Definition of the Universe

Many people wonder about the origin of the universe and the planets. One of the most frequently asked questions is: Did the universe created by God appear by chance?

We have decided to help you better understand the universe as a whole made up of several planets by writing this article.

The universe is the sum of all living things, of heaven and earth. It is also the sum of everything that exists, the totality of beings and things. The principle of correlation is universal and this foundation is common to all beings that have relationships.

In this article, you will discover:

• The origin of the physical universe and the universe according to the Christian faith,
• Did the universe appear by chance?
  
• What is the current view of the Universe?

If you would like to know the secrets of the universe created by God and the exact origin of this universe, we invite you to find out now! 🙏

The origin of the physical universe

The rigorous scientific consideration of the origin of the universe is a relatively new problem. However, its incorporation into human thought can be considered very old. Although our knowledge of oral and written human history is less than 5,000 years old. It is clear from various archaeological data that man is concerned with the world in which he lives. He has ideas about the Universe as a whole. It can be said that the traces are lost in time.

When man became a farmer, he needed to scan the sky to better regulate the sowing periods. He also needed to scan the sky for harvests and thus become more efficient in his new mode of survival. Then, the observation of nature, and fundamentally of the cyclical behavior in the movements of the sky, became an important task. This occupation enabled him to gather a set of observations over a few millennia. These observations accumulated in parallel with the different theories of the Universe that he developed to explain them.

These theoretical descriptions are not scientific because many of the elements that we consider fundamental to this discourse today are missing. In any case, they gave man an overview of what he observed and of certain clearly recurring phenomena. They even allowed him to predict future consequences, a fundamental objective of current science. The first interpretations that analyzed the observed regularities by considering the “celestial spheres” (homocentric) are supposed to locate the “fixed” stars. The inclusion of epicycles and deferents made it possible to explain planetary movements. They constituted an important advance in the construction of a primitive “science of totality” or “cosmology”. These primitive cosmologies developed and progressed in true schools of thought that are remembered today alongside the names of Hipparchus, Apollonius, Aristotle and Ptolemy.

The origins according to the Christian faith

The idea that we have presented so far is derived from the scientific method. According to this method, theories are confirmed or abandoned if the results of experiments and observations on the universe do not verify the conclusions. Sometimes these same experiments provide new data that does not correspond to existing theories and requires new formulations. The starting point, our first affirmation on this path is therefore our personal recognition and our acceptance (at least) of the possibility of the existence of this Being: God.

The concept of God's Universe that we will analyze comes from very different sources of science. In this case, the concepts on which to reason come from a spiritual experience at the beginning of which God himself is situated. And God is not a philosophical idea. For all monotheists, he is a person. He is the Being par excellence, the only necessary Being, according to which he has been revealed to us: God is He who is, that is to say the only being who is by himself. The rest of us are contingent beings, created by Him.

When we affirm that we are contingent beings, we are not introducing anything new in relation to the previous vision: for science, it is also obvious. Man did not create the Universe nor did he create himself, and therefore, in relation to nature, we are also contingent. But in our religious conception, there is a fundamental difference: God is above nature, he is both the Creator of the universe and our Creator. In this sense, God is superior to destiny, unlike the other religions of antiquity which, like the Greeks, assumed that their gods were subject to it.

What was God doing before he created the universe?

According to St. Augustine, time itself is a creation of God and did not exist before.

The recent tendency to consider what may have happened before the creation of the universe is the latest change in thinking over the millennia. Philosophers and theologians have addressed the question of the creation of time and the creation of the world in all cultures. Our “genealogy” leaves behind it the first forms of life, the formation of the stars, the composition of the first elements, and reaches the energy that bathes the main space.

Will everything continue like this forever or will everything end at some point in life? Greek philosophers discussed the origin of time at length. Aristotle, for example, discussed the absence of continuity, invoking the principle that nothing comes from nothing. If the universe cannot come into being from nihilo, it must always exist. Similarly, time must extend forever into the past as well as into the future. But Christian theologians do not agree at all with these thoughts of Aristotle. St. Augustine asserts that God exists outside of space and time and can create them by forging other aspects of the universe.

The changes that the universe created by God undergoes over time

Over time, the Universe created by the eternal changes itself. Here are some examples of modification:

• Expansion and stretching of the Universe towards infinity

Until now, our idea of the world has been very simple, not to say naive. The Universe was reduced to the Milky Way. All in all, there can only be one Universe, ours and no other. However, the observations of Hubble and Humason show, without question, that the Universe is not made up of a single galaxy, but of millions of others.

When the discovery was officially announced on the morning of January 1, 1925, the whole world was stunned. The universe is much bigger and much vaster than we could ever have believed. In 1929, Hubble's findings were even more disturbing and very interesting. Something unheard of, which no one had expected.

But the spectral images are incredibly unimaginable because the galaxies are far from fixed. As we thought, the galaxies are moving relative to each other at breakneck speed. What can this mean: galaxies are moving? It is not galaxies, but the universe itself, the whole universe that is fleeing! It is expanding at every moment, being drawn towards infinity.

• The evolution of the universe created by God towards increasing complexity
  

As with all living beings, there is genetic data that “encodes” the physical characteristics of each being. The Universe could thus be preceded by cosmological information. This genetic information also “encrypts” the properties and higher physical laws of beings. Like any code, this “basic universal” program boils down to a system of instructions and numerical data.

During 137 million centuries after the birth of the world, life appeared in a small trivial world. This small world is in the form of flowers; bacteria, dogs, paramecia, rhinoceroses, oaks and mites, starfish and human beings. However, despite this tremendous diversity, the organisms of all human beings, at the genetic and molecular level, display a remarkable unity of structure and function. They all have the same nucleic acids and the same proteins made from the same building blocks (amino acids). Their genes are all forms of a DNA molecule, the genetic code is the same, the same enzymes are involved in the same reactions.

Of course, luck plays a part, but there is also a mysterious program that limits and contributes to the increasing complexity of the evolution of the Universe.

Current view of the universe and its formation

Generally speaking, we can say today that 99% of the visible matter in the universe is made up of hydrogen and helium. The remaining 1% corresponds to the heaviest elements, which astronomers refer to collectively as “metals”. Their relative abundance, the temperature at which they were formed and the time during which they were formed can be seen in the figure. With the current data and accepting the hypothesis of “inflation”, we can summarize the history of the universe as follows: in the first moments, during “Planck time” (10-43 s), the universe was filled with very dense energy, at a temperature and pressure corresponding to this state.

Subsequently, it expanded and cooled rapidly, undergoing phase changes of the type that occur during the condensation of steam, but relating to elementary particles. At approximately 10-35 of the first second, the universe undergoes a phase change that causes a stage of exponential expansion, known as “cosmic inflation”. This stage of inflation resulted in a plasma of elementary particles called “quarks” and “gluons”, with a relativistic motion.

The increase in the size of space causes additional cooling, which continues until another phase transition occurs and “baryogenesis” takes place, the genesis of the components of the atomic nucleus, about which we still know very little. It is believed that at this time the “baryonic mass of the universe” was formed and that the asymmetry between matter and antimatter that we observe today occurred. That is to say that at that time, quarks and gluons, which until then had been free, combined to form baryons such as the proton or neutron, the basic constituents of the atomic nucleus.

Was the Big Bang the beginning of time, or did the universe exist before it?

Less than ten years ago, such a concern emerged as a sacred sanctuary. For cosmologists, there was simply no opinion on such a question. Imagining a time before the Big Bang was like looking for a place north of the North Pole. According to the theory of general relativity, a growing world must have begun with a big bang. This implies the finiteness of time, which appeared simultaneously with space and energy-matter.

This way of looking at things has changed in recent years. When the universe was born, it was concentrated in a very small area where the laws of quantum physics had to be applied. General relativity, which is not a quantum theory, is valid on the scale of the Big Bang. String theory, which has been in development for some thirty years, is likely to be replaced by a quantum description of gravity. Recently, the design of two cosmological models (the pre-Big Bang model and the expirotic model) has made it possible to describe a world before the Big Bang. These scenarios, where time has neither beginning nor end, may have had a visible effect on the diffuse background of cosmology. The radiation emitted shortly after the Big Bang and which we detect today in fossil form across the entire sky.

A strange homogeneity of the universe

There are two more natural explanations: either the Universe was much smaller in its early moments than classical cosmology assumes, or it is much older. In both cases, two parts of the sky that were distant before the emission of the cosmological radiation could have interacted.

First hypothesis

The first hypothesis is the one preferred by astrophysicists. The Universe would have experienced a period of dizzying expansion, inflation, at the very beginning of its history. Previously, all regions of the cosmos were so close that their characteristics were homogenized. Then, during the inflation phase, the expansion spread and the Universe expanded faster than the speed of light. The different parts of the Universe are separated from each other. After a fraction of a second, the inflation stopped and the growth returned to a slow trend. Contact between galaxies was gradually re-established as light caught up with the delay created by the inflation.

To explain this insane expansion, physicists have introduced a new force field. They have also introduced an inflaton, which produces a very high repulsive force in the first moments after a big explosion. Unlike gravitation, the inflaton accelerates expansion. A fraction of a second after the big bang, it became fatigued, lost its repulsive force and was overpowered. This theory, proposed in 1981 by the physicist Alan Guth, has made it possible to explain a large number of observations. Nevertheless, certain theoretical difficulties remain, starting with the nature of the inflaton.

Second hypothesis

The second way of solving the problem is less conventional: it assumes that the Universe is much older than expected. The Universe would have had a homogeneous time, if the beginning of the current expansion period had been preceded by a long period of time. It would also have a homogeneous time if time had not begun with the Big Bang. Such a scenario also eliminates the difficulty posed by the singularity that arises when one wants to extend general relativity beyond its field of application.

Indeed, as the Big Bang approaches, the confinement of matter is such that quantum effects must be dominant, and relativity takes no account of this. To discover what really happened, physicists must replace general relativity with a quantum theory of gravitation. Theorists have been working on this since Einstein's time, with little progress until the mid-1980s.

The true secrets of the universe created by God

If you want to start analyzing the sources from which Holy Scripture comes, you have to turn to the written tradition in the Old Testament that we receive from the people of Israel. The references to the origin of the universe in Holy Scripture can be found at the beginning of its first book, “Genesis”. In its first chapter, first verse, the Bible says: “Bereshit bara Elhoim”, that is to say: “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth”.

The ideas of Genesis

God: the necessary Being, the one who is by Himself, as He will later tell Moses from the burning bush, created everything we know. No one on Earth can attribute a human name to God, as best we can say of Him, He has revealed it to us: I am who I am. He created us and we cannot bridge this abyss, and it is He who takes the initiative.

He created the “primitive atom”. He created the Earth that was before us, the Universe that was before the Earth, and He is before the Universe, time and space. This idea of God, transcending any idea, matter or energy that we can think of, is disseminated throughout the biblical conception of the Old Testament. God transcends all that is natural. The texts of revelation are multiplying: Genesis II, 5-25, The Psalms, 2 Maccabees VII, 28. This conception carries over completely into the New Testament. God sends his Word to Earth. But his Word already existed before creation.

Naturally, Revelation does not say by what process we were created, nor does it communicate scientific data to us; we are free to discover it. Revelation gives meaning to our life and tells us how we should live it. At the same time, the freedom that God has given us obliges us to choose at every moment: we can accept our destiny and give meaning to our life or reject it. It is prudent to emphasize that although the evolutionary sectors consider ideas on the origin of man, in reality, they do not speak of the origin of the universe. And much more than the origin of life on the planet, it is a theory about the transformation of elementary forms of life into more complex forms. But this subject deserves special consideration, much more extensive and detailed, for which it refers to the relevant bibliography

Everything you need to know about the secrets of the universe created by God

Experimental data has confirmed that expansion exists and is accelerating, and few scientists today consider the possibility of a stationary model for the universe. As a result, the theory of a final regression (or “Big Crunch”) currently has very little acceptance. The evolution of the universe as described (with general relativity and the “standard model” of elementary particles) is also accepted today by most scientists and specialists. But this should not suggest that everything is known about the origin of the universe and its future.

In order to estimate its future evolution, we are working on analytical extensions of current theories. In these cases of long-term projection, we know that science tends to describe previous processes and their probable continuation very well. But science cannot say much about the possibility of new emerging phenomena, new discoveries or unexpected results in observation, a situation that has been normal in its history. For example, it is now thought that most of the matter that makes up the universe is “dark matter”, about which nothing is known. Nothing is known about dark energy either, although there is no shortage of theories for all these cases. We know “with certainty” that the visible universe is expanding and cooling, and that certain stages of the initial big bang have very strong experimental verification. The rest, as already said, is speculation for the time being.

If you would like to discover even more articles about GOD and the world around us, feel free to take a look at our blog. We have an excellent article for you, which is about the definition of blessing.