The first sound: How science confirms the Bible’s account of creation

Now and then a scientific advance dramatically aligns with what the Bible already taught us.

This happened when the Big Bang theory described the sudden start of creation that is indicated in Genesis: “And God said, ‘Let there be light’” (Genesis 1:3). It has recently happened again with the surprising discovery that even before the formation of atoms and rays of light, the universe reverberated with a ‘random’ noise that determined the design of the universe. The Bible not only told us about this, but it also says something that science can’t confirm or deny: this noise wasn’t random at all. God had spoken through his “Word”, Jesus, to bring order out of chaos (Genesis 1:1-4; John 1:1-3).

The age of the universe was first estimated by the Belgian Catholic priest and mathematician Georges Lemaître in 1927. He pointed out that if the universe was expanding at a measurable rate (which astronomers had just discovered), then we could go back in time mathematically to the point when it started as a tiny dot. This idea, that the entire universe began as a dot, not only sounded silly, but was also suspiciously similar to the start of Genesis, so some scientists were immediately sceptical. 

Big bang theory

One cosmologist, Fred Hoyle, was particularly against the ‘religiosity’ of this idea. I once went to hear him speak and took a girl I was keen on. She must have forgiven me for the unromantic date, because she later married me! 

Hoyle agreed with Einstein that the universe was static, without a beginning, so he had to explain why new telescopes showed that it was expanding. He theorised that as the universe expands, there is ‘continuous creation’ of matter, so that it maintains a constant average density. Unusually for the time, he was an engaging scientist who communicated well. During a radio interview, he coined a humorous name for Lemaître’s rival idea which he thought would demonstrate the idiocy of a universe growing from nothing. He called it a ‘Big Bang’ – a putdown that he probably thought would soon be forgotten! 

But the facts accumulated and confirmed that this universe does have an origin, so Hoyle – and even Einstein – were proved wrong in this regard. All scientists eventually agreed, even those who don’t believe in a creator. 

Let there be light

But one detail didn’t seem to align with the Bible: the fact that there wasn’t any light until the first stars formed hundreds of million years after the Big Bang. Light couldn’t appear until the matter of stars had accumulated enough mass to ignite the kind of fusion reactors we’re now trying to build on earth. Remarkably, the James Webb telescope has found extremely distant stars in the universe, 900 million years after the Big Bang. However, a different kind of light was emitted after only 380,000 years – a tiny slice of time. At that point, there was a sudden burst of light which is still travelling through the universe today. 

The date of this radiation, called the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), was confirmed by the Planck satellite’s 2013 map. However, it was first discovered thanks to early TVs. If, like me, you are old enough to remember having to tune a TV set, you’ll recall that annoying white noise which occurred between stations. 

Early TV engineers thought this was interference from a human structure or a nearby star, so they tried pointing their aerials in different directions. But the same interference signal came from every angle. Fortunately, it is very weak, so as soon as you transmit a programme, the signal disappears. But that’s rather a pity, because it turned out that the ‘interference’ is the CMB – a distant echo of creation.

Even before the formation of atoms and rays of light, the universe reverberated with a noise that determined its design 

We now know that the CMB didn’t just record traces of the first light of creation; it also preserved part of the sound that preceded it. This discovery was made when the new high-definition map of the CMB was completed in 2021 by the Atacama Cosmology Telescope. This sound was the key to our existence, because the pattern of these sound waves determined how the universe grew (see this readable article).

Without these sound vibrations, every atom would have simply travelled outwards in a straight line, and the universe would have contained nothing but a thin cloud of hydrogen. The vibrations, however, caused atoms to veer into each other and build into clumps of matter. And precise details in the sound determined the patterns of movement that resulted in every galaxy of stars. In those stars, fusion reactions produced heavier elements such as carbon, the basis of life. When the first stars exploded and stardust formed new solar systems and planets, these new heavy elements became available for life. 

The first sound 

In scientific language, this sound of creation is merely ‘noise’ originating from random quantum vibrations, so the shape of the universe is entirely random. But the Bible adds a new fact that can’t be detected by scientific instruments: God was there.

The Bible reveals that creation was actually directed by his voice. It says: “The universe was formed at God’s command” (Hebrews 11:3); “By the word of the Lord the heavens were made, their starry host by the breath of his mouth…For he spoke, and it came to be” (Psalm 33:6,9). Today, Jesus is still “sustaining all things by his powerful word” (Hebrews 1:3). And this doesn’t just mean holding together the fabric of the universe, because the verse continues: “After he had provided purification for sins, he sat down at the right hand of the Majesty.” 

The Word that came as flesh within his creation for our sake – and who now reigns over it in power and authority – is the same Word that governed its formation. The sound of his voice created the exact patterns of vibrations necessary to move each atom into place in a universe designed to be exactly right for life – including ours.