Big Bang Failures Reach the Breaking Point

If prediction is a test of good science,
Big Bang should be renamed Big Bust

Cosmologists may come to regret launching the James Webb Space Telescope. It has developed a bad habit of finding things that shouldn’t exist.

Early photos from JWST were crowd pleasers. “Cosmic Cliffs” of the Carina Nebula, by James Webb Space Telescope, July 2022.

Right after beautiful images from the JWST were being promoted in the media (Nature, 2 Dec 2022), troubling headlines began appearing.

• Late in 2022, the JWST was already finding the earliest galaxies ever seen (New Scientist, 9 Dec 2022). Claims of early galaxies had been met with skepticism, the report said, but now their existence was confirmed. They were said to have “formed within about 325 million years of the big bang,” uncomfortably early for the big bang theory.
• Rochester University found a “wide diversity of galaxies in the early universe” in JWST data on 9 Jan 2023, reporting a zoo of 850 diverse galaxies with high redshifts. Live Science called these galaxies “baffling,” saying that they “challenge prevailing models of the early universe.” Space.com reported on the Rochester conference on 10 January, describing astronomers as both excited that JWST was working so well, but busy trying to understand how galaxies could exist 200 to 400 million years after the big bang. At the time, the galaxies were considered primitive blobs with little structure, composed of “young stars.”
• A few days later, Space.com (12 Jan) said “The 1st galaxies may have formed much earlier than we thought, James Webb Space Telescope reveals.” Phys.org reported on 25 Jan 2023 that Japanese scientists confirmed a record-breaking galaxy using spectral lines of oxygen.
• Around this time, the University of Missouri added its voice to the rumbling. “Using data from NASA’s new space telescope, University of Missouri astronomers suggest more galaxies were formed in the early universe than previously thought.“
• By spring, the journal Science was taking note of the hubbub. Daniel Clery wrote, “Earliest galaxies challenge ideas about star birth in infant universe” (Science, 28 March). “Discoveries by giant new space telescope JWST are getting too big for theorists to ignore.“
• By April 4, more early galaxies were turning up in JWST images. They overlapped with the “era of reionization” when the first stars were supposed to become capable of forming. Now there was only 300 million years between the bang and galaxies. “The frontier is moving almost every month,” remarked one researcher.
• On May 17, the Niels Bohr Institute poured fuel on the fire, saying, “James Webb’s ‘too massive’ galaxies may be even more massive.” The findings put tension on the popular “cold dark matter” theory for the big bang, the press release said. The same day, Nature reported an ultra-faint galaxy with a “complex morphology” dating to the “cosmic dark ages” before galaxies were supposed to exist.

The heat was growing against conventional wisdom. Evolutionary bluffing, however, was still going strong by summer 2023. On July 11, Robert Lea at Space.com announced confidently, “The 1st light to flood the universe can help unravel the history of the cosmos. Here’s how.” He likened the triumph of big bang theory to the triumph of Darwinian evolution:

Just as Charles Darwin once used the fossil record to tell the story of the evolution of life on Earth, astronomers are using the first light ever to shine through the universe to understand events that have shaped the cosmos.

This first light is called the “Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB),” leftover radiation which is spread almost evenly through the universe. The CMB carries with it the signatures of the physical processes of the early universe and possesses unique features that can be used to determine the make-up of the universe.

Just like how the study of biological evolution has evolved since the time of Darwin, the ways in which cosmologists use this cosmic fossil have changed, and future missions are set to increase the focus on the CMB and what it can teach us about how the universe evolved.

His article included conventional diagrams of the big bang, inflation and evolution, but did not mention the findings of the James Webb Space Telescope.

Predictions continued falling through the summer of 2023:

• Carbon was found in the first billion years after the big bang (Univ of Cambridge, 12 July). Heavy elements were supposed to take several generations of stars to form in cosmic dust. It is “a challenge to fully explain these results,” the press release says. Universe Today said this discovery is among “finds [that] change what they thought they knew about the infancy of the cosmos.”
• On Aug 14, “Maisie’s Galaxy” found by JWST in the summer was confirmed by astronomers at the University of Texas to be one of the earliest yet observed, at 390 million years after the big bang. The image looked relatively featureless, however.
• On Aug 22, Science surprised readers with the headline, “Giant black hole formed puzzlingly fast at dawn of cosmos.” Black holes were thought to require the death of stars and galaxies long after the big bang.

By late summer, Nature was not yet prepared to confirm the existence of modern-looking galaxies near the beginning (Nature, 14 Aug). But with the arrival of autumn, materialist scientists lost their final excuse for repeating the party line. The universe had changed.

James Webb telescope spots thousands of Milky Way lookalikes that ‘shouldn’t exist’ swarming across the early universe (Live Science, 26 Sept 2023). The early universe didn’t wait billions of years for mature galaxies to form. They appear to have popped into existence, like Darwin eyes (see Popeye Theory of Evolution). These snippets from Ben Turner’s article expose the upset that JWST has caused in cosmology:

• Thousands of disk galaxies like our own Milky Way were spotted in the early universe, where they shouldn’t exist.
• Shaped like warped vinyls and sporting delicate spiral arms, the Milky Way doppelgangers were found by JWST more than 10 billion years into the universe’s past — during a period when violent galactic mergers were thought to have made an abundance of such fragile galaxies impossible. 
• …the disk galaxies are 10 times more common in the early universe than astronomers previously thought…
• The strange discovery joins others made by the JWST that point to a deepening mystery around how large galaxies, and with them the potential for life, first bloomed in our universe.
• For over 30 years it was thought that these disk galaxies were rare in the early universe….
• …astronomers long-assumed that galaxies like our own would be quickly twisted out of shape.
• Yet by using the JWST to peer from 9 billion up to 13 billion years into the past, the astronomers discovered that, out of the 3,956 galaxies they had spotted, 1,672 were disk galaxies like our own.
• “These new JWST results push the time these Milky Way–like galaxies form to almost the beginning of the universe.“
• …changing our complete understanding of how galaxy formation occurs….
• ….astronomers must rethink our understanding of the formation of the first galaxies and how galaxy evolution occurred….

Turner based his report on a paper in the Astrophysical Journal, 22 Sept 2023, that analyzed JWST images of 3,956 early galaxies. Trying to appear on top of things with a loose grip on conventional big bang theory, the authors admit,

The new JWST data are challenging our understanding of galaxy evolution and structure formation in the early Universe by revealing the resolved optical morphologies of high-redshift galaxies for the first time.

Astronomers find abundance of Milky Way-like galaxies in early Universe, rewriting cosmic evolution theories (University of Manchester, 22 Sept 2023). Start over, these scientists say. Our conventional theories have essentially been falsified.

Christopher Conselice, Professor of Extragalactic Astronomy at The University of Manchester, said: “Using the Hubble Space Telescope we thought that disk galaxies were almost non-existent until the Universe was about six billion years old, these new JWST results push the time these Milky Way-like galaxies form to almost the beginning of the Universe.”

The research completely overturns the existing understanding of how scientists think our Universe evolves, and the scientists say new ideas need to be considered.

And thus a quarter century of reports about “early maturity” of the universe come full circle. From first light, the universe has looked mature. This falsifies conventional wisdom. Yes, new ideas need to be considered. Maybe some ancient ones, too.

We’ve been reporting on the “early maturity” theme since NASA first held a bombshell press conference in 2002 about it. Articles back then contained cartoons of a star looking like an old man in a maternity ward. “The Grand Finale came first,” wrote surprised reporters. This theme is not new. It just keeps getting more and more confirmed with observations. Riding alongside the theme is another one: the “peculiar universe” (e.g., 6 Oct 2004). Leading cosmologists have long puzzled about how strangely habitable our universe seems compared to what a big bang would produce. These are ancillary puzzles to long-standing ones about the horizon problem, the lumpiness problem, the entropy problem, and the flatness problem that have plagued big bang theory for decades. Trying to solve those led to magical solutions like inflation.

We trust the photons coming into the JWST mirrors. We trust the observations. But why are people still trusting the “experts” who have been so wrong for decades, and whose predictions keep falling? And why would some Christians build their cosmology on these failed ideas? Secular cosmologists may be great at math and at building sophisticated instruments for observation, but that doesn’t make them good philosophers. It doesn’t give them immunity from groupthink. Intelligence does not necessarily correlate with values.

While the atheistic, materialistic “experts” sweat, let’s take a moment to consider a Biblical viewpoint on the observations. Creationists expect to find early maturity. Just as the animals and plants were created fully grown and functional in a day’s time during Creation Week, why not the galaxies, too? You can’t use laws of nature now in operation to explain creation, because the abrupt appearance of plants with seeds already in their fruits, and birds and whales already flying and swimming, and a man growing from the dust of the ground and a woman soon after from his rib involved one-time powerful actions by an omniscient, wise God. After they were made, then the regularities of natural laws began.

But wouldn’t it have taken 13.7 billion years for the light of the universe to reach Earth? Nobody knows that, and it is impossible to disprove that the light arrived instantaneously (see 11 Jan 2021). If the purpose of God in creating the heavenly bodies was to give light on the earth and to provide markers for signs and seasons and days and years, and to display the glory of God (Psalm 19:1, Psalm 8), then we should expect for Adam and Eve to have seen a mature-looking universe the first night they looked up with their newly fashioned eyes.

Atheists will call foul at the imposition of the “supernatural” and “miracles” into science. But everyone believes in the supernatural, and everyone believes in miracles. Atheists use their minds, thoughts, and logic, which are immaterial conceptual facts, without which no science is possible. As for miracles, no Bible believer has enough faith to think a finely-tuned universe came from nothing (12 April 2023), or that life sprang from mindless chemicals (video, book). The supernatural and miracles are part and parcel of every person’s reality whenever they use their marvelously equipped bodies and minds. Since logic is supernatural, choose to believe in miracles that were intelligently designed, that have historical evidence, and that are logically consistent. Miracles of chance like the spontaneous origin of life don’t happen. The Stuff Happens Law is idolatry. Turn from modern myths and follow the signposts to reality.