Cosmogenesis

Cosmological Creation Story

Physics has its own creation story: cosmogenesis. The story goes as follows: Cosmologists now assume that the universe began 13.7 billion years ago in an immensely hot and dense state, much smaller than a single atom, called a singularity.
It began to expand after about a millionth billionth billionth billionth billionth second after the Big Bang.
Gravity separated from the other forces.
The universe then underwent an exponential expansion called inflation.
Somewhere in the first billionth of a second, the Higgs field became active and the quarks, gluons, and electrons, which we are made of, acquired mass.
The universe continued to expand and cool. After a few minutes, there was hydrogen and helium in the universe. The universe consisted of about 75% hydrogen and 25% helium. That is still the case today.

There Was Light

The universe continued to expand for about 380 million years. Then light began to travel through the universe. The universe was now large enough to be translucent; that light is what we now see as the cosmic background radiation.
After about 400 million years, the first stars formed.
Hydrogen and helium began to fuse into heavier elements.
The building blocks of life, carbon, oxygen, iron, and all the elements we are made of, originated in that first generation of stars; these stars exploded when their fuel ran out and hurled heavier elements back into the universe.
Then they came together again in a next generation of stars and planets.

Civilization

On some of those planets, oxygen atoms, which originated in that first generation of stars, were able to fuse with hydrogen to form water, namely liquid water on the surface.
On at least one (and perhaps only one of those planets) primitive life arose: Earth. This life evolved over millions of years into beings who walked upright: humans; and humanity created civilization.
For that, the laws of nature were beautifully balanced. If the weak nuclear force had been even slightly different, then carbon and oxygen would not have been stable inside stars, and those elements would not have occurred in the universe.