Did the Universe evolve or was created?
The opening sentence in the Bible – “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth” – pre-supposes the existence of an all-powerful and awesome God.
If we believe this as true and accept it – over four billion people do – then, we must accept that God existed before the beginning. This has to be so for God to create the heavens and the earth in the beginning.
“In the beginning” implies that there was really a beginning. This can be the beginning of the heavens and the earth, or the start of a series of events: the events of creation.
It can also mean the beginning of time. We can take the creation of the heavens and the earth as an initial event that took place and can be linked to a time – the beginning.
This appears an equally correct interpretation because in the biblical account (Genesis 1:1-5), it is said that the creation of the heavens and the earth (and the separation of light from darkness) were in the First Day.
There is also mention of the Last Day which will be the end of time and the Universe when there will be judgement (Matthew 25, Mark 13:5-35, Luke 21:8-36, John 12:48).
The term “first” means, under a particular condition it is being used, that there is nothing of its kind before it. It, therefore, follows that for the heavens and the earth there can be no day before the first day.
So, in the beginning, we can say that, from the biblical account, the first day started the history of time with the creation of the heavens and the earth. As the account went, it will together with the Universe end in the last day which will be the end of time.
From this account of the beginning, the Universe and everything in it had a finite beginning. The Universe had not always been there, but was created by God.
In the holy book for Muslims, the Koran 31: 11 “He has created the heavens without any pillars that you can see, and He has placed in the earth firm mountains that it may not quake with you, and He has scattered therein all kinds of creatures; and We have sent down water from the clouds, and caused to grow therein every noble species.”
“This is the creation of Allah. Now show me what others beside Him have created. Nay, but the wrongdoers are in manifest error” (Koran 31: 12).
Pillars are a form of support. The invisible pillars, or pillars that you cannot see, are obviously referring to gravity. It is this gravity that is holding the heavenly bodies and the Earth also, in position.
Both Christian and Muslim traditions believe in the “First Cause”, that is, that something caused something to happen until you get ultimately to God.
They then took a common sense approach and called going beyond the First Cause a mystery. A mystery, they say, is a truth which is above reason, but revealed by God.
It is a fact which is beyond human understanding, to be believed by faith. Faith, they say, is a supernatural gift of God which enables us to believe without doubting whatever God has revealed.
So, in effect, we need God to understand God better.
It is significant that the first things created, according to the Bible, were the heavenly bodies and the Earth, giving rise to space and time.
Space is most fundamental for anything to exist. This is followed by motion for time to exist. Space and motion in space created time, from the biblical account, instantaneously.
The biblical argument is that if all creation since the beginning was done in time, and God existed before time, then God cannot be defined in time because there was no time “then.” God has no beginning.
The creation was done by God, from the biblical account, by saying a word. God may say, “Let there be light;” and there was light. This is how spacetime was created instantaneously.
Scientists define matter as anything that has mass (some material stuff that will have weight on Earth) and occupies space. What cannot occupy space has no mass and cannot be matter.
Waves, and indeed all forms of radiation, travel through space and can only exist in space.
Without space there will not be any wave even if it is mass-less. To have created space, as in the biblical account, God and God’s Word are therefore not matter, waves nor radiation.
The Christian belief is that God existed in this form before the beginning.
There are many other traditional accounts of the beginning of the Universe. Virtually every people have their own, complete with its set of belief system.
A typical African cosmology, like that of many other traditional societies, is not devoid of mythology.
That of the Yoruba people of south-west Nigeria is widely considered to be one of the most developed..
The Yorubas believe in the Supreme Being called Olodumare or Olorun who has a creative force which led to the creation of the Greater Orishas or ministers.
These Greater Orishas, or great divinities, built the Universe, the way it is, and even created man. They also created the Lesser Orishas or lesser divinities.
These great divinities after creating the Universe also expanded it. With the agreement of the Supreme Being, a large serpent was possibly created to wrap itself round the large Universe to hold it together.
However, the Supreme Being knows that when the serpent is hungry, it will eat its tail and then everything will re-collapse.
The science of Cosmology; the Universe as a whole, its origin, evolution and future, has led scientists to study and even try to calculate the age of events that led to the formation of the Universe.
They believe that everything started from about the size of a particle under intense pressure which exploded in the Big Bang.
Cosmologists believe they are sure of what actually happened when the Universe was ten-thousandth of a second old.
It would have started from a point of intense pressure and heat and exploded in a Big Bang which had a temperature of a thousand billion oC (degrees Celsius) or 1,800 billion oF (degrees Fahrenheit) ten thousandth of a second after.
This is possible, they say, because the density in this condition is equivalent to the density in the nucleus of an atom today.
In this temperature, energy form called photons can turn to subatomic particles like electrons and protons which can in turn change again into photons. Such conditions take place in particle accelerators today.
As the Universe cooled, photons and particles lost energy, as the Universe continued to expand and were no longer interchangeable.
In 14 seconds, the Universe cooled to three billion oC (5.5 billion oF) and nuclear fusion as in an exploding Hydrogen bomb took place.
At three minutes, the Universe was 70 times hotter than the centre of the Sun today.
By the fourth minute, a series of nuclear reactions took place and the nuclei of Helium were formed in a process scientists call Nucleosynthesis.
Nuclei could not hold on to electrons to form atoms at this condition.
By 30 minutes, the temperature was 300 million oC. At this condition, electrons developed and interacted with the nuclei to form plasma as in the centre of the Sun today.
By 300,000 years, the Universe, still expanding, cooled to the temperature at the surface of the Sun today: 6,000 oC (10,800 oF). Atoms started to form at this condition.
Between then and half a million years, stable atoms of Hydrogen and Helium had developed.
Since stable atoms are electrically neutral, they stopped interacting with photons, so light broke out, so to say, and the Universe became transparent.
Before then, “darkness was upon the face of the deep.”
Scientists trying to unify the account of creation as in the Bible with the Big Bang theory, believe that this was the point that God said “Let there be light;” and there was light.
This was marked by the decoupling of matter and energy.
It is this energy in form of radiation that scientists call the background cosmic microwave radiation of the Big Bang which, they say, still exists today.
It is about – 273 oC now and is what is said to be big evidence that there was the Big Bang.
By one million years, stars and galaxies started forming after matter and radiation had decoupled. This was because the Universe continued to expand and in dense regions, the expansion would have slowed and the region would have re-collapsed on its gravity.
Gravity outside pulled this body and it started rotating and the rotation, when fast enough, will balance the gravity outside to yield the galaxies. A rotating body can withstand gravity when its speed balances the gravity pulling it.
Huge amounts of Hydrogen atoms gathered under their own gravity, the temperature increased under pressure and nuclear fusion started.
The heat caused expansion or stopped further contraction. Stars were born.
Large stars need more heat to stop the gravitational attraction inside them and thereby will be burning more nuclear fuel which finishes earlier.
With the intense heat, the elements formed by the stars, like Carbon and Oxygen with Hydrogen, may gather and form another generation of stars like our Sun which is believed not to be a first generation star.
Some of the heavy elements formed this way came together to form the planets.
The Earth would have been too hot to yield life in the first two billion years.
After three billion years, the process of evolution started.
Primitive forms of life may have consumed the rubbish around by then to yield oxygen to give the more conducive atmosphere that we have today.
The Theory of Evolution on how life came to be on Earth is based largely on the work of Charles Darwin in his book Origin of Species written in 1859.
The theory states more or less: life started as a naked speck of protoplasm floating in water, from there to seaweeds and aquatic animals and then amphibians, some turning into land creatures evolving into reptiles and birds, while others evolved into mammals like apes and man.
It is not impossible for life to have started in water before moving on to land. Toads, they say, tend to live out this evolution theory when from eggs, they start as tadpoles living like fish in water and metamorphose into animals that can live on land.
The discovery of the background radio hiss of cosmic microwave radiation, or cosmic glow, was by two physicists, Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson, in 1965 and was believed to be that from the Big Bang.
Penzias and Wilson, physicists at the Bell Telephone laboratories in New Jersey, U.S.A., using a sensitive microwave detector, were said to have found their detector picking noise than it should.
The noise was the same in all directions even as the Earth moves, day and night and all-year round. This source, and the noise which was even, would have come from very far.
This was confirmed by other researchers. Penzias and Wilson won the Nobel Prize in 1978.
Another clue in support of the Big Bang theory came from the American astronomer, Edwin Hubble (1889 – 1953), who in the 1920s discovered that the Universe is expanding.
Trying to unify the account of the Big Bang with the biblical account of the beginning is difficult.
Be that as it may, the Church in 1951 officially pronounced the Big Bang theory in conformity with the Bible: It is just details of how God did the creation.
What the Big Bang theory says took thousands and millions of years to evolve took just one day to be created from the biblical account.
This is the main difference between the two accounts.
Perhaps, as in the Bible, one thousand years can be one day in the eyes of God (2 Peter 3:8).
