The Cosmic Expansion: Scriptural Intuition and the Fine-Tuning of the Vacuum
For millennia, the prevailing philosophical and scientific view of the universe was that of a "steady state" , an eternal, static backdrop against which the drama of history unfolded. However, the 20th-century discovery of the expanding universe by Edwin Hubble fundamentally altered our understanding of reality. Interestingly, long before the advent of the telescope, ancient Hebrew texts repeatedly utilized a specific linguistic motif: the "stretching out" of the heavens. When we examine these twelve biblical claims alongside the modern scientific realization that the expansion of the universe is fine-tuned to an accuracy of 1 part in 10^120, we find ourselves at a staggering intersection of ancient intuition and modern cosmology. The Linguistic Motif of "Stretching" In the Hebrew Bible, particularly within the prophetic and poetic books, the verb natah is frequently used to describe God’s interaction with the heavens. This term literally means to stretch,...