Too Old and Fat? part II

Every creation day in Genesis 1 closes with the refrain, “And it was good.”  The last day heightens this by adding another word, “And it was very good.”  There’s one exception.  No such refrain follows the second day (some have suggested that apparently even God doesn’t like Mondays).  Yet the central point still stands.  God decreed the physics of the universe as we actually have them.  This doesn’t leave us with mere physics.  A better way to put it is, in creation we have “physics plus!”  In previous blogs I already described the high level of precision that was involved in both the total amount of mass and the rate by which it expanded outward from its initial creation out of nothing.  To lay my cards on the table, I am arguing the evidence for God’s providential involvement in creation all along the line.

Now, is our cosmos “Too old and too fat?”  In order for humans like us to live in a cosmos with the physics God has decreed, several things had to happen.  Remember the distinction from my last posting between what God can do (which is anything at all He chooses) and what God has chosen to actually do.  Since we are commanded from the Bible to believe the witness of nature (Romans 1:18-21) then we can conclude that the God-willed initial physical conditions were not compatible for life.  Only hydrogen existed, and then very quickly helium developed.  So far so good, but so far not enough!  This is consistent with Genesis 1:2, “And the earth was without form and void.”  The initial lack was God-willed.

An essential requirement for life to thrive is that we need a home which is safe, comfortable, and equipped with those conditions that allow us to walk, breath, eat, mate, and so forth.  Given the physics nature tells us God has created (Romans 1), things had to transpire before planet Earth would become ready.  Stated very simply, there needed to be hard matter (“heavy” elements) to provide the solid surface on which we Earthlings can walk.  This means a rocky planet like our own, as opposed to a star or even a gas planet like Jupiter.  Jupiter is largely made of Hydrogen (the lightest element on the periodic table) which is hard to stand on (jumping is even more problematic).  In addition, our biological chemistry absolutely requires the existence of another, heavier, element, Carbon.  And our physical bodies also require the array of additional elements (from our periodic table) in order that our bodies might be sustained.  The more scientists study the complex conditions necessary for human life, not to mention life in general, the more it becomes clear that every bit of the natural world participates in some way in its on-going care.

So how does the above discussion support the contention of this posting that our cosmos is NOT too old and fat?  The single answers is, the production of all of the necessary elements required time in order to form, and large amounts of it.  Every bit of matter in the universe is composed of atoms of different numbers of electrons, protons, and neutrons.  The more of each, the heavier the element, from Helium, the lightest, to Ununoctium, the heaviest, as of the writing of the book in front of me by Theodore Gray, titled The Elements. (Black Dog & Leventhal, 2009).  As scientists peer across the entire history of the cosmos they notice that the heavier elements appear much more recently.  But they are produced from their predecessors, (the next lightest element,) in a long chain of events going all the way back to the beginning by the process of nuclear fusion.

Scientists tell us that solid planets such as Earth were not even possible (there were not yet heavy enough materials) until the third generation of stars came into being.  What this means is that the universe had to have been expanding long enough, which means far enough as well, in order to produce the materials we all enjoy on Earth today.  It therefore bears repeating that our cosmos is neither to old nor too fat (large).  It is just right.  Were it not as old and large as it actually is, we would not be here to consider the matter.  But let this truth not be interpreted as a case for evolution.  Not even theistic evolution.  It all bears witness to the God of the Bible who said of His own creation, “It was very good.”