The earth is guesstimated to be about four and a half billion years old, give or take an epoch or two. It must have been a lonely and Martian place for awhile, until life began to swim around in the primordial ocean ooze. We now speculate this happened more than three billion years ago, far sooner than was previously believed. God is very old!

Physical and chemical forces pulverized rock to sand and then dust over eons of time. In the meantime life continued to live and die and become more complex. From plants evolved animals which then ate the plants and, much later, each other. And since life wastes nothing, a process of decay was needed to recycle all that was once alive back to earthly dust. And so it was. Eventually this inorganic and organic gruel would simmer into a primeval soil, and the mechanism was at hand which would give rise to birds and bees, which, of course, is how we got here.