Earlier this month I was sitting on the right side of an airplane cruising at 30,000 feet up the Eastern shoreline of the USA, flying from Jacksonville to Philadelphia. It was 6:30 in the morning and the Eastern horizon was coming alive with a red glow as the sun appeared to rise out of its watery depths and slowly pan its way across the sky. At least that seems to be the reality of the sun’s movement when one is standing firmly rooted to the earth’s surface. But sitting at this height, and being able to see the gentle curvature of the earth to the north and the south, it was easier to imagine that I was, in fact, on a spinning ball, and that the sun was not rising out of the ocean depths or flying through our skies. It was just that the slow rotation of this ball made the sun become visible from my vantage point and made it appear to traverse the sky and hide some hours later behind the Western horizon. As that true reality found an anchor within my mind, another reality began to form. Somehow it is the press of gravity, that made this glowing ball we call the sun exist in the first place. It was the inexorable squeezing of primordial hydrogen and helium into such tight confinement that these elements had no choice but to fuse together and ignite into a massive fusion explosion. And it is also that gravity that kept that explosion from blowing itself apart and made it appear instead as a glowing ball hanging there in space, 93 million miles away – a blinding orb of light. Within that ball, two of the most misunderstood basic laws of the universe, light and gravity, were interacting, to bring everything, including the aluminum fuselage I was housed within and the glass window through which I was peering, into existence.
Looking downward I could see the ground, the seashore and the oceans and realize that every piece of that matter is composed of a vast diversity of atoms that came into existence within the confines of one of those solar furnaces. And each of those atoms broke forth from the interstellar crush of gravity only under the explosive power of a huge star as it ended its life in a supernova.
Yet those atoms, freed from the intense gravitational pressure at the center of a star, were not free of gravity's formative work. Instead, they spewed outward from the dying neutron star, herded together into gigantic plumes by the electrical fields set up by the speeding, charged particles. And then gravity again worked its magic by pulling them together into larger and larger conglomerate bodies.
One of those bodies had the good fortune to contain a mixture of almost all the element that could possibly exist in the periodic table of elements. And it was a good thing that such a plethora of parts was available because this was to be a very special planetoid. It was big enough to have sufficient inward crush to cause the radioactive elements at its core to maintain themselves in a molten state. This internal, bubbling mass mixed and roiled the surrounding envelope which cooled and solidified into a cracked, floating crust like the slang on top of a crucible of iron. It broke into massive crustal plates that jostled each other at their edges. When they crashed together, their densities determined which would slide over the top and which would be cast down into the molten abyss below. Those cast down carried with them the wonderful elixir, water, which has the magical property of hydraulic expansion when cooled and of an explosive transition into steam when boiled. This explosion of steam could not be contained by the weight of the overbearing crustal plates and resulted in volcanos erupting onto the surface, carrying the molten magma of the core with it. At the same time, the colliding plates that had floated upward were cracked and crazed into dizzying mountain ranges like the Himalayans or the Andes. Lying buried within this distorted landscape were incredible veins and pockets of all those elements forged within the stars. The tectonic plate motion provided both the bearing of diverse elements from below, and the piling it up from above. But the resulting landforms could not remain static due to the presence of that previously mentioned elixir, water! Now it was going to exhibit yet another of its vast, magical characteristics and work with gravity and heat to sculpt the landscape in the most interesting ways.
The temperature on the surface of this planetoid was such that water could exist in any of its three states – solid, liquid or gas – depending on the temperature and pressure it was subjected to. This amazing coincidence meant that water would constantly be lifted from the low-energy reservoirs of the oceans and lakes and be cast adrift in the skies where it could circle the globe in its gaseous form, only to condense into clouds which then released the water droplets as rain. Albeit, now the water had been given additional energy by virtue of its elevation as it landed upon the folds of the crustal plates and volcanic slopes. Again, gravity acted upon these free-flowing molecules to cause them to find a downhill slope to cascade across. As they flowed, they eroded the landscape, exposing the underlying rocks. If they did get trapped in the crevices, they would lie in wait for a cold spell when they would undergo another phase change into ice, expanding as they froze, cracking and splintering the encasing rocks. These combined actions, along with glaciers and wind, sculpted the tectonic landscape into mountains and valleys. The eroded material was carried downstream and deposited into the bottoms of lakes and oceans. There it piled up and the crush of gravity now turned it into hardened, sedimentary rocks. These rock layers in turn would be crushed and thrust skyward as the tectonic plates continued their sliding and grinding of the floating landmasses.
And so, the world, slipping away below the wings of that speeding jetliner, had slowly been transformed into a habitation worthy of God’s second act of creation; LIFE! But the awe-inspiring beauty of this first act of creation – the making of this water-saturated, rocky cauldron of minerals that we call earth – is that he did it simply by imparting energy from his hands into the Deep, causing it to vibrate with light, allowing that light to condense into matter, and acting upon that matter with gravity. And now, eons later, the products of that elegant combination of forces could provide me with an airplane, a seat and a window through which to gaze upon that most magnificent of creations.
And oh, if you were waiting to see how I was going to explain how the second act of creation, LIFE, happened, you may need to wait until I can arrange a long meeting with God and take up that question with the Creator. It seems that the mystery of where life came from will forever elude the understanding of mortal man. But as one can see from this short discussion of where matter came from, understanding can only increase the wonder and awe surrounding the Creator God rather than diminishing it. And remember. There remains the third act of creation – SPIRIT. We have a very long way to go to understand how God did all of this. Thankfully, He also created one other important element – ETERNITY! Without that, we would never have enough time to appreciate all that God did to create the one thing He has always wanted – uncoerced FELLOWSHIP with mankind!
Note: for those interested in a much more scientific discussion of the life of the stars, I highly recommend the Great Courses series, "The Life and Death of Stars" by Keivan G. Stassun, available on Audible.
