How did life begin? Two common answers come to mind. One is that, at some point, a deity decided to suspend the laws of physics and will a slew of slimy creatures into being. A second is that a one-in-a-trillion collision of just the right atoms billions of years ago happened to produce a molecular blob with the unprecedented capacity to reproduce itself.

UNIVERSE IN CREATION: A NEW UNDERSTANDING OF THE BIG BANG AND THE EMERGENCE OF LIFE by Roy R. Gould Harvard University Press, 288 pp., $24.95

If the first answer fails to convince atheists and agnostics, the second answer feels a like a bit of a letdown. Life on earth was dumb luck, or—depending on how you look at it—a cruel accident. Life might not exist on any other planet, but even if it does—even if there is, say, some creature vaguely resembling a paramecium swimming in a pond on some moon halfway across the galaxy—then there, too, it’s just a freak accident. Or as the great molecular biologist Jacques Monod dourly noted in 1971, “The universe was not pregnant with life, nor the biosphere with man.”

But there is a third possibility. In his new book Universe in Creation: A New Understanding of the Big Bang and the Emergence of Life, Roy Gould, an education researcher at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, argues that life is neither a miracle nor an aberration, but an inevitability whose emergence is dictated by the laws of nature. He frames his book around a question posed by the physicist John Archibald Wheeler in 1983. “Is the machinery of the universe so set up, and from the very beginning,” Wheeler asked, “that it is guaranteed to produce intelligent life at some long-distant point in its history-to-be?”

Gould answers Wheeler’s hypothetical in the affirmative. To do so, he walks us through the history of the universe, making the case that at each step, the “universe’s major construction projects … laid the groundwork for life.” The result is a fascinating synthesis. You have probably heard, for instance, that the universe is steadily expanding. But as Gould describes, it is not growing outward like a balloon, progressively filling up more space around it. Instead, new “universe” is constantly being created, every moment, in the interstices of space and matter. But the manner in which the universe expands, he argues, happens to be optimal for the emergence of life. For instance, it the universe had expanded more quickly, stars would not have formed; more slowly, and hydrogen—a basic component of water and hence life—would not exist. In either case, you would not be reading this paragraph; therefore, the “universe’s infrastructure guaranteed that things would work out properly.”

Gould artfully describes various other highlights in universal history, like the formation of stars and planets. Many of these moments are majestic and hard to visualize, like when stars explode, ejecting their innards throughout the universe, which then, acting under gravitational forces, coalesce into new stars and planets. He describes how under certain conditions all stars will produce carbon, the basic atom of life (at least as we know it). Hence: the laws of nature produce stars, stars invariably produce carbon, carbon is a necessary constituent of life, and ergo, the laws of nature lead to life.