God's big bang

Group, May/Jun 1999

Newsweek columnist George Will, in a startling defense of a God-created universe, wrote this about the insights the Hubble Space Telescope has brought to the big-bang theory:

"From a pinpoint of compressed potential.. . [the Big Bang] sent a cosmos hurtling outward at an unimaginable speed. The forces loosed were-are-remarkably (miraculously?) balanced: If the Big Bang had been slightly less violent, the expansion of the universe would have been less rapid, and would soon. . . have collapsed back on itself. If the explosion had been slightly more violent, the universe might have dispersed into a soup too thin to aggregate into stars. The odds against us were-this is just the right word-astronomical.... This good news suggests life is so improbable it must somehow be favored by something.... 'to which,' said [Thomas] Aquinas, 'everyone gives the name of God.'"