Some understand these days as six consecutive 24-hour periods, a view known as young-earth creationism. Others read the same text and conclude that the word “day” (the Hebrew word yôm) represents longer periods of God’s creative activity. This approach is often called old-earth creationism.

Both perspectives begin with Scripture and seek to honor its authority. The difference lies in how each interprets the language and structure of the creation account, not in their commitment to God or his Word.

For Christians who wonder how scientific evidence for an ancient universe fits with a faithful reading of Genesis, old-earth creationism represents a historical understanding of God’s two revelations. It holds that God is both the Author of Scripture and the Creator of the natural world. Therefore, the two won’t ultimately contradict each other. God’s “two books”—the Bible and the created world—work together to reveal the same Creator.

Old-earth creationists recognize that while God’s two books are wholly reliable, human interpretations of both are not. Theology is our attempt to interpret Scripture; science is our attempt to interpret the natural world. No one has complete knowledge of either, and our assumptions can lead us astray. So when our theology and our science seem to conflict, old-earth creationists see that tension not as a reason to dismiss one or the other, but as a call from God to study both more carefully.

In the following sections, we’ll explore what old-earth creationists believe, how they interpret the creation days in Genesis, how their view compares to other creation perspectives, and why this discussion matters for Christians who want to take both the Bible and the evidence of nature seriously.

What Is Old-Earth Creationism?

Old-earth creationism is the view that God created the universe, Earth, and all life over long periods of time—billions rather than thousands of years.

Where it differs from young-earth creationism (YEC) is in timing. The old-earth creation view asserts that the “days” of Genesis are not 24 hours each, but rather long spans of God’s creative activity.

From an old-earth creationism perspective, scientific evidence for an ancient universe and Earth—including radiometric dating, geological records, expansion of the universe, and the light from distant stars and galaxies—is consistent with God’s creative work and with Scripture.

Current scientific measurements place the age of the universe at roughly 13.8 billion years and the age of the Earth at about 4.6 billion years.

This idea that the six creation days may not be six 24-hour periods has deep historical roots. Early Jewish and Christian thinkers, including Philo, Clement of Alexandria, Origen, Basil, and Augustine, allowed for creation time periods other than 144 hours. This means the idea of long creation days is not a modern compromise with science. It predates modern science by more than a thousand years

What Do Old-Earth Creationists Believe?

Old-earth creationists like those at Reasons to Believe see the universe as ancient—billions of years old—yet shaped and designed by a personal, purposeful God. Their core convictions include that God reveals himself through both Scripture and the natural world (dual revelation); that the “days” of Genesis represent long, consecutive time periods (the day-age view); that God directly created new forms of life at key moments in Earth’s history; and that Adam and Eve were real, historical individuals from whom all humanity descends. We explore these more fully below.

Is Old-Earth Creationism Biblical?

How can we assess if old-earth creationism is biblical? For many, this is less a question of “Could God create in six days?” but “What does Genesis mean by ‘day’?”

This matters because our answer shapes whether Christians see science as a threat to their faith or as a witness to the same God who inspired Scripture.

The Hebrew word translated as day, yôm, has four literal definitions: part of the daylight hours, all the daylight hours, a 24-hour calendar day, or a long, finite time period. Old-earth creationists hold that the context of Genesis 1 supports the fourth meaning. (For a deeper look at what the Bible says about Earth’s age, see this blog post.)

Core Tenets of Old-Earth Creationism

If Scripture and creation truly speak in harmony, what does that look like in practice? Old-earth creationists ground their view in several core convictions:

Dual Revelation

Old-earth creationists hold to the historic Christian teaching, often called dual revelation, that God reveals himself through both Scripture and the natural world. Because both come from a God for whom it is impossible to lie (Hebrews 6:18), they work together in harmony. This is not a modern idea—the Belgic Confession (1561) describes creation as “a beautiful book” through which God makes himself known, alongside his written Word (drawn from Psalm 19:1–9 and Romans 1:20). Reasons to Believe (RTB), founded in 1986 by astrophysicist Hugh Ross, has been a leading voice for this view, showing how science and Scripture function as two independent witnesses that corroborate one another where they overlap.

A Universe Both Ancient and Faithful

Multiple independent lines of evidence, from astronomy to geology to nuclear physics, converge on the same picture: an ancient cosmos, roughly 13.8 billion years old, on an Earth about 4.6 billion years old. The prophet Jeremiah reminds us why we can trust these measurements: God made the laws that govern heaven and earth fixed and unchanging (Jeremiah 33:25). The constancy of natural laws over billions of years reflects the faithfulness of the God who set them in place.

Day-Age View

Why do we interpret the Genesis 1 creation days as consecutive long time periods?

One of the literal definitions for yôm (day) is a long, finite time period. The Hebrew words for evening (‘ereb) and morning (boqer) can likewise mean ending and beginning. The first six creation days all conclude with an “evening was, morning was” phrase—but the seventh day has no such marker. This implies God’s seventh day has not yet ended, a reading confirmed by both Psalm 95:11 and Hebrews 4:1–11, which state that we are still in God’s seventh day.

If the seventh day has lasted thousands of years at minimum, it is not a 24-hour day. The scientific evidence confirms this pattern. The fossil record documents the appearance of new species throughout Earth’s pre-human history, but no new species have appeared since humans arrived on the scene. This is exactly what we’d expect if God ceased his creation work on the seventh day, as Genesis 2 describes.

Genesis 1:27 says God created humans, male and female, during the sixth day. Genesis 2 details what happened within that day: God created Adam, placed him in Eden, had him tend the garden, observe all the animals, and name each one. Only after all this did God create Eve. When Adam first saw her, the word he spoke—happa’am—means “at long last.” Both the number of events and Adam’s own response suggest the sixth day, like the seventh, was far longer than 24 hours.

Some assert that the fourth of the ten commandments implies 24-hour creation days. However, the Bible addresses Sabbath periods of different durations.

Direct Creation

Old-earth creationists accept that species adapt within their kind—what scientists call microevolution. But they hold that natural processes alone cannot explain the sudden appearance of new, complex life-forms in the fossil record or the unique capacities of human beings. These transitions in the fossil record reflect moments of direct divine action, with God introducing new forms of life at different points in Earth’s history, consistent with the pattern presented in Genesis 1.

This view rejects macroevolution—the idea that all life descends from a single common ancestor through undirected processes. Instead, the complexity of living organisms, the fine-tuning of their systems, and the gaps in the fossil record point to a God who actively and purposefully created life throughout Earth’s long history.

Historical Adam and Eve

Old-earth creationists affirm that Adam and Eve were real, historical individuals specially created by God, from whom all human beings are descended. Adam was formed from the dust of the ground and given life when God breathed into him; Eve was created directly by God from Adam’s side.

This sets humanity apart from all other creatures and establishes humans as bearers of God’s image. Because Adam and Eve are historical, the doctrines that depend on them—the fall, original sin, and Christ’s redemption of a fallen humanity—stand on historical ground, not metaphor.

The Flood That Swept Humanity

According to the old-earth creationism view, the Genesis flood destroyed all humans outside the ark and their domesticated animals—but not the entire planet. It was worldwide in the sense that the whole world of ungodly people was wiped out (2 Peter 2:5). Noah and his family were the only survivors.

Regions not occupied by humans were not flooded. The Hebrew supports this reading. The word used throughout the flood account, eretz, often translated “earth,” can also mean “land” or “region.” The second most common word, ‘adama, refers to land inhabited or tilled by humans—which makes sense, since only land inhabited by humans can be damaged by human sin. In Genesis 8, haraba is used for the flooded land, a Hebrew word that never refers to the entirety of Earth’s land surface. The purpose of the flood was to rid the world of human wickedness and prevent humanity’s self-destruction. This reading affirms the authority of Scripture and the historicity of the flood while remaining consistent with evidence from geology, genetics, and archaeology.

Death Before the Fall

How could death exist before the rebellion in Eden? Paul tells us, “sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin, and in this way death came to all people” (Romans 5:12). Of all Earth’s creatures, only humans sin. By saying death came to all people, rather than all life, Paul implies that microbial, plant, and animal death occurred before Adam and Eve.

Scripture reinforces this picture. Job describes a world where lions hunt and feed by God’s design (Job 38:39), and the psalmist says lions “seek their food from God” (Psalm 104:21). Animal death is not a punishment for human sin but part of the ecosystem God established. The scientific evidence agrees. The fossil record shows that animal death and extinction occurred long before modern humans appeared. The enormous abundance of biodeposits—coal, oil, natural gas, limestone, marble, gypsum—testifies to ages of life and death before humans were created.

A common concern is that death before the fall undermines the gospel. But this view preserves the doctrines that matter most: the uniqueness of humanity as God’s image-bearers, the reality of Adam’s fall, and the necessity of Christ’s redemptive work. Human death—spiritual separation from God—entered through Adam’s sin. That is the death Christ came to conquer.

Animal death before the fall does not undermine that promise. In this view, human spiritual death and separation from God are the direct results of Adam’s sin, while nonhuman death reflects the normal functioning of the natural world God made.

How Does Old-Earth Creationism Compare to Other Creation Views?

Other Creation Perspectives

The table below compares four widely discussed creation views. Two points of detail worth noting: Evolutionary creationism is sometimes called theistic evolution, but there is a distinction. Unlike some theistic evolutionists, evolutionary creationists hold that God directly intervened in miraculous ways to shape the universe, solar system, and Earth so it could support a great abundance and diversity of life.

Where evolutionary creationism parts company with old-earth creationism is on the question of life’s development: evolutionary creationism accepts macroevolution and common descent, while old-earth creationism holds that God directly created new forms of life at key points in history.

Intelligent design (ID) is not a creation model based on a particular reading of Genesis but an apologetic framework. It argues that features of the natural world—such as biological complexity and the fine-tuning of the universe—are best explained by an intelligent cause. Because ID does not specify the age of the earth or identify the Designer in biblical terms, Christians, Jews, Muslims, or even nontheists may affirm it. Many old-earth creationists draw on ID arguments as scientific support for the claim that life shows marks of purposeful design.

Popular Creation Views

What Unites Us in the Creation Conversation

Christians hold different views on creation, but old-earth creationism offers something distinctive: a reading of Genesis that takes the Hebrew text seriously and seeks alignment with what God has revealed through the natural world. It affirms that “in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth” (Genesis 1:1) and that “through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made” (John 1:3)—while also embracing the full weight of the evidence he left for us to find.

Thoughtful Christians reach different conclusions on these questions, and the conversation is worth having. But if the same God who authored Scripture also made the heavens and the earth, we should expect his two works to tell a consistent story. Old-earth creationism says they do.

The post Old-Earth <em class="algolia-search-highlight">Creation</em>ism: Is It Biblical? appeared first on Reasons to Believe.

Christians have asked these same questions for centuries. Some picture the Creator working within six literal 24-hour days; others see him creating through long but finite periods of time.

These aren’t arguments that should divide the family of faith. They’re the kind of conversations that happen when brothers and sisters in Christ ask together, “What might God be showing us here?”

Let’s explore what the Bible says about the creation days, what the Hebrew text reveals, and how what we see in nature echoes what we read in Scripture.

Were the Creation Days 24-Hour Days?

When we hear the word day, we think of sunrise to sunset or a 24-hour calendar day. So when Genesis says, “There was evening, and there was morning—the first day” (Genesis 1:5), it’s natural to assume God completed each day’s work within a 12- or 24-hour period.

But that isn’t the only way to read the Genesis creation account.

The story of creation isn’t confined to Genesis. It’s reflected across Scripture — in Job, Psalms, Isaiah, Hebrews, and many other books.

Each passage adds to our understanding of what God started “in the beginning.” Together they reveal the creation days as a story unfolding over time in perfect order and purpose.

Christians have long understood the “days” of biblical creation in different ways, including:

• The Calendar-Day View, which sees the six days of creation as six consecutive 24-hour days; each one part of a historical week followed by a Sabbath rest of 24 hours.
  
• The Framework View, which understands the creation week as a literary device or framework that groups creation events thematically rather than strictly chronologically.
  
• The Analogical-Day View, which sees the creation days as God’s workdays—periods of divine activity of unspecified duration that set the pattern for our own rhythm of work and rest.
  
• The Day-Age View, which understands each “day” in Genesis as a long but finite span of time. These days are chronological, sequential, and correspond to real periods in history, marking the unfolding of God’s creative work from the formation of the earth to the origin of humanity.

At Reasons to Believe, we hold that the day-age view best honors both what Scripture says and what God reveals through nature. Scripture and nature are God’s two books, written by the same hand and telling the same story.

How Long Were the Days of Creation?

At Reasons to Believe, we hold that the days of creation were not 24-hour calendar days but long, finite periods of time. The Hebrew word yôm has four literal meanings: a full 24-hour day, the daylight hours, part of the daylight hours, or a long but finite span of time.

Days 1–6 each had a definite “evening” and “morning”—a clear ending and beginning. But Scripture (Psalm 95 and Hebrews 4) tells us we are still living in day 7, God’s Sabbath rest. That’s why Genesis 2 attaches no “evening was, morning was” to the seventh day—it hasn’t ended yet. And because these days are not defined by Earth’s rotation, they need not be equal in length. Some may have lasted hundreds of millions of years.

What about that repeated phrase, “evening was, morning was”? In English it sounds like a clock—sunset, sunrise, done. But in Hebrew, the phrase can mark the completion of a creation phase rather than describe a 24-hour period. It signals an ending and a new beginning, not a tick on a calendar.

The Days of Creation in Genesis

Before there was a single sunrise on earth’s surface, there was the beginning described in Genesis 1:1. In those first moments, time, space, matter, and energy came into existence at God’s command, bringing forth the universe. Biblical Hebrew has no single word for “the universe.” Instead, it uses the phrase “the heavens and the earth”—found thirteen times in the Old Testament, and always meaning the whole of matter, energy, space, and time.

The Sun, the Moon, and the other planets in our solar system were already in existence before the creation narrative turns its focus to Earth.

In Genesis 1:2, the point of view shifts. We’re no longer looking at the universe from the outside—we’re on the surface of the early Earth, seeing what the Spirit of God sees as he hovers over the deep. Everything that follows in Genesis 1 unfolds from this vantage point.

Scripture describes that surface as “formless and empty,” wrapped in darkness and covered by water. Job 38:8–9 fills in the picture: God made the early Earth’s clouds a garment for the surface waters, wrapping them in thick darkness. And there, hovering over the deep, the Spirit of God begins the ordered work of shaping Earth and filling it with life.

From here, Genesis unfolds the story day by day. In the day-age view, each day represents a long but purposeful span of time — a distinct era in God’s creative plan. Let’s look at each one.

Day 1: Light Pierces the Darkness

“And God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light” (Genesis 1:3). With a word, darkness broke. Visible light reached Earth’s surface for the first time.

Earth’s early atmosphere was roughly 200 times thicker than today’s — dense enough to block all visible sunlight. Then a Mars-sized body struck the young Earth, stripping away most of that atmosphere and blasting debris into orbit that eventually formed the Moon. For the first time, sunlight broke through.

That light made life possible. RTB scholars read the Spirit’s hovering over the surface waters as showing that God created life on Earth at the very start of this first day.

Early photosynthetic life used that sunlight to produce oxygen, laying the groundwork for every complex creature that would follow.

Day 2: Waters Above and Waters Below

The description of day 2 is the briefest and most cryptic of the six, but Genesis doesn’t stand alone. Job—the oldest book in the Bible—devotes much of chapters 37 and 38 to the same event. There God describes establishing a water cycle on Earth: snow, hail, frost, rain, mist, and dew.

The result was a stable water cycle—liquid water moving from oceans, lakes, and rivers into the atmosphere and back again, distributing nutrients and shaping the land. Without this balance, Earth would be barren and dry, like Mars or Venus.

Day 3: Land Appears and Life Takes Root

At God’s command, the seas withdrew and continents rose to their appointed places. “And God said, ‘Let the water under the sky be gathered to one place, and let dry ground appear’” (Genesis 1:9).

The psalmist captures it vividly: “You set a boundary they cannot cross; never again will they cover the earth” (Psalm 104:7–9).

Earth’s crust shifted and folded, mountains formed, valleys deepened, and continents found their place. Scientists call this plate tectonics—and geophysical research places the main burst of continental growth at roughly the time Genesis assigns to day 3.

Then God spoke again: “Let the land produce vegetation” (Genesis 1:11). The Hebrew word deshe covers all green vegetation, and Genesis breaks it into four components: seed, plant life, woody growth, and fruit. Life like this had existed in the oceans. Now it would spread across the newly formed land.

Skeptics once argued the fossil record placed ocean animals before land vegetation—the opposite of Genesis. But more recent fossil and isotope evidence has reversed that conclusion: land vegetation predates the first ocean animals by at least 600 million years.

Early photosynthetic vegetation transformed the atmosphere—drawing energy from sunlight, releasing oxygen, and preparing the air for creatures yet to come.

By the close of creation day 3, the world had contours and color. Waters had found their boundaries, the land its shape, and life had begun to flourish.

Day 4: Lights in the Sky

Like the first day, creation’s fourth day is a story of light—not its beginning, but its governance.

On day 1, light from the Sun and Moon pierced through Earth’s atmosphere. On day 4, the atmosphere shifted from translucent to transparent — from a thick haze to a clear sky where the Sun, Moon, and stars became visible as distinct objects for the first time.

From that point on, the celestial lights became timekeepers. Advanced animals would need these cosmic clocks to manage their migrations, life cycles, and daily rhythms.

Day 5: Life Fills the Waters and the Skies

At God’s word, the waters stirred with an explosion of life unlike anything before. The fossil record confirms it—the sudden, simultaneous appearance of entirely new and diverse forms of marine life.

Later, God created birds and sea mammals—creatures with what RTB scholars call “soulish” qualities: emotion, will, curiosity, attachment to their offspring, and the ability to bond with humans. RTB also holds that dinosaurs, though not named in Scripture, lived and died during day 5.

Extinction and new creation are part of God’s plan. As the psalmist writes: “All creatures look to you to give them their food at the proper time. . . . when you take away their breath, they die and return to the dust. When you send your Spirit, they are created, and you renew the face of the ground” (Psalm 104:27, 29b–30).

Day 6: The Crown of Creation

Genesis 1 is silent on when God created the first land mammals. Day 6 describes the arrival of three categories of advanced land mammals—the ones crucial for humans to launch and sustain civilization.

These three categories—small fur-bearing animals, large domesticated herd animals, and large carnivores that could be tamed—represent exactly the creatures humanity would need to build and sustain civilization.

Then came the crown of creation.

Day 6 holds such importance that Genesis 2 pauses to tell the story again in even greater detail:

Here we see the Creator’s closeness. God stooped to the dust and breathed.

Unlike any other creatures before them, humans were made to reflect God’s nature. Like God, humans are spiritual beings who reason, communicate, create, and recognize beauty. They are aware of a moral code, of grace, and of eternity. They were made to rule over what God entrusted to them.

Day 7: God Rested

And then, on creation day 7, came rest.

Day 7 is the only day without the phrase “There was evening and there was morning.” That’s no accident. Psalm 95 and Hebrews 4:1–11 tell us that God’s seventh day never ended — he is still resting from creation.

God’s rest was not marked by inactivity, but satisfaction—the pause of an Artist who delights in his finished work. He still upholds what he made—and he is doing the most important work of all: redeeming the people he created from sin and death.

The Sabbath principle runs through all seven days: God worked, then turned to what mattered most—redeeming the people he made. We are called to the same rhythm. Six days for the work of living; one day set apart to ask the deeper questions—who we need, who we are becoming, and what God made us to do.

Every step of creation, every word God spoke, fits within an order bigger than any clock can measure. When Scripture speaks of “days,” it isn’t binding the Almighty to our calendars—it’s revealing the rhythm of his work.

Creation Timeline

The diagram above traces God’s creative work from the universe’s first moment to the arrival of humanity. A few key markers:

No other ancient text on creation gets all the science correct.

Why Is a Biblical Timeline for Creation Important?

The creation timeline is ultimately about who made the world and why it matters that we get the story right.

Many readers assume “day” in Genesis can only mean 24 hours. But as we saw earlier, the Hebrew word yôm carries a range of literal meanings—including a long but finite span of time.

That range of meaning isn’t something scholars invented to reconcile Genesis with science—it was always there in the Hebrew. It’s a feature of the language Moses used, and it matters for how we read the whole account.

The verbs of Genesis matter too. Each one reveals something about how God worked—not just the sequence of events, but his manner: deliberate, patient, precise. A few of the most telling ones are worth pausing on:

Hebrew Creation Verbs in Genesis

Together, these verbs tell a story of power and patience—a God who creates, forms, and sustains with purpose.

That’s what gives this conversation weight. The biblical creation timeline doesn’t soften the tension between faith and science—it resolves it. When the Bible’s account of creation matches the world it describes—in sequence, in detail, in direction—that’s not coincidence. It’s confirmation that truth belongs to God, whether written in Scripture or traced in the stars.

Every detail, from galaxies to genomes, speaks of intention. Paul saw it clearly: “For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made” (Romans 1:20).

Creation itself is God’s testimony. It has been speaking since the beginning.

The God Who Spoke Then Still Speaks Now

The God whose voice set that story in motion has not gone silent. He knows the names of over a hundred billion trillion stars (Psalm 147:4, Isaiah 40:26), numbers our days, and knows each of our names.

The creation account was always about more than sequence and timing. It was about who made the world, and what he intended for the creatures he placed in it.

The God who created everything from nothing is the same God who entered his creation to save it. The One who said, “Let there be light,” would later walk among us and declare, “I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness, but will have the light of life” (John 8:12).

When we trace the timeline of creation, we don’t just see how long it took; we see the patience of God.

Designs in nature reflect the heart of a Designer who still holds all things together. He shapes galaxies and souls alike.

And his creative work continues—not in creating new kinds of life, but in transforming the people he made in his image. He saw his creation and called it good. He sees us and calls us his.

If the story of creation stirs new wonder in you, you’re not alone. Faith welcomes questions, not because it’s fragile, but because truth is strong enough to face them.

The same God who thoughtfully designed our world delights to reveal his truth to those who seek him: “It is the glory of God to conceal a matter; to search out a matter is the glory of kings” (Proverbs 25:2).

So keep looking up. Keep reading. Keep asking.

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Figure 1: James Webb Space Telescope 
The James Webb Space Telescope is 1.6 million kilometers (1 million miles) from Earth at the Lagrange 2 point along Earth’s orbit. Credit: NASA

To observe the cosmic dawn, astronomers must look many billions of light-years away. (Remember: distance means time, due to the finite velocity of light. That is, the farther away we look, the farther back in time we see the condition of the universe. Also keep in mind that due to the expansion of the universe, the most distant objects are moving away from us the most rapidly.) The visible light of objects at distances corresponding to the cosmic dawn era (12.6–13.6 billion light-years away), will be shifted into the infrared segment of the electromagnetic spectrum. For this reason, astronomers designed the JWST to detect infrared radiation. 

Bright Early Galaxies
One of the big surprises for astronomers using the JWST was to observe several bright galaxies in the first billion years of cosmic history—galaxies with ultraviolet luminosities as much as ten times brighter than what standard big bang models would seem to allow.¹ Most big bang models had predicted that galaxies as ultraviolet bright as these would take more than a few hundred million years to form. However, this prediction relied on a lack of understanding about how early galaxies formed.

As reported in Today’s New Reason to Believe, posted on January 1, 2024, a team of astronomers has solved the problem of these early ultraviolet bright galaxies.² The solution came from evidence confirming that star formation was just as “stochastic,” or “bursty,” during the universe’s first billion years as during the subsequent 12.8 billion years.

GN-z11 Galaxy
Even before the launch of the JWST, the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) allowed astronomers to observe a cosmic dawn galaxy, GN-z11 (aka GNS-JD2, seen in figure 2). It appeared much brighter than anticipated at visible wavelengths, despite being the most distant galaxy researchers had yet discovered.

A team of eighteen astronomers, using the HST’s grism spectroscopy, measured GN-z11’s redshift to be 11.1.³ This redshift measure implied that GN-z11 is 13.41 billion light-years from Earth, a distance that corresponds with a mere 380 million years after the cosmic origin event. GN-z11 is the most highly redshifted (thus, most distant) galaxy spectroscopically confirmed using the HST. 

Figure 2: GN-z11 Galaxy
Credit: NASA/ESA/James Webb Space Telescope

A team of eight astronomers led by James Baldwin measured the effective diameter of GN-z11. Based on images from the HST CANDELS survey and additional observations,⁴ they determined the half-light diameter (the distance from the galactic core to the point where its luminosity is reduced by half) of GN-z11 to be about 500 light-years, a determination consistent with later measurements made using the JWST.⁵ At this relatively small size and high luminosity, GN-z11 was confirmed to be the brightest galaxy yet known at a distance greater than 13.3 billion light-years, in the early part of the cosmic dawn. For this reason, GN-z11 became a prime target for investigation by the JWST.  

In September 2023, a team of sixty-three astronomers led by Andrew Bunker used the near-infrared spectrometer on board the JWST to make a more precise measurement of GN-z11’s redshift,⁶ which turned out to be 10.603. This measurement tells us that GN-z11 is 13.38 billion light-years from Earth. At this distance, GN-z11 appears to have formed 410 million years after the first moment of cosmic creation. This finding is astounding, given that star formation is not even possible until the universe is at least 200 million years old.

In fact, GN-z11 is not the only exceptionally luminous galaxy found in the cosmic dawn. Images taken by the JWST reveal several dozen others. The discovery of such galaxies has become a regular theme for the JWST, and this theme has spawned numerous articles in the popular media and on the web—many claiming that the big bang model needs major revision and/or that scientists are on the verge of discovering some new physics. 

Why Such Brightness?
While no astronomer whose work appears in peer-reviewed astrophysical literature has called for an abandonment or replacement of big bang models, a few are advocating for “a reexamination of the theoretical landscape of galaxy formation at the cosmic dawn.”⁷ To determine whether a reexamination is necessary, a team of thirty-six astronomers led by Cambridge University’s Roberto Maiolino undertook a detailed probe of GN-z11. 

Using both the near-infrared spectrometer (NIRSpec) and the near-infrared camera (NIRCam) on board the JWST,⁸Maiolino’s team discovered a huge clump of gas in the galactic halo, about 7,800 light-years from the GN-z11 core. The camera revealed that this clump was so powerfully illuminated by stars in the core that its gas had been ionized. The spectrometer additionally revealed the elemental composition of the clump: hydrogen and helium, and no elements heavier than helium.

The lack of any elements heavier than helium in the gas clump provided, for the first time, direct evidence that aligned with a major prediction of big bang models. According to these models, the universe begins infinitesimally small, nearly infinitely hot, and with just one element—hydrogen. Between three and four minutes after the cosmic beginning, the expanding and cooling universe passes through the temperature window at which hydrogen fuses into helium. About a quarter of the primordial hydrogen (by mass) becomes fused into helium, along with a trace amount of lithium. All other elements are manufactured later in the nuclear furnaces of future stars. Maiolino’s team was the first ever to see a gas cloud that contained only the elements produced in the initial “bang.”

To explain the level of ionization observed in the gas clump, Maiolino and his colleagues calculated that the combined luminosity of the stars illuminating the gas clump was equivalent to at least 20 trillion times our Sun’s luminosity. This high luminosity can be explained only if the stars in GN-z11’s central region are extremely massive. Based on the spectra of the gas clump, the team was able to determine that the ionizing radiation came from stars in GN-z11’s central region but not from the active galactic nucleus (AGN) in the core. 

In the context of big bang modeling, astronomers have developed a range of predictions for the mass of the universe’s first stars—stars that begin their nuclear burning with 75% hydrogen, 25% helium, and a trace amount of lithium.⁹ These estimates range from 1–100 solar masses, 1–500 solar masses, and 50–500 solar masses, with the slight possibility that some of these first stars could be as massive as 1,000 solar masses.

The gas clump spectra taken by the NIRSpec show that the stars illuminating the gas clump are, indeed, the universe’s first-formed stars. Further, the spectra show that these stars are predominantly in the 50–500 solar masses category, with a significant fraction greater than 500 solar masses.

The luminosity of a star rises exponentially (to the 3.9 power) with its mass. A star with a mass 200 times the Sun’s mass will be ~1,600,000,000 times brighter than the Sun. A star 500 times more massive than the Sun will be about 6,000,000,000 times brighter! On this basis, we can determine that even if the GN-z11 central region contains only 20,000 stars, the light from those stars would be more than sufficient to illuminate the gas clump to the degree that Maiolino and his colleagues observed. Given that all big bang models predict the formation of 20,000+ metal-free stars (stars with no elements heavier than helium other than a trace amount of lithium) in multiple galaxies during the cosmic dawn, the population of bright galaxies observed by the JWST in no way poses a challenge to big bang creation models. 

Early Supermassive Black Holes
Maiolino and his team also found a second source of luminosity in GN-z11.¹⁰ They observed an extremely dense flow of gas into the nucleus of GNz-11. In this gas they detected ionized elements that clearly signify the existence of a giant black hole there, one that is aggressively accreting matter. They also observed powerful radiation spewing from the accretion disk surrounding the black hole. These observations enabled the team to calculate the mass of the black hole residing in GN-z11’s nucleus. That mass measures two million times our Sun’s mass. Thus, the nuclear black hole in GN-z11 falls into the “supermassive” category. (Astronomers classify any black hole more massive than one million solar masses as a supermassive black hole, or SMBH).

The event horizon around a black hole is a location at which the black hole’s gravitational attraction is so strong that not even light can escape it. Consequently, everything inside the event horizon appears black, while just outside the event horizon, matter is being converted into energy with 10–42% efficiency—the highest efficiency of any source in the universe. By comparison, this efficiency is 150–600 times greater than that of matter-to-energy conversion in the Sun’s nuclear fusion furnace. The brightest sources in the universe are the accretion disks just outside the event horizons of SMBHs (see figure 3).

Figure 3: The Bright Accretion Disk Outside the Event Horizon of the M87’s SMBH
Credit: Event Horizon Telescope

The SMBH in GN-z11 is the most distant SMBH discovered to date. The presence of this ravenous SMBH and the brightness of first-formed stars in GN-z11 explain its luminosity, which is entirely consistent with the standard ΛCDM big bang creation model (where Λ stands for dark energy—the primary component of the universe—and CDM for cold dark matter—the second most dominant component of the universe).

Maiolino and his colleagues have confirmed that the first stars to form in the universe are likely very massive. They have also demonstrated that a dense clump of very massive stars in a cosmic dawn galaxy has a high probability of forming an SMBH. Therefore, it is not surprising that astronomers will find many bright cosmic dawn galaxies. The claim that the big bang model needs a major revision or points to new physics now appears to be nullified.  

One More Gift from the JWST
A fundamental prediction of all big bang models is the existence of three distinct star populations. Astronomers refer to stars formed during the most recent five billion years as Population I stars. These stars are characterized by a high abundance of elements heavier than lithium. Why? Because they formed from the ashes of stars that formed and burned up before these younger stars existed. Our Sun, for example, is a Population I star. 

Stars older than Population I stars contain fewer heavy elements because they formed from the ashes of stars that formed and burned up at earlier times in cosmic history. The earlier in cosmic history, the lower the abundance of elements heavier than lithium available in interstellar space. Astronomers call these stars Population II stars. Most globular cluster stars and most stars in the halos of galaxies are Population II stars. 

Population III stars are those that formed from the universe’s primordial gas: hydrogen, helium, and a trace amount of lithium. Astronomers had previously detected low-mass Population III stars in the halo of the Milky Way Galaxy.¹¹ These stars did, indeed, form from the universe’s primordial gas; however, they took a very long time to fully form—hundreds of millions of years or more. Thus, before they began shining as nuclear-burning stars, their atmospheres had been polluted by the ashes of nearby very high-mass Population III stars, which had quickly burned up and exploded, sending their ashes into interstellar space.

Until now, though, astronomers have lacked the telescope power to detect these “metal-free” Population III stars or to detect the universe’s primordial gas. In fact, many astronomers have expressed doubt that the JWST possesses the necessary observing power to make such a detection. Maiolino’s team has now raised hopes that the JWST can make this detection. The team’s two papers end with a call for follow-up observations of GN-z11 to affirm their findings and to detect similar cosmic dawn galaxies. Given the importance of their findings, such observations likely will be forthcoming soon.

Philosophical/Theological Implications
For thousands of years, the Bible has stood alone in describing the fundamental features of the big bang.¹² No other cosmic origin model has been subjected to as many independent, rigorous tests as the big bang.¹³ Thanks to the power of the JWST and the research efforts of Maiolino and his team, the big bang has passed yet another set of tests. Their success provides still greater evidence to support the biblical claim that a Causal Agent beyond space and time created our universe and exquisitely designed it so that billions of humans can reside on our planet and develop a technologically advanced civilization. Their success also confirms the Bible’s power to predict, accurately, future scientific discoveries. This power affirms the supernatural inspiration and accuracy of the Bible, with its assurance of God’s desire and capacity to redeem fallen (as in self-serving, self-exalting) humanity.¹⁴    

Endnotes

1. Guochao Sun et al., “Bursty Star Formation Naturally Explains the Abundance of Bright Galaxies at Cosmic Dawn,” Astrophysical Journal Letters 955, no. 2 (October 1, 2023): id. L35, doi:10.3847/2042-8213/acf85a.
2. Hugh Ross, “Big Bang Model Is Not Dead,” Today’s New Reason to Believe (blog), Reasons to Believe, January 1, 2024.
3. Pascal A. Oesch et al., “A Remarkably Luminous Galaxy at Z = 11.1 Measured with Hubble Space Telescope Grism Spectroscopy,” Astrophysical Journal 819, no. 2 (March 10, 2016): id. 129, doi:10.3847/0004-637X/819/2/129.
4. James O. Baldwin et al., “A Size Estimate for Galaxy GN-z11,” Research Notes of the AAS 8, no. 1 (January 2024): id. 29, doi:10.3847/2515-5172/ad220a.
5. Roberto Maiolino et al., “A Small and Vigorous Black Hole in the Early Universe,” (January 17, 2024), arXiv:2305.12492.
6. Andrew J. Bunker et al., “JADES NIRSpec Spectroscopy of GN-z11: Lyman-a Emission and Possible Enhanced Nitrogen Abundance in a z = 10.60 Luminous Galaxy,” Astronomy & Astrophysics 677 (September 2023): id. A88, doi:10.1051/0004-6361/202346159.
7. Sun et al., “Bursty Star Formation Naturally Explains,” p. 1.
8. Roberto Mailino et al., “JWST-JADES. Possible Population III Signatures at z = 10.6 in the Halo of GN-z11,” submitted to and accepted for publication in Astronomy & Astrophysics (June 6, 2023), arXiv:2306.00953v2.
9. Kimihiko Nakajima and Roberto Maiolino, “Diagnostics for PopIII Galaxies and Direct Collapse Black Holes in the Early Universe,” Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society 513, no. 4 (July 2022): 5134–5147, doi:10.1093/mnras/stac1242.
10. Maiolino et al., “A Small and Vigorous Black Hole in the Early Universe.”
11. Hugh Ross, “Cosmic Dawn Evidence Bolsters Case for Creation,” Today’s New Reason to Believe (blog), Reasons to Believe, July 10, 2023; Hugh Ross, “Big Bang Implications of Detecting the Universe’s First Stars,” Today’s New Reason to Believe (blog), Reasons to Believe, November 14, 2022; Hugh Ross, “Pursuing the First-Born Stars and a Better Cosmic Creation Model,” Today’s New Reason to Believe (blog), Reasons to Believe, July 15, 2019; Hugh Ross, “J0023+0307, a Pristine Firstborn Star?” Today’s New Reason to Believe (blog), Reasons to Believe, April 9, 2018. 
12. Hugh Ross, “What Does the Bible Say about the Big Bang?” Today’s New Reason to Believe (blog), Reasons to Believe, February 6, 2023.
13. Ross, “Big Bang Model Is Not Dead; Ross, “Cosmic Dawn Evidence Bolsters Case for Creation”; Hugh Ross, The Creator and the Cosmos, 4th ed. (Covina, CA: RTB Press, 2018).
14. Hugh Ross, Rescuing Inerrancy: A Scientific Defense (Covina, CA: RTB Press, 2024).

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Data indicates that: (1) the growing human population size, (2) the increasing conversion of land for agricultural usage, and (3) the continuing abuse of the environment all contribute to the destruction of ecosystems. And as ecosystems are destroyed, extinction risks increase. Studies show that species loss is accelerating at rates that exceed background extinctions (those due to normal environmental or ecological factors) by 10 to 100 times.¹

Current estimates place about 25% of the world’s species on the verge of extinction. If these species are lost, ecosystems will reorganize and, in turn, render even more species vulnerable to extinction. It’s a vicious cycle. Extinctions beget extinctions. 

This loss of species is tragic because it robs the world of beautiful, majestic organisms. The biodiversity loss also threatens human civilization. We depend on ecosystems to deliver several critical benefits, such as: 

• stable climates
• sources of fresh water 
• agricultural pest control 
• control of disease-causing vectors
• crop pollination 

In short, without flourishing ecosystems, human flourishing is impossible. 

Extinctions: A Challenge for the Design Argument 
As frightening as the prospect of another mass extinction may be, extinctions are troubling for another reason—at least for people who believe that a Creator played a role in the origin, design, and history of life. 

Skeptics often argue that if there is a Creator, he must not be very capable—as evidenced by all the extinctions that have occurred throughout life’s history. Surely, if he is all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-good, God could have created organisms that weren’t vulnerable to extinction. 

This challenge was recently leveled against me on social media in response to an article I posted making the case for a Creator based on the design of biochemical systems. The challenger, Joshua, retorted in the comments, “If life on earth was designed, it wasn’t by an intelligent creator as evidenced by the thousands of extinct species that have existed.”

It’s not the first time I’ve heard this all-too-common objection. Even prominent scientists such as the late evolutionary anthropologist Irven DeVore quipped, “I personally cannot discern a shred of evidence for ‘[intelligent] design.’ If 97% of all creatures have gone extinct, some plan isn’t working very well!”

Withstanding the Challenge 
On the surface, this challenge appears to undermine the design argument and the idea that God designed life and oversaw its history. But there’s no reason to fear. Careful reflection exposes a serious flaw in this counterclaim to the design argument: namely, extinctions don’t equate to bad designs.

First, many of the species that have disappeared from Earth became extinct tens of millions to hundreds of millions of years after their first appearance. Considering how long these species endured on Earth, it is hard to argue that they were poorly designed. 

Second, Earth’s conditions have changed throughout life’s history. Organisms perfectly suited for an earlier era of Earth’s history, over time, will gradually become ill-adapted to the new environments that emerge as Earth’s conditions evolve. These losses in fitness between organisms and their environments will render species vulnerable to extinction. Again, it’s hard to argue that these organisms were poorly designed when they were ideally created for specific sets of conditions that no longer exist on Earth. 

Third, many of the organisms lost to Earth’s past disappeared because of mass extinction events. In almost every instance, some type of cataclysmic event caused the wide-scale loss of biodiversity. Paleontologists have identified five mass extinction events that eliminated between 70–95% of all species in one fell swoop. In addition to these “big five” catastrophes, paleontologists think that somewhere between 5 and 15 additional mass extinctions occurred. These extinctions weren’t as dramatic as the big five, but they still resulted in substantial biodiversity loss. 

These extinctions had little to do with the “poor” design of these organisms. Instead, dramatic events rendered conditions on much of Earth so extreme that few life-forms could survive even if they were well-designed.

A Philosophical or Biblical View of the Creator?
When considering challenges to God’s competence and goodness as a Creator, it’s necessary to engage with the concept of God as revealed in Scripture as opposed to a nonbiblical philosophical depiction of God—which is how Joshua (and Irven DeVore) view God.

Though it may be surprising to some, passages in the Bible such as Psalm 104 and Job 38 and 39 describe animal death as part of the good creation God instituted. In these passages, the Creator is worshipped and celebrated for providing prey for predators. It may seem counterintuitive, but there are good and necessary reasons why God would create a world with plant and animal death. Stable, thriving ecosystems would be impossible without plants and animals dying. Is it possible that the Bible teaches that mass extinctions are part of God’s good creation, too?

I think so. Consider Psalm 104:27–30. This passage describes a cycle of life and death regulated by God’s ongoing actions. Some Bible commentators see this passage as describing the daily occurrences of birth and death in ecosystems. Others have argued that the text has an even richer and deeper meaning, presciently describing mass extinction and mass origination events that have taken place throughout life’s history. 

Key to this interpretation is the use of the words bara and ruach in this passage. God is described as renewing (bara) the Earth with life by his Spirit (ruach). The word bara—translated as “renew” in Psalm 104—occurs in Genesis 1 in reference to God originating things that are new; things that did not previously exist. In other words, God isn’t merely replacing creatures with the same creatures. Instead, he is replacing animals that vanished with entirely new ones—unlike anything that has previously existed. 

The word ruach is also found in Genesis 1:2, where it refers to the spirit of God hovering over the earth. The use of these two words doesn’t seem accidental. It looks intentionally designed to highlight the connection of the Genesis 1 creation account to Psalm 104. In this way, Psalm 104 not only echoes Genesis 1 but also extends it. If this interpretation of Psalm 104:27–30 is sound, then it expands our understanding of creation days 5 and 6. And it means that mass extinctions and mass originations were part of a divinely orchestrated natural history. 

If, indeed, Psalm 104:27–30 references mass extinctions and originations throughout Earth’s history, it is one more example of the remarkable scientific accuracy of the creation accounts found in Scripture. The author of Psalm 104 (presumably David) and those who originally received this psalm wouldn’t have had any concept of mass extinctions and originations. Yet, inspired by the Holy Spirit, the author of this psalm communicated ideas that the original audience would grasp, while at the same time anticipating future scientific insight that would resonate with a modern reader.

Resources 

A Christian View on Extinctions 

“A Christian Perspective on the Sixth Mass Extinction” by Fazale Rana (article)

“Did Humans Cause the Global Extinctions of Mammals?” By Fazale Rana (article)

“Did Humans Cause the Global Extinction of Large Mammals?” By Fazale Rana (video)

“How Should Christians Respond to the Sixth Great Mass Extinction?” By Fazale Rana (video)

Animal Death and the Good Creation

“Wolf Predation Improves Moose Herd Health” By Fazale Rana (article)

“Is Cruelty in Nature Really Evil?” by Fazale Rana (article)

“Why Would God Create a World Where Animals Eat Their Offspring?” by Fazale Rana

“Why Would God Create a World with Parasites?” by Fazale Rana (article)

“Why Did God Create the Thai Liver Fluke?” by Fazale Rana (article)

“Scientists Uncover a Good Purpose for Long-Lasting Pain in Animals” by Fazale Rana (article)

“Of Weevils and Wasps: God’s Purpose in Animal Death” by Maureen Moser (article)

“Animal Death Prevents Ecological Meltdown” by Fazale Rana (article)

“Animal Death before the Fall: What Does the Bible Say?” by Lee Irons (article)

“Animal Death and the Atonement” by Krista Bontrager (article)

“Life from Death” by Fazale Rana (article)

Extinctions and Psalm 104

“Does Psalm 104 Affirm Progressive Creation?” By Hugh Henry and Dan Dyke (article)

Endnotes

1. Christopher Sandom et al., “Global Late Quaternary Megafauna Extinctions Linked to Humans, Not Climate Change,”Proceedings of the Royal Society B 281 (July 22, 2014): doi:10.1098/rspb.2013.3254; John C. Briggs, “Emergence of a Sixth Mass Extinction?” Biological Journal of the Linnean Society 122 (October 2017): 243–248, doi:10.1093/biolinnean/blx063; Gerardo Ceballos et al., “Accelerated Modern Human-Induced Species Losses: Entering the Sixth Mass Extinction,” Science Advances 1 (June 19, 2015): e1400253, doi:10.1126/sciadv.1400253; Carlos P. Carmona et al., “Erosion of Global Functional Diversity across the Tree of Life,” Science Advances 7 (March 26, 2021): eabf2675, doi:10.1126/sciadv.abf2675; Gerardo Ceballos and Paul R. Ehrlich, “Mutilation of the Tree of Life Via Mass Extinction of Animal Genera,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, USA 120 (September 18, 2023): e2306987120, doi:10.1073/pnas. 2306987120.

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In the beginning [rêʼshîyth] God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering [merahepheth] over the waters (Genesis 1:1–2). 

One important difference between young-earth creationists and old-earth creationists is the interpretation of “beginning” [rêʼshîyth] in Genesis 1:1. Did God create “the heavens and the earth” in a moment, or was it an ongoing process? Did earth and the universe appear in an instant—as Greek goddess Athena did from the head of Zeus, fully grown in a suit of armor—or did they develop over a period of time?

The answer to this question may be found in the exact meaning of the Hebrew word rêʼshîyth. Bible versions uniformly render it as “beginning” in Genesis 1:1, and Brown, Driver, and Briggs define it in their lexical dictionary as: “first, beginning, best, chief.” Yet to understand its precise meaning—whether it suggests a moment or a process—it’s necessary to analyze its usage elsewhere in the Bible.

How Merahepheth Is Used
A clue comes from the Hebrew word merahepheth, rendered “hovering” over the waters. Merahepheth—and its root râchaph—is a little-used word. In Mosaic usage (first five books of the Bible), it refers to the nurturing of God. In Deuteronomy 32:11 it appears as an eagle hovering over her nest.¹ If the same concept applies to Genesis 1:2, it makes a powerful statement about God and his relation to creation.

In Genesis 1:2, merahepheth is a participle, for which “the active participle emphasizes durative, linear action (i.e., as action which is prolonged and uninterrupted). Occasionally the participle is used for actions which are in reality repeated or plural rather than durative. The participle is atemporal (not time-bound), dependent upon the context for its tense (whether past, present, or future). Past Time: expresses durative, linear uninterrupted action in the past.”²

How rêʼshîyth Is Used
The durative, ongoing action surrounding merahepheth in Genesis 1:2 suggests the same may be true of rêʼshîyth in the previous verse.

Regarding rêʼshîyth: almost twenty instances refer to firstfruits of agriculture or the best of livestock brought to God.³ Firstfruits are obviously a process. Does a farmer bring zucchini to God when it is 4” long, or when it has grown to 8”? Must a yearling lamb be 365 days old, or approximately a year old? Agricultural produce and livestock undergo a process of development before they can be brought to God as firstfruits. Bringing firstfruits is a moment, but the firstfruits themselves represent a process.

Two instances (including this one) of rêʼshîyth refer to sexual proclivity:⁴

Reuben, you are my firstborn, My might and the beginning [rêʼshîyth] of my strength (Genesis 49:3, NASB).

The same reasoning for firstfruits applies to human offspring. Conception is a moment, and the birth of a son is a moment; yet there is a nine-month process in the production of a firstborn son.

Five instances of rêʼshîyth refer to “chief” as in “Amalek was first among the nations” (Numbers 24:20, NIV).⁵ This type of leadership is not a moment but a process; Amalek’s position of leadership was not a one-time coronation: it had to be both developed and maintained.

Perhaps the most compelling argument for a continuing process is found in two instances of rêʼshîyth that clearly refer to an ongoing period:

The beginning [rêʼshîyth] of his kingdom was Babel and Erech and Accad and Calneh, in the land of Shinar (Genesis 10:10, NASB).

. . . in the beginning [rêʼshîyth] of the reign of Zedekiah king of Judah, in the fourth year, in the fifth month . . . (Jeremiah 28:1, NASB).

(We use the NASB in some of the above verses because—for reasons the authors find hard to understand—the NIV and some other Bible versions translate rêʼshîyth with words other than “beginning.” When the translation is not indicated, NIV is the default translation we refer to.)

“Beginning” as a Process, Not a Moment
In summary, in all instances in the Bible for which the temporal element can be discerned, rêʼshîyth refers to a beginning process or period; none clearly refer to a beginning moment. Hence the use of rêʼshîyth elsewhere in the Bible suggests that Genesis 1:1 refers to an ongoing creation process. This means that when God created the “heavens and the earth,” they did not spring into existence immediately, fully formed. Instead, the rêʼshîyth, the “beginning” in Genesis 1:1, was a process similar to the growth of produce or livestock.

If it is established that rêʼshîyth is a beginning period, how long does it extend? Does it stop with the earth being formless and empty and dark? Does it continue up until God’s Sabbath rest following the creation of humans?

Our opinion, based on the biblical text, is the former: the “beginning” included the process of creating the universe and an early Earth covered with water. Then the Holy Spirit hovered lovingly like an eagle over her nest as the balance of God’s creative process unfolded: removing the conditions of formlessness and emptiness as described in Genesis 1:3–2:1.

This textual review shows that the use of the Hebrew word rêʼshîyth in Genesis 1:1 offers support for the old-earth creationist position. The exact process God used to form “the heavens and the earth” can probably never be discerned by humans, but we can say with some confidence that it was a combination of divine action and the laws of physics which we believe God ordained “in the beginning.”

Endnotes

1. The only other usage of the word is in Jeremiah 23:9 as a man “shaken” by God’s holiness.
2. J. Paul Tanner, Hebrew Syntax: A Quick-Reference Manual for Hebrew Exegesis, 11th rev. ed, (Middletown, DE: J Paul Tanner, 2020), 26.
3. Exodus 23:19, 34:26; Leviticus 2:12, 23:10; Numbers 15:20–21, 18:12; Deuteronomy 18:4, 26:2, 10, 33:21; 1 Samuel 2:29; 15:21; Psalm 105:36; Proverbs 3:9; Jeremiah 2:3; Ezekiel 20:40, 44:30, 48:14.
4. Genesis 49:3; Deuteronomy 21:17
5. Numbers 24:20; Job 40:19; Jeremiah 49:35; Daniel 11:41; Amos 6:1.

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To be frank, I’m not sure I understand the ins and outs of cryptocurrency well enough to be comfortable investing in it. 

Currency is a standardized form of exchange in an economy. It’s a universal store of value that can be presented or received in exchange for goods or services. The use of currency is so commonplace that it becomes easy to overlook its genius as a human invention and its critical importance to any economy. Without currency, we would all have to barter for goods and services. And bartering is extremely cumbersome and inefficient. 

The Cell’s Energy Currency
Currency not only ensures the efficient operation of economies, but it also ensures the efficient operation of biochemical processes inside the cell. These processes require energy. And that energy is almost always supplied by the biomolecule, ATP (adenosine triphosphate)—a molecule dubbed the energy currency of the cell.

Biochemists have learned that for the cell’s biochemical processes to be suitably efficient, they require an energy currency molecule such as ATP. What’s the best explanation for how this indispensable energy currency emerged? 

Broken Bonds Provide Energy
Let’s start with the structure of the biochemical energy source. ATP consists of an adenine attached to the sugar, ribose. Also bound to the ribose is a triphosphate group (see figure 1). 

Figure 1: The Structure of ATP
Credit: Shutterstock

The triphosphate portion of ATP is the source of energy used to drive biochemical activities. The three phosphoryl groups are labeled as alpha (α), beta (β), and, for the terminal phosphate, gamma (γ). The triphosphate group is joined to ribose via a phosphoester linkage. The three phosphoryl groups are joined by two phosphoanhydride linkages. Biochemists refer to the phosphoanhydride linkages as high-energy bonds. When these bonds are broken, the released chemical energy powers the energy-requiring processes within the cell. 

When the bond between the gamma and beta phosphoryl groups is broken, the compound ADP forms and releases a phosphate molecule. When the linkage between the beta and alpha phosphoryl groups is broken, the compounds AMP and pyrophosphate form (see figure 2). The phosphoanhydride linkage joining the two phosphate moieties of pyrophosphate can be further broken down into two phosphate molecules, releasing additional energy that can also be used to power cellular activities. 

Figure 2: Hydrolysis of ATP
Credit: Shutterstock

ATP forms in the cell through a variety of biochemical pathways. These pathways involve the breakdown of “fuel” molecules (such as sugars and fats) which, in turn, release chemical energy that drives the formation of ATP from ADP and inorganic phosphate. Ultimately, most of the cell’s ATP is made by the enzyme complex, ATP synthase.  

The Cellular Economy
The use of a single molecular species (for the most part) to store and supply energy for biochemical operations relies on the same logic that undergirds the use of currency to drive an economy. Hence, ATP is called the energy currency of the cell.

To appreciate the ingenuity of using a single molecular species as the energy currency, imagine that you work for a farmer. Without currency, the only way he can pay you for your labor is with goods, say oranges produced in his orchard. If you need a pair of shoes, you must hope that the shoemaker needs oranges. If he doesn’t, you can’t get the shoes. You now need to find someone who will take the oranges and provide you with goods that the shoemaker needs. 

If no one wants oranges, you are out of luck procuring any goods and services. And you (and anybody else for that matter) are unlikely to work for the farmer unless he agrees to give you some other commodity for your labor that you can easily exchange for the goods and services you desire. If he can’t, then you will lose a job and he will lose labor. 

Currency eliminates all these problems. Because it is a standardized medium of exchange that has value, it can be used to pay laborers who, in turn, can use it to buy whatever products they want. And the shopkeepers can accept currency from them because they have the confidence that they can use it to buy whatever they would like. 

In the same vein as this imaginary scenario, the cell could employ a type of bartering system. Instead of using ATP as an energy store and currency, the energy released when the chemical bonds of “fuel” molecules break apart, in principle, could be directly used to drive biochemical activities. However, if specific biochemical operations were coupled to the breakdown of specific molecules (or the breakdown of specific bonds within specific molecules), it would lead to molecular-scale inefficiencies in the same way that bartering frustrates economic efficiency. Specific biochemical processes in the cell could only take place if the just-right type of “fuel” molecule was present in the cell or if it was at the just-right levels. For example, if a certain biochemical process required the breakdown of a specific chemical bond in the sugar molecule, glucose, and if insufficient levels of glucose existed in the cell, the necessary biochemical process couldn’t take place until other metabolites were converted into glucose. 

This conversion most likely would involve a highly convoluted series of chemical reactions—in the same way that multiple exchanges must take place in a barter economy to satisfy everyone involved. In fact, the inefficiency of a barter-based metabolic economy would be so extreme that it raises questions—at least for me as a biochemist—about the possibility of life without some type of energy currency. 

Additionally, ATP’s use as an energy currency helps maintain balanced biochemical processes in the cell. In the same way that economies can be slowed down or ramped up by controlling the amount of currency, the metabolic operations in the cell can be dialed up or down based on ATP levels. When ATP levels are high, energy-harvesting pathways slow down and energy-consuming pathways speed up. When ATP levels are low, the reverse scenario takes place with energy-generating pathways speeding up their operation and energy-consuming pathways slowing down. 

Biochemical Energy Currency and the Watchmaker Argument
The remarkable similarity between the role ATP plays in the cell’s economy and currency plays in human economies allows us to advance a version of the Watchmaker argument for God’s existence and role in the origin and design of life. 

British natural theologian William Paley (1743–1805) proposed this argument by highlighting the characteristics of a watch, specifically the complex interaction of its precision parts for the purpose of telling time. He maintained that the contrivances integral to the watch’s design implied the work of an intelligent designer—a watchmaker. Paley demonstrated that systems in biology share the same characteristics that cause us to recognize a watch as the product of a designer. Therefore, by analogy, as a watch requires a watchmaker, so too, life requires a Creator.

In my book The Cell’s Design, I argue that the latest insights into the structure and function of biomolecules add new vitality to Paley’s Watchmaker argument. For example, there are many kinds of molecular-level biomachines that stand as strict analogs to human-made machines with respect to their architecture, operation, and assembly. As a case in point, some protein complexes, such as ATP synthase (the enzyme complex that makes ATP from ADP and phosphate), bear an astonishing similarity to motors designed by humans. These protein complexes come with rotors, stators, drive shafts, cams, turbines, and universal joints. The one-to-one relationship between the parts of human-made machines and the molecular components of biomachines is startling and further justifies Paley’s conclusion that life stems from the work of a Creator. We can add the discovery of ATP’s role as the cell’s energy currency to the revitalized Watchmaker argument.

The use of currency to generate economic efficiency is a human invention. In fact, I would submit that it might be the greatest, most ingenious human invention of all time—even greater than the wheel. If not for the invention of currency, efficient economies would be impossible—and so would human civilization. And if the use of currency to generate economic efficiency is an ingenious human design, then the use of biochemical energy currency must, too, reflect the ingenuity of an intelligent agent.

Why ATP?
Scientists now recognize the necessary role of a biochemical energy currency. But why was ATP “selected” as the energy currency? Why not some other biomolecule?

ATP serves universally as the biochemical energy currency. Every organism on Earth uses ATP to power its metabolic operations. From an evolutionary perspective, this recognition means ATP must have been employed as the cell’s energy currency in LUCA (the last universal common ancestor) and perhaps in the cells that preceded LUCA. In an evolutionary framework, ATP’s usefulness as the biochemical energy currency must have been an early invention. 

Many evolutionary biologists would argue that ATP’s choice as the cell’s energy currency was happenstance. It resulted from the outworking of an unguided, undirected, evolutionary process that was constrained by history. In other words, there was no rhyme or reason for why ATP was selected as the cell’s energy currency. It’s just the accidental outcome of evolutionary history. Alternatively, other researchers propose that the forces of natural selection led to ATP as the optimal (or near optimal) choice as the cell’s energy currency.

As it turns out, biochemists have identified several reasons why ATP is well-suited for its role as the biochemical currency for the cell’s energy. This fact explains ATP’s ascendency to its status as the universal energy currency.

One reason relates to other roles ATP plays in the cell. Not only does ATP function as the cell’s energy currency, but, along with the ribonucleotides GTP, CTP, and UTP, ATP is one of the building block components for RNA. This class of biomolecules plays a critical role in expressing the information found in DNA. For example, the cell’s machinery produces messenger RNA by copying the information harbored in the DNA molecule in regions (called genes). The RNA copies, in turn, direct the production of specific proteins. These biomolecules then form the structures that comprise the cell’s components and carry out the cell’s operations. By utilizing one of the building blocks of RNA as the biochemical energy currency, gene expression is linked to the energy status of the cell. When the cell’s energy status is low, it’s best to minimize gene expression overall. On the other hand, it makes sense to accelerate the expression of genes that code for proteins that play a role in energy-harvesting processes.  

Second, using ATP as both the cell’s energy currency and a building block component for RNA leads to metabolic simplicity. Instead of having a separate metabolic pool for the cell’s energy currency and, in this case, the building blocks needed for the biosynthesis of RNA, the cell can rely on a single pool of biomolecules that serves both biochemical operations.

A third reason why ATP was chosen instead of GTP, CDP, or UTP concerns how it interacts with proteins. Both CTP and UTP contain a pyrimidine as the nucleobase instead of a purine. Because purines consist of two fused molecular rings, they are more hydrophobic (lacking affinity for water) than pyrimidines, which consist of a single six-membered nucleobase. The increased hydrophobicity of purine nucleobases causes ATP and GTP, as a rule of thumb, to interact more strongly with proteins than CTP or UTP, an important quality for a molecule that functions as the cell’s energy currency. 

For a fourth reason, we might ask why ATP instead of GTP? Guanine (GTP’s nitrogenous base) is made of carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen atoms. On the other hand, adenine (ATP’s nitrogenous base) lacks oxygen atoms in its structure. This compositional difference means that it takes fewer biosynthetic steps to make ATP compared to GTP. As a result, using ATP as the cell’s energy currency leads to more efficient utilization of the cell’s energy resources. In other words, it makes more sense to use a molecule that is less expensive to produce than one that is more expensive to produce as the cell’s energy currency.

In sum, there appears to be an exquisite rationale for the selection of ATP as the cell’s energy currency. This insight means that ATP’s designation as the biochemical energy currency wasn’t a frozen accident of a historically contingent evolutionary process. The recognition of a molecular logic in ATP as life’s molecular energy currency is consistent with two radically different views: ATP as the cell’s energy currency came about either by (1) an evolutionary adaptation driven by natural selection, or (2) the intentional design of a Creator. 

Can Evolutionary Processes Generate a Cellular Currency System?
I contend that the intentional choice by a Creator is the best explanation for the selection of ATP as the biochemical energy currency. I question whether gradual, stepwise evolutionary processes could have produced an energy currency system. To understand why, let’s return to the analogy of human economies. For a currency to be accepted as a universal store of economic value, it must be accepted by virtually every actor in the economy—in effect, all at once. Those people who refuse to use the currency can’t fully take part in the economy, other than by bartering. They can’t truly be integrated into the economy and would participate only from the sidelines.

The same requirements would be true for the ATP-based cellular economy. For a cell to use ATP to power its metabolic reactions, all the biochemical processes must use ATP as an energy source all at once. Those biochemical reactions that don’t use ATP can’t fully participate in the cellular economy. These processes may still occur, but they would operate in a haphazard, unpredictable way that prevents them from reliably contributing to cellular metabolism. The failure of these sidelined metabolic activities to consistently contribute to the cell’s economy could be deleterious to the cell, particularly if they’re part of core biochemical operations.

In fact, the use of ATP as the energy currency molecule could not have emerged in a stepwise manner with a few reactions relying on ATP and the rest bartering. The inefficiency of bartering reactions would so overwhelm the cell’s operations that life would be impossible. Despite this problem, evolutionary biologists and origin-of-life researchers still seek an evolutionary explanation for the origin of ATP as the biochemical energy monetary system.

Insight from Prebiotic Chemistry 
A team headed by biochemist Nick Lane from University College London took a different approach to the “why” question about ATP’s selection as the cell’s energy currency. Assuming an evolutionary origin, they wondered if chemical—instead of evolutionary—processes on early Earth could offer insight into the origin of ATP’s role as the cell’s energy currency.¹ 

In an earlier study, this team showed that acetyl phosphate—a phosphorylating agent—could form under mild hydrothermal conditions from the reaction of thioacetate (which would reasonably form at hydrothermal events on early Earth from hydrogen sulfide and acetic acid) and inorganic phosphate. Acetyl phosphate is modestly stable and can survive for several hours, depending on pH and temperature. In other words, this compound has the just-right balance of chemical stability and reactivity. Acetyl phosphate can also transfer a phosphate group to: (1) ribose to make ribose-5-phosphate, (2) adenosine to make AMP, and (3) ADP to make ATP.²

The team reasoned that the transfer of the phosphate from acetyl phosphate to ADP may be a preferred reaction that explains ATP’s emergence as the universal biochemical currency. Their reasoning was justified. They showed that in the presence of ferric iron, acetyl phosphate transferred a phosphate group to ADP. The team discovered that no other phosphorylating agent successfully added a phosphate group to ADP. They also evaluated other ions as catalysts and discovered that none of them promoted the phosphorylation of ADP. Finally, they found that acetyl phosphate and ferric iron would not phosphorylate GTP, CDP, and UDP. The researchers discovered that this remarkable specificity stems from just-right, precise chemical interactions that uniquely exist for acetyl phosphate, ADP, and ferric iron. 

This discovery carries profound implications. It means that the use of ATP as the cell’s energy currency isn’t a frozen accident that arises out of the constraints of a contingent evolutionary history. Nor is it due to natural selection. Instead, it’s due to a highly unusual chemical reaction. In other words, the use of ATP as the cell’s energy currency—from the perspective of prebiotic chemistry—has been prescribed by the laws of nature.

The research team’s responses are compelling:

“The emergence of ATP as the universal energy currency of the cell was not the result of a ‘frozen accident,’ but arose from the unique interactions of ADP and AcP.”³

“This implies that ATP could have become the universal energy currency of life not as the end-point of genetic selection or as a frozen accident, but for fundamental chemical reasons.”⁴

“Our results suggest that ATP became established as the universal energy currency in a prebiotic, monomeric world, on the basis of its unusual chemistry in water.”⁵

“It was very surprising to discover the reaction is so selective—in the metal ion, phosphate donor, and substrate—with molecules that life still uses.”⁶

As interesting as this finding may be, the chemistry the research team discovered lacks geochemical relevance. There are a few reasons to be skeptical that this chemical process could take place on early Earth. 

1. It’s questionable that geochemically relevant prebiotic reactions could generate ADP.
2. It’s questionable that a source of inorganic phosphate would be available.
3. It’s questionable that ferric iron would be abundant on early Earth.

Evidence of Intentional Design
Despite these doubts, let’s assume that this reaction did take place on early Earth as part of the process of chemical evolution.

If we do, the evidence for teleology (design, purpose) is still undeniable. It is eerie that a highly unusual, just-right chemical process uniquely produces ATP—a molecule with a just-right set of properties that’s ideally suited to serve as the cell’s energy currency—under presumed prebiotic conditions. Neither accident nor natural selection is responsible for ATP’s origin. This biomolecule appears to be prescribed by the laws of nature. Its existence appears to be intentional. These coincidences highlight the design and purpose of ATP as the biochemical energy currency.

When we combine these remarkable coincidences, the Watchmaker analogy (described above), and the challenge of imagining how ATP could have emerged as the energy currency for the cell through evolutionary processes, we are left with only one reasonable conclusion: Whether one adopts a creation model or evolutionary approach to life’s genesis, ATP’s origin, properties, and biochemical role point to the necessary action that a Creator must have played in the origin and design of life.

And that conclusion is money in the bank.

Resources

• Fit for a Purpose: Does the Anthropic Principle Include Biochemistry? by Fazale Rana (book)
• The Cell’s Design: How Chemistry Reveals the Creator’s Artistry by Fazale Rana (book)

Biochemical Anthropic Principle

• “DNA’s Fine-Tuned Structure Minimizes Harmful Tautomers” by Fazale Rana (article)
• “Just-Right RNA Structure Points to Intentional Design” by Fazale Rana (article)
• “The Logic of DNA Replication Makes a Case for Intelligent Design” by Fazale Rana (article)
• “How the Central Dogma of Molecular Biology Points to Design” by Fazale Rana (article)
• “Is the Optimal Set of Protein Amino Acids Purposed by a Mind?” by Fazale Rana (article)
• “A Periodic Table for Protein Structures Reveals Biochemical Design” by Fazale Rana (article)
• “Evidence That the Cell’s Metabolism Is Planned” by Fazale Rana (article)
• “Krebs Cycle Origin Brings Case for Creation Full Circle” by Fazale Rana (article)
• “Molecular Logic of the Electron Transport Chain Supports Creation” by Fazale Rana (article)

The Watchmaker Argument

• “ATP Synthase Ratchets Up the Case for Intelligent Design” by Fazale Rana (article)

• “Addressing the Concerns of a Critic and the Case for Intelligent Design” by Fazale Rana (article)

Endnotes

1. Silvana Pinna et al., “A Prebiotic Basis for ATP as the Universal Energy Currency, PLoS Biology 20 (October 4, 2022): e3001437, doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.3001437.
2. Alexandra Whicher et al., “Acetyl Phosphate as a Primordial Energy Currency at the Origin of Life,” Origins of Life and Evolution of Biospheres 48 (March 3, 2018): 159–79, doi:10.1007/s11084-018-9555-8.
3. PLOS, “Ancient Chemistry May Explain Why Living Things Use ATP as the Universal Energy Currency,” ScienceDaily (October 4, 2022).
4. Pinna et al., “A Prebiotic Basis for ATP.”
5. Pinna et al., “A Prebiotic Basis for ATP.”
6.  PLOS, “Ancient Chemistry May Explain.” 

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To help readers who are not astrophysicists to appreciate this discovery, let me provide some background. 

Cosmic Dawn
Astronomers refer to one of the most crucially important epochs in the universe’s history as the cosmic dawn. It’s the time when the first stars form and their nuclear furnaces ignite so that they shine. In this early moment, the universe transitions from ubiquitous darkness to pervasive brightness. 

The JWST’s primary long-term mission is to explore and determine the nature of this cosmic dawn. Specifically, astronomers want to know how massive and numerous these first-born stars were and how they affected the formation of the universe’s first galaxies and black holes. Different big bang creation models predict different populations and mass ranges of such stars (called Population III stars).

Challenge of Seeing the Very First Stars
Astronomers have long known that not all stars form at the same rate. The greater the mass and density of a gas cloud, the faster that cloud will collapse and produce a protostar (young star that is still gathering and compressing the mass needed to ignite nuclear fusion). The greater the mass of the protostar, the faster the nuclear fusion in its core (the fusion of hydrogen into helium) will ignite to make it a stable, bright, shining star.

The shortest time in which a gas cloud can produce a protostar is about 1 million years.³ The longest it may take is about 10 million years. Table 1 lists the time required for protostars of different masses to transition from first becoming protostars to igniting the nuclear fusion of hydrogen into helium in their cores.⁴ Knowing these times helps astronomers gain a more accurate picture of the universe’s early history.

Table 1: Time Durations for Protostars to Become Nuclear-Burning Stars

Star mass at nuclear ignition time               Time until nuclear-burning ignition

Table 2 lists the time required for stars to complete their nuclear burning cycle from start to finish and become supernovae. In a supernova event, a star blasts most of its nuclear-burning products into interstellar space. Stars that end their nuclear burning with masses more than 1.4 times the Sun’s mass will undergo a supernova eruption.⁵ Only stars that begin their nuclear burning with a mass greater than or equal to about 10 times the Sun’s mass will end their nuclear burning with this much mass. The duration of a star’s nuclear burning cycle is inversely proportional to the 2.5 power (~M^-2.5) to its mass at the time nuclear burning ignites.  

Table 2: Times for Stars to Complete Their Nuclear Burning and Become Supernovae

Star mass at nuclear ignition time     Time from nuclear ignition until supernova

As Tables 1 and 2 show, the most massive Population III stars in the universe burn through their nuclear fuel and explode as supernovae in 18,000 years or less (table 2) before the least massive Population III stars even begin their nuclear burning in 1 billion years (table 1). In fact, the most massive Population III stars will go through their entire nuclear-burning cycle before the least massive ones completely form as protostars from within the universe’s first gas clouds.

The dramatic difference in star formation time means that all the universe’s low-mass Population III stars will inevitably be polluted by the ashes from the high-mass Population III stars well before nuclear burning even ignites in these low-mass stars. This difference means that only the highest-mass Population III stars will be free of chemical pollution from supernova eruption events.   

Pristine Population III Stars
All big bang models predict that the universe begins with just one element in the periodic table: hydrogen. At the cosmic creation event, the universe is nearly infinitely hot. As the universe expands, it cools. One of the strongest verifications of big bang cosmology is the 12 billion-year cooling curve astronomers have observed and measured. It perfectly matches what the big bang models predict.⁶  

During the first few minutes after the cosmic beginning, the universe spends about 20 seconds in the 14–150 billion Kelvin temperature window, where nuclear fusion is able to take place. Within these 20 seconds, about 24% of the universe’s primordial hydrogen is fused into helium, along with a trace amount of lithium.

Big bang models thus predict that the very first stars to form will be composed of only these three elements: hydrogen, helium, and lithium. All other elements will arise from the nuclear furnaces of stars, from supernovae, and from neutron star mergers.⁷

The challenge for astronomers has been that only the most massive Population III stars will have avoided being polluted by the ashes of supernovae. These extremely massive stars shine brightly for only a few tens of thousands of years. This rapid burn-up means that astronomers will only be able to image them at look-back times corresponding to the very early cosmic epoch when conditions first permit star formation to occur: the cosmic dawn. In other words, astronomers will need to search for these stars at distances of about 13.6 billion light-years—close to the earliest moments of the universe’s 13.8 billion-year history.

Not even the JWST possesses the power to image individual stars at distances of 13.6 billion light-years. The best that astronomers can hope for is to image a large dense cluster of stars at this distance. However, given how rapidly the most massive stars form, burn, and explode, such a star cluster is bound to be at least partly polluted by the earliest-forming stars, making the detection of stars comprised of only hydrogen, helium, and a trace amount of lithium extremely difficult.   

Nearly Pristine Population III Stars
The fact that stars composed of only hydrogen, helium, and a trace amount of lithium are observationally out of reach does not mean, however, that astronomers have no hope of establishing that such stars existed in the early universe. This important prediction of big bang cosmology can be verified by the discovery of low-mass Population III stars that have been polluted (infused with elements) exclusively by the residue of stars that started their nuclear burning with only hydrogen, helium, lithium, and no other elements.

These low-mass Population III stars remain bright for billions of years. Therefore, astronomers need not look back as far as 13.6 billion years (or the equivalent distance) to see them.     

To date, astronomers have discovered some low-mass Population III stars in the outer halo of our Milky Way Galaxy (MWG).⁸ As described in my book, Designed to the Core, our MWG is extraordinary in that its outer halo has an extremely low density of stars,⁹ with an especially sharp drop-off in density beyond 90,000 light-years from the MWG center. Astronomers have also determined that these outskirt stars have remained dynamically undisturbed for the past 11 billion years.¹⁰ Because of the unique features of the MWG’s outer halo, a few of the universe’s Population III stars still exist there and have not been polluted by later-forming stars (called Population II, which form entirely from the ashes of exploded Population III stars, and Population I stars, which form predominantly from the ashes of exploded Population II stars). They’ve been polluted only by the ashes of other Population III stars. 

The spectral signatures (measures of atmospheric composition) of these stars show that they possess extremely low quantities of elements heavier than lithium, quantities lower by orders of magnitude (factors of hundreds of times) than the least polluted Population II stars. Thus, there is no mistaking that they are Population III stars.

Breakthrough: Metal-Free Population III Stars
Astronomers would still hope to find direct evidence of “metal-free” Population III stars, stars manifesting huge amounts of hydrogen and helium and no measurable quantity of elements heavier than lithium (in astronomers’ terms,“metals”). 

Thanks to the JWST, such direct evidence of metal-free Population III stars may now be in hand. A mission known as JADES (JWST Advanced Deep Extragalactic Survey) is a quest by dozens of astronomers from all over the world to image the cosmic dawn in far greater detail and depth than the Hubble Space Telescope made possible.

In a paper already submitted to and still undergoing peer review at Astronomy & Astrophysics, 36 astronomers led by Roberto Maiolino used the JWST to study, spectroscopically, the halo of the galaxy GN-z11 (see figure 1). GN-z11 is an exceptionally luminous galaxy, ranked as the brightest known galaxy in the first half billion years of cosmic history.¹¹ GN-z11 has a light-travel distance of 13.35 billion light-years, which tells us that we are seeing it as it was just 440 million years after the big bang origin event.

Figure 1: Hubble Space Telescope Image of GN-z11
Credit: NASA/ESA        

GN-z11 has 1% of the mass and about 5% of the size of the MWG, and yet it’s one of the largest galaxies in the very early universe. GN-z11’s total stellar mass is about a billion times the Sun’s mass and its stars have an average age of only 40 million years (young, in astronomical terms).¹²

Maiolino and his colleagues detected the HeIIl1640 emission line in the halo of GN-z11. They then went on to show that the unusual width of this spectral line, as well as the absence of metal spectral lines, is best explained by the presence of extremely massive Population III stars. These stars—with masses ranging from 100 to 500 times (or greater) the mass of the Sun—would have effectively photoionized all the gas in GN-z11’s halo. The team’s data simultaneously ruled out Population II stars or GN-z11’s active galactic nucleus as possible source(s) of the observed photoionization. 

The existence of metal-free stars in GN-z11 with masses in the 100–500+ range, measured by Maiolino and his colleagues, helps explain GN-z11’s exceptionally high mass and size. This discovery yields the most direct and definitive evidence to date for the existence of the mass range of Population III stars predicted by virtually all big bang models. It provides the clearest picture to date of the cosmic dawn. 

A Bright Way Forward
It’s a momentous discovery, but it must be confirmed and more solidly established. As Maiolino’s team notes, astronomers will need the JWST to take deeper images of GN-z11 and other distant galaxies like it. (In an upcoming post, I’ll describe a new tool that astronomers plan to use to explore the cosmic dawn—a low-cost telescope to be placed on the Moon’s far side with the capacity to detect wavelengths of light never before seen by astronomers.) Already, however, this research has shown the astronomical community and the wider world the value of the JWST in providing fresh insights into the cosmic dawn. 

As astronomers gain further understanding of the numbers and mass distribution of the earliest stars, they’ll be able to build better models for the formation and development of the universe’s first galaxies. This bottom-up approach will be complemented, potentially, by a top-down strategy, which entails using the JWST to gather data on the universe’s first galaxies and how they formed.

One major benefit of this latest discovery is this: as astronomers learn more about the cosmic dawn, their insights will reveal which of several big bang creation models provides the most accurate description of the origin and history of the universe. I’m confident that a more detailed and precisely defined big bang model will yield yet more evidence that what the Bible declared thousands of years ago about the origin and the history of the universe is, in fact, true. Thus, it will strengthen the case for the divine inspiration and accuracy of the Bible, giving people around the world more reasons to believe in the One who created the universe and inspired the Scriptures.

Endnotes

1. Roberto Maiolino et al., “JADES: Possible Population III Signatures at z = 10.6 in the Halo of GN-z11,” arXiv:2306.00953v2 (June 6, 2023), submitted to Astronomy & Astrophysics.
2. Hugh Ross, “What Does the Bible Say about the Big Bang?” Today’s New Reason to Believe (blog), Reasons to Believe, February 6, 2023.
3. Richard B. Larson, “The Physics of Star Formation,” Reports on Progress in Physics 66 (September 10, 2003): 1651–1697, doi:10.1088/0034-4885/66/r03.
4. Masanobu Kunitomo et al, “Revisiting the Pre-Main-Sequence Evolution of Stars: I. Importance of Accretion Efficiency and Deuterium Abundance,” Astronomy & Astrophysics 599 (March 2017): id. A49, doi:10.1051/0004-6361/201628260; I.-Juliana Sackmann, Arnold I. Boothroyd, and Kathleen E. Kraemer, “Our Sun. III. Present and Future,” Astrophysical Journal 418 (November 20, 1993): 457–468, doi:10.1086/173407; Rudolf Kippenhahn and Alfred Weigert, Stellar Structure and Evolution (Berlin: Springer Verlag, 1994), 266–270.
5. Eduardo Bravo et al., “Chandrasekhar-Mass White Dwarfs Are the Progenitors of a Small Fraction of Type Ia Supernovae According to Nucleosynthesis Constraints,” Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society Letters 517, no. 1 (November 2022): L31–L35, doi:10.1093/mnrasl/slac103; Paolo A. Mazzali et al., “A Common Explosion Mechanism for Type Ia Supernovae,” Science 315, no. 5813 (February 9, 2007): 825–828, doi:10.1126/science.1136259.
6. Hugh Ross, “Taking the Big Bang’s Temperature,” Today’s New Reason to Believe (blog), Reasons to Believe, April 4, 2022. 
7. Hugh Ross, “Neutron Star Merger Explains Why We’re Here (Expanded Version),” Today’s New Reason to Believe (blog), Reasons to Believe, November 3, 2017.
8. Hugh Ross, “Big Bang Implications of Detecting the Universe’s First Stars,” Today’s New Reason to Believe (blog), Reasons to Believe, November 14, 2022; Hugh Ross, “J0023+0307, a Pristine Firstborn Star?” Today’s New Reason to Believe (blog), Reasons to Believe (April 9, 2018); Hugh Ross, “Pursuing the Firstborn Stars and a Better Cosmic Creation Model,” Today’s New Reason to Believe (blog), Reasons to Believe (July 15, 2019). 
9. Hugh Ross, Designed to the Core (Covina, CA: RTB Press, 2022), 90–92.
10. Hugh Ross, “Have Galactic Archaeologists Found Evidence for Design?” Today’s New Reason to Believe (blog), Reasons to Believe, June 6, 2022.
11. P. A. Oesch et al., “A Remarkably Luminous Galaxy at Z = 11.1 Measured with Hubble Space Telescope Grism Spectroscopy,” Astrophysical Journal 819, no. 2 (March 8, 2016): id. 129, doi:10.3847/0004-637X/819/2/129.
12. Oeasch et al., “A Remarkably Luminous Galaxy,” p. 7.

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The answer from astronomers and physicists is that dark matter particles, regardless of how many such particles exist, by their very nature will be extraordinarily difficult to detect. Unlike ordinary matter, which is composed almost entirely of protons, neutrons, and electrons, dark matter either does not interact with light (photons) at all or interacts with light extremely weakly. Because of this very weak or nonexistent interaction, dark matter does not emit, absorb, or reflect light, which makes dark matter particles almost impossible to detect. 

Detection and Measurements of Dark Matter
In spite of the fact that astronomers and physicists have thus far been unsuccessful in their attempts to detect dark matter particles, they nevertheless are convinced that dark matter exists. The reason why is that astronomers observe the effects of dark matter’s gravity on the behavior of galaxies and galaxy clusters. They note that the structure and long-term stability of galaxies can only be explained if galaxies are surrounded by huge haloes of matter that interact very weakly or not at all with light. Figure 1 shows the inferred dark matter halo that envelops our Milky Way Galaxy (MWG). Dark matter makes up about 90% of the MWG’s total mass.

Figure 1: Milky Way Galaxy’s Dark Matter Halo and Stellar Disk
The central stellar bulge and the stellar disk are shown in black. The thin disk of gas appears in light gray. The much larger dark gray area depicts the dark matter halo. Credit: Hugh Ross

Astronomers also observe the effects of dark matter on maps of the cosmic microwave background radiation, also known as the radiation remaining from the cosmic creation event. These maps yield the most accurate measure of the total amount of dark matter in the universe. They reveal that dark matter comprises 85% of the total mass of the universe.²

Quest to Find Dark Matter Particles
Recent advances in cosmology and particle physics affirm that the cosmic creation model that best fits astronomical observations is fully compatible with the particle creation model that best fits the results of particle accelerator experiments. However, significantly more detailed and comprehensive particle and cosmic creation models would require the discovery and determination of the properties of dark matter particles. Consequently, for both astronomers and physicists the goal of discovering and measuring dark matter particles has become their “holy grail” quest. 

The two leading hypothesized candidates for dark matter particles are high-mass particles called weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs) and extremely low mass particles called axions. (As an aside, physicists displayed their marketing expertise by trademarking WIMPs so as to cash in on any manufacturers who desire to call any of their products a WIMP!) 

The enormous mass difference between a WIMP and an axion implies that WIMPs will behave predominantly like discrete particles rather than like waves, whereas axions will behave predominantly like waves rather than like discrete particles. A team of astronomers led by Alfred Amruth has attempted to use this distinction to make headway in the quest to discover which particles comprise dark matter.³

According to Einstein’s theory of general relativity, the gravity of a massive object will bend light around itself. Ever since 1919, astronomers have routinely affirmed this prediction of general relativity by observing the bending of starlight passing close to the Sun’s disk during solar eclipses. Now, astronomers are taking advantage of this gravitational lensing to detect very distant galaxies and quasars directly behind a foreground galaxy or galaxy cluster. If the distant galaxy or quasar is lined up perfectly behind a foreground galaxy, its image will be smeared out into a circle—what astronomers call an Einstein ring. Figure 2 shows an example of a near perfectly aligned gravitational lensing of a distant galaxy into an Einstein ring image.

Figure 2: Gravitational Lensing of a Distant Galaxy into an Einstein Ring
Gravitational lens LRG 3-757. Credit: NASA/ESA/Hubble Space Telescope

Amruth and his colleagues developed several theoretical models to determine the different ways that gravitationally lensed images of distant galaxies/quasars would be distorted if the dark matter (that they know is responsible for most of the lensing phenomena) were composed predominantly of WIMPs or of axions. They then examined images of real gravitationally lensed galaxies to see whether WIMPs or axions best explained the observed features of the lensed galaxies/quasars.

The most definitive test in their sample was the gravitational lens around the foreground galaxy HS 0810+2554.⁴ However, since the alignment was not perfect, astronomers observed four bright spots instead of an Einstein ring around the foreground galaxy. The distant quasar gravitationally lensed by HS 0810+2554 manifests variable light intensity. Therefore, astronomers have observed multiple distinct gravitationally lensed images of the distant quasar (see figure 3).

Figure 3: Three Observations at Different Times of a Quasar Gravitationally Lensed by HS 0810+2554
The scale bar to the bottom right of each image is 1 arcsecond. Credit: iweb.cfa.harvard.edu 

In their entire sample of gravitationally lensed images of distant quasars, Amruth’s team noted that the images predicted by their WIMP models did not match the actual images. However, the images predicted by their axion models didaccurately reproduce the images, especially those of HS 0810+2554. In particular, they demonstrated that the brightness and position anomalies of the images gravitationally lensed by the foreground galaxy are well explained if the dark matter halo surrounding the galaxy is dominated by axions where the axion mass, to within a factor of ten, = 10^-22 electron volts (for comparison, the mass of a proton = 928 million electron volts). Amruth and his colleagues also established that a dark matter halo surrounding HS 0810+2554 dominated by WIMPs fails to explain the observed features of the images gravitationally lensed by the galaxy. Consequently, the research team concluded that axions are a much more probable candidate than WIMPs for being the universe’s predominant dark matter particle. 

This research is the strongest evidence to date favoring axions as the dominant dark matter particle. However, it is not the only evidence favoring axions. The axion and WIMP dark matter particle models predict different kinds and populations of dwarf galaxies in the universe. The WIMP models predict that dark matter haloes will dramatically increase in number toward lower masses, with numbers dropping to zero at a dark matter halo mass of 1,000 solar masses. The axion models predict that the numbers of dark matter haloes will be increasingly suppressed below masses of about a billion times the Sun’s mass, assuming an axion mass of 10^-22 electron volts.⁵ The mass where suppression of dark matter haloes occurs is roughly proportional to the axion mass. 

Counts of the number of low mass dwarf galaxies in the Local Group favors the axion models over the WIMP models. Likewise, the observed abundance of low luminosity galaxies at high redshifts (large cosmological distances) favors axion models and strongly disfavors WIMP models.⁶ The axion models also explain why dwarf galaxies do not exhibit cusps,⁷ a feature that WIMP models can explain only by appealing to star formation feedback. Axion models, unlike WIMP models, can explain the stellar velocity dispersion of DF44, an ultra-diffuse dwarf galaxy.⁸  

Astronomers now possess the telescope power to observe the structure of the universe on the largest size scales. Observations conducted to date reveal a large-scale structure of the universe that fits the model holding that the universe’s dark matter is composed predominantly of axions.⁹ Astronomers have also observed white dwarf stars where the white dwarfs are cooling at faster rates than what thermodynamics alone would predict. The additional cooling could be explained if large numbers of axions exist in the white dwarf stars and if some of those axions are escaping or decaying.¹⁰  

Amruth and his team concluded their paper by noting that major gravitational lens surveys are underway. The database of well-observed gravitationally lensed images of distant quasars will exponentially increase within the next several years. Such a database could not only definitively establish axions as the predominant dark matter particle but also provide an accurate measure of the axion mass. Meanwhile, laboratory experiments to detect axions are underway and more sensitive experiments are being proposed and developed.¹¹

Philosophical Implications
The research achieved by Amruth and his teammates carries significant implications. It dispels the claim that scientists will never detect dark matter particles and removes any reasonable doubt of dark matter’s existence. It also provides yet more scientific evidence in support of the biblically predicted big bang creation model. Already, it has provided a more detailed and comprehensive model for the origin and history of the universe and for the origin and history of the universe’s fundamental particles. 

This work shows the research pathway for developing increasingly detailed and comprehensive cosmic and particle creation models. We can all look forward to the results. Once again, scientific advance affirms Psalm 19:1: “The heavens declare the glory of God.”

Endnotes

1. Hugh Ross, “What Does the Bible Say about the Big Bang?” Today’s New Reason to Believe (blog), Reasons to Believe, February 6, 2023.
2. G. Hinshaw et al., “Nine-Year Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) Observations: Cosmological Parameter Results,” Astrophysical Journal Supplement 208, no. 2 (October 2013): id. 19, 5–11, doi:10.1088/0067-0049/208/2/19; P. A. R. Ade et al., Planck Collaboration, “Planck 2015 Results. XIII. Cosmological Parameters,”Astronomy & Astrophysics 594 (October 2016): id. A13, 1, doi:10.1051/0004-6361/201525830; David N. Spergel, Raphael Flauger, and Renée Hložek, “Planck Data Reconsidered,” Physical Review D 91 (January 27, 2015): id. 023518, 1, doi:10.1103/PhysRevD.91.023518.
3. Alfred Amruth et al., “Einstein Rings Modulated by Wavelike Dark Matter from Anomalies in Gravitationally Lensed Images,” Nature Astronomy (April 20, 2023), doi:10.1038/s41550-023-01943-9.
4. Neal Jackson et al., “Observations of Radio-Quiet Quasars at 10-mas Resolution by Use of Gravitational Lensing,” Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society 454, no. 1 (November 2015): 287–298, doi:10.1093/mnras/stv1982.
5. Lam Hui et al., “Ultralight Scalars as Cosmological Dark Matter,” Physical Review D 95, no. 4 (February 15, 2017): id. 043541, doi:10.1103/PhysRevD.95.043541.
6. Enoch Leung et al., “Magnification Bias of Distant Galaxies in the Hubble Frontier Fields: Testing Wave Versus Particle Dark Matter Predictions,” Astrophysical Journal 862, no. 2 (August 1, 2018): id. 156, doi:10.3847/1538-4357/aacdad.
7. Tom Broadhurst et al., “Ghostly Galaxies as Solitons of Bose-Einstein Dark Matter,” Physical Review D 101, no. 8 (April 15, 2020): id. 083012, doi:10.1103/PhysRevD.101.083012.
8. Alvaro Pozo et al., “Detection of a Universal Core-Halo Transition in Dwarf Galaxies as Predicted by Bose-Einstein Dark Matter,” (December 17, 2021), preprint arXiv:2010.10337.
9. Hsi-Yu Schive, Tzihong Chiueh, and Tom Broadhurst, “Cosmic Structure as the Quantum Interference of a Coherent Dark Wave,” Nature Physics 10 (July 2014): 496–499, doi:10.1038/nphys2996.
10. J. Isern et al., “Axions and the Luminosity Function of White Dwarfs: The Thin and Thick Discs, and the Halo,” Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society 478, no. 2 (August 2018): 2569–2575, doi:10.1093/mnras/sty1162; J. Isern et al., “Axions and the Pulsation Periods of Variable White Dwarfs Revisited,” Astronomy & Astrophysics 512 (March 2010): id. A86, doi:10.1051/0004-6361/200913716; J. Isern et al., “Axions and the Cooling of White Dwarf Stars,” Astrophysical Journal Letters 682, no. 2 (August 1, 2008): L109–L112, doi:10.1086/591042; Jordi Isern, “White Dwarfs as Advanced Physics Laboratories. The Axion Case,” in White Dwarfs as Probes of Fundamental Physics: Tracers of Planetary, Stellar, and Galactic Evolution, edited by Martin A. Barstow et al., Proceedings of the International Astronomical Union 357 (October 9, 2020): 138–153, doi:10.1017/S1743921320000873. 
11. Yannis K. Semertzidis and Sungwoo Youn, “Axion Dark Matter: How to See It?” Science Advances 8, no. 8 (February 23, 2022): id. abm9928, doi:10.1126/sciadv.abm9928.

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My Answer: The reference that Paul made to the third heaven in 2 Corinthians 12:2–3 has its foundation in the biblical Hebrew word for heaven possessing three literal definitions. It can refer to the troposphere where rain clouds form. It can refer to the realm of the Sun, Moon, planets, and stars. It can refer to the spiritual realm beyond the universe where the angels dwell. Paul in 2 Corinthians is implying that he was taken up to the angelic realm where he “heard inexpressible words, which a human being is not allowed to speak.”

The Bible is clear that when we enter the new creation, described in Revelation 21–22, the universe will cease to exist since it will have fulfilled its purposes. The Bible does not tell us what will happen to the third heaven—whether it will continue to exist, cease to exist, or be incorporated into the new creation. We will find out when Jesus Christ ushers those of us who have received his redemptive offer into the new creation.

The post What Will Happen to the Third Heaven When God's People Enter the New <em class="algolia-search-highlight">Creation</em>? appeared first on Reasons to Believe.

My Answer: God had multiple purposes in creating the universe, Earth, and humans. One of those purposes was to grant humans free will so that an exchange of love would be possible between him and humans. God also wanted to eradicate the possibility of evil and suffering while enhancing the free-will capability of those humans who desire a personal relationship with him so that they could experience exponentially greater love. This quest to eradicate evil and suffering in an efficient and rapid manner required that the universe be endowed with certain laws of physics and space-time dimensions. One consequence of these physical laws and dimensions is that 4.56 billion years, minimum, is needed to prepare Earth, physically, chemically, and biologically, for the existence of humans and to make possible the global high-technology civilization that is necessary for the good news of salvation through Jesus Christ to be propagated rapidly to all the world’s people groups (Matthew 28:18-20). I describe the reasons why in my books Why the Universe Is the Way It Is and Improbable Planet. So, yes, Earth is 4.5662 billion years old, life has been producing the biodeposits needed for global human civilization for 3.8 billion years, and according to Genesis 2, God created Adam and Eve sometime during the last ice age, 13,000–130,000 years ago, when the Garden of Eden site would have been above sea level. To read more about what the Bible and the scientific record say about the timing of the creation of different forms of life on Earth, see Navigating Genesis.

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