A Scientist and His Book

I’m currently reading The Language of God, by the head of the Human Genome Project Fancis S. Collins. Collins is a Christian and a scientist.  Below is an excerpt from chapter 3 entitled “The Origins of the Universe,” where Collins gives a scientific account of the beginnings of the universe. When I first read this, I was so taken with a deep feeling of awe and wonder in God’s great work of creation!  The method by which God has caused our universe to evolve is truly amazing!  I appreciate Christian scientists who boldly maintain integrity where there may be both religious and professional pressure.

“For the first million years after the Big Bang, the universe expanded, the temperature dropped, and nuclei and atoms began to form. Matter began to coalesce into galaxies under the force of gravity. It acquired rotational motion as it did so, ultimately resulting in the spiral shape of galaxies such as our own. Within those galaxies local collections of hydrogen and helium were drawn together, and their density and temperature rose. Ultimately nuclear fusion commenced.

This process, whereby four hydrogen nuclei fuse together to form both energy and a helium nucleus, provides the major source of fuel for stars. Larger stars burn faster. As they begin to burn out, they generate within their core even heavier elements such as carbon and oxygen. Early in the universe (within the first few hundred million years) such elements appeared only in the core of these collapsing stars, but some of these stars then went through massive explosions known as supernovae, flinging heavier elements back into the gas in the galaxy.

Scientists believe our own sun did not form in the early days of the universe; our sun is instead a second- or third- generation star, formed about 5 billion years ago by a local re-coalescence. As that was occurring, a small proportion of heavier elements in the vicinity escaped incorporation into the new star, and instead collected into the planets that now rotate around the sun. This includes our own planet, which was far from hospitable in its early days. Initially very hot, and bombarded with continual massive collisions, Earth gradually cooled, developed an atmosphere, and became potentially hospitable to living things by about 4 billion years ago. A mere 150 million years later, the earth was teeming with life.” Francis S. Collins, The Language of God