Time line?
Well, according to the best estimates of present day cosmologists and extra-galactic astronomers, who devote their careers to sifting the evidence as best they can...
The universe was created (by God, or by Someone whose mysteries lie equally beyond the reach of scientific inquiry) about 14 billion years ago.
According to what has become, since the 1960s, the "standard big bang model, with inflation and cold dark matter," at first the universe was without form, and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep.
After about 300,000 years (as we humans came later to divide time into days and years), the primordial plasma of mass/energy cooled to the extent that atomic hydrogen could form. This astonishing and singular event released high energy photons (particles of light) formerly trapped in an opaque labyrinth of interactions with quarks and leptons -- and there was light!
We can still "see" this fireball from the dawn of time. After all, it filled the universe and there is nowhere else for it to go, so it must still be here, all around us! This is the Cosmic Background Radiation, now diminished in intensity by the expansion of the universe, first detected in the microwave band in 1965 by Penzias and Wilson, for which discovery they won the Nobel Prize.
The days went by, and about 5 billion years ago (so the geologists tell us) the earth was created out of a small remnant of the cloud of hydrogen gas that condensed to form the sun. And the earth evolved and in due course the waters under heaven were gathered unto one place, and the dry land appeared, and the dry land was called Earth and the waters were called the Seas.
Well, according to the researches of evolutionary biologists, life began in the sea, and the waters brought forth abundantly the moving creatures that hath life, the fowl that may fly above the earth in the open firmament of the heavens, and great whales, and every living creature that moveth, which the waters brought forth abundantly, after their kind. And after this (maybe a couple of billion years ago) the dry Earth also brought forth living creatures after their kind, and cattle after their kind, and everything that creepeth upon the Earth.
Personally, I do not see anything in this scientific account which could cause offense to the religious temperament.
The only point of contention, it seems to me, is this: What does the Bible mean when it says that all these living things were brought forth “after their kind.” If it means that two monkeys are likely to produce a baby monkey rather than a baby elm tree, biologists do more than merely concur -- they can explain to us the exact mechanisms at the sub cellular level that mediate these processes.
Biologists specializing in the mechanisms of natural selection attempt to come to a similarly satisfactory understanding of the details of how “the Earth brings forth creatures, according to their kind” (Gen. 1:24). I applaud their efforts. I think they have come up with some pretty cool stuff.
