[AndyTheBear]

Interesting that the "big bang" standard model is being seen as too secular by some today. For decades after Georges Lemaitre (the Jesuit Priest and Mathematician) proposed it, it was suspected of being a case of religious influence interfering with science because it predicted there was a moment of creation. And of course non-religious people had to think the universe had simply always existed.

Now his theory gets it from the other side. Sometimes you can't win...

[angryoldfatman]

About the initial mass of the universe, yep, correct. Given all of what we know about cosmology and astrophysics, a universe smaller than a certain size (the size implied by the current measurements of universal expansion) should never expand. Hence, a beginning moment is needed to “spark” the current expansion we observe.

This is known as cosmic inflation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflation_(cosmology)

This flew in the face of the Static Model of the universe, which held sway from Ancient Greek times all the way to the 1950s. The Static Model supported the non-existence of God, because it destroyed the Kalam cosmological argument which implied the necessity for a Creator.

In short, Big Bang needed an unexplained period of inflation (which was an EXTREMELY brief period of time - a 32-position decimal fraction of one second), which needed an entity outside of the universe to initiate - an entity that we have known for millennia as God.