In an article titled Does the Universe Need God?, cosmologist Sean Carroll provides a rejoinder to those who would try to squeeze god in as an answer to what they perceive as unexplained gaps in our knowledge. It is a long article that is worth reading in full but for those who lack the time, I will excerpt some of the key points.

He starts by making the same point that I made in the series Why atheism is winning, that the long-term outlook for religion is extremely bleak because science and its associated modernistic outlook is making it irrelevant in ways that are hard to ignore even by the most determined religionist.

Most modern cosmologists are convinced that conventional scientific progress will ultimately result in a self-contained understanding of the origin and evolution of the universe, without the need to invoke God or any other supernatural involvement. This conviction necessarily falls short of a proof, but it is backed up by good reasons. While we don’t have the final answers, I will attempt to explain the rationale behind the belief that science will ultimately understand the universe without involving God in any way.

Those who want to insert god somewhere, to show that he/she/it is necessary in some way, need to realize that they have at most a window of one second just after the Big Bang to work with.

While we don’t claim to understand the absolute beginning of the universe, by the time one second has elapsed we enter the realm of empirical testability. That’s the era of primordial nucleosynthesis, when protons and neutrons were being converted into helium and other light elements. The theory of nucleosynthesis makes precise predictions for the relative abundance of these elements, which have passed observational muster with flying colors, providing impressive evidence in favor of the Big Bang model. Another important test comes from the cosmic microwave background (CMB), the relic radiation left over from the moment the primordial plasma cooled off and became transparent, about 380,000 years after the Big Bang. Together, observations of primordial element abundances and the CMB provide not only evidence in favor of the basic cosmological picture, but stringent constraints on the parameters describing the composition of our universe.

He then clarifies what it means to talk about the Big Bang event, a singular event in time, as distinct from the Big Bang model that is the working out of the aftermath of that event.

One sometimes hears the claim that the Big Bang was the beginning of both time and space; that to ask about spacetime “before the Big Bang” is like asking about land “north of the North Pole.” This may turn out to be true, but it is not an established understanding. The singularity at the Big Bang doesn’t indicate a beginning to the universe, only an end to our theoretical comprehension. It may be that this moment does indeed correspond to a beginning, and a complete theory of quantum gravity will eventually explain how the universe started at approximately this time. But it is equally plausible that what we think of as the Big Bang is merely a phase in the history of the universe, which stretches long before that time – perhaps infinitely far in the past. [My italics] The present state of the art is simply insufficient to decide between these alternatives; to do so, we will need to formulate and test a working theory of quantum gravity.
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The problem with “creation from nothing” is that it conjures an image of a pre-existing “nothingness” out of which the universe spontaneously appeared – not at all what is actually involved in this idea. Partly this is because, as human beings embedded in a universe with an arrow of time, we can’t help but try to explain events in terms of earlier events, even when the event we are trying to explain is explicitly stated to be the earliest one. It would be more accurate to characterize these models by saying “there was a time such that there was no earlier time.”

To make sense of this, it is helpful to think of the present state of the universe and work backwards, rather than succumbing to the temptation to place our imaginations “before” the universe came into being. The beginning cosmologies posit that our mental journey backwards in time will ultimately reach a point past which the concept of “time” is no longer applicable. Alternatively, imagine a universe that collapsed into a Big Crunch, so that there was a future end point to time. We aren’t tempted to say that such a universe “transformed into nothing”; it simply has a final moment of its existence. What actually happens at such a boundary point depends, of course, on the correct quantum theory of gravity.

The important point is that we can easily imagine self-contained descriptions of the universe that have an earliest moment of time. There is no logical or metaphysical obstacle to completing the conventional temporal history of the universe by including an atemporal boundary condition at the beginning. Together with the successful post-Big-Bang cosmological model already in our possession, that would constitute a consistent and self-contained description of the history of the universe.

Nothing in the fact that there is a first moment of time, in other words, necessitates that an external something is required to bring the universe about at that moment. [My italics]

The Big Bang event itself does not necessarily imply that the universe had a beginning in time and even if it should turn out that it had, it does not imply a beginner. This strikes at the heart of the arguments of religious apologists who need a beginning to make their claim say that a beginning necessarily implies a beginner. That argument is weak to begin with, but is the main one they have for god.

Religious people know that this conclusion is a devastating one for them. After all, if no god is required to create the universe, then he is truly an unnecessary concept. So they will fight or ignore or obfuscate this point with theological jargon.