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Artistic illustration of the early formation phase of the solar system. At the time, the young sun (in the centre) was surrounded by a pro-planetary disc - a rotating collection of gas and dust.
© ESO/L. Calçada.
According to creationists who treat the Bible as both science and history, the Earth was created ex nihilo as a small, flat world beneath a dome, sitting at the centre of the universe. This happened, they claim, when a male deity with magical powers spoke some special words – in a language no one else could have known, since no other sentient beings yet existed.
And all of this supposedly took place instantaneously, just 6,000 to 10,000 years ago.
Creationists also like to imagine that the Earth, and indeed the whole universe, was purpose-built and fine-tuned, with a grand plan designed so that they could live comfortably here and now.
The scientific reality, however, could not be more different.
Earth formed some 4 billion years ago, condensing out of an accretion disc around a young, second- or third-generation star – our Sun – amid the chaos of the early solar system. Planets jostled for stable orbits, minor planetoids collided or were absorbed, and gravity ruled everything.
Now, two scientists at the University of Bern have shown that the Earth which first emerged was dry, barren, and stripped of the essential building blocks of life. It was only thanks to a colossal chance collision with a wandering planetoid, rich in water and volatile elements such as hydrogen, carbon, and sulphur, that Earth acquired the raw ingredients for habitability. The debris from this impact later condensed to form the Moon, while the tilted axis of Earth’s rotation – which gives us our seasons – was another by-product of that chaotic event.
None of this was inevitable. It was the result of blind chance shaped only by natural forces such as gravity, directly refuting the creationist mantra that “order cannot come from chaos.” To insist it was all preordained as part of some cosmic plan to produce humans (and, more parochially, white Americans) is to deny the fragility of existence and the extraordinary good fortune of being alive now, able to appreciate the wonder of how it all came to be.
Atheists do not live for death; they live for life.