ABSTRACT
Accounts of the cosmic timeline have become common. What is apparent in all of them, besides the immense amount of time accounted for - approximately thirteen and a half billion years from beginning until now - are the different kinds of scientific explanation needed in each of the major stages. That the big bang account and the creation story of Genesis might be descriptions of the same event was immediately apparent to the physicists and mathematicians who developed the scientific theory. The caution of the priest-scientists may have been vindicated by the attempts to find an alternative to the big bang account by secular-minded scientists. According to scientific estimates, approximately nine billion years passed from the time of the big bang until the formation of the solar system about five billion years ago. The one significant event in cosmic history that organic evolution by means of natural selection cannot explain is the origin of life itself.
