Slow Down! No Growing Too Fast!

It is desirable that children grow big and tall. But how fast is too fast?  When our triplet children were in diapers 27 years ago (our older daughter was age 2) there were moments when I imagined the day they would learn to do “that” for themselves.  There were also times (not always—I did, and do, really love them!) when I longed for their learning to talk and feed themselves, and for the day the house would become quiet as they would go off to school.  Well the time did pass.  And later looking back from the day of their high school graduation, and as it dawned on me that our home was finally to become quiet after all, uncomfortably so, I wondered with great sadness how the time had gone by so fast.

How fast is too fast and how slow is too slow?  Interestingly, the need for growth that applies to children also applies to our universe.  But the rate of growth for the latter deals with factors much more precise.  Before the discovery of the Big Bang, back when scientific opinion declared that the universe always existed, it was also assumed that the same was held together in “perfect” balance.  The fact of gravity did raise bits of concern that one day these heavenly bodies known as stars would “notice” each other and come to fall into each other (how romantic!).  But Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity brought an end to that notion of a stable and “static” universe (by static is meant unchanging and unmoving).  The new insights arising from relativity demanded that our universe cannot be static.  It must be either be expanding or collapsing.  Out of that insight alone French physicist and clergyman, Georges Lemaitre hypothesized an expanding universe out of a “primeval atom.”  Scientific discoveries, which soon followed, beginning with Edwin Hubble’s observations through the telescope at Mount Wilson, added to the case that our universe has been (and continues today) expanding out from an absolute beginning in the singularity of the Big Bang.  An entertaining and informational survey of the whole story can be found in the book, Show Me God, v.II, by Fred Heeren. (Daystar, 2000).

Only later did it become clear just how precise this expansion rate had to be, when measured against the necessary requirements for a universe that can host life of any kind.  The basic problem is, if the expansion rate had been too slow, all matter would quickly have collapsed in on itself into a gigantic black hole.  In that case there could be no galaxies, stars, and planets at all.  On the other hand, had the expansion rate been larger, all of that potential matter would have so quickly dissipated that it could not gravitationally form into galaxies, stars, and planets either.  While this basic theme should be fairly clear, what is most astonishing is just how razor thin that allowable expansion rate is which allows for the kind of universe in which it is possible for any kind of life to exist.  Stephen Hawking put it this way:

“Why did the universe start out with so nearly the critical rate of expansion that separates models that recollapse from those that go on expanding forever, so that even now, ten thousand million years later, it is still expanding at nearly the critical rate?  If the rate of expansion one second after the big bang had been smaller by even one part in a hundred thousand million million, the universe would have recollapsed before it ever reached its present state.” (A Brief History of Time. (Bantam 1988), p.122,3).

The very rate of expansion is therefore an additional indication of design in the very creation that exists by the Word of God (Genesis 1:1,2, John 1:1-3, Hebrews ll:3)  Truly, “The Heavens declare the glory of the LORD and the firmament proclaims His handiwork” (Psalm 19:1).