Let us begin our journey back to the beginning of time with a scientist named Slipher, who in 1926 saw that light from distant galaxies appeared red [1]. Three years later, in 1929, Hubble (after whom the NASA space telescope is named) discovered that the further the galaxy was from Earth, the redder it appeared. This is termed ‘redshift’ and is a measure of the speed at which the galaxies are travelling. Hubble had proven that the universe was expanding outwards in all directions [2,3].

Imagine for a moment a polka dot balloon blown up for a birthday party: as the balloon inflates, each polka dot moves further away from all the others. Let the air out, and the polka dots move closer together to their original state. Scientists, therefore, realised that just as a balloon can deflate, they could reach back to the beginnings of space and time by mathematically reversing the expansion of the galaxies that Hubble had found. By following their movement backwards in time, they found that it led to a point at which the whole universe was contracted down into an “infinite density”. They called this moment at the very beginning of everything the “Big Bang” [1].

Therefore, at the beginning of space and time, everything was joined together in an “infinite density”. Whilst you may ask, “What is an infinite density?” the true question here is, in fact, “What is infinity?”. Indeed, many mathematicians have pondered this question, and even al-Ghazali in the 11th century said that the existence of God could be proven if the universe was shown to not be infinite [1].

In fact, there are two possible answers to the question of infinity, as there could be an ‘actual’ infinite or a ‘potential’ infinite. The ‘potential’ infinite is a never-ending infinite which stretches on for… well… infinity – a never-ending stream of numbers or time. Mathematically, this type of infinite was proven to exist by Cantor, a mathematician working in the late 1800s [4]. However, whilst it worked in the realm of imaginary numbers and paper mathematics, the ‘potential’ infinite has unsolvable problems that mean it is impossible to translate it into the real world, which leaves the ‘actual’ infinite [1].

Unlike the ‘potential’ infinite, an’ actual’ infinite is a specific number, behaving just as the numbers one, ten or twenty do. However, mathematicians found that even an ‘actual’ infinite is impossible in the real world and therefore had to concede that the infinite does not exist. Everything in our world is finite: space, time, everything [5].

So, if infinity doesn’t exist, what is the “infinite density” at the beginning of the universe?

Cast your mind back to the proof in maths class, where 0.999 recurring was shown to be equal to 1. In a similar fashion, an “infinite density” is exactly equal to “nothing”. The universe, therefore, came from nothing.

Whilst some physicists are happy with this literal argument and ignore the laws enshrined in physics that no energy is created nor destroyed and nothing happens without a cause, others try to get around the need for a creator by proposing new theories. Each theory proposed to date, however, has been disproven. For example, some proposed an “oscillating universe” that expands and contracts continually – until it was proven by the existence of background radiation that the universe happened only once and that the gravitational pull of the universe was not enough to pull it back in on itself [1]. The charade of alternate causes for the ‘Big Bang’ therefore continues.

Science has, therefore, over the past two hundred years, not only shown that the universe has a beginning (and an end), but also how it was shrunk down to, and appeared from, nothing. For those without faith, many questions remain. These questions will continue to go unanswered, as scientific experiments and knowledge can only take us so far, and further questions will always exist beyond any answer found.

However, to a believer of the Islamic faith, the Big Bang theory and the finitude of time do not just prove that there is a Creator behind the universe, but also give a scientific explanation for a truth sent down to the Arabian desert 1400 years ago:

The creation and expansion of the universe, the Big Bang, had one cause: God.