Among other things, the Webb telescope may add additional confirmation onto the standard model of the origin of the universe that states the universe had a beginning in time, and if it did that's very powerful evidence that the universe had a Creator.
The Webb telescope is a $10 billion, 21-foot device that features a massive umbrella-like sun shield. It also boasts 15 times the range of motion and six times the light-gathering capability of the Hubble Space Telescope—NASA’s next best instrument for peering deep into space and far back in time.
It will operate from an orbit 1.5 million miles from earth.
Astronomers using the Hubble telescope have already detected energy, called the Cosmic Background Radiation, left over from what they believe to have been the initial Big Bang, but the Webb telescope could provide further confirmation of that event.
Here's Meyer:
The light that NASA’s new telescope seeks to detect comes, not from those very earliest moments after the beginning, but from the first stars and galaxies that formed an estimated several hundred thousand years later.But why does evidence for an initial creation event point to God?
Detecting that light will nevertheless provide further confirmation of an expanding universe. Since the new telescope can detect infrared light—invisible light with extremely long wave-lengths—it can establish whether the most distant galaxies exhibit the amount of red shift that astronomers expect given the Big Bang.
As space plasma physicist and long-time NASA contractor Rob Sheldon has explained, “The light coming from these ancient, extremely distant galaxies, should be ‘ultra red-shifted’ into the infra-red range that the Webb telescope is designed to detect.”
This additional evidence of an expanding universe would further deepen the mystery associated with the Big Bang and add weight to a growing science-based “God hypothesis.”
If the physical universe of matter, energy, space, and time had a beginning — as observational astronomy and theoretical physics increasingly suggest — it becomes extremely difficult to conceive of any physical or materialistic cause for the origin of the universe.Moreover, though Meyer doesn't mention this, to have created a universe as precisely calibrated and complex as this one the cause of the universe must be unimaginably intelligent and purposeful, two qualities of personal agents. The vast majority of possible universes are universes in which nothing much could exist except for perhaps a few atoms of hydrogen, but our universe is exceedingly complex and, in our little corner, fit for life.
After all, it was matter and energy that first came into existence at the Big Bang. Before that, no matter or energy — no physics — would have yet existed that could have caused the universe to begin.
Instead, whatever caused the universe to originate must not have been material and must exist beyond space and time. It must further have been capable of initiating a great change of state, from nothing to everything that exists.
Such considerations have led other scientists — former Massachusetts Institute of Technology physicist Gerald Schroeder and the late Caltech astrophysicist Allan Sandage, for example—to posit an external creator as the best explanation for the origin of the universe as revealed by modern cosmology.A passage from the late astronomer Robert Jastrow, himself an agnostic, seems appropriate here. He wrote in his book God and the Astronomers, that,
Oddly, the detection of light from extremely old and distant galaxies could also further corroborate the specifically biblical account of the origin of the universe. After all, the first words of the Bible not only affirm a “beginning,” but also that the first light came soon thereafter.
As Tulane University cosmologist Frank Tipler has noted, “Genesis tells us that there was a beginning and that after the beginning, light was the first created thing — exactly what modern astrophysics confirms.” [Nobel Prize winner] Arno Penzias has similarly noted, “The best data we have are exactly what I would have predicted had I nothing to go on but the first five books of Moses. . . .and the Bible as a whole.”
Astronomers now find they have painted themselves into a corner because they have proven, by their own methods, that the world began abruptly in an act of creation to which you can trace the seeds of every star, every planet, every living thing in this cosmos and on the earth.
And they have found that all this happened as a product of forces they cannot hope to discover. That there are what I or anyone would call supernatural forces at work is now, I think, a scientifically proven fact....
For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance, he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.
