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Creation Narrative
The Creation Narrative
Science and religion are two windows that people look through, trying to understand the big universe outside, trying to understand why we are here. The two windows give different views, but they look out at the same universe. Both views are one-sided, neither is complete. Both leave out essential features of the real world. And both are worthy of respect. Trouble arises when either science or religion claims universal jurisdiction.
Freeman Dyson[1]
Introduction.
For the past few years I have tried to put together a website that gives a complete statement of how the creation that we live in proceeded from the very beginning to the present. I use "complete" in the sense used in the theological literature in which "Complete" stands against "Comprehensive" to mean "good, but not exhaustive coverage," perhaps modestly acknowledging that only God knows exactly how he proceeded. The website is 19thpsalm.org, the name reflecting a view of mine that will perhaps clarify as we proceed. The name is an insider's codeword that informs someone who has a pretty thorough understanding of the Bible, or at least knows what Psalm 19 is about.
My aim in the website is to be accurate in what I say, and to agree with most scientists, or at least with a substantial cadre, and on the website I try to give frequent links or references to original sources for any assertions. Undoubtedly my belief in a hands-on creator colors my presentation but my emphasis (I trust) is on scientific accuracy rather than persuasion as such, and so I would hope that any person can assent to the main factual data, even if he finds my theistic bias a bit annoying -- or, deity forfend, "unscientific".
I may as well say it right up front, that I believe that there is overwhelming evidence in favor of a purposeful, divine (that is, acting from outside the physical universe) Creator. I believe that to hold a contrary view takes a considerable amount of willpower. But I don't belabor that point, other than to point out what I see as "Sharp Points" throughout the Creation Narrative that must be considered by any fully aware person. We will mention a number of these sharp points throughout the creation narrative, but you can see the sort of thing in this statement by Fred Hoyle, regarding the creation of the elements Carbon and Oxygen -- I'll talk about that later -- which are essential components of any conceivable life form:
"A common sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a super intellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as with chemistry and biology, and that there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature. The numbers one calculates from the facts seem to me so overwhelming as to put this conclusion almost beyond question."[2]
As far as I know, Fred Hoyle was an atheist, or at least agnostic. Yet he said this on a number of occasions. Somehow, I guess, he processed the "common sense interpretation" and remained at peace with his non-theistic view. That is exactly the point of a sharp point: not that it compels assent but that it forces one to make a choice or else to accept a certain rational equivocation or disconnect.
I can understand and respect a person like Fred Hoyle who honestly faces the difficulties in his worldview. What I have less respect for is a person who attempts to ignore or even suppress contrary data -- through ridicule, perhaps. About a decade after the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species -- his thesis of natural selection spread like wildfire -- Lydia Miller, widow of the geologist Hugh Miller, remarked:
“I must confess that I was at first startled and alarmed by rumours of changes and discoveries which, I was told, were to overturn at once the science of geology as hitherto received, and all the evidences which had been drawn from it in favour of revealed religion… God with us, in the world of science henceforth to be no more!"[3]
She concluded that the evidences are still there but "removed into a more distant and dimmer region," so presumably it won't have to be faced head-on. Frankly, this pretty much sums up the state of evolutionary and biological science today: the facts are there but "removed into a more distant and dimmer region."
So, I began the present project to flesh out the Creation Narrative as scientists understand it today. Also, in order to gain a more complete understanding myself, because the narrative includes many matters outside of my own -- or anyone's -- expertise. With your indulgence, this is what we will engage beginning right now.
Let There Be Light -- the Big Bang.
"...the vast mysteries of the universe should only confirm our belief in the certainty of its Creator. I find it as difficult to understand a scientist who does not acknowledge the presence of a superior rationality behind the existence of the universe as it is to comprehend a theologian who would deny the advances of science."
Wernher Von Braun[4]
One interesting factum that may or may not be generally recognized in the secular world is that the Bible and the orthodox theology derived from it has always argued that the universe, the matter of which it is composed, and time itself, had a beginning: a time before which it did not exist. This is not true of most non-Biblical religions (as far as I am aware), and emphatically not true of the roots of science in the Mediterranean cultures. All of the creation myths of my acquaintance, apart from the Bible's, implicitly take it that matter is eternal: the earth, or the gods, or whatever, is formed from something. If I am not correct in this assertion, I sure would like to be pointed to the exceptions, because I have looked into it a bit.
Until the mid-20th Century, this eternal existence of matter was also the preferred view of scientists. The first strong contrary evidence came from Hubble's discovery of an expanding universe, and from some fairly simplistic solutions to Einstein's general relativity equations[5], both of which could be seen to imply a beginning, both coming in the 1920s. But now, the evidence for a beginning some 13.73 ± 0.12 billion years ago is generally agreed, based in the most recent instance on NASA's WMAP satellite measurements of the cosmic microwave background[6]. 13.73 billion years may seem to be a long time, but in fact it is a very short time to accomplish all that had to be done to get to where we are today.
My favorite conceit is to identify this beginning -- the Big Bang -- with God's command in Genesis 1:3 "Let there be light," because in the beginning of the universe (according to the Standard Cosmology) there was nothing but intense radiant energy -- i.e., light. I should note that most interpreters of the Genesis account do not read the passage in this way, but it makes complete sense to me[7]. At this instant, all of the energy of the universe was created in the form of (positive) radiant energy and (negative) gravitational potential energy (light does have gravity!). It is an open question whether these two energies exactly cancel out so that the universe had net zero energy! One of the most fundamental laws of physics -- the conservation of energy -- says that the total energy of the universe was fixed at this creative instant: it never increased or decreased from that starting amount.
What caused the Big Bang? Nobody knows, and in fact it is unknowable in any way that can be proved by any scientific means, because at that instant the entire universe was smaller than the Planck length, and consequently all known science is inapplicable. Perhaps when a true unified theory of everything is able to combine quantum physics with general relativity, it may be possible to say more, but we are not there yet, and even if we were, it seems unlikely that we could prove the new theory to be correct. This doesn't, of course, stop speculations about an infinity of universes, strings, loops, cosmic holes, etc. but none of this can be proved (as far as we can tell) [8].
The Cosmic Inflation and the Cosmic Brake.
"The more I examine the universe and the details of its architecture, the more evidence I find that the universe in some sense must have known we were coming."
Freeman Dyson[9]
Almost immediately after the Big Bang (around a trillion trillion trillionth (10-36) of a second) the universe expanded very rapidly -- many times the speed of light -- for a duration of about a billion-trillion-trillionth of a second and then stopped expanding when the density reached a very precise value. The expansion, called the cosmic inflation, was as if an e-coli bacterium (length about 10 microns) suddenly grew to a size greater than the Milky Way galaxy (diameter 100,000 light years). After this the expansion rate returned to normal -- a little less than the speed of light. At the end of the expansion, the density of the universe was precise to within about 1 part in a trillion trillion[10]. I compare this to the Avogadro number -- it's as if the number of atoms in a gram-mole (6.02x1023) must be exact to within 1 atom: one too many and the universe collapses into itself; one too few and the universe expands too fast to form galaxies, elements, the solar system and us.
As far as I am aware, nobody knows why the expansion occurred, or why it stopped when it reached that precise density, which is so precise it begs for some universal law (or for God's hand). I call this a pretty sharp point.
Incidentally, a natural conclusion from the expansion is that the universe we can see is only a small fraction of the original Big Bang universe, and that there are literally trillions upon trillions (one should be able to compute the number) of other universes, which we will never see because they are further away than light can travel in the time since the Big Bang. Perhaps the laws of physics are different on these other universes: we will never know, but if so, then they almost certainly cannot harbor any form of life that we can conceive of[11].
Creation of Primordial Matter.
Physics that we can measure and test begins shortly after the cosmic inflation. The CERN Hadron Collider can (reportedly) reach energies of over 7 TeV (trillion electron volts) which corresponds to the ambient temperature at about 10-30 seconds (a million trillion trillionth of a second) after the Big Bang. This is just before the first matter forms, so the physics of what happens this early -- including the entire process of the formation of primordial matter -- can actually be verified by testing, and is known with a good degree of confidence.
When radiant energy precipitates out into particles, matter and antimatter form symmetrically. Normally they mutually annhilate, but for some reason -- not yet fully understood -- there seems to be an imbalance so that about 1 in a trillion particles of matter survive, with the result that we live in a universe of matter.
Whole books have been written about the universe's first 15 minutes. It is a fascinating time, weighted with portent, and the fact that it produced our present universe is because of many precisely "just so" values of physical parameters. Nobody, of course, knows where these values came from or why they are just what they are. But we will drop the matter because it would take us far astray -- read one of the books[12].
Matter precipitated out first as quarks, which then combined as free protons, neutrons and electrons (because quarks cannot exist independently) beginning about 1 second after the Big Bang. Free neutrons decompose with an average life of about 15 minutes, and so the only way for neutrons to survive is to combine with protons to form heavier elements. The ambient temperature was too hot for heavier elements to combine until the universe was about 100 seconds old with an ambient temperature of about a billion degrees Kelvin, so all of the heavier elements had to form between 100 seconds and 15 minutes.
Deuterium -- one proton + one neutron -- formed first in a binary collision between a proton and a neutron:
n + p -> deuterium
Heavier elements also formed: Helium, Lithium and a small amount of Beryllium. That's it. In this first 15 minutes essentially all of today's hydrogen, deuterium and lithium formed. These are called the primordial elements.
Why didn't heavier elements form? This is the grist for yet another remarkable "coincidence" or sharp point. The reason is something called the "lithium barrier." Heavier elements could not form because there are no stable elements with atomic mass (protons + neutrons) of 5 or 8, and therefore it is impossible to continue building the elements. Why not? Why are there no stable elements with AN 5 or 8? As far as I am aware, nobody knows, it is just a fact[13]. But because of this the formation of heavier elements stopped. That's fortunate, because otherwise there would have been a runaway combination into ever heavier elements leaving little if any hydrogen and lighter elements. None of the elements essential for life would have formed later in the stars. Another sharp point.
Creation of the remaining Elements.
"It is mere rubbish thinking at present of the origin of life; one might as well think of the origin of matter."
Charles Darwin (ltr, 1863)[14]
Just think for a moment about what Darwin meant in this quote. In his time, and for the next hundred years, science had no firm understanding about how the elements were created, and indeed most evidence seemed to imply that they had always existed and were unchangeable -- a rejection of alchemy. It was thought foolish to even think about it, a waste of time as was cosmology, generally viewed then as the province of profoundly unscientific religious and mystical speculation.