When I first started reading the God, the Science, the Evidence (2025) by Michel-Yves Bolloré and Olivier Bonnassies, my main interest was to understand how the Big Bang was understood outside the the English-speaking world.
It is widely known that mathematician and astronomer Fred Hoyle (1915–2001) had named the origin of the universe the Big Bang in order to ridicule it. Astrophysicist Geoffrey Burbidge (1925–2010) accused his colleagues of “rushing off to join ‘the First Church of Christ of the Big Bang’” when evidence in support of the theory started to win the day.
But isn’t that just froth on the beer?
I was hardly prepared for what Bolloré and Bonnassies reveal about efforts across Europe to discredit the idea of a beginning to the universe — by any means necessary.
Why is a beginning to the universe so controversial?
The authors tell us that the idea was controversial because it raised the likelihood of a Creator after centuries of science advances that seemed to put the matter in doubt:
This point is crucial because if science confirms that time, space, and matter had an absolute beginning, it becomes clear that the Universe proceeds from a cause that is neither temporal, spatial, nor material. In other words, it proceeds from a transcendent, non-natural cause at the origin of all that exists and, as we shall see, at the origin of the extreme fine-tuning of the Universe’s initial parameters and the laws of physics and biology, which are indispensable for the existence and evolution of atoms, stars, and complex life. p. 99
Trashing Big Bang theorist Georges Lemaître (1894-1966) for being a priest and ridiculing the theory itself was a comparatively benign response. Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler, by contrast, were ready to kill. Far more was at stake for them than for the average atheist in science.
Perhaps that’s because leading intellectuals in Europe and the Americas had adopted materialist atheism as a creed. But it was grafted irregularly onto ancient cultures that were Judaeo-Christian in origin.
By contrast, both communism and Nazism were materialist and atheistic by conviction — as well as brand new. And the leaders were determined to totally reshape their cultures on that basis:
For the communists,
More precisely, dialectical materialism uses the dialectical method to analyze reality within the framework of materialism, taking as axiomatic the eternal nature of matter. Materialist thought therefore consists in relying on Hegel’s dialectic, stripped of its “idealist” dimension, to represent the eternal transformation of reality without beginning or end. p. 130
Thus Big Bang theorists, prominent or otherwise, came to be treated as enemies of the State. The first to suffer was Alexander Friedmann (1888–1925) of St. Petersburg State University whose work inspired many others. Perhaps mercifully, he died, apparently of typhoid fever, just as the general Purge was beginning.
Meanwhile, Stalin had found his bearings. He secretly began to prepare the grand show trials and mass executions that from the early 1930s would successfully reduce to silence those they now called “Lemaître’s henchmen.” p. 138
Fortunately, George Gamow and his wife succeeded, with the help of Marie Curie, in fleeing to the United States in 1934. Mathematical physicist Vladimir Fock was jailed and tortured — but released.
However, Yevgeny Perepyolkin, head of the Pulkovo Observatory near St. Petersburg — the center of Big Bang theory in Russia — was shot in 1938 for “undermining the regime’s ideological basis by denying the eternity of the Universe and refusing to admit that the idea of God is completely without merit” (p. 142). Quantum physicist Matvei Bronstein, astrophysicist Dmitry Eropkin, and Maximilian Musselius were shot the same year for similar reasons.
Astronomer Boris Numerov suffered in 1941: “On Stalin’s personal orders, Numerov’s torturers broke his legs with the butt of a rifle before beating him to death like a dog.” (P, 145) Many others suffered too.
The Stalinists would stop at nothing to win their war on evidence within the Soviet Union, though, in the free world, it became apparent that they were losing more and more decisively over the years.
And what of the Nazis?
It’s well-known that the Nazi government that came to power in 1933 drove out Albert Einstein (1879–1955) and many other Jewish physicists. What’s less well-known is that any physicist who favored the Big Bang (“Jewish physics”) could also be unpersoned. Hitler seethed with hatred of their ideas, the authors say, and even Max Planck (1858–1947) proved unable to reason with him:
From the 1930s onward, under the influence of the violently anti-clerical Himmler, he rejected any idea of an immaterial God outside nature. Matter, he was now convinced, is eternal and any attempt by science to question this principle should be, in his own words, “killed in the cradle.” pp. 156–57
Instead, the Nazis espoused a unique crackpot cosmology which required an eternal universe in which Nazism would flourish. Fortunately, figures such as Einstein, Otto Stern, Max Born, and Hermann Weyl, were able to flee.
The Big Bang remains uncomfortable for many in science
Both the Soviets and the Nazis weakened their science by driving out evidence-based reasoning (and reasoners!). However, the remarkable fact is that while both regimes collapsed, that lesson was not as apparent as might be expected. Purely philosophical opposition to the idea of the Big Bang continued for some time, in the face of the growing evidence. More on that later.
This article is sponsored by Palomar Editions, publisher of God, the Science, the Evidence. However, Discovery Institute staff were responsible for the editorial content of this posting.
