NOTE:  I regularly read or listen to scientific studies from National Public Radio, the Associated Press, and National Geographic.  Though I am not a scientist, they help me stay up to date on scientific advances.  I am indebted to an article on NPR as well as a blog by James Emery White for the quotations in the article.  I am an avid reader of both the Bible and science. 

NASA’s newest space telescope—the SPHEREx—was rocketed into space last week, with a goal to map the entire sky like never before.  It is an attempt to answer what NASA considers the big questions about the universe.  As an NPR news report said, “Sometimes, space missions aim to answer the simple questions we ask ourselves as we go about our lives:  How did the universe begin?  How did galaxies start to develop? How did I get here?”

Instead of traditional telescopes like the Hubble which focus on stars and galaxies in detail, the SPHEREx will use a very wide-angle lens to see the big picture of the universe.  Scientists will seek to see sources of light they may have missed in the past, looking at the earliest galaxies and learning how they came to be and learning what they can about the “big bang.”  As the chief scientist for the project, Jamie Bock of the California Institute of Technology said, “We won’t see the big bang, but we’ll see the aftermath from it and learn about the beginning of the universe that way.” 

The infrared detectors on the SPHEREx will be able to distinguish 102 colors invisible to the human eye, giving us a completely different way of looking at the universe.  The extreme wide-angle means that in the four-year mission of the telescope, it will see—they hope—the entire universe.  This will give scientists a huge amount of data which they will use to draw conclusions on the “big questions” of the origins of the universe.

Today’s astronomers are mostly united in their belief that the “big bang” occurred about 13.8 billion years ago and that it led to a huge expansion of our universe in an extremely short amount of time.  From that explosion, everything that later formed the stars and planets was born.  But every new understanding uncovers new questions, so there is admittedly a lot they don’t know.  What triggered that expansion?  Why was it so extensive?  Where did the matter and energy come from? 

SPHEREx is charged with providing answers—or at least insight—to these questions.

Scientists recognize that there’s a huge problem with the existing theory, for no matter how far back we look, there is some point in which “something came from nothing,” a scientific impossibility as we understand science.  The Big bang is an elegant theory that explains much of what we know about the universe, but the big questions remain unanswered.  What—if anything—existed before the big bang?  Where did the original “stuff” of the universe come from?  What was the something—or Someone—that brought that matter into existence in the first place?

Whatever it was that ignited the big bang had to exist outside of our universe, since space and time as we know it didn’t exist before our universe.   Therefore, something happened that could not have happened by any of the known laws of physics.  Whatever it was that began our universe cannot be explained by any known natural phenomena.

In other words, something “supernatural” occurred.  Something happened outside of all known scientific principles.

SPHEREx will help us understand more details about the big bang.  I will be excited to read the results and the theories that will come from SPHEREx.  I want us to add to our knowledge of the universe, and I am deeply interested in learning more.

But SPHEREx will not give us all the answers.  A scientific instrument—no matter how amazing it is—will not be able to give insight into the supernatural something—or Someone—behind the Universe.  Even if it successfully teaches us more about the beginnings of our universe, it won’t be able to study what happened before time and space began.  Science alone, therefore, can never fully answer the question, “Where did we come from?”

Something—or Someone—beyond and before our system of time and space caused our universe to exist. 

I don’t think that we will ever find a better answer than the one written by Moses approximately 3500 years ago, “In the beginning, God . . .”

For me, and I hope for you, that’s where faith and science come together. 

PS.  Apologetics is the reasoned defense and explanation of religious doctrine.  This blog supports the “First Cause” (or the “Cosmological”) argument of apologetics.  The “First Cause” argument states that everything that happened has a first cause.  The Universe could not have come into existence by itself unless “something” or “Someone” outside of the universe caused it to occur.