Only 400 years ago – until Galileo – the stars and planets were thought to be pure orbs of light set in perfect crystal spheres. Galileo’s observations disproved that long-held view and pulled down the artificial curtain between heaven and earth. In accordance with Copernicus’s theory that the Earth revolved round the Sun, he saw that Venus exhibited phases, Jupiter had its own satellites, and Saturn, far from being a perfect orb, had a sort of collar. Although it would be a while before the collar was recognised as a disc, the implications were clear: the supralunary realm was not a supranatural one, where things existed in a different reality.

Our first impression of Saturn is of something breathtakingly beautiful, communicating a beauty perhaps more important than any scientific message. But then what? When we allow ourselves to wonder how the splendour of Saturn’s rings came into being, should we imagine that we are viewing the direct handiwork of the Creator, like the astronomers before Galileo? They believed themselves to be peering into a mode of reality where things never changed, as if the night opened out on a world still in its original state. Will the sense of a transcendent power be lost if we take another view?

The idea that the world is only 6,000 years old imposes a taboo on looking too deeply into phenomena. Any appearance of history is dismissed as an inevitable consequence of creating the world, and it seems futile to ask, “How did this state come into being?” To take appearance at face value is to be misled. Scientific inquiry is shut down – very often at the first fence. It is feared that if one asks open-ended questions about the history of the solar system, the Earth or the life on it, the beauty will vanish, and one will end up concluding that nothing was created.

The world obviously goes back a lot further than 6,000 years. However, rejection of this creationist dogma need not imply rejection of the idea that all things originated in creation, any more than rejection of an evolutionist age need imply rejection of the idea that all things have evolved over time. We should guard against assuming that anything was created as we now find them, just as we should guard against assuming that all things came into being of their own accord. No questions should be off limits, and no answers should be off limits. We should venture wherever the evidence leads.

The following pages look into the events of the early solar system. The oldest datable objects are meteorites. It has long been assumed that chondrites – the least altered kind of meteorite – are the remnants of a primeval cloud of dust and gas, called the ‘solar nebula’. However, recent research has shown that this is incorrect. Meteorites and the asteroids from which they derive are fragments of larger bodies, not smaller ones, and some of these ancestors originated from still larger bodies – objects the size of planets. They have more of a history than even evolutionists were ready for. The solar system appears to be older than its oldest datable objects.

The following pages are organised in two parts. The first considers whether what we know about the planets accords with the belief that they came into existence naturally. The second focuses on the origin of asteroids, moons and comets.

The idea that the solar system formed naturally attracts so little criticism in academic circles that one might suppose it must be extremely robust, but in fact it suffers from many problems – problems which in any area of science not fundamental to the prevailing world-view would be fatal. They include:

• Regions of the solar system such as the main asteroid belt and the Kuiper Belt appear to have too little mass to be consistent with the hypothesis that everything originated from a solar nebula.
• Before a giant gas planet could have formed, the material from which it formed would have been sucked into the central star. This is also a problem for small bodies. At one Earth-distance from the Sun, metre-sized particles surrounded by gas will spiral into the star within 100 years.
• The gas in our galaxy is nearly all located in the spiral arms. But the stars which formed in these arms are rotating round the galactic centre faster than the gas, so it would take them only 10 million years to pass through into the regions between the arms. This suggests that the stars are less than 10 million years old – a tiny fraction of the Sun’s supposed age.
• Star formation in giant molecular clouds happens surprisingly slowly. Assuming no inhibiting factors, theoretical calculations indicate that all the gas should have condensed into stars within 4 million years, whereas the observed star formation rate is around 1% of this rate. Current thinking requires that the clouds have gone through multiple cycles of condensation, over a period many times longer than the maximum longevity of the clouds.
• The process leading to the formation of embryonic planets is ‘murky’. Asteroids composed of accreted rubble show that dust and boulders can stick together, but beyond a certain size they are as likely to come apart again as cohere into much bigger units.
• Evidence that the solar system suffered a heavy asteroidal bombardment at the end of the Hadean era is difficult to reconcile with models indicating that interplanetary space should have been mostly clear of asteroids by then.
• While the nebula hypothesis has been boosted by the discovery that in other parts of the Galaxy entire solar systems have formed from rotating gas clouds, creation theory does not exclude the natural formation either of stars or planets. The crucial question is whether any other planetary system is sufficiently similar to support the belief that our own formed naturally. So far, we know of none.

These pages constitute sections of one developing argument. They should therefore be read sequentially.

• Chondritic meteorites. These are the oldest datable objects in the solar system, but their constituents are not at all what the nebula hypothesis presupposed. The main constituents are melt droplets, condensates, metal grains and dust – all but the last showing evidence that they formed at very high temperatures. They appear to consist of particles produced in planetary explosions, not a primordial nebula.
• Piecing asteroids back together. Meteorites stem from asteroids, and asteroids come in diverse shapes and sizes and have diverse histories. None of them, however, appear to be first-generation conglomerations from the nebula. They originate from larger bodies, and the oldest of the larger bodies are surprisingly mature. Iron meteorites had grandparents older than the canonical age of the solar system itself.
• Asteroids, comets and moons. Asteroids hail from the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, and they are the sparse, much altered remains of rocky planets which occupied this region. Most of the debris got swallowed up by the gravitational pull of Jupiter, Saturn and the Sun. Comets and the rocky moons around the planets have the same origin.
• Water in the heavens. Interplanetary space in the early solar system era seems to have been wet. Evidence of ubiquitous water is abundant. Saturn’s rings are made of water ice, the Moon retains substantial traces of water, the composition of most meteorites has been altered by it, and in the outer solar system the substance occurs in increasing abundance all the way out to the Kuiper Belt. Although interpreted as a remnant of the solar nebula, the Kuiper Belt is more probably the remnant of a created nebula around the solar system – the ‘waters above the heavens’ of Hebrew tradition and the celestial ocean of Egyptian and Indo-European traditions. Like the water that once rained on Mars, much of the Earth’s oceans is likely to have come from the Kuiper Belt.
• Impacts or explosions from within? That the early solar system was dominated by debris from exploding planets and planetesimals has become part of astronomy’s explanation tool-kit. The question is whether the explosions were the result of collisions or of heat generated from within. Here it is argued that the main heat source was (i) the thermonuclear production of radioisotopes within terrestrial planets, closely followed by (ii) heat from the radioactive decay of those isotopes.
• Events in real time. Are the oldest datable objects in the solar system truly 4.6 billion years old? Only if rates of radioactivity have always been the same. At that earliest datable period, there is a huge discrepancy between radioisotope dates and direct evidence bearing on lengths of time. Rates of radioactivity appear to have been much higher than now, in which case the objects dated by radioactivity are much younger than supposed.

The solar system that we see now therefore cannot be understood as reflecting its original state. The interior of every terrestrial planet melted, the elements dissolving with fire. The largest of these planets exploded. Mercury may have been intermediate in size – bigger than Earth but not as big as the planets which completely disintegrated – for its unusually small and dense body suggests that it shed part of its mantle; what is left is a dense, partly differentiated metallic core. The smaller planets – Venus, Earth and Mars – were blanketed with upwelling magma and pounded by asteroids. The giant gas planets underwent equally transformational convulsions.

This is the scientific basis for taking seriously the words of a man who once sat at the very feet of the Creator:

It was thermonuclear heat from within the Earth that caused the land to rupture and the subterranean deep to break out onto the surface. When the ‘windows of heaven opened’, what they let in was debris from the ruptured bodies of other planets. The rain that fell also came from outer space. Having suffused inwards from the edge of the solar system, the accumulated water was prevented from reaching the Earth’s surface by its atmosphere. As the asteroids ripped through, the envelope of water collapsed. The Earth emerged, in the early Archaean period, a baptised reborn planet.