory, mocked it on a 1949 BBC broadcast as a «Big Bang idea.» The name stuck. What had been heretical in 1927 was mainstream by 1965 when the cosmic microwave background was discovered — the leftover radiation from the bang itself. The universe began. Genesis had said so for three thousand years.
Ἐν ἀρχῇ ἐποίησεν ὁ Θεὸς τὸν οὐρανὸν καὶ τὴν γῆν.In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.
1Ἐν ἀρχῇ ἦν ὁ Λόγος, καὶ ὁ Λόγος ἦν πρὸς τὸν Θεόν, καὶ Θεὸς ἦν ὁ Λόγος. 2οὗτος ἦν ἐν ἀρχῇ πρὸς τὸν Θεόν. 3πάντα δι' αὐτοῦ ἐγένετο, καὶ χωρὶς αὐτοῦ ἐγένετο οὐδὲ ἓν ὃ γέγονεν.1In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. 2He was in the beginning with God. 3All things were made through him, and without him was not any thing made that was made.
πίστει νοοῦμεν κατηρτίσθαι τοὺς αἰῶνας ῥήματι Θεοῦ, εἰς τὸ μὴ ἐκ φαινομένων τὸ βλεπόμενον γεγονέναι.By faith we understand that the universe was created by the word of God, so that what is seen was not made out of things that are visible.
‘In the Beginning’ — A Beginning Means a Beginner
Plato and Aristotle did not believe in a creator God. They did not need to — the universe, on their view, had always existed. A universe that has always existed needs no explanation. But a universe that began — that came into being at a finite moment in the past — demands an explanation. What caused it? On the philosophical principle that nothing comes from nothing, the answer must be something that did not itself begin. Something eternal. Lemaître’s discovery returned the cosmological argument to the front of the room.
The Hebrew “In the Beginning”
The first word of Genesis in Hebrew is b’reshit. The Septuagint translators rendered it en archê (Εν αρχᴙ) — in the beginning, in a starting point. The same phrase opens John’s gospel a thousand years later. John writes en archê ên ho Logos — in the beginning was the Word — deliberately echoing Genesis 1:1. He wants the reader to make the connection: the One who began the universe is the same Word now incarnate in Christ.
Order of Creation — A Real Tension
Critics rightly point out that the Genesis order (heavens and earth, light, sky, dry land, plants, sun and moon, fish and birds, land animals, humans) does not match the scientific order (energy, the four forces, stars, galaxies, planets, primitive life, animals, humans). The two orders are not identical. Honest readers from Augustine onward have proposed several resolutions: the day-age view (each Genesis day is an epoch), the framework view (the six days are a literary structure of forming and filling, not a chronological log), and the cosmic temple view (Genesis 1 is the inauguration of the cosmos as God’s temple). Week eleven will return to this carefully. For now: both books begin in the beginning, and the same God wrote them.
Pleasant Springs Church — Discipleship School