On the Third Day, Part 1: A Plate That Can Move Mountains

Then God said / “Let the waters under the heavens be gathered together into one place / and let the dry land appear” / and it was so / and God called the dry land Earth / and the gathering together of the waters He called Seas / and God saw that it was good.

One of the perks of scientific study is the chance to go to conventions in far-flung places. I just got back from one near Munich, and yes, Sam, as you kept reminding me before I left without you: "Daddy, I've never been to Germany." (Substitute: Austria, Switzerland, etc.) You've never been on a plane for 14 hours in one day and disembarked at 11am, either, Sam. You'll get your chance soon enough.

So your mom and I rented a car and drove south from Munich, toward the Alps, to the small town near a lake where the convention took place. The airport is on very flat land, and by the time we got south of the city, the land began rippling in green waves a little like a bedsheet, but in a easy farmland-pasture cowbell kind of way. But that was nothing compared to the green wall ahead of us; even the smaller, eastern half of the Alps looms over the mountainscape like a sudden escarpment. It's the reason the border between Germany and Austria is where it is: there's just this big, sudden wall that's hard to get over. Good fences make good neighbors, for countries too. Here's the best picture I could find, although even this doesn't do full justice to the sudden, looming nature of the Alps:







This border is geographical and political, and it's sudden. On the southern side of the Alps (all the way into Italy), it's not nearly so sudden. I like to have an idea for why the land looks like that. The best current idea is that we were looking at the back side of a "continent crash." To imagine what this might be like, take a look at Google Earth and click on a "hybrid" view that will superimpose roads and city names onto the satellite view of the mountains and lakes. On the highest zoom level, look at the Alps. and imagine that a very large hand is pressing Italy into the rest of Europe. Imagine that the Alps are the ripples from that continental attack. Click back and forth on the view, zoom in and out. With Google Earth, you can look at it from any angle you like. Also, look at India pressing up into Asia: the Himalayas are a larger version of the same phenomenon. I'm not sure if this is geologically sound, but I like to think that because Italy is pressing northward, the ripples on the north side of the Alps are more sudden, and it's more like a wall on that side, but for now that's just a hunch.

Now, I realize this may seem like a lot to swallow. After all, something moving too slowly to observe is something that must be taken on faith. This idea, that Italy and India are scooting around on the earth like cards on a playing table, is just about 100 years old to science, and it was understandably controversial at first. I'll save you the debates, and just show you the ideas that are the current, uncontested results: the Alps for one, the Himalayas for another, and for another provocative idea, look at the east side of South America and the west side of Africa. Not only do they look like puzzle pieces that have been torn apart, there are also mountain ranges/types of rock and even fossils that match on each side, separated now by an ocean but hinting that the two were once together. I know how much you like puzzles, and it's kind of satisfying to think of the Earth as a giant, moveable puzzle. I mention this now because the third day of creation describes the land separating oceans, the definition of borders, and land and sea becoming defined. These things are geology, and we see that geology has been very active and dynamic, much like God's hand is described on the third day.

I think that to accept such an outlandish idea as dancing continents, it helps to have a reasonable scientific mechanism, preferably chemical. It might be just because I'm a chemist, but there actually is a chemical -- well, at least atomic -- reason to adhere to this theory. The hand of God shuffling land is an interesting idea: what if he left fingerprints? He did, but in his typical, low-key, intricate and natural way, a way that we can retrace by being chemists and looking at the atoms.

It all has to do with why Lord Kelvin was wrong. If you recall from Day 2, Lord Kelvin was the venerable old scientist who calculated the age of the earth by assuming it had cooled down from a molten state and asking, how long would it take to cool off to the current temperature? His answer was it would take millions of years to cool off. Yet the Earth's age from the pitchblende experiments is in the range of BILLIONS of years old. How could Lord Kelvin be so wrong when his basic ideas were right? The problem is he didn't know his chemistry. (Take this as a lesson, young sons!)

To be specific, he didn't know his nuclear chemistry. In Day 2, the message that "atoms fall apart" is actually a statement of "nuclear" chemistry, because the part of the atom that falls apart is the hard core in the middle: the nucleus. Lord Kelvin didn't know about the nucleus because he was a 19th-century scientist and the nucleus wasn't known at all until the early 20th century. Once it was found, scientists studied how it falls apart, with the result being one of the most ambiguous yet defining discoveries of all time: the atomic bomb. Clearly when an atom falls apart, it releases energy. When lots are made to fall apart at once, you get an extraordinary, even demonic?, amount of energy. When you have a big ball of tons of atoms, which is what the earth is, there's a few falling apart deep inside, releasing little bits of energy. They act like tiny spaceheaters, because the energy warms its surroundings just a bit (much more gentle and spread out than a bomb). This means the decay of atoms deep within the earth keeps it warmer than it would be without that decay. This warmer earth means it took longer to cool down and is therefore older than the most prominent 19th-century chemist could calculate. It also means the earth, deep down, is still pretty warm. In fact, it's still liquid underneath its crusty shell.

Although we can't yet drill down and scoop this liquid up for examination, we can see it (from a healthy distance) when it shoots out of a volcano and we can observe its effects by just rubbing a magnet on a floating needle: the magnetic field that keeps a compass pointing north is caused by the liquid inside the earth. The crust is actually very thin compared to the rest of the earth, like the skin of an apple. If you think of it that way, it's possible to see how the continents are floating on a sea of magma and, very slowly, can move about. The chunks of dry land are wide and flat and eventually came to be called "plates." The movement of the plates is "plate techtonics."

And so, there's the theory that as the surface of the earth cooled, and as rains fell and seas formed on the lowest parts of that surface, that continents became defined and moved about on the million-year scale. One theory is that a huge land mass formed first and then broke apart along the line of the African-South American coast. I can read the third day of creation in the Bible and see that happening in my head, with God commanding it (perhaps from the very beginning of time) and the radioactive nature of atoms causing it. Or, if you prefer, of God causing the atomic cause. It's all chain-of-command detail once you identify the source.

The clincher for me is that we have GPS systems and laser measurements where we can actually measure movements as short as the wavelength of light, and using these fine tools we can actually observe Greenland moving west at about an inch a year, for example. We can work on the details of what moves where and when -- but it looks pretty clear that the continents are moving and have moved. (By the way, did you know that GPS does not work unless you account for "relativity" in the math? As strange as physicists may seem when they talk about relativity, you need to account for it to get the resolution that a GPS system provides, or GPS simply does not work.)

So the seas formed around the land, and continents separated waters from waters. "Seas" and "dry ground" were defined. Then something really remarkable began to happen, too small to see at first, but an event so amazing we're still having a hard time trying to see just how it happened. That event is the subject of Day 3, part 2, coming next. Let me give you a hint: it has something to do with chemistry.

To be continued ...

In Memoriam, Scott Becker

My friend died yesterday morning. He was my pastor at Bethany from about 10 years ago. He wasn't yet 50.

He taught me to read Stanley Hauerwas. He taught me Romans from N.T. Wright's perspective before I knew N.T. Wright from A.W. Tozer. He watched Laurie and me come together -- our evening fellowship group was a useful pretext. He knew how to teach with questions, not statements, something I'm still trying to figure out. He played "Rainbow Connection" in the church Talent Night with a spot-on Kermit voice. I thought the second verse about being half-asleep was his personal joke at first, but there it is in the original lyrics. He did have that kind of humor. He co-presided over our wedding. He taught me to make omelets. He gently pushed me into teaching Sunday School classes when I didn't feel quite ready (and I wasn't quite ready). It was those classes, not my graduate education or chemistry-teaching assignments, that actually taught me how to teach. That's what I do every day now. At his prompting I taught the Psalms, a post-September 11 course with Kevin Hilman, and a History of Church and State course. I would not have done them without his prompting, or even known how to teach without his example. I wouldn't even be able to read the books I'm reading now without what he gave me.

He had moved to California a few years ago to get his Ph.D. at Fuller Theological Seminary. About a year ago he was diagnosed with cancer. He had always been riddled with health problems, and this was the worst of all. Last Thanksgiving he and his wife were visiting and we were able to host an after-church party for him. Our old fellowship group came over and played Boggle and ate food. Halfway through the afternoon snow started to fall, without warning. It kept falling and started sticking. Then the power suddenly went out. We still said goodbye slowly, in the dark, and people filtered out in the quiet. (Although part of it was waiting for a nearby 4X4 to arrive to push some people's cars up the snowy hill by our house.) I was hoping that wasn't a sign, but I'm afraid it was.

Chemo wasn't working, so he chose to quit it a few weeks ago. His last blog post is open, hopeful, but not really optimistic. He could feel the tumors inside him. Still, my reaction is one of surprise. I wish we all had more warning, one more time together, one more hug. Now, part of me looks forward to the last trumpet that much more. One more thing is broken. One more silence calls out from the ground, waiting to be made right. One more wound, one less friend.

We miss you, Scott.

Day 2 Postscript: The Barrier of the Firmament

I'm going to be traveling soon, and it's been more than a week since I last was able to add to the Eight Days of Creation. Not sure when I'll put together time to write a full post for Day 3 (that one looks like a two-parter too), but in the interim, another quick thought about the firmament:

After Jesus' baptism by John the Baptist, a dove came down and a voice spoke from heaven. It's hard to understand just how big of a deal this was for those who saw it. To them, the sky was a firmament, a hard metal shell. God broke clear through that shell and spoke from his heaven to his son, on earth as it is in heaven. This is a crack opening in the sky and God peeking through. It's not warm and cozy, it's a little scary.

But I think if one of us moderns had been there, and had seen the same thing, the result and message would have been much the same. The same scene to us would mean that God had come from (seemingly) very far away to be very near. His voice would be ringing in our ears. The barrier overcome would be one of space, not metal, but the message would still be that the barrier is broken, and heaven has come to earth in this very ordinary-looking package, Father, Spirit, and Son.

People don't talk as if God is behind a barrier as much anymore. Instead we talk as if he doesn't exist, or is very, very far away -- our cosmology has changed but our symptoms haven't. In all cases, even if it seems he's not here, we look at Jesus and see God breaking through, whether the thickest of shells or the longest of distances, to show himself right here.

On the Second Day, Part 2: The "Baby Story" of the Universe

Needless to say, I have two sons who are very different, as was clear from the very beginning. Sam, you were four days late, and your birth was as scary as any first-time experience is, slow to come on, slow to progress, and if I even start to talk about how difficult it was, your mother kicks me under the table to remind me that she was the one who had to go through the actual pain (and to transfer some of that pain retroactively to me). I was reduced to cheerleader for a twenty-hour struggle. Then you came and we enjoyed a first quiet hour together. I held you so you could take your first look and you stared up at me with a bit of a question, maybe a “sorry about that” kind of expression, but I also saw you memorizing my face. Then I remember the TV showed the end of a Mariners game in which Lou Pinella threw a major tantrum and kicked his hat. I’m not sure what that means, but somehow it seemed fitting after all your mother went through.

Aidan, on the other hand, you were ready to go two weeks early, and Laurie asked for an epidural right away. We were so rushed we didn't have time to worry. The epidural worked well – so well that I took a little nap and woke up when the nurse said, in effect, “Here he comes!” This is when I first saw your incredibly red hair (we always knew you were a redhead even though the nurse told us you were a blonde -- actually, you had hardly any hair at first so it was an open question). You were long and stretched-out, and laid back, from the beginning, and we loved you from before that beginning.

Each birth was joyful and painful, but in different ways and with different timing. The important parts of the births were the results – two wonderful little boys – not the exact amount of time it took you to get here. We’re just glad you’re here.

Still, time is integral to the story that we tell. With that in mind, as part of telling the "Baby Story" of the universe, let’s try to figure out the length of its birth-day. We can emulate the “Harvard computers” with their Cepheid stars, and try to find some kind of yardstick for how old things actually are. Let's ask the earth how old it is, and let’s ask several different ways.

In the nineteenth century, geology was the fancy, popular science, much like biotech is today. Lots of hobbyists ran around trying to figure out rocks and fossils, including more than a few scientist/reverends like Rev. William Buckland of Oxford. It's important to start out by noting that everyone agreed the earth was very old, whatever their background, and the only question was, how many years does "very" old actually mean (and, how do you understand Noah's flood)? The most authoritative voice was the scientist Lord Kelvin, who saw from melted-looking rocks that the earth was once very hot, then calculated how long it would take hot rock to cool down in space, ending with a guess that the earth was 24 million years old. Others used different deductions to answer the question with 2300, 153, or 89, all "million years old." (Methods?) The bottom line is, even in the 1800's, many methods gave results confirming that the earth is very old.

But how can we actually measure it? We need something in rocks that is more durable than rock and as common as dirt. The rocks themselves can be split and deformed, knocked around by glaciers or floods, but the atoms themselves last very long time. All we have to do is stay away from the cores of massive stars or supernovas where atoms are created, which, incidentally, is probably good advice regardless. We can measure how fast atoms fall apart in the lab, and moreover, we can tell what should result from an atom falling apart with the certainty of 2 + 2 = 4, or perhaps 4 - 2 = 2.

(Here's an example, actually used in dating rocks: a potassium atom has 19 protons and 21 neutrons in its nucleus. It "breaks down" when one proton falls apart into an electron and neutron, which turns it into an atom with 18 protons and 22 neutrons: this is now an argon atom, because the protons tell us what kind of atom it is. We know how fast this break-down occurs: it takes 1.251 billion years for half of a potassium sample to turn into argon. To put it all together, a young rock will have lots of potassium and a little bit of argon, while an old rock will have lots of argon and a little bit of potassium. Since 19 = potassium, 18 = argon, and 1 = the poor-fated proton, it's 19-1 = 18 when you get down to the heart of it.)

We had to wait for the twentieth century to understand exactly how atoms fall apart. Thanks to the periodic table and work in nuclear physics, we figured out that uranium falls apart into lead, and not just any lead, but a special, unnatural lead with a few extra neutrons. If we can find both of these things in the rock we can tell how old the rock was when it cooled and froze into solid rock.

Clair Patterson is a scientist in the 1950's who tested samples of pitchblende, which has both uranium and lead in it. In 1953, he calculated that the earth is 4.5 BILLION years old. In other words, Lord Kelvin didn't know the half of it. In recent years, scientists scoured rocks where potassium fell apart into argon and rubidium fell apart into strontium, and the oldest rocks we can find always turn out to be 4.5 billion years old. It looks like that's when the earth started to cool, and that would be its birthday (probably, planets call it a "coolday"). (By the way, looking at moon rocks, we get an age just about as old, but a little younger than the earth.)It takes some more calculations to extend these ideas to the universe, which looks about 13 billion years old right now. Once you've accepted the idea of a 4.5-billion-year-old earth, what's another 8.5 billion years? The catch is you have to get your mind around the idea that from day 1 to day 2 of creation, from "let there be light" to the separation of the worlds and formation of the earth, it looks like 8 billion years elapsed.

You may want more information on exactly how these rock-dating methods differ, and how they account for atoms getting dissolved out of the rock or reacting with other atoms, etc. That's why it's good we have at least four very different methods that give consistent dates. I suggest a set of three articles by Davis A. Young, a Christian geologist who taught at Calvin College till his 2004 retirement, published in Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith vol 58:4-59:1, the journal of the American Scientific Association (referenced in a previous blog article titled "The Scientists' Favorite Psalm"). Dr. Young compares the many different techniques and talks about the theological implications of a very, very old earth.

Also, let's not forget to ask the physicists and mathematicians if they can work out a model for how the universe expanded, coalesced, and cooled into today's configuration over that long of a time scale. They can, and in fact, they have mathematically consistent theories for how the Big Bang happened down to a fraction of the very first second of the universe. So the chemistry gives us an old age from the rocks, and that gives the physics and math enough time to sort everything out. Everything makes sense scientifically. But ... not everything is reducible to "scientifically" right now, is it?

I expect you're experiencing a bit of cognitive dissonance. Doesn’t the Bible say everything was made by God's word in six days? How can it be the word of God if the age of the universe is six days plus or minus 13 billion years? Why do we just see physical processes and no fossilized fingerprints of God in the mud?

It will take this entire series for me to even begin to answer all of these questions. We have to start somewhere, so let's start with the question of time. My immediate response is: don’t ask me, ask the Bible. In particular, ask Moses, who is the traditional author of Genesis.

It actually doesn’t say for sure in the Bible whether he wrote the first five books or not. But did you know there is one chapter in the middle of the Bible with Moses' name on the byline? It’s Psalm 90, which was not written by the usual suspects like David or Asaph, but "A Prayer of Moses the man of God." The amazing thing about this Psalm is that it fits right in with any discussion of Genesis. It opens with praise for God’s consistency and faithfulness, just like we talked about earlier in Day 2:

Lord, You have been our dwelling place in all generations / Before the mountains were brought forth / Or ever You had formed the earth and the world / Even from everlasting to everlasting / You are God.

You can embellish that with "Before the Big Bang and gravity," and it remains the same basic idea. We haven't got to mountains yet, but they're coming in Day 3. Keep reading the next two verses of the Psalm:

You turn man to destruction / And say, “Return, O children of men.” / For a thousand years in Your sight / Are like yesterday when it is past / And like a watch in the night.

That's an interesting perspective on time. Often people quote 2 Peter on this subject, but it appears that 2 Peter is quoting Psalm 90 (which also makes sense if you read the whole Psalm, because its themes of righteousness and judgment go right along with 2 Peter). So, if we read Psalms alongside Genesis, then the author of Genesis must have had a surprisingly flexible perspective on time, and how God relates to it. This isn’t too different from the findings discussed in day 1, the insight Albert Einstein gave us, that time and space are tied up together and can be distorted, even bent out of shape. Light is the absolute of the universe, and time itself bends to its constancy. I'm not saying that Einstein and Moses were describing the same thing, but I am saying that the same mind can read and assemble the ideas of each without having to wall them off from each other (like in Edgar Allen Poe's "The Cask of Amontillado" for example!).

There’s lots to chew on here. The idea that time itself is not really pinned down is very, very hard to get your mind around. It does free us from having to say that the creation described in Genesis 1 had to happen in precise 24 hour spans. I'm not sure if the phrase "24 hrs" even has meaning here. What's clear from the chemistry of rocks and the physics of the Big Bang is that the universe was around long before us.

In day 1, we saw we live in a very big universe: from that I get a sense of awe, not self-pity or nihilism. Just because I'm small doesn't mean I'm insignificant or unloved. In day 2, we see that the timescale of the universe is very long: from that I get the same idea, of awe, not insignificance. Your Veggie Tales Bob doll is still right, you're still special and God still loves you very much. The scale of the universe does not diminish you, it enhances and even glorifies God. He loves you so much he made you through a billion-year-long process, something incomprehensible to us, but if He made it, it's not incomprehensible to him, is it?

Another side note is that it took 8 billion of the universe's 13 billion years to make the earth. The seven-day creation in Genesis is not evenly spaced. If it was, it might be more accurate science but it wouldn't be even half-decent writing. So the birth of the universe was more like the birth of Sam than the birth of Aidan. It was unimaginably slow. And that tells us something about the God who created it.
Some people don't like the idea of a long creation, and they say it makes God seem weak somehow, that if he's all-powerful, he could've made the earth in seven days. Well, why stop there? He could've made the earth in seven seconds. He could've caused the earth to pop out of nowhere without any process at all. But he didn't; he took his time, and his word did not return to him empty. Who am I to say it's an insult to him if he took his time? He gave me a mind to do my chemistry and count my uranium in pitchblende, and in good conscience I apply that, and I find that the world is old. I could have found that nothing is old, and it would have forced me to conclude that God made the world in seven days. But he doesn't force that, instead, he allowed the gravity he made to quietly scuplt the galaxies, the stars, and the worlds.
Love is patient ... God is love ... and God is patient. The root of patience is "passio," the Latin meaning to suffer along with something. God's patience can be seen in the long wait for the universe to come together according to his fixed laws. It can also be seen in Jesus' suffering on the cross, just a day on the earth but who knows how long to him? The birth of the universe, like your own births, was joy and pain blurred together like a spinning wheel of colors. God could have done it other ways, sure. He also could've fixed the world once and for all on that first Easter morning when Jesus came out of the grave -- but he didn't. Better yet, he could've sent legions of angels to Gethsemane to establish his kingdom in the way everyone expected, using the language of violence everyone (including his closest disciples) spoke -- but he didn't. Think of the reasons why he didn't, and hear his still small voice in the quiet of 8 billion years between the creation of the universe and the formation of the earth. Isaiah, David, and Bono combine to ask "How long, Lord?" for the patience to wait hundreds or thousands of years; God answers with the quiet patience to wait billions. This is part of the way creation groans from Romans 8, waiting for God to set things right. We live in a time where much has been fulfilled, but much is still to come. So we wait, and suffer a little bit more, and the fulfillment comes that much closer.

The previous three posts are about origin, immensity, and nearness. In those topics God appears as Creator and Father. But God as Creator is also the God seen in Jesus, and this fourth area (patience) is the first time that becomes clear. Consider the lengths to which He would go to create a universe elegant enough to produce what we need to know ourselves and to know him, and love him. His provision extends to the centers of the stars where atoms are created. We see a suffering God reaching out to us and patient enough to wait billions of years. God was above time but he also participated in it -- that's part of what it means to say he created "by his Word" and to say that "In the beginning was the Word and the Word was God and the Word was with God."
As for Genesis 1, it's tantalizingly close to what science shows us in what I'd argue are the most important points. But it's not as if science will eventually prove a 24-hour-creation day right, nor does it need to. I don't think God proves his existence that way, it's just not his style, and I don't think a God provable from nature would be same as the God revealed in Jesus.
As for the structure of Genesis 1, I like the idea that the seven days were the seven visions in which it was given to Moses, perhaps visually accurate, at the very least accurate in establishing each and every one of their essential points. Maybe I'm right on that, maybe I'm wrong and it was a polemic about God defeating the idols of the ancient Middle East. Maybe both are true. What matters is that I can see his hand in the gravity, and his heart in the long silences of creation. That's what science tells me: not an independent confirmation, nor a dissonant conflict, but a coloring and shading of the Genesis story, stretching some parts of it that are not essential to the message, but maintaining that (1) God made it and (2) it was good. I'd say those two points are repeated enough in Genesis 1 to be highly important!
Looking at the Bible with 21st-century eyes, and a full understanding of the experiments done to probe our universe, can pose some brief moments of dissonance, but it can also give dimension to what was unknown before. Consider how the size of the universe underlines the power of God. And while we're talking about the heavens and the Psalms, consider these words from Psalm 103:
For as the heavens are high above the earth / So great is His mercy toward those who fear Him / As far as the east is from the west / So far has He removed our transgressions from us.
In ancient times those were both examples of very far things, but most people considered them to be finite and limited. The firmament was very far away but it was still some kind of metal shell, or so they thought. What's fascinating is that hidden in this poem is an even greater understanding of God, unlocked by recent discoveries. The heavens are not just high above the earth, they're infinitely high (or, if you want to consider the firmament as the limit of the universe, 13 billion light-years away). Because we're on a sphere with a north pole but not an east pole, east and west are not just far, they're infinitely far from each other. So God's mercy is not just big, it's infinitely big. That's how far away your sins are removed: infinitely.
So that's what Genesis 1 says about the waters above; now we can pan down and move our focus to the waters below, the great oceans and seas that still are less explored than the surface of the moon. In them, life appeared almost immediately, as if it could hardly wait for the earth to cool off. But there was still a lot of waiting before it really started to flower, for similar reasons of patience and preparation. But I get ahead of myself, because that story really belongs to the third day. Wait for another post for that part of the story.
So there was a separation of the waters. There was evening, and there was morning. The second day was done.

The First Official McLab Publication

Here it is ... the first official publication entirely from my SPU lab, with undergraduate co-authors and everything:
http://www.jbc.org/cgi/content/abstract/M704513200v1

This paper has been three years in the making and one year in the writing, so I must say I am very relieved that it is on its way into print. Today I have to quickly learn Adobe Illustrator to spruce up the images so they look nice on paper.

It's free till publication, which should be sometime in November. Then it will be nicer-looking but will cost about $30, so download it now!

And congratulations to all my undergrad co-authors. You did a great job!

On the Second Day, Part 1: Feeling Gravity's Pull

Then God said, “Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters / and let it divide the waters from the waters” / Thus God made the firmament / and divided the waters which were under the firmament / from the waters which were above the firmament/ and it was so / And God called the firmament Heaven / So the evening and the morning were the second day.
The key word for the second day is “firmament,” an old word you don’t encounter much outside of English class. To explain firmament I think of Perry Como and Bobby Sherman: There’s an old song that starts “The bluest skies you’ve ever seen are in Seattle,” and if you imagine just how solid the blue above you looks on one of those August Seattle days, you can understand the ancient notion that the sky is a big, strong dome above us. (Maybe “dome” for most people and “shell” for the ancients who thought of the world as a sphere – some did, you know.) The firmament was obviously strong, and the ancients supposed it to be made of the strongest thing they knew of, which would be metal. It was also supposed to be the barrier between this world and the next. I can’t report that this ancient conception was scientifically right; but I can tell you is that there are strong things that separate us from everything else (this world from the next one over), and they came about on the second day. It’s not a shell of metal, it’s a shell of blue light, but it’s held together by something that is just as powerful as metal in the long run. When I think of what holds up the heavens, I think of the force that holds the earth together and holds the earth to the sun to keep it from spinning into space. So, on the second day, I’d say God created gravity – and gravity, in turn, created metal in the heavens, rather than a heavens made of metal.


Physicists looking at matter today can see four different kinds of forces, each with different “shapes,” strengths, locations, and other properties. Two of the four are what hold the centers of atoms together, one is the electromagnetism that causes magnets and charged particles to stick together, and the last one is gravity, which it’s not too far wrong to say holds everyTHING together. Gravity is always the odd man out when you talk to a physicist: the two atomic forces and electromagnetism are similar enough that you can see how they go together, mathematically speaking. You can use the same kinds of equations to talk about them (called the Standard Model). Gravity, on the other hand, is so weak that we can’t see it (yet) and can’t fit it together with the other three forces (yet). Mathematically, it’s the problem child. But gravity is special because it’s inclusive: everything that is made of matter can both give and take tugs of gravity on everything else made of matter, and this can be from a significant distance.


Because gravity is so different, it makes sense that it’s the one force that separated from the others first, after the Big Bang. All that expanding matter started to clump up into clouds of dust, and some of the dust started to clump up into bigger clumps. The bigger the clump, the more its gravitational pull and the bigger it became. From this clumping we got stars and galaxies of stars and clusters of galaxies. The dust was very gaseous and nebulous and poorly formed, but gravity pulled it together into spherical stars with the same kind of crisp shape you see in our sun. God set up gravity, at the moment of creation, to shape the stars out of the matter that spilled out of the Big Bang. It’s as effective as if he had rolled the stars out of interstellar Play-Dough, or folded them up like so many boxes, although a little more elegant. When I look at the universe I see that God likes elegance, especially when it comes to the fundamental forces that mold space and time.



Gravity is weak enough that you can defeat it (temporarily) by jumping into the air, even at the young age of three years old. But it is strong, too. Not only did it form the stars, but some stars got so big that deep inside the pressure of all that stuff squeezing down made a furnace where those strong atomic forces themselves start to melt down. Atoms got mashed together so tightly they started to fuse together, making new atoms and a little extra energy to burn (therefore, stars are both hot and bright). The new atoms are more complex, mashed-together versions of the old ones. For example, one atom of hydrogen is made up of two small parts: one proton and one electron. In the center of a star, a bunch of hydrogen gets compressed so tight that the protons start sticking togther, and when two protons stick together, that’s the core of a helium atom. Three protons = a lithium core, and that’s a metal already! In fact, sometimes the stars themselves break down with a huge supernova bang, and the forces from this are so intense that there’s a little mini-creation of very complex atoms bursting out from the site. Metals are complex atoms that may have been formed this way – from weak but persistent gravity overcoming the stronger forces.


The concept of all these stars forming from the amorphous clouds of matter, knit together by gravity, is similar in my mind to God’s word separating waters from waters on the second day. This weakest but most common and least understandable of all forces started to differentiate the fluid universe, creating spiral-armed galaxies, red giants, supernovas, and from these factories we got lithium and carbon and more and more complex atoms. Gravity is still at work today. Here’s a picture of an infant galaxy forming nearby, relatively recently, and you can sort of see gravity pulling it together:




[Image from the Hubble Space Telescope, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Hubble_-_infant_galaxy.jpg]

I want to give you a paradox here: God is wholly other and different from his creation, but he is also everywhere, and if he’s everywhere, he is very, very near. If he’s omnipresent, he knows when the sparrow falls, when the hairs fall, and he knows every time gravity knits part of his creation together. Don’t make the mistake of thinking because gravity is consistent and understandable that he must be very far away somewhere, watching us from a distance. On the other hand, don't make the opposite mistake of putting the two things together and thinking he is the gravity, he is not, he is its master. Rather, think of gravity as his tool, his servant that does his bidding and does it very well. Gravity does its job so well, and so consistently, that He lets us use it: we can figure out how it works, give it an equation, and predict where the earth was long ago, and where it will be in the future, assuming its “mission” doesn’t change. These physical forces are messengers of grace for all, like the rain falling on everyone.

This consistency means that I can do an experiment today, and tomorrow I can do the same experiment and get the same result. If something is different, I can’t blame gravity or electromagnetism changing on me (at least as a biochemist I can’t – most biochemical forces boil down to force #3, electromagnetism). Also, if I see light coming to me from across the universe, I can assume it came to me straight, according to the rules set down at creation. I don’t have to worry about it hitting any “pockets of irrationality” that alter it on its way to earth. I can assume that the universe is wholly rational and obeys the same laws everywhere, and everything we see sure reinforces that idea. When scientists look at the universe and can see things billions of light-years away, we see that everything is consistent with this underlying rationality. If God didn’t make the universe, there’s no reason it should be rational, or understandable at all (side note: I’m going to apply Ockham’s Razor to shred the multiple-universe counterargument). Yet everywhere we see, if not order, then the underlying order of rationality. This is a subtle argument, to be sure, but I think it’s a strong one that we live in a rational universe, the consistency of which is a pointer to God. The very rationality atheists spend so much time defending, in their minds against the evils of religion, is really a gift of grace. In a sense there’s a distorted witness to the truth in their strident arguments about justice and rationality.
I think God's nearness in the universe comes out most clearly in times of solitude. This may be a result of my introverted nature, or it may be more common than that -- I just hope you can find your way to see God all around. For me, in college, I lived next to a large athletic field that was dark and empty at night. I would walk back and forth across that field, sometimes thinking, sometimes praying, sometimes neither, and somehow no one ever called security on me. I could see the stars bright and the rest of the earth in shadows, no one else around, and I would get a sense that God was near. The flat field of grass seemed holy, burning but not consumed, "charged with the grandeur of God," to quote Gerard Manley Hopkins. In that boring, open, clear field, I saw God's hand. I also knew that the grass was made of carbon atoms and water molecules, and that all those stars were very, very far away, and if I tripped in a hole that I would fall in the dark, because gravity was still doing its job. God's nearness negated none of those facts. The God that was faithful to carve out all this, and to give us a universe where we could reliably repeat events, as much as we wanted, that God was closer to me than anything else, and yet different, An Other, at the same time. From these observations of a regular, repeatable world, you can conclude one of two things that are ultimately opposite to each other: (1) God is either distant "upstairs" somewhere, dead or close to it; or (2) he is close, faithful and consistent in the midst of these elements, upholding all these forces by his word. I choose to conclude the latter. Much of the Bible is the story of working out what God's faithfulness actually means.
So time passed after the Big Bang. Waters continued to separate from waters. In the spiral-arm corner of one nondescript galaxy, a spinning disc of dust started to collect around a massive collection of matter. The center of this became a yellow star, and eight smaller spheres started to form from the disc, all more or less in the same plane, moving in the same direction. The third of the eight spheres developed a relatively large, single moon (possibly from something else coming along and whacking into it early on), and became our planet Earth. The sun’s gravity keeps it in place, the sun’s light keeps it warm, the moon’s gravity keeps it from wobbling too much, and somehow it had liquid water and a richness of the chemicals needed for life.

This is what happened. The question is, when did it happen? How long did it take after the big bang for these events to take place? How old is this dirt we’re standing on? That’s something I want to give you some data for, and data takes time (surprise), so I’ll continue with the question of time in part 2.

On the First Day, Part 2: Point of Origin

[continued from Part 1]
Being able to see single stars in other galaxies wasn't just good for proving that galaxies were far, far away. It also proved just how far away they are. Some stars don't burn with a steady light, but they wobble bright, then dim, then bright, then dim, so regularly that you could set your watch to the oscillations. It’s almost as if the stars are breathing in and out. The first person to notice this was a computer: one named Henrietta Swan Levitt to be precise.

(A hundred years ago, Harvard College Observatory hired roomfuls of technicians to process and catalogue the photographic plates that came from the telescopes. Most of these “computers” were women because an early director found they could do the job as well or better than male assistants, and, unjustly, for half of the going rate as the men. Part of Harvard's reputation today must be attributed to the work of these unsung heroes.)

Levitt discovered this regular pattern of star-breathing when she was looking at the constellation Cepheus, so this special kind of star is called a Cepheid. The oscillations are so unnervingly regular they can be used like marks on a ruler to measure how far away each star is. This is how, for instance, the size of the Milky Way was figured out, which so impressed everyone at first, but turned out to be the mere tip of the iceberg. Hubble used Cepheids in distant galaxies to calculate the exact number of “reallys” you have to put in front of “really far away” for his galaxies (assuming a conversion factor of 1000000 kilometers per “really”, of course). This, even more than actually seeing the stars, is what convinced everyone that these clouds were massive and far away, not just splotches of dust.

If you can learn a lot about the size of the universe from looking at the intensity of light, imagine what you can learn from looking at its color! Once bigger and better telescopes allowed us to look at colors of galaxies farther and farther away, these colors started to tell us something hugely important. The farther away the galaxy, the redder it appears, without fail. This is strange, because galaxies should be pretty much the same color, or perhaps if they differed they'd be mixed up in color like a jar of assorted jelly beans. But they only differ based on distance.

An important clue for how this could be comes from Albert Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. Don't be fooled by the name: this is actually a theory of absoluteness, because everything in it springs from the one statement that nothing can go faster than light. There is an absolute speed limit to the universe, set to the speed of light itself. (We’ll get to the “relative” part in a few paragraphs.) Light’s speed is absolute, everywhere, everywhen. As a result, if you’re moving away from something that’s glowing, the speed of the light won’t change but its color will. Specifically, it will look reddish, and the faster it’s moving away, the redder it will look. (You’ve never observed this effect in person because, no matter how fast that 1978 Toyota I bought you goes, you’ve never come close to moving at the speed of light. Try and you're grounded.)

This “red shift” is amazingly consistent. When we look around ,we see all galaxies outside of our local cluster running backwards, away from us. The farther away from us, the faster they're going. It’s a bit like being at a crowded party and then realizing that everyone is inching backwards away from you (if it’s any comfort, everyone is also inching away from everyone else). Or as if you’re standing in a room, and you look north, south, east, west, up, and down, and every wall is rushing away from you. Think the entry rooms to Disney's Haunted Mansion on a grand scale.


This gave the scientific community an immediate sense of vertigo. No wonder they developed a sense of nausea. Hubble played a role in putting together the data, and got his name put on the observed “red shift,” but he didn’t really put it together to figure out what it all meant; it was just too weird for him. It took a priest with a Ph.D. from MIT named Georges Lemaitre to say what's probably occurred to you already, “So if everything’s moving away from everything else, doesn’t it follow that at first everything was together, at a single point?” This is just a case of playing “connect the dots” with galaxies and realizing all trajectories meet at a single point. Lemaitre called it a “primeval atom," which, as Dave Barry would say, sounds like a great name for a rock band. The universe is an inflating balloon, with the galaxies as specks painted on its surface. And it’s still blowing up and out. (Sam, there’s your balloon, as promised.)

The very idea that the universe was once mashed down into a single point seemed preposterous to scientists brought up on the Greek idea of a static or flat universe. Fred Hoyle, a brilliant scientist in other respects but one of the leading proponents of the “Steady-State Theory” that insisted something else must be wrong, scornfully called this primeval explosion the “Big Bang.” But the name stuck, and is now the name everyone uses!

It's important to keep in mind that this has all changed in the last hundred years. More experiments in the 1960’s helped the case of the Big Bang theory. Two scientists from Bell Labs were trying to use microwaves to carry phone messages, but they heard a constant annoying static buzz below everything. No matter what they did to clean out their system, the buzz persisted. Then they talked to some astronomers down the road: it turns out one of the predictions of the Big Bang theory is that there should be a constant, low-level “echo” of microwaves in the universe. That is what they were hearing. You can see some for yourself if you tune a TV to an unused channel: about 1% of the static you see is from this background radiation. The exact properties of the static they measured matched what the Big Bang model said we should "hear" at that frequency. (Their measurement is the blue bar on the left side of the blue-and-pink graph below, by the way.) But it was just one point -- and it would take a satellite to measure many more.

The microwave static helped to cement the case for the Big Bang, but the Bell Labs experiment could only see a fraction of the radiation that the Big Bang caused. A satellite was designed called the Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) that could better observe the shape of the radiation, from its vantage point in orbit far above the interfering veil of the atmosphere. It was able to systematically scan microwaves from every part of the sky that had never been compared before. A simple event like the Big Bang should produce a simple pattern of microwaves, evenly spread out through the sky. What it saw was this, colored from red to blue over a span equivalent to four degrees Celsius:





Hmmm. Looks pretty simple to me. The reasons for this are pretty complicated, but basically, a big explosion that started the universe should leave a big, even residue of microwaves spread across the universe. And that's what we see!

Better than colors, let's use numbers. If you draw a graph, you can put the prediction of the Big Bang theory on it as a line, and the measurements that we’ve got can be put as points near that line. The better they line up, the better the theory. See for yourself (blue dots are from COBE, and see how they match the pink line exactly):

[both pictures from http://ircamera.as.arizona.edu/NatSci102/lectures/bigbang.htm]

The blue points match the pink line as if they belong there. Therefore, the Big Bang is currently one of the best-proved theories in physics. Since COBE, physicists have learned to accept it.

So we’ve established that there was a Big Bang event. What does it mean? It means if we run the film backwards, we see the birth of the universe, and this expansion started from a point. So all this bigness was contained in something smaller than small. It was nothing.

There was a void. God said let there be light. And there was light. That’s not a bad description of what happened. The universe was wound up like a clock, and exploded like fireworks, or the beginning of Star Wars theme music. There was a starting line to a grand race of galaxies when everything was compressed like a tiny springy snake in a peanut brittle can, waiting to be unleashed. I can try with mixed metaphors like these, but I can't improve on what I hear in the Bible, with ears and eyes that have taken in what science has to give me. I really think that knowledge of Genesis 1 allowed Lemaitre to see what the data meant, and to name the beginning of everything.

By everything, I do mean every thing. Don’t forget that we may be talking about the beginning of space, but we’re also talking about the beginning of time. It’s easy to think of time the way the ancient Greeks thought of the universe: constant, static, even flat. But that is a mistake. According to physicists, time is a fourth dimension that goes along with the three space-dimensions of height, width, and breadth. "Our instinct is to regard time as eternal, absolute, immutable -- nothing can disturb its steady tick. In fact, according to Einstein, time is variable and ever changing. It even has shape. It is bound up -- 'inextricably interconnected,' in Stephen Hawking's expression -- with the three dimensions of space in a curious dimension known as spacetime." -- Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything, p. 126. If the three other dimensions had an origin in the Big Bang, then time did as well.

In the Theory of Relativity, Einstein said if the speed of light is always absolute, then other things have to change, time and space in particular. (This is your mind-bending physics nugget for this post; why should time be able to change when light cannot? The key is that you can't work out the math for light changing, but you can for time changing. Weird, huh?) When I hear “let there be light,” I imagine light as the absolute into which everything else, even time, must fit. It is the laser level against which the universe is squared. The “relativity” that Einstein talked about forces us, humans looking at the past of the universe, to understand that time and space are relative (while light was not) and were compacted in a single origin, so that light itself may remain unchanged, insurpassable, framing the universe and giving us the chance to see things as they are: 10,000 galaxies in a speck of sky flying away so fast they've turned red.

In the past century, science has earned its Creation Myth: it tells us "And there was light." Space and time had an origin. In Genesis 1 we hear the words "Let there be light" and as Christians, we hear the Originator, birthing the universe with his word.

So there was light. There was evening, and there was morning. The first day was done.

[to be continued with Day 2]