Posted in Life, the Universe, and Everything

Nance left a rather lengthy comment on the Day 1 entry about "Creation Myths" or "Sacred Narratives." She seems to miss the point(s) I'm trying to make. It’s probably too early for anyone to notice that I tend to push the envelope with a lot of my posts. I find that looking at extremes helps me to decide where my real positions are.

The creation story told in Genesis is (or was 4,000 years ago) a theory. Perhaps not a "scientific" theory, but it was a theory. Or it could be looked at as one. It was a descriptive model of how the life, the universe, and everything began. One point I'm trying to make is that before we accept or reject this theory, it would be a good idea to know what the theory really is.

What would it mean if whoever wrote Genesis I was actually describing the Big Bang and Evolution? Could we write it off as a lucky guess? Would it stand as evidence of the existence of God? Or would it simply throw a curve to the archeologiststs?

If one is as intractable in their belief in evolution as some Creationists are about the 144 hour creation schedule, does that make evolution a "Sacred Narrative?"

This is an intellectual exercise, not a theological debate. I'm not trying to prove one view right or wrong; I just want to see what happens if we try to find the points where the two views agree. Where is the common ground?

With that said, lets look at the third day:

 9And God said, Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear: and it was so.

 10And God called the dry land Earth; and the gathering together of the waters called he Seas: and God saw that it was good.

 11And God said, Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit after his kind, whose seed is in itself, upon the earth: and it was so.

 12And the earth brought forth grass, and herb yielding seed after his kind, and the tree yielding fruit, whose seed was in itself, after his kind: and God saw that it was good.

 13And the evening and the morning were the third day.

Science: In evolution, the first building blocks of life, Amino Acids were theoretically formed in shallow pools with banks/bottoms made of a clay material. Amino Acids joined together and formed larger molecules that had the chemical capability of self replication. These molecules were similar to what we now call viruses. They were not quite capable of sustaining them selves, but depended on their environment for the energy to replicate. After further mutation, we get to the first procaryotic cells (blue-green algae, some forms of bacteria) which were self contained and self replicating. As these life forms developed, random copying errors in the DNA caused mutations. Some mutations were advantageous, most were not. Somewhere along the line, a series of mutations caused the one celled life forms to clump together and specialize into multi-cellular life forms.

As things stabilize in this epoch, Earth’s atmosphere is largely Carbon Dioxide (CO₂), so it follows that a life form that metabolizes CO₂ would be selected for survival. Any such life form will be somewhere where it can get sunlight and can draw other nutrients necessary to sustain the system and to replicate itself. In such an environment, photosynthesis would have a heyday. The first visible forms of life on Earth then are likely to have been plants.

Commentary: At first glance day three seems to be out of order. How can plant life develop before the sun is created in day 4? Looks like a deal breaker, except… Evolution has a similar problem. It seems when the physicists and geologists worked their mathematical magic to determine how old the Earth and solar system are, they came up with about 4.55 billion years, and Earth became friendly for life about 3.5 billion years ago, but when the theoretical biologists and evolutionists regressed the origin of life, they figured it would have taken about 5-6 billion years to reach the point where we are now looking back at it. This looked like a deal breaker, or a least a serious challenge, for evolution, but then somebody came up with the theory of “panspermia”  

Fossilized stromatolites or bacterial aggregates, the oldest of which are dated at 3.5 billion years old, suggest that photosynthesis might be exogenic. The bacteria that form stromatolites, cyanobacteria, are photosynthetic. Most models of the origin of life have the earliest organisms obtaining energy from reduced chemicals, with the more complex mechanisms of photosynthesis evolving later. (Wikipedia) 

Note that the first person history records proposing panspermia was the Greek philosopher Anaxagoras in 5BCE. It isn’t a really new idea at all. Could our ‘prophet’ have been aware that photosynthetic life probably originated somewhere other than on Earth before the sun and Earth were created, then simply described the process to its Earthly conclusion in Day 3?