painted themselves into a corner? What does paint mean here?

If you said "squeezed yourself into a corner," it is fairly easy to understand. But painted into a corner? It sounds confusing to me.

Context:

His expressed views on creation were that although he was an "agnostic, and not a believer",[1] it seems to him that "the curtain drawn over the mystery of creation will never be raised by human efforts, at least in the foreseeable future"[1] due to "the circumstances of the big bang-the fiery holocaust that destroyed the record of the past".[1]

In an interview with Christianity Today, Jastrow said "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."[2]