CREATION

The origin of the Earth and the Universe is a defining issue. It is a major preoccupation of science, the Big Story, and tells us much about who we are and how the world around us works. It also has major political implications, given how cultural groups vying for influence derive a large part of their identity from traditions that incorporate mythological accounts of creation. This often places them at odds with the conventional scientific explanations for the origins of the various aspects of the natural world.

Science is often accused of misrepresenting the evidence in favor of a pre-determined outcome, but that’s not how science operates. Science approaches the question of origins the way a detective approaches a criminal case—by viewing the evidence left behind at the scene of the crime of working backwards to piece together the sequence of events. Well, enough evidence has been gathered and pieced together to form a pretty detailed picture of the Big Story.

It’s sort of like the defense in the OJ Simpson trial. There may not have been any witnesses at the scene, but there were so many pieces of evidence of so many different kinds that fit together and reinforced each other to form a unified picture. But those biased in favor of a different outcome treated each piece of evidence as though it were the only piece—in isolation from all the others—the goal being to cast enough doubt on the straight story to permit the preconceptions to remain uncontradicted. What they’re not interested in is evidence to flesh out their preferred scenario.

Enough evidence has been gathered in past couple centuries to tell a fairly complete story, and it is this story that forms the basis of our understanding. We don’t know what happened before then, but roughly 13 billion years ago all the matter in the Universe was concentrated in a single Cosmic Egg that exploded in a Big Bang. The matter, all hydrogen gas, formed vast swirling clouds that coalesced into a multitude of stars, within which the gravitational pressure triggered nuclear fusion reactions that gave off energy while producing higher elements like hydrogen, carbon, etc. Over the course of this first “solar generation”, and the subsequent supernova explosions of dying stars, all the familiar atomic elements were produced. The material from dead stars proceeded to form new stars as well as planets. One of these planets was the Earth, and the figure generally accepted by geologists is that the surface cooled around 4.6 billion years ago. Given the vast number of planets that came into existence, the law of averages ensured that some, including the Earth, had all the right conditions—size, distance from the star, liquid water, moderate atmosphere, and a magnetic field—to sustain life.

We don’t know just how the first but of self-replicating DNA came into being, but we do know that living things were present at least 3 billion years ago, since rocks that old contain microfossils of extinct microorganisms. This marks the beginning of the fossil record. The way that fossils are distributed throughout the rock strata shows a clear progression from older, more primitive life forms to more sophisticated ones over time. And the composition of each sedimentary layer tells us a great deal about the type of environment that existed when it on the surface. Limestone, for example, consists partly of the ground-up shells of sea-creatures as well as numerous fossils of the same, sandstone is fairly obvious, and “fossil” fuels—coal and oil—are made up of ancient organic material. On top of that there’s evidence of ancient volcanic activity, continental drift, geologic uplift, erosion, an ice ages.

It took a long time for all that stuff to form, a lot more than 6,000 years. Some people contend that most geological features can be explained by accepting as literal truth the Biblical story of the Great Flood, but such single-event “catastrophism” can in no way explain the complex makeup of the rock strata. For one thing, there are alternating layers of sedimentary and igneous rock, meaning that it can’t all be hardened mud left over from a single event since it couldn’t have found its way underneath layers of hardened lava. Plus, it takes about a million years for surface sediment to solidify and for bones etc, to fossilize, although this kind of scientific assertion tends to get airily dismissed. But as for the way fossils are distributed throughout the strata, not so fast. Forget Darwin, here’s what Leonardo Da Vinci had to say:

“If the Deluge had carried the shells for distances of three and four hundred miles from the sea it would have carried them mixed with various other natural objects all heaped up together; but even at such distances from the sea we see the oysters all together and also the shellfish and the cuttlefish and all the other shells which congregate together, found all together dead; and the solitary shells are found apart from one another as we see them every day on the sea-shores.”

And of course there’s evidence of continental drift, the ice ages, so much more. As for evolution, there’s plenty of evidence for that too, including DNA evidence and fossils of transitional forms, as well as the obvious family resemblance among the various species of a given phyla. When this kind of evidence becomes undeniable, some folks resort to making a distinction between “microevolution”, which they’ll accept, and “macroevolution” which they do not. But that’s not a distinction that mainstream science recognizes, and yet either way, the broader geological and paleontological record leaves no room for a literal reading of Genesis.

That’s not to say that life came about completely “by accident”. Looking at the complexity of the human mind and apparently forthright manner by which evolution cumulated in this extraordinary structure—along with everything else—it’s tempting to speculate that there may have been some intelligent design going on. After all, aircraft are the product of intelligent design, and yet they evolved, and fighters especially are subject to “natural selection” in the crucible of air combat. But testing innovations in a real-world environment and applying the lessons to the next generation takes time. A lot more than six days.