The friction between science and religion stretches back millennia and has been addressed by some of humanity’s greatest minds. Galileo paid a high price for his dissenting opinions. Richard Feynman channeled his views in an ode to the universe, while Albert Einstein articulated his beautifully in a letter to a little girl who wanted to know whether scientists pray. Carl Sagan found reverence of science and Bucky Fuller revised The Lord’s Prayer with science. Richard Dawkins countered mythology with the magic of reality and Isaac Asimov found humanism in the spirituality of science. Ray Bradbury exorcised the tension in his sublime unpublished poems.

Now, the fine folks of MinutePhysics — who have previously explored whether the universe has a purpose, why the color pink doesn’t exist, how science education is stuck in the 19th century, why the past is different from the future, why it’s dark at night, and the true science of parallel universes — trace the origin of this friction all the way back to the Big Bang, whose very name, it turns out, is so terribly misleading that it might be to blame for much of our cultural ambivalence.

Experimental evidence doesn’t actually rule out the possibility that there may indeed be a time before the beginning — a previous age of the universe that ended when space collapsed in on itself … so physics might actually be nudging us back to the view that the universe is eternal and didn’t “begin” after all.

Complement with why there is something rather than nothing, then revisit Sagan’s timeless meditation on science and spirituality.