Page 40 - The Creation Of The Universe

38 THE CREATION OF THE UNIVERSE

expands, this equilibrium becomes more delicate. 20
Even Stephen Hawking, who tries hard to explain away the Creation of
the universe as a series coincidences in A Brief History of Time, acknowl-
edges the extraordinary equilibrium in the rate of expansion:
If the rate of expansion one second after the big bang had been small-
er by even one part in a hundred thousand million million, the uni-
verse would have recollapsed before it ever reached its present size. 21
What then does such a remarkable equilibrium as this indicate? The on-
ly rational answer to that question is that it is proof of Creation and cannot
possibly be accidental. Despite his own materialist bent, Dr Davies admits
this himself:
It is hard to resist that the present structure of the universe, apparently
so sensitive to minor alterations in the numbers, has been rather care-
fully thought out… The seemingly miraculous concurrence of numeri-
cal values that nature has assigned to her fundamental constants must
remain the most compelling evidence for an element of cosmic de-
sign. 22

The Four Forces
The speed of the Big Bang's explosion is only one of the remarkable
states of equilibrium at the initial moment of Creation. Immediately after the
Big Bang, forces that underpin and organize the universe we live in had to
be numerically "just right" otherwise there would have been no universe.
These are the "four fundamental forces" that are recognized by modern
physics. All structure and motion in the universe is governed by these four
forces, known as the gravitational force, the electromagnetic force, the
strong nuclear force, and the weak nuclear force. The strong and weak nu-
clear forces operate only at the atomic scale. The remaining two–the grav-
itational force and the electromagnetic force–govern assemblages of atoms,
in other words "matter". These four fundamental forces were at work in the
immediate aftermath of the Big Bang and resulted in the Creation of atoms
and matter.