How Do We Understand The Universe Around Us

The world we live on right now may very well be just one in a series of many worlds God has created. Moses 1:38 states, “And as one earth shall pass away, and the heavens thereof even so shall another come.” This may be shocking to hear, as it’s difficult to imagine that there were multiple creation stories, multiple covenant peoples, creating their own scriptures, and perhaps even multiple Adams and Eves on their respective earths.

We know that God is eternal and that He is constantly progressing, so that must mean that He continues to provide experiences for His spirit children to grow and progress. We also know that this earth must eventually pass away, and the only way for those two facts to be reconciled is for there to be multiple earths. For there to be multiple earths, there must be a way that the universe essentially recycles itself. The first stars in the universe were made nearly entirely out of Hydrogen. Within the stars’ core, elements fused and became the heavier elements, such as Carbon, Oxygen, and Iron. Without those elements having been forged in the hearts of stars, our planet could not have been formed, as they are mostly made of those heavier, denser materials. As the star dies, it often ejects much of its own material into the surrounding space and eventually explodes as a supernova, collapsing under its own gravity. Taking a quote from Moses again, God says, “For behold, there are many worlds that have passed away by the word of my power” (Moses 1:35). That material is then mixed in with the Interstellar Medium (ISM), the matter and energy that fills up much of empty space waiting to be formed into new stars and planets. This material is unorganized at first and distributed fairly evenly, but due to many different forces acting on it, such as gravity density waves, other supernovae, and radiation from nearby stars.

As Neil A. Maxwell stated, “Whatever God’s initial process, there apparently was some divine overseeing: ‘And the Gods watched those things which they had ordered until they obeyed’ (Abraham 4:18; emphasis added).” Whatever the means God uses to oversee the formation of planets, we are able to observe many solar systems being formed from this chaos and have developed a hypothesis named the Solar Nebular Hypothesis, which is believed to be the method of how our solar system formed.

The Solar Nebular Hypothesis describes how the sun, planets, moons, and asteroids were all formed at the same time about 4.5 billion years ago. They were all formed from a cloud of gas called a nebula. Due to one of the forces described earlier the nebula began collapsing in on itself. As it did that, it began to spin faster and faster because it kept getting smaller, much like an ice skater when she brings her arms in to spin quicker. As it spun faster, it got hotter, and a proto sun (a type of pre-sun, which would become the sun) formed. Other material in the nebula was pushed further out and began lumping together to form planetesimals (pre-planets, similar in idea to the proto sun), which then formed into the earth and other planets in our solar system.

When we look at other nebulae near us, we see proto stars forming, and disks forming around them, reinforcing the validity of the Solar Nebular Hypothesis. It’s possible there is more to the story we do not understand, because some solar systems don’t seem to follow the same pattern that the Solar Nebular Hypothesis predicts. Regardless, there is an order to the way solar systems are formed, and it is clear that they are formed from the unorganized chaos of the ISM. In the creation account, God sees chaos and creates order from it. Almost every Near East culture has a creation that has to do with chaos being controlled and manipulated to form the world. In Latter-Day Saint theology, we don’t believe in creation Ex Nihilo (a Latin term meaning “from nothing”). Instead we believe that the earth was formed from pre-existing materials and organized. This is supported by an analysis of the Hebrew text in Genesis 1:1, where the verb “ברא‬”, or “bara”, is used. This verb correctly translates to the infinitive “to create,” but it also translates to the verbs “to fashion,” or “to form.” This suggests again that there existed at least stars before our earth existed. Stars from which the materials needed to form our planet and put in place to start the process of creating our solar system were produced. It also leads to the conclusion that other earths will be formed from the materials of our star when it passes in a few billion years, fulfilling God’s words, saying that more earths will come after the previous ones have passed away.

The truly amazing thing about science and religion, though, is how they work in tandem to help us understand the universe. “Revelations give us very little information about how the Lord created it all. Scientists meanwhile focus on how and what and when. Nevertheless, some of them acknowledge the puzzlement over why. Hawking said: ‘Although science may solve the problem of how the universe began, it cannot answer the question: Why does the universe bother to exist? I don’t know the answer to that’”. As soon as the Lord tells Moses that He creates and destroys worlds almost at His leisure, He tells him why — “For behold, this is my work my glory — to bring to pass the immortality and eternal life of man” (Moses 1:39). He does all of this for us. Our vast, immense, beautiful universe wasn’t made on a whim, it wasn’t a side project, nor was it a means to any ends other than making our existence meaningful. Every movement, every reaction, every development in the universe is deliberate and planned for the sole purpose of creating better lives for God’s children. “Therefore, brothers and sisters, as we look at the universe, we do not see unexplained chaos or cosmic churn. Instead, the faithful see God ‘moving in His majesty and power’. It is like viewing a divinely choreographed, cosmic ballet—spectacular, subduing, and reassuring!”.

Let us then seek further beauty in the universe around us, so we can further understand and appreciate the power of God acting on us and on everything around us and seek out the order and majesty that imbues all objects in existence.