Ever since the beginning of time people have turned to myth, religion, and science for the answers to some of the toughest and most mysterious questions anyone could ever ask: When and why was the universe created? Is there a divine creator? And who might that someone or something be?

#Generations upon generations of people have formed views, opinions, criticism, and logical or wild theories on the answers to these ultimate questions. A few of the more familiar examples of answers to questions about creation are the religious stories of Adam and Eve and God Created The World in Seven Days. However over the last 30 years, the most widely accepted, and to me the most realistic, theory has been the Big Bang theory.

The Big Bang is supposed to have occurred between 10 and 20 billion years ago from a particle even smaller than a grain of sand, so that the universe (and everything in it) was created in a single, incomprehensible gigantic explosion. It has been expanding and evolving to this day and will continue until the universe reaches its end.

True, the concept of the Big Bang leaves a number of unanswered questions about creation, but no other explanation can come close to fitting observations to theory. Amazingly, this success continues to grow because it is equipped with new, outstanding tools such as high-powered space telescopes, extremely sensitive radiation detectors and super-computers so that scientists can learn more.

As people prepare for the twenty-first century, scientists who are just now beginning to develop a semi-adequate understanding of how and when the universe was created still do not know when it was created and cannot even begin to speculate about the reason why it exists and whether or not there is a divine creator. However, with far more powerful instruments soon probing the remote corners of the universe to detect any forms of matter left from the explosion of the Big Band, and with NASA planning to put telescopes in orbit as far away as Jupiter, scientists hope to find the answer to "when" in the near future. Although the questions of "why" and "by whom" may have to be addressed by a different means than science, as written by Smoot, "facing this, the ultimate question challenges our faith in the power of science to find explanations of nature. Is this then where science breaks down and God takes over?" u