Page 36 - Timelessness and the Reality of Fate

34 TIMELESSNESS AND THE REALITY OF FATE

each step. This is the creation of Allah, Who created the universe out of noth-
ing and Who at every moment keeps it under His control and guidance.

Objections to the Fact of Creation and Why These Are Invalid
As we have seen this far, the Big Bang theory means that the universe
came into being from nothing, and obviously therefore proves Creation. For
that reason, astronomers and physicists who espoused materialist philoso-
phy have tried to come up with alternative accounts in order to be able, in
their own eyes, to reject this reality. The "steady state" theory, one such
instance, is a hopeless alternative produced by a number of scientists "philo-
sophically" uneasy at the idea of the creation of the universe.
Two other alternatives proposed by materialists consist of models that
accept the Big Bang but seek to interpret it in ways that exclude creation.
One is the "oscillating universe model," and the other is the "quantum
model of universe." Let us now consider these theories in turn, and see why
they are invalid.
The oscillating universe model was advanced by the astronomers who
disliked the idea the Big Bang was the beginning of the universe. In this
model, it is claimed that the present expansion of the universe will eventu-
ally be reversed at some point and begin to contract. This contraction will
cause everything to collapse into a single point that will then explode again,
initiating a new round of expansion. This process, they say, is repeated infi-
nitely in time. This model also holds that the universe has experienced this
transformation an infinite number of times already and that it will continue
to do so forever. In other words, the universe exists for eternity but it
expands and collapses at different intervals with a huge explosion punctu-
ating each cycle. The universe we live in is just one of those infinite univers-
es going through the same cycle.
This is nothing but a feeble attempt to accommodate the fact of the Big
Bang to notions about an infinite universe. The proposed scenario is unsup-
ported by the results of scientific research, which show that it is impossible
for such an "oscillating" universe idea to come into being. Furthermore the
laws of physics offer no reason why a contracting universe should explode
again after collapsing into a single point: it ought to stay just as it is. 36
Even if we allow that there is some mechanism by which this cycle of
contraction-explosion-expansion does take place, the crucial point is that