In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth – the whole universe. This familiar statement is not primarily a summary of what is about to be narrated, but of what God did first. Since in the next verse the earth already exists, the opening verse must be referring to the earth’s creation, and if the earth was created at that time, so must the heavens have been. ‘Heavens’ (or ‘heaven’: the Hebrew does not distinguish between singular and plural) designates both matter and space – hence the later reference to ‘the heavens and all their host’, the host being in the heavens. Matter and space were created as one, implying that space is not an absolute void, defined by the absence of what was created. Finally, we may note that the creation of the heavens took place before anything else. It was creation ex nihilo, in the sense that nothing pre-existed; the visible proceeded out of the invisible, God himself.

Among the most fundamental laws in science are the first and second laws of thermodynamics – thermodynamics being about how energy passes from one system or state to another. Fortunately these laws are easily expressed in words.

The first, the law of conservation, states that energy, or matter (which is a form of energy), can neither be created nor destroyed. The total energy of the universe will always be the same, whatever physical or chemical processes take place within it. The law therefore implies that the creative act that brought it into existence was an act done once for all. The act has a purpose, and matter would exist so long as the purpose remained to be fulfilled. Matter would not be added to, at later moments, by further acts of creation.

The second law says that the amount of thermal energy available for work in a system can never increase. Heat flows from hot to cold objects, never the other way round. In effect, the law encapsulates the condition which allows anything to happen. In radiating light, the sun converts nuclear energy into electromagnetic energy, which is radiated out as photons. As a consequence the sun’s entropy increases. Every physical and chemical process results in a net increase of entropy, including biological processes, and were it not for their ability to utilise energy from their surroundings, no organism would be able to live. Thus the law points back to a state, at the beginning, when contrasts between hot and cold were at a maximum and entropy at a minimum.

The second law can also be conceived as saying that the level of disorder in a closed system cannot increase. Organised systems become progressively less ordered over time, never the other way round. A house will rot and eventually collapse; a highly ordered molecule such as DNA or haemoglobin will break down. This is because thermal energy (heat) comes from the incessant motion of atoms, and over time the colliding atoms break down the segregations and partitions that make for order, reducing a system to a state of homogeneity. Thermodynamics is still the cause of an increase in entropy, and the entropy is still irreversible. The arrow of time goes one way. It can only have originated in a moment when a supernatural agent imparted order to the universe and order was at a maximum.

The first law derives from the permanence of the creation, and from its having been brought into existence once for all; the second derives from its impermanence, its evolving and temporally finite nature. Left to itself, the universe will run down. It was not designed to go on forever in its original state.

We cannot therefore argue that matter has always existed and has been organising itself in one corner of the universe into ever more complex, ordered states called ‘life’. A bacterium is a vastly more complex ordering of matter than any non-biological system. To postulate bacteria self-assembling without supernatural input is to imagine a massive violation of the second law – to postulate precisely the miracle-working supernatural agency that one wishes to avoid. The universe is perpetually descending from a state of higher order to a state of lower order. Thus the beginning must have been when order was at a maximum, and this maximum order must have been imparted from outside the material universe. The deduction is one of well-established physics. Any account that purports to be a true account of how the world began, whether on religious or scientific authority, must be consistent with it.

The second law of thermodynamics shows that the universe has an inherently created character. It points back to a supernatural agent that had power over matter. If matter had always existed, that agent would have been unable to exercise power over it – not the power that forms ‘without human hand’ and in a mother’s womb unites flesh and spirit into a living soul. Nor could we now say that ‘he sustains all things by the word of his power’. Creation was an act of self-alienation, whereby the thing created ceased to be part of the Creator. He sustains the world because, ultimately, it still belongs to him. Although alienated from him, matter is still of him, and this is true of all existence, spirit and matter. He fills heaven and earth. ‘In him we live and move and have our being.’ That is why he knows the end from the beginning, and why, in the end, his purpose for the creation will be fulfilled

Notwithstanding attempts to qualify its absolute determinism, the modern view is that famously expressed in 1814 by the astronomer mathematician Pierre-Simon Laplace,

We may regard the present state of the universe as the effect of its past and the cause of its future. An intellect which at a certain moment would know all forces that set nature in motion, and all positions of all items of which nature is composed, if this intellect were also vast enough to submit these data to analysis, would embrace in a single formula the movements of the greatest bodies of the universe and those of the tiniest atom; for such an intellect nothing would be uncertain and the future just like the past would be present before its eyes.

In Laplace’s view everything in the world had a physical cause and there was no room for free will. (If anything in the universe had free will, or if there was an element of randomness or unknowability in the behaviour of atoms, such an intellect would not have been able to see both past and future: any animal with free will would have disrupted the predictability of nature. On the other hand, was not Laplace, in the very act of reasoning, presuming that human intellects were in fact independent of and superior to the merely physical?) But the truth is not so much that time is part of the creation and God lives outside it, knowing it as something external to himself, as that space-time issued from him. He is immanent as well as transcendent. He created the ages, time itself, when the visible came into being. He ‘inhabits eternity’. Although, once created, time has no end and will go on infinitely unless it is brought to an end, space is finite. The universe is bounded, as anything created must be bounded. The Creator is greater than that which he has made.