Contradiction on creation of universe

The beginning of the universe had, of course, been discussed for a long time. According to a number of early cosmologies in the Jewish/Christian/Muslim tradition, the universe started at a finite and not very distant time in the past. One argument for such a beginning was the feeling that it was necessary to have a first cause to explain the existence of the universe. Another argument was put forward by St. Augustine in his book, The City of God. He pointed out that civilization is progressing, and we remember who performed this deed or
developed that technique. Thus man, and so also perhaps the universe, could not have been around all that long. For otherwise we would have already progressed more than we have. St. Augustine accepted a date of about 5000 B.C. for the creation of the universe according to the book of Genesis. It is interesting that this is not so far from the end of the last Ice Age, about 10,000 B.C., which is when civilization really began. Aristotle and most of the other Greek philosophers, on the other hand, did not like the idea of a creation because it made too much of divine intervention. They believed, therefore, that the human race and the world
around it had existed, and would exist, forever. They had already considered the argument about progress, described earlier, and answered it by saying that there had been periodic floods or other disasters that repeatedly set the human race right back to the beginning of civilization. When most people believed in an essentially static and unchanging universe, the question of whether or not it had a beginning was really one of metaphysics or theology. One could account for what was observed either way. Either the universe had existed forever, or it was set in motion at some finite time in such a manner as to look as though it had existed forever. But in 1929, Edwin Hubble made the landmark observation that wherever you look, distant stars are moving rapidly away from us. In other words, the universe is expanding. This means that at earlier times objects would have been closer together. In fact, it seemed that there was a time about ten or twenty thousand million years ago when they were all at exactly the same place.This discovery finally brought the question of the beginning of the universe into the realm of science. Hubble's observations suggested that there was a time called the big bang when the universe was infinitesimally small and, therefore, infinitely dense. If there were events earlier than this time, the they could not affect what happens at the present time. Their existence can be ignored because it would have no observational consequences. One may say that time had a beginning at the big bang, in the sense that earlier times simply could not be defined. It should be emphasized that this beginning in time is very different from those that had been considered previously. In an unchanging universe, a beginning in time is something that has to be imposed by some being outside the universe. There is no physical necessity for a beginning. One can imagine that God created the universe at literally any time in the past. On the other hand, if the universe is expanding, there may be physical reasons why there had to be a beginning. One could still believe that God created the universe at the instant of the big bang. He could even have created it at a later time in just such a way as to make it look as though
there had been a big bang. But it would be meaningless to suppose that it was created before the big bang. An expanding universe does not preclude a creator, but it does place limits on when He might have carried out his job.