Refuting Creationism - What Was Before The Big Bang? It Wasn't Nothing!

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Forget sci-fi wormholes — physicists now think Einstein’s mysterious “bridge” may connect two directions of time itself.

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Wormholes may not exist – we’ve found they reveal something deeper about time and the universe

A paper published open access in January 2026 in the journal Classical and Quantum Gravity should, if creationists could understand it, shoot one of their favourite foxes: the supposed killer question, "What came before the Big Bang?"

Only a creationist could believe the absurd notion that once literally nothing existed as a state of being, and that a god — presumably also made of nothing, because there was nothing to make it from — simultaneously existed and created everything out of that nothing by casting a magic spell, spoken in a language there was no-one else to communicate with in. The first intuitive mistake in that convoluted nonsense is the assumption that the default state of existence is non-existence.

Creationists, however, hypocritically try to hold science to a much higher standard than they apply to their own nonsensical superstitions. While demanding answers to what they imagine are "Gotcha!" questions of science, they routinely dismiss any answer with a wave of the hand. One favourite "Gotcha!" is: what was there before the Big Bang? The usual response is that, in the simplest version of standard cosmology, the question may be meaningless, because time and space themselves are part of the universe being described. If time does not extend through t = 0, then there is no "before" in the ordinary sense. But to a teleologically minded creationist, the answer that there was no "before" at the Big Bang sounds like a cop-out — a way of avoiding the question.

But what if there was a "before", not in the naive sense of empty time waiting around for a universe to be inserted into it, but in the deeper sense that what we call the Big Bang may have been a transition between two time-related phases of a larger physical system?

That this is at least a theoretical possibility comes from the work of three theoretical physicists, Enrique Gaztañaga and K. Sravan Kumar of the Institute of Cosmology & Gravitation, University of Portsmouth, UK, and João Marto of the Departamento de Física, Centro de Matemática e Aplicações (CMA-UBI), Universidade da Beira Interior, Portugal. They have revisited the work of Albert Einstein and Nathan Rosen, whose 1935 paper led to the idea of Einstein–Rosen bridges. These were later popularly interpreted as "wormholes" connecting different regions of spacetime, although that was not the original purpose of the idea.

Using a quantum-field-theoretic approach, Gaztañaga, Kumar and Marto argue that Einstein–Rosen bridges may not be space-travel tunnels at all, but mathematical bridges connecting two complementary components of a quantum state — two microscopic arrows of time. In one component, time flows in the direction we experience; in the other, it is mirrored in the opposite direction. Near black holes, or in expanding and collapsing universes, both components may be needed for a complete quantum description.

This offers a possible route through the black hole information paradox: the puzzle of how information can be preserved when matter crosses an event horizon and a black hole eventually evaporates. In the authors’ interpretation, information is not destroyed; it continues to evolve through the time-reversed, mirror component of the quantum state. That would preserve the quantum requirement that information is not simply lost, without requiring science-fiction wormholes, time machines or supernatural intervention.

The idea also opens the possibility that what we call the Big Bang was not an absolute beginning, but a bounce — a quantum transition from a preceding phase of cosmic evolution. In that scenario, our universe could even be the interior of a black hole formed in an earlier, parent cosmos, where collapse on one side becomes expansion on the other. The Big Bang, in other words, would not be a magical creation event, but a natural physical gateway.

That possibility also recalls an earlier speculative but serious scientific idea proposed by Lee Smolin in 1992, known as cosmological natural selection. Smolin suggested that black holes might give rise to new universes, with the physical constants of each descendant universe varying slightly from those of its parent. Universes whose laws favour the formation of many black holes would therefore tend to leave more descendant universes, rather as organisms that leave more offspring become over-represented in a biological population.

This is not evolution by genes, of course, and it is not established fact. It is a speculative cosmological hypothesis. But it is scientific speculation of the proper kind: naturalistic, mathematically framed, open to criticism and, in principle, vulnerable to observational evidence. It stands in stark contrast to creationism, which answers the same question with nothing more substantial than magic, asserted certainty and Bronze Age mythology.

One of the authors of the paper, Enrique Gaztanaga, also wrote an article in The Conversation, explaining their idea for a lay readership. His article is reprinted here under a Creative Commons licence, reformatted for stylistic consistency:

Creationism Refuted - Something From Nothing - Let There Be Light!

Normalised ellipticity across the transverse plane for the Gaussian scenario.

Illustration of photon-photon scattering in the laboratory. Two green petawatt lasers beams collide at the focus with a third red beam to polarise the quantum vacuum. This allows a fourth blue laser beam to be generated, with a unique direction and colour, which conserves momentum and energy.

Credit: Zixin (Lily) Zhang

Oxford physicists recreate extreme quantum vacuum effects | University of Oxford Department of Physics

As Sam Harris once remarked, “When religions are right, they are right by accident.” His point highlights the lack of empirical grounding in religious claims, which are typically non-falsifiable and therefore beyond the scope of scientific validation.

Ironically, this may mean that the authors of Genesis were accidentally correct in one of their most iconic assertions: that the universe began with the creation of light (Genesis 1:3). While the biblical writers lacked any scientific understanding, modern physics now suggests that under extreme quantum conditions, something akin to this could indeed occur — light arising from an apparent vacuum.

This is an area where creationists normally tie themselves up in knots, claiming on the one hand that you can't get something out of nothing because it contravenes the laws of thermodynamics and on the other hand that a god made of nothing created the universe out of nothing with some magic words.

The truth, of course, is rather more rational and subject to scientific analysis and testing.

Researchers at the Department of Physics at the University of Oxford have successfully simulated a remarkable prediction of quantum electrodynamics: the spontaneous emergence of photons from empty space. Their work, published in Communications Physics, demonstrates how light can be generated from the quantum vacuum — a phenomenon that, until now, had only existed as a theoretical possibility.

Creationism Refuted - Consciousness Is Yielding Up Its Secrets To Science

Quantum Consciousness

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If there is one thing that creationists get right it is that science is a threat to their childish superstition, so they have two main lines of argument: firstly they tell us how their religion disagrees with science, using Bible quotes as though they are indisputable facts, not just claims written down and declared to be true; secondly they attack science as though finding fault with one aspect or another of science somehow invalidates all of it and their superstition wins by default.

Neither of these tactics ever provide any evidence for creationism of course because there is none to produce, but they have the desired effect of making the creationist feel superior to those clever-dicky, elitist scientists with their big words.

And one of their favourite lines of attack is to claim that 'science can't explain consciousness', conveniently forgetting to add the word 'yet' to the end of their claim. A basic understanding of science and the history of science, would tell them that not yet understanding something doesn't invalidate science, it invalidates ignorance. Science never used to understand lightening or earthquakes, or diseases, or atoms, or biodiversity and the appearance of kinship between species, but now it does.

And now we are beginning to understand consciousness too. We know, for example, that it doesn't exist independently of a fully-functional brain because it can be abolished with chemicals and by injury, so we know that whatever the mechanism, it is a function of neurophysiology and so amenable to scientific investigation and explanation. The questions are the 'how' and the 'what' that makes up all scientific investigation.