Bell Laboratory in Holmdel, New Jersey, 1964
Arno Penzias clamped on his headphones and listened intently to the crackling sounds emanating from his radio, a device attached to a cryogenic microwave receiver used for astronomical observations. He turned to a colleague, Robert Woodrow Wilson.
“Every day it is the same problem,” Arno complained. “That aggravating hiss ruins our research.”
Robert agreed. “We have to do something to fix it.”
In a painstaking manner, they took apart the receiver, cleared it of pigeon droppings and tightened fixtures. The next day, Arno and Robert picked up their headphones, hopeful that they had eliminated the hissing. Still, the same background noise persisted.
“I give up!” Arno said in disgust.
That is not the end of the story, as you might have guessed. Keep in mind that Arno and Robert were scientists in the truest sense of the word, that is, they sought the truth. One day Arno read a research paper about the Big Bang fireball that spewed gamma rays into the universe 13.8 billion years ago. The researchers speculated that those rays could now be detected as radio waves.
Arno read the paper with growing excitement.
“Robert, read this paper. It may unlock the clue to those hissing sounds!”
In fact, they had discovered proof that the Big Bang really happened. The discovery by Penzias and Wilson earned them the Nobel Prize in 1978
Alas, proof that the world had a beginning was bad news for atheists who had to believe that the world had no beginning but stretched back into infinity. After all, nothing comes from nothing. To believe that the universe had a beginning opened a cosmic can of worms. Now hard evidence had led scientists to the conclusion that the universe had exploded into being billions of years ago.
How did this explosion occur? Who caused it?
Now we come to an age-old argument, that is evidence for the existence of God, called First Cause. Reason tells us that something that exists must have a cause. Something or someone caused life to exist, in this case The Big Bang. First Cause must be uncreated: a primal cause, a transcendent creative cause. This reasoning leads us to an answer that upsets the applecart for atheists. That First Cause has a name, and that name has no beginning and no end, the great I Am, His essence is pure existence. His essence is pure love for all creation, for mankind, made in His own image.