The Big Bang occupies an unusual place in contemporary thought. It is, simultaneously, one of the most successful scientific models ever constructed and one of the most mythologically overburdened ideas of the modern world. Few concepts have been so widely misunderstood, not because the physics is obscure, but because the desire for beginnings is so deeply entrenched.
As a scientific framework, the Big Bang theory does something remarkably modest. It describes the large-scale dynamical behaviour of spacetime, matter, and radiation under specific conditions. Run the equations backward, and the universe becomes hotter, denser, and more uniform. Certain regularities appear. Certain parameters converge. The model works extraordinarily well within its domain of applicability.
What it does not do is announce a cosmic birthday.
Yet almost everywhere outside specialist cosmology, the Big Bang is spoken of as “the beginning of everything”: the moment when the universe sprang into existence from nothing, when time itself started ticking, when reality crossed a metaphysical threshold from non-being into being. This is not a conclusion demanded by the physics. It is an interpretive move — a mythic one — quietly smuggled in under the authority of scientific language.
This slippage is revealing. It shows how readily a theory-internal explanation becomes an ontological story the moment it brushes up against our appetite for origins.
The equations of cosmology describe the evolution of spacetime given certain constraints. They do not explain why there is spacetime at all. They do not explain why those constraints hold. They do not even explain why the model’s own domain of validity should be treated as extending to an absolute limit. What they provide is a powerful description of how a particular regime of the universe behaves.
The so-called “initial singularity” is not a physical event. It is a boundary marker: the point at which the model ceases to apply. To treat it as an explosive moment of creation is to mistake the edge of a map for a dramatic geographical feature.
And yet the metaphor persists. The word “bang” itself is already doing mythic work, conjuring images of violence, rupture, and sudden origin. It invites the imagination to picture a before and an after, a void and an eruption. These images are not part of the theory; they are narrative prosthetics added to make the mathematics feel existentially satisfying.
This is not an accident. Creation myths have always functioned less as explanations than as settlements. They stabilise a world by anchoring it to a story of origin. They answer the unnerving question “why is there something rather than nothing?” not by solving it, but by enclosing it within a narrative frame that can be lived with.
In this sense, the Big Bang has become a modern creation myth not because science has failed, but because science has succeeded in creating a model so powerful that it invites overreach. Where earlier cultures invoked gods, chaos, or cosmic eggs, modern culture invokes spacetime, quantum fields, and vacuum fluctuations — and then quietly treats these theoretical constructs as metaphysical primitives.
The result is a hybrid story: scientific in vocabulary, mythological in function. It reassures us that the universe has a comprehensible beginning, that existence itself is explainable in principle, that the demand for an ultimate “why” has been answered — or at least deferred to physics.
But this reassurance comes at a cost. By turning a model into an origin story, we obscure the difference between description and creation, between constraint and cause, between the limits of a theory and the limits of reality itself.
What cosmology actually offers is something more subtle and, in its own way, more unsettling: a picture of a universe whose intelligibility arises from structure, not from an inaugural moment. A universe whose past can be traced, but not grounded in a final explanatory point. A universe that does not need a beginning in order to be describable.
In the next post, we will look more closely at why beginnings exert such a powerful hold on the imagination — and how the desire for temporal origins quietly reintroduces metaphysical assumptions that the physics itself has already left behind.
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