On April 10 2019, scientists released a picture of the black hole at the centre of a galaxy called Messier 87 (M87), which was captured by the Event Horizon Telescope using light in radio wavelengths.
Now you are probably asking, how on earth does this help the case for the existence of God? To see how it does, we need to provide some context.
Albert Einstein developed his theory of General Relativity between 1907 and 1915. At this point it was just that, a theory that had little to no observational support. Soon thereafter though, predictions that resulted from his theory started trickling in as scientists worked on the equations. Not only that, but some observational support started popping up. Like expansion.
The expansion of the universe was a prediction of the theory, which was observationally confirmed in 1929 by American astronomer Edwin Hubble, who observed the redshift of receding galaxies using his telescope. (For the noobs out there, take a deflated balloon, draw some spots on it, and then inflate the balloon. Yup, every spot moves further away from every other spot as the balloon grows. Expansion!(read Eureka!))
The Big Bang was another prediction of General Relativity. A consequence of the Big Bang would be the heat radiation left over from it, nowadays called cosmic microwave background (CMB). In 1964 this radiation was observed using radio telescopes. Robert Wilson, along with Arno Penzias, won the 1978 Nobel Prize in physics for the find. (Pop quiz, Who banged the Big Bang?)
Yet another prediction of the theory was the existence of black holes. And now finally, as of April 2019, we have observational evidence of black holes!
The Big Bang as the Standard Model has been going from strength to strength over the decades, and the confirmation of the existence of black holes adds to that tremendously. General Relativity has yet again been confirmed observationally. Einstein would, of course, be beaming in delight right now.
Now if you did not know it, there was a great resistance to the Big Bang theory in the 50’s and 60’s, with Cambridge astrophysicist Sir Fred Hoyle the ‘leader’ of the resistance (sic). A whole bunch of models were proposed as alternatives, but one by one they fell. Why was there resistance?
The reason there was such fierce resistance was because of the parallel the Big Bang drew with the bible. The first verse of the bible in fact. “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.” – Genesis 1:1
The early Hebrew idiom “heaven and earth” means “visible universe”, which is the standard translation of it.
The Big Bang is synonymous with the birth of our universe, and thanks to these black hole images, the first verse of the bible enjoys even more scientific support for it.
To be more formal on how this all provides evidence for the existence of God, we need to go to the Kalam argument, where it supports the 2nd premise that the universe began to exist:
1. Whatever begins to exist has a cause of its beginning.
2. The universe began to exist.
3. Therefore, the universe has a cause of its beginning.
With the observational evidence of black holes, which in turn were predicted by the General Theory, the same theory that predicted the universe has a beginning, you can see how premise two is supported by this observational evidence. Directly, the Theory of General Relativity is further confirmed and strengthened, and indirectly the same for the beginning of the universe.
If you would like to listen to a wonderful podcast on this very subject between Dr Jay Richards and Dr Guillermo Gonzalez, you can do so here.
“In the beginning GOD…”.
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