It’s not every day that a secret about the origins of our planet land on someone’s driveway. But that’s precisely what happened in March 2021 when a meteorite landed outside the home of the Wilcocks in Winchcombe, Gloucestershire. The carbonaceous chondrite had travelled for several hundred thousand years from somewhere between Mars and Jupiter but arrived carrying all its chemical secrets intact. After analysing the rock for a year, scientists are delighted to discover that it contains water that is a near-perfect match for that found on earth. Where the water on earth came from has long long been a puzzle so perhaps the meteorite reveals that it arrived from outer space.
This is all well and good and I’m fascinated by the scientific discoveries which help us understand how our universe works. But there’s a question that science struggles to find the answer to. Where did the water come from in the first place? Or, for that matter, where did the material that made the meteorite come from? But where science draws a blank the Bible provides an answer beginning as it does with these simple words, ‘In the beginning God.’ Our wonderful world exists as an expression of God’s boundless creativity – a creativity we see all around us and in the minds of the scientists helping us to understand it.
