About 3,000 years ago, Jewish nomadic desert dwellers told a
story around campfires about the creation. The version we finally got in the
Bible was first written down about 700 years before Christ from the Yahwist
source, and then 100 years later these writings were influenced by the
Mesopotamian mythological creation story when the Babylonians captured
Jerusalem. Still later it was expanded by other authors, one known as the
Priestly source. Nevertheless, the basic tenets of the story told by those
Jewish nomadic desert dwellers has been validated by cosmologists, astronomers,
petrologists, and anthropologists as they dig into the earth and look though
telescopes at the heavens. These
scientists marvel at how those ancient tribesmen got the creation explanation
basically correct while knowing nothing about the immenseness of God’s
universe. There can only be one answer.
God needed to reveal the story of His great works in a manner that could only be
understood by a people that knew nothing of the lands beyond their villages or
the movement of the earth around the sun, much less its position in the
universe. So begins my comparison of “creation” as explained through the Bible
paralleling scientific theory, two stories that have little contradiction with
each other, but rather many matching meeting points.
Genesis begins with, “In the beginning…” Like the Jewish nomadic desert dwellers, cosmologists and astronomers began to wonder what there was before the beginning of our universe. The Jewish nomadic desert dwellers knew it was God because He had to be there to create the universe, but it took scientists until just recently to figure out there was something before our universe existed. For quite a while astronomers have theorized our universe began 13.8 billion years ago as a result of the “Big Bang.” But before that – what? Cosmologists, citing new evidence, suggest our universe exists alongside other universes they call the “multiverse,” an astonishing huge number of them, all interacting with each other. Giving weight to this theory is the discovery that our universe will go on expanding to eventually create new universes when absorbed into other expanding universes. This doesn’t stop cosmologists from wondering where it all ends and begins. For the Jewish nomadic desert dwellers, God has always been around and his kingdom will have no end. Theoretical physicist Albert Einstein tried to explain it by visualizing, in addition to our known three dimensional world, another dimension of a space-time continuum, a realm with no beginning and no ending; something those early Jewish nomadic desert dwellers knew all along, just not in scientific terms.
Let’s get on with Genesis. “God created the heaven.” Using the most accepted theory of the “Big Bang,” astronomers theorize that less than one-trillionth of a second after the event, something analogous to a kernel of popping corn, our universe expanded a 100 trillion times from an infinitesimally small and massively dense speck to eventually form what is today an expanding universe, some 75 billion light-years in all directions with 170 billion galaxies, each with 400 billion stars, some containing solar systems similar to ours. Peering through the Kepler telescope, a space observatory launched in 2009 specifically designed to locate planets around other stars, the University of California-Berkeley and Hawaii astronomers have concluded that about 40 billion stars in our galaxy have planets that have a surface temperature conducive to the development of life (one in ten stars). Going beyond our 400 billion-star Milky Way, the other 170 billion galaxies in our universe have a total of 68 sextillion stars. Using the same one in ten statistics, 6.8 sextillion stars could have planets favorable to life. To put this in perspective, with the estimated 700 quintillion grains of sand on our planet, there exist around 10 stars for each grain of sand with possible life forms in the universe. But let us not just be so naïve to limit our understanding to just our own universe, that infinitesimal portion of the multiverse. This gives room for a lot of life. The number of people on Earth is large, 7.2 billion, but the numbers out there on other planets could simply be mindboggling. Did God just populate this one little corner of His vast universe with “His own image?” I think not, and the “out there” must be rich with life forms, but we may only speculate about them in movies as those closest (72 trillion miles away) will have to travel in their space ship 450,000 years to reach us. Can there be any doubt then that Cosmologists and Astronomers must marvel at “HOW GREAT THOU ART?”
Moving along with the Biblical Creation Story, the writers go on to say, “God created the earth.” From the study of rocks petrologists theorize planet Earth formed 4.6 billion years ago from debris orbiting the young Sun, and over the next 500 million years the Earth’s surface cooled to form a hard crust, atmosphere and oceans.
The Jewish nomadic desert dwellers then make an amazingly statement by saying, “And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And God said, let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear.” The Earth coming out of the darkness is compatible with the scientific understanding that dark energy plus dark matter constitute 95% of the total content of the universe. Scientists still don’t completely understand what roll dark matter plays and will spend some time catching up with the Biblical story.
Continuing with the Creation Story, “And God said, let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature
that hath life, and fowl that may fly above the earth … and every living
creature that moveth;” all this on the fifth day since the Jewish nomadic desert dwellers wanted
their story to be contained in a time frame they could comprehend. From the study of rocks and fossils, petrologists
and anthropologists give the sea creatures that eventually learned to fly and become
land dwellers a little more than one day. They theorize life evolved in stages starting 4.1
billion years ago with simple cells, then simple animals such as sponges 600
million years ago, fish 500 million years ago, land plants 475 million years ago,
insects and amphibians 400 million years ago, and mammals and dinosaurs 200
million years ago. Of note is our
assertion that dinosaurs became extinct due to their large body size coupled
with a small brain, but one should consider that they survived for 135 million
years, dying out some 65 million years ago, existing 22 times longer than man. We still have 129 million years to go to catch
up with them.
“And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over ….every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.” The ancient tribesmen knew little about people living long before them in Africa or even the first Americans who showed up in North America 7,000 years before they began telling their creation story. Petrologists and anthropologists didn’t know either, but by analyzing bone fragments and rock stratum they have put together their version of the story about how man came on the scene. They theorize that humanoids, living in the African rainforest eight million years ago, split into two lineages - one that led to chimps and another that led to pre-humans. They say another two million years went by with pre-humans still swinging through the trees like their monkey cousins.
The Biblical creation story focuses on man’s progress under God’s supervision. Perhaps God intended for Adam and Eve to lead a perfect earthly existence with everything handed to them in the Garden of Eden. Or perhaps He didn’t; else why would God have presented them with this “forbidden fruit” challenge? Their choice was a poor one and they suffered from it, but by learning from this mistake and through other challenges, their heirs progressed beyond being taken care of in a “Garden of Eden surrounding” into more intelligent beings able to take care of themselves in a world full of challenges. This explanation in the Bible of man’s progression through trial and error challenges is similar with what anthropologists and petrologists found in piecing together bone fragments and rock stratum. They found that pre-man’s brain saw significant development two million years ago when the African climate went through a series of rapid changes from dry to wet and back to wet decimating the lush forests and leaving wide belts of open terrain with no trees. Man’s first big challenge was to figure out how to get from forest to forest. They found that it took less energy to walk upright, and those who figured this out were the ones to survived and the ones to see a fairly progressive enlargement of their brains. With their expanding brain capacity Homo Sapiens, Homo Erectus, Denisovans, and Neanderthals discovered fire and began to leave Africa in several waves of migration about 1.9 million years ago migrating into Eurasia (the landmass of Asia & Europe). The Homo Sapiens that stayed behind in Africa were believed to be our ancestors. In 1987, three scientists announced in the journal “Nature” they had found through DNA analysis a common ancestor to us all, a woman who lived in Africa about 200,000 years ago. Our ancestors stayed in Africa for another 140,000 years. Then around 60,000 years ago, equipped with group social skills plus superior speech and problem-solving abilities, our ancestors left Africa and spread across the globe. All of the early travelers eventually died out. Neanderthals were the largest of the three groups to leave Africa early and disappeared about 41,000 years ago.
Moving forward to the last 5,000 years, man’s existence has
led to a time of supercharged evolutionary change, at a rate roughly 100 times
higher than any other period as a result of diet and population explosion. These are findings from a study published Dec.
10, 2009. Led by University of
Wisconsin-Madison anthropologist John Hawks, they examined data from the past
40,000 years and came to this conclusion. Prior to these times, the population
was so small for so long that positive selection occurred at a glacial pace.
Could the Bible’s Creation story and the scientists’ evolution theory actually be similar? Many folks don’t think so, but I disagree, and contend that the Biblical creation story, which incorporates Mesopotamian mythology, has indeed been validated by astronomers studying the heavens, by cosmologists going beyond the heavens, and by petrologists and anthropologists digging into the Earth. Scientists just can’t seem to call “evolution” God’s work, but we get a better acknowledgement from them by their admission that, if it was God, then He created “science” to get the job done, a process that sits well with most scientists and theologians.
References:
"Alien Electromagnetic Signals Will Be Discovered by 2040," Feb 10, 2014 http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2014/02/astronomers-will-have-scanned-enough-star-systems-by-2040-that-well-have-discovered-alien-produced-electromagnetic-signals-s.html
“Sentient Machines: The Next Step in Human Evolution,” Jan 8, 2013
“The Computational Universe,” American Scientist July-August 2006
“Time Will End in Five Billion Years, Physicists Predict,” National Geographic News, Oct 28, 2010
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2010/10/101027-science-space-universe-end-of-time-multiverse-inflation“The Problem of Israel's Origins,” http://fontes.lstc.edu/~rklein/Documents/mosesone.htm
“Genesis Creation Narrative,” Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genesis_creation_narrative
“When did the Hebrews or Israelites become
known as Jews?” George’s Journal
“Genesis
1 (New International Version)” http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Genesis+1
Cosmologists
- the study of the origin, evolution, and eventual fate of the universe.
Astronomers
- the study of moons, planets, stars,
and galaxies
Petrologists
- the study of the origin, composition,
distribution and structure of rocks
Anthropologists
- the study of humankind, past and present
“Study: Sun Will End Earthly Life in 2.8
Billion Years” http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2013/10/131028-earth-biosignature-doomsday-space-science
“Cosmic Inflation' Discovery Lends Key
Support for Theory of Expanding Early Universe,” Huff Post, Mar 17, 2014 http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/03/17/cosmic-inflation-theory-early-universe-expansion_n_4979486.html
“Americans Win Nobel for Big-Bang Study”
Oct 3, 2006 http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15113168
“Researchers
Find Evidence of Other Universes Lurking in the Cosmic Background,” by Clay
Dillow, Dec 13, 2010
“The
Universe Will Go On Expanding Forever,” by Andrew Hough, 19 Aug 2010
“5 Reasons We May Live in a Multiverse,”
by Clara Moskowitz, Dec 07, 2012 http://www.space.com/18811-multiple-universes-5-theories.html
“Multiverse Theory” http://www.astronomy.pomona.edu/Projects/moderncosmo/Sean's%20mutliverse.html
“Multiverse” -http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiverse
“Dark Matter,” Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_matter
“Star Eater,” National Geographic, March
2014 http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/print/2014/03/black-holes/finkel-text
“Earthshaking News: There May Be Other Planets Like Ours” http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/11/04/earth-like-planets-milky-way-galaxy/3433449
“How Many Grains of Sand Are There in the World?” http://www.thenakedscientists.com/forum/index.php?topic=19016.0
“How Many Stars are There in the Universe?”
“Many-worlds Interpretation”
“Oscillating
Universe Theory,” by John Carl Villanueva on August 24, 2009
“Tracing Ancestry with Mitochondrial DNA,”
Rick Groleau, Jan 2002
“Brain–computer
Interface” - direct communication pathway between the brain and an external
device http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain-computer_interface
“New Tasks Become as Simple as Waving a Hand
with Brain-computer Interfaces,” Jun. 11, 2013
“Genomics” from Wikipedia -
“Genome Study Places Modern Humans in the
Evolutionary Fast Lane,” Dec. 10, 2007
http://www.news.wisc.edu/14548
“Telepathy,”
from Wikipedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telepathy
“Are We Close to Creating Super-Humans? - A
Galaxy Insight,” Jan. 15, 2009
“Cyberware
Technology Project,” May 16, 2012
“Genetic
Engineering,” from Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_engineering
“Cyberware,” from Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyberware
“Neuroprosthetics - Brain–computer Interface,”
from Wikipedia
“Mitochondrial Eve,” Wikipedia
“Noosphere,” from Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noosphere
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