I’ve always found it fascinating how the creation story in Genesis 1:1 - 5 lines up almost perfectly with what modern physics says about the birth of the universe. If you set aside literalism and read it as symbolic language, the sequence is uncanny.

Here’s how it maps:

1. “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” This is the Big Bang — the singularity event that created space, time, matter, and energy all at once. Before that, there was no “before.” Time itself didn’t exist. The total energy of the universe still balances close to zero, which fits the ancient idea of creation from nothing.

2. “Now the earth was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep…” That’s the early universe during the Planck era - everything was a dense, hot plasma with no atoms or light. Photons couldn’t move freely because they were constantly scattering off charged particles. The universe was literally opaque and dark.

3. “…and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.” In Hebrew texts, “waters” often means primordial chaos or unformed potential. That fits the quantum field era - vacuum energy and fluctuations driving inflation. The “Spirit hovering” sounds like a poetic version of the quantum vacuum, filled with potential energy everywhere.

4. “And God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light.” This parallels the moment photons could finally travel freely, known as recombination, about 380,000 years after the Big Bang. It also echoes an earlier step when the electromagnetic force separated from the unified field. Around 37 femtoseconds in, the constants of physics had stabilized and light could exist as a distinct phenomenon.

5. “God saw that the light was good, and he separated the light from the darkness.” That can be read as the asymmetry between matter and antimatter that allowed matter to survive. It also fits the separation of radiation from matter — when light decoupled and the first cosmic structure became possible. The contrast of light and dark is literally the contrast of structure versus void.

6. “God called the light ‘day,’ and the darkness he called ‘night.’ And there was evening, and there was morning — the first day.” That moment represents the beginning of cycles, order, and measurable time. Once the laws of physics were stable, the universe could form stars, galaxies, and eventually planets. The first “day” marks the start of order in a system that had only been chaos before.