Certain "progressive creationists" have been accusing me of believing that the universe never had a beginning—that time, space, and matter have always existed in some form.

There has been much excitement recently regarding the stunning successes of America's two Mars Exploration Rovers (MERs). Landing on opposite sides of the Red Planet, Spirit and Opportunity have functioned almost flawlessly. Now it looks like they have found signs of past water activity, sulfate minerals, and salts in some rock samples.

Judging from the number of published books and articles on the subject, there is a lot going on in the field of evolutionary cosmogony as astronomers and cosmological physicists are trying to learn how the universe originated and its various components evolved, including all the millions of galaxies, stars, planets, and other objects in the vast cosmos.

Astronomers have guessed that there are possibly as many as ten thousand billion trillion stars out there in the observable universe, of which perhaps five thousand can be seen without a telescope. If the universe is expanding, as many astronomers believe, there is an outer limit to this vast population of stars, as defined by the distance thus far attained by the expansion.