I’m fascinated with astronomy — always have been — and had I been better at math, I might have taken that as a career path instead of the writing/journalism route. The former would have definitely earned me more money.

In recent years, there’s been a lot more news articles out there about the topic; not just about terraforming Mars, but really 22nd century stuff such as parallel universes (and M-theory and string theory) ; dark matter, the heliopause, exoplanets and building cloud cities on Venus.

Just this month, one of the two winners of the Nobel prize for physics is a scientist who put together a theoretical framework for what happened just after the Big Bang.

There’s more journalism out than ever on sophisticated astro topics and the motherlode of all astronomy pieces is Medium, which offers several a day on the specialized feed that I receive. Popular Science, Scientific American and Business Insider are other sources. But in all the discussions about the Big Bang and beyond, there is one thing that is never mentioned.

Yes, we are talking about what came before the Big Bang or what/who made the Big Bang happen 13.8 billion years ago. In other words, journalists are avoiding the debates about God. Most pieces I read are silent on the topic, although this Quanta magazine piece wonders if the late theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking was right when he said the universe has no beginning.

National Geographic, in the video shown above, puts the God question into a “creation myths” category. Generally, religion isn’t treated seriously in science media. I quote from this piece in Medium about what happened just after the Big Bang is typical of silence out there.

Immediately after the Big Bang, when the Universe was nothing more than a hot sea of subatomic particles, photons crashed into and scattered off of everything they encountered. Then, as space expanded and time elapsed, various different regions of higher energy began to have the same pressure as regions of lower energy. Gradually, certain sectors of the Universe were able to collapse into the seedlings of primordial Black Holes. …