Stardust – our place in the vast cosmic story

This is the transcript of the Revd Prof David Wilkinson’s ‘Thought For the Day’ on BBC Radio 4, 25th August, 2025.

Good morning. On this programme on Saturday, there was a discussion of the significance of dust. That is, recent scientific papers have identified in the dust retrieved by NASA from the Bennu asteroid, ‘presolar grains’, material from before the solar system was formed. This material, older than 4.6 billion years, was itself formed by a previous generation of stars to our Sun. It is a reminder how small a part we are in the vast cosmic story and yet within this there is a deeper question concerning our significance.

As an astrophysicist I worked on this process of star formation and the evolution and distribution of the chemical elements, dependent on a landmark paper which was started sixty years ago by Margaret and Geoffrey Burbidge, William Fowler, and Fred Hoyle. Hoyle had proposed that all the elements apart from hydrogen, helium and lithium, such as carbon, oxygen and iron were synthesised in the life and death of stars. The Burbidges and Fowler were able to work with Hoyle to give convincing evidence for this proposal.

Not only did this work demonstrate that the carbon in the solar system and indeed my body is the ash of dead stars, it also was a significant theological moment for Hoyle. He had become well known, not least through a series of BBC broadcasts, as an atheist. Yet he saw that the creation of carbon in this way is dependent on some very fine-tuning of the energy levels in atoms. This unlikely situation led Hoyle to speak of being shaken in his atheism, and would later conclude, ‘A common sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a superintellect has monkeyed with physics’. As a result he would move to writing a book entitled ‘ The Intelligent Universe’.

We now know of a number of these ‘unlikely situations’ of fine tuning in the law and circumstances of the universe which have to be just right for its evolution and human life. The cosmologist Paul Davies calls it ‘The Goldilocks Enigma’. 

Some have argued that the only explanation of this fine-tuning is an intelligent designer. I’ve never been theologically or scientifically convinced of the logic of this attempt to prove God. But it is an intriguing pointer that while we are simply products of stardust, there may be a deeper story to the universe. And this resonates for me with the Christian claim that there is a Creator who sustains the evolution of human beings out of dust and walked in Jesus through the dust of Israel and Gaza showing that all human beings are significant and loved by God.