Universe

Belief in the Bible Parallels Evolution

The Creation of Adam |Michelangelo Buonarroti

Michelangelo depicts God’s creation of Man first told 3,000 years ago by Jewish nomadic desert dwellers, a story that found its way into the Bible about 700 years before Christ. The Genesis story begins with God’s plan for man. He says, “Let us [me] make man in our [my] image, after our [my] likeness.” 

Albert Einstein maintained a deep respect for religious intellects who believed religion was necessary to guide people between right and wrong.

Richard Rohr, (born 1943) is an American author, spiritual writer, and Franciscan friar. He has been called "one of the most popular spirituality authors and speakers in the world." He states that for some there is a common perception that science and religion are at deep odds with one another. Others say we are coming to understand that spiritual perceptions are paralleled to scientific theories giving rise toward integral wholeness.
Google > New Every Morning by Audred Assad

Following is a scientific theory of creation developed by physical cosmologists, paleoanthropologists, geneticists, and evolutionary biologists who have studied their surroundings and the heavens for observable and physical evidence. Much of their findings parallels the religious belief about God.  Genesis Chapter One declares, “God created the earth and the earth was without form 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.”

Before 13.7 billion years ago.
Recent mapping shows that our Universe is lopsided, with more fluctuations in some areas than in others. This is evidence that our Universe "bubbled off" as pure energy, not as an explosion as referred to as a Big Bang, but like a balloon blowing up caused by Dark Energy's behavior as the opposite of gravity in the initial expansion of the Universe, one of perhaps billions of similar events creating billions of universes. All the atoms and light in the Universe together make up less than five percent of the Universe. The rest is composed of Dark Energy with a small percent turning into Dark Matter. Dark Energy then dominated the structure and evolution of the Universe, and is responsible for the expanding Universe at an accelerated rate, and at some point causing the Universe to contract back to where expansion started. Dark Energy is made up of extremely light particles called axions and an extremely heavy type of particle called WIMPS (Weakly Interacting Massive Particles).

13.7 to 12.8 billion years ago.
There was only a soup of ionized plasma, hydrogen atoms without their electrons. Then Dark Energy forced the hydrogen atoms together, and by fusing them into helium in immense orbs, the primordial Universe eventually became capable of forming stars giving off the first light in an omnipresent sea of background radiation.

The Early Universe

12.8 to 4.6 billion years ago. Billions of galaxies formed like our Milky Way.

Asteroids containing water bombard the early earth

4.6 to 4.1 billion years ago our solar system began to form. Dust and gas joined into millions of asteroids slamming into one another to form the planets and Earth. Water was present in these asteroids creating a world of water on Earth with no land.

4.5 billion years ago, a Mars-sized object smashed into the early Earth, spinning off our moon, and leaving blobs within Earth’s interior that helped kick off plate tectonics, the geologic process that fuels earthquakes, volcanoes and generally created the conditions for life by helping the planet to cycle in carbon, important to keeping the climate habitable.

4.1 to 2.5 billion years ago. Volcanic activity produced land, and streams of water began trickling down the slopes into a primordial geothermal soup. Flowing through tiny networks of branching cracks in the porous rocks, heat from lightning sorted and filtered molecules creating simple compounds like amino acids and sugars. Eventually these compounds fused into more complex ones like polyamide nucleic acids (PNA) with their ability to extract energy from surroundings and start self-replication. With help from PNA, Ribonucleic acid (RNA) was formed, with the ability to cut and paste different bits of itself together to create more useful sequences finding a way to make enzymes which led to making Deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA), a thread-like chain of nucleotides carrying the genetic instructions used in the growth, development, functioning and reproduction of all known living organisms, a process which set the stage for the birth of all life on Earth. Could Earth be unique in this evolutionary process? A study by astronomers from the University of California-Berkeley and the University of Hawaii estimates there are trillions and trillions of stars that have planets conducive to the development of life.

2 billion years ago, massive ice sheets covered the new land formed from volcanic activity. Five ice age periods have been defined with the fifth one, the Holocene period, starting three million years ago and continuing today. The Holocene period had relatively warm “interglacial periods," with the current one beginning 75,000 years ago when North America (Canada and the northern half of today’s U.S.) was covered with ice. Due to man's dumping of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, this current interglacial period is expected to last another 150,000 years, eight times longer than any of the past five Holocene interglacial periods.

2.5 billion to 550 million years ago. From DNA organisms a profusion of different forms of early plant and animal life evolved.

A replica of a 500 million year old giant centipede

550 million years to 400 million years ago fish evolved, then spiders and centipedes became the first to creep onto land, some the size of a man.

300 milion years ago land masses began to move, like floating plates they eventually collided with each other forming a supercontinent called Pangaea. Virginia was located thosands of miles from the ocean, deep within Pangaea. Eventually Pangaea began to break up drifing apart to form the Atlantic Ocean. For the next 50 million years animals continued to evolve.

250 million years ago 90% of the species then living became extinct caused by an enormous 5.6-mile asteroid that hit the ocean off the Australian coast. The remaining animals evolved into the first mammals and dinosaurs.

66 million years ago a massive asteroid moving at 150,000 mph carved a 90-mile-wide crater into Earth at today’s Chicxulub, Yucatan, Mexico. Coming about a million years later volcanic eruptions in Western India caused a global drop in temperature around the world, a phenomenon known as a volcanic winter. Together the asteroid and volcanic eruptions saw the end of dinosaurs weighing over 15 pounds, shrew-like mammals' primary enemy. With their fur coats and warm-blooded metabolisms they survived and acquired certain traits that would characterize mammals ever afterward: limbs positioned under the body, an enlarged brain, milk-producing glands, and a diverse array of teeth. A key to their evolution was the development of grasping hands and feet that could manipulate objects and used to climb trees. Of interest, mice and men share about 97.5 per cent of their working DNA, making them vital in research for new drugs.
 

 The rat-like critter survived, and also surviving were small dinosaurs who evolved into reptiles and birds.

34 million years ago the evolutionary spike leading eventually up to man happening where the only forests to grow were in Africa. With their grasping hands and feet pre-man was the first to clime up into the trees safe from predators.

25 million years ago some mammals, now with the lack of a tail, had ape-like elbows, and a slightly larger brain relative to body size. They were the ancestor of apes, chimpanzees and Hominins, our distant relative.
 

 
10 million years ago a split occurred separating great apes from chimpanzees and Hominins. Over the next 3 million years a further divergence occurred separating chimpanzees from Hominins. During this period climate change decimated the forest, leaving wide belts of open terrain with few trees. Hominins had to travel between tree-patches in open areas that got wider and wider. Those that learned to travel more easily upright were the ones whose brain size grew larger, but for the next four-million years Hominins' brains flat-lined. Fossilized scull remains show a consistent rather ape like forehead during this period consistent with little change in the climate. Then as the African climate went through a series of great rapid changes from dry to wet and back to wet, Hominins had to adapt or die out, which gave rise to the skull bones of a pre-man discovered in 2016 in Ethiopia, a 7 million-year-old Hominin. They walked on two legs and with their long arms and strong hands, they could easily climb trees. When compared with other ancient bones, this skull cranium marked a critical change in the evolution of human like primates.

Studies have shown that the southwestern willow flycatcher is adapting at a genetic level to climate change. The findings add to a body of research suggesting that climate change is forcing evolution in some animals at a rapid pace just as Hominins’ brains size grew larger as they adapted to climate change.

 


3.5 million-years-ago. Skull bones of a Hominin were discovered in 2019 with a mixture of traits both primitive and humanlike that matched a relative who also lived about the same time named Lucy, discovered in 1974. The discovery of Lucy could not provide a head skull like the 2019 discovery. Together they have been hailed as a major milestone link in understanding the evolution of man.

The brain evolved into a highly complex organ of more than 3,000 types of brain cells, such as the neurons pictured above, that collectively gave rise to emotion, thought, memory, and a soul.

2.5 million – 100,000 Years Ago. Pre-man became a true man.
With the African climate continuing to go through changes, those who could figure out how to survive did survive, and those were the ones who, over this period, saw a fairly progressive enlargement of their brains becoming a true man and evolving into at least six different species including Homo Habilis, Homo Erectus, Neanderthal, Denisovans, and Homo Sapiens (that’s us). Over time, man lived together, hunted food, and evolved to such an extent that they could cope with the climatic changes that occurred. Besides hunting, they discovered how to propagate certain plants and how to breed animals. Soon they learned to produce more food, and ate a variety of animals and plants. Their control over fire and their tendency to live in larger groups also led to the creation of better shelters. Prompted by innovation in tool making, evolution in other areas went into overdrive marking the dawn of the modern man.

                                       Spencer Wells
80,000 years ago. By analyzing DNA from people in all regions of the world, geneticist Spencer Wells has concluded that all Homo sapiens alive today are descended from a single Homo sapien living in Africa 80,000 years ago. This small band of Homo sapiens became equipped with group social skills, superior speech and problem-solving abilities.

72,000 years ago. By forming larger groups outside just one immediate family they were able to survive the Toba super-volcanic eruption which occurred 72,000 years ago at present-day Lake Toba in Sumatra, Indonesia, one of Earth's largest known eruptions. It resulted in a severe reduction in human population, but those African Homo sapiens living in Africa survived, and Homo sapiens who had left Aftrica earlier, most likely did not have the skills of the Homo sapiens who stayed in Aftrica, and did not servive.
Google > How Human Beings Almost Vanished From Earth In 70,000 B.C.

50,000 years ago our ancestors, Homo sapiens, left Africa and over the next 15,000 years spread out to all continents, except America, meeting up with the last of the Neanderthals and Denisovans. Evidence points to their inter-breeding. In 2011 a Stanford University study found ancient variants of immune system genes from both Denisovans and Neanderthals in Homo sapiens. Skull fragrants from both Denisovans and Neanderthals revealed they had larger brains than Homo sapien.

30,000 years ago: So why didn't the Denisovans and Neanderthals advance alongside Homo sapiens or even be the ones to populate the planet? The answer is because of wolves. Smelling the meat man was roasting, wolves began coming closer to man. Their instint to run from man became a desire to stay close. As wolves evolved into dogs, they started doing man's work. Man was then able to settle down and no longer move from camp site to camp site as a "hunter-gatherer." This marked a turning point in evolution. Man started to thrive while Denisovans and Neanderthals, without the adantage of dogs, died off.

A group of Homo sapiens traveled east to Beringia, a 100-mile wide land mass connecting Asian and North America that existed then.

35-25,000 years ago - the fertile lands of Beringia

There they were interrupted for 10,000 years by the Wisconsin Glaciation, part of the Holocene ice-age warming period begun 75,000 years ago covering Canada and part of northern U.S.A.

25,000 years ago, as the massive ice sheet began to wane, one small clan of Arctic First American dwellers skirted along the Pacific coast avoiding the glacier, a 25,000-mile journey that finally saw the last large habitable land mass become populated by Homo sapiens.

This 25,000 year date is older by as much as 10,000 years from a long believed orginal date. In 2021, a team of scientists found that human tracks, sunk into mud in the New Mexico White Sands National Park, contained ditchgrass interspersed with the footprints. Using radiocarbon dating the ditchgrass was found to be more than 21,000 years old. To confirm their find, they found pollen from conifer trees embedded around the footprints. This type of material would not have the same problem as aquatic plants, because trees take carbon from the atmosphere. Using radiocarbon dating, the pollen dated 22,600 to 23,400 years ago, matching their first results. This study is the most convincing evidence of early human presence in the Americas as early as 25,000 years ago.

23,000 years ago, those that settled in western Canada and the American northwest perished when the Wisconsin Glaciation melt caused a massive ice dam to burst open, causing waters of the present-day Great Salt Lakes in a wall of water hundreds of feet high to thunder downstream at 65 miles per hour toward the Pacific Ocean. The massive flood with its ice and debris rearranged 16,000 square miles of present-day Montana, Idaho, Washington, and Oregon. Today tourist marvel at the massive rock formations.

Carolina Dogs: Until recently the dogs that shared the ancient First Americans’ homes were thought to have vanished. But in the early 1970s, while trapping fur-bearing animals for study Lehr Brisbin, Jr., Senior Ecologist at the University of Georgia's Savannah River Ecology Laboratory, first sited Carolina Dogs on the Savannah River Site (SRS). He immediately noticed they looked very much like Australian Dingo Dogs. In the late 1980s more of these dogs were sighted on public lands bordering the SRS. Dr. Brisbane and his colleagues have confirmed that these shy canines are, indeed, a separate breed that are direct descendants of the early First Americans’ dogs. Carolina Dogs were registered as a separate breed by the American Rare Breed Association in 1991 and later by the United Kennel Club in 1995. Carolina Dogs are classified in a group known as Pariah Dogs.

During the North American period 18,000 years ago up to 150 years ago when the Spaniards brought in horses, Indians living between the Rocky and Appallachian mountains used herds of bison estimated to be 30-60 million, not only for food but also skins and bones for building material, bones and horns for eating utensils, hides for clothing, sinew for bowstrings and ropes, boiled hooves for glue, and dung for fuel, all keeping them way ahead of Indians living in mountainous areas who did not have the advantage of the bison (buffalo).

18,000 years ago Homo sapians arrived in Virginia. In the 1980’s remains of an 18,000 year-old Pre-Clovis Indian culture was discovered at a site on the Nottoway River in Sussex County called Cactus Hill. There, the Pre-Clovis Indians quarried jasper from the river’s west bank to make tools. This area, had a large population due to the vast number of artifacts discovered contradicting earlier views that Pre-Clovis Indians lived in small groups.

Not far from this discovery, a few years later two miles west of Bluemont VA, their advanced civilization was further clearly revealed. At different times in the year Pe-Clovis Indians made visits here for ceremonial services. Concentric stone circles of rocks, weighing more than a ton, were found placed to mark solar events. It is claimed to be the oldest man-made structure in North America still in existence with more features than Stonehenge and twice as old.

From the hill country of Virginia, the Pre-Clovis Indians spread out with groups moving into the Atlantic coastal region. Recent finds on Parsons Island in Maryland found pre-Covis Indian remains dated between 15,000 and 20,500 years old, a site miles from the coastline at that time. Called Eastern Woodland Indians, those along the Cape Henry coast became known as the Chesepian Indians, a name used for the Chesapeake Bay, “Great Shellfish Bay." By the end of the sixtenth century, Virginia had reached a total population of 50,000 Indians.

African Indigenous People

3,000 years ago, in another part of the world, evolution went into overdrive as Eurasians (comprising all of Europe and Asia) made rapid advances. They had land animals (mules, horses and camels) to carry the load and good trade routes across the continent that gave rise to large cities. Natural resources led to the bronze and then the iron ages. These Eurasian geographic and mineral resources left the indigenous people in the American, Australian, and African continents technologically far behind. In the eighteenth century when Eurasians traveled to Africa and saw people far behind in development, this led the Eurasians to the belief that Africans were not Homo Sapiens (true men) as they believed themselves to be. Using this difference, the British created the term “race” to categorize people. Using skin color, they called the Indigenous Africans the Black race and established themselves as the superior White race. When the Europeans moved into these three continents with their advanced knowledge, they were able to rule over indigenous people establishing discriminatory policies which kept them even further behind, some that have existed up to the present. As recently as 1958 in Virginia when the Lovings were found guilty of miscegenation (inter-racial marriage), in reading the verdict the judge said, “Almighty God created the races, White, Black, Yellow, Malay and Red, and he placed them on separate continents. And, but for the interference with his arrangement, there would be no cause for such marriage. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix.”

The Present Danger for Homo Sapiens.
What perils lie ahead for the future? Certainly not water as when we run out of fresh water, we will start using the oceans with massive desalination plants. Certainly not crops and animals which will be replaced by foods produced artificially in laboratory conditions. Maybe a super-hot climate along with frequent hurricanes and tornadoes - but we will build underground cities and stronger structures like 3D printed concrete houses, and if dirty climate becomes hard to breath, a synthetic organ transplanted into the body will filter out harmful particles and gases in the air.
With our growing population of over 8 billion people (2022), these new inventions, methods and products will become available causing a slow decline in the long-standing population equalizer of starvation, wars, and climate.
A way to reduce population quickly is the depoyment by a one country of its nuclear weapons on another, with the recipient country retaliating, resulting in nuclear armageddon.
Mutual survival comes down to the two sides of Homo Sapiens (man), championing "nonviolent" or "war-like." Which side will triumph?

The Future of Homo Sapiens. Evolutionary expansion of Homo sapiens’ brains is not likely to slow down, the only animal on the planet whose brain is continuing to evolve, a process that started 3 billion years ago with RNA protocells. With  rapid evolution now in overdrive, Homo sapiens should be able to conquer environmental catastrophes, and eventually Homo sapiens will become a hybrid species, a fusion of biology and technology to become part organic and part non-organic. Technologically Homo sapiens will combine their bodies with computers, smart phones, synthetic eyes, limbs, and organs. But as for biology, the most astounding breakthrough has already come. 

In 2012 biologist Professor Jennifer Doudna and her team at California Berkeley University in studying bacteria stumbled on a system called CRISPR (Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats), a biological process for altering DNA. By snipping DNA in the right place, CRISPR has the potential to change the lives of Homo sapiens. Doudna found a way to do what RNA did three billion years ago, cut and paste different bits of itself together to create more useful sequences.
  

 Vladimir Ivanovich

Of the many CRISPR advancements for Homo sapiens the most earth shaking will be telepathic brains. Homo sapiens will be able to communicate among the population through brain waves and become like an ant colony with a singular “hive mind” completely caring and protective of one another. This state of mind was known by Vladimir Vernadsky way back in 1922. He called it a "noosphere," a collective "sphere of human thought."

Ants interactions with each other generates highly complex outputs of information that produces adaptive behavior for their mutual survival.

Now with the fear that Artificial Intelligence (AI) provides the ability for a person to convince others in mischievous ways, with the incorporation of AI brain implants into a person who has had DNA altering procedures, that fear will only grow with a new breed of Homo sapiens being capable of changing the world for the better or the worse.
Never to let a machine get the better of man, an army of AI experts have prioritized the fight against rogue AI. Called "AI Safety," they are stamping out the behavior of AI systems by embedding human ethics into AI systems.
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With the universe housing most likely billions of planets, we turn to see what's out there. There are some, maybe millions of planets with intelligent beings like us, more advanced and some still in trees. There are people who tell about visitors several thousand years ago from a planet that swooped through our solar system. If not, Proxima Centauri was found by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to have a planet orbiting around it. It lies at a distance of about 4.3 light-years or about 25,300,000,000,000 miles away. Our fastest spaceship with the new nuclear-powered buster would take about 3 years to reach it. The planet is close to its star unlikely to have liquid water, but this discovery gives astronomers hope of finding Earth-like planets with water, carbon dioxide, and hydrogen.
Our best hope is to hear something from the observations of the Very Large Array (VLA) radio telescopes in New Mexico which recently revealed evidence of a magnetic field on the rocky exoplanet YZ Ceti b, orbiting a star about 12 light-years away from Earth. This is the first possible detection of a magnetic field on a planet beyond our solar system, a finding published on April 3, 2023 in the journal, Nature Astronomy.
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The Universe is now 13.7 billion years old with a diameter of 93 billion light-years and will double in size in 10 billion years. Our galaxy, the Milky Way, is 17 million light-years from the center of the Universe where the Big Bang, or ballon blowing up, starting pushing the young Universe in all directions. That puts us 29.5 billion miles from the edge of the Universe were Dark Energy exists surrounding an infant number of pre-exiting Universes now expanding like ours, contracting, or yet to be born.

/\ 170 Billion Galaxies /\

/\ An Image from the $10 billion James Webb Space Telescope Launched on 25 December 2021 from Kourou, French Guiana, arriving at its home on 24 January to orbit the Sun, 1 million miles away from the Earth to last longer than 10 years.

/\ The James Webb Space Telescope /\

In 170 billion galaxies there are 300,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (300 sextillion) stars (more stars than all the grains of sand). Our planet Earth, one of eight planets in our Solar System revolving around our star (the Sun), is part of the Milky Way galaxy containing over 200,000,000,000 (200 billion) stars. The number of other Universes is unknown with each having, most likely, the same number of stars or even more if they are larger than our Universe, and there will likely be billions of planets with life even more advanced than ours.

On into the Future. 500 million years from now Earth will become an arid desert with the Earth's oceans disappearing, and 5 billion years from now our Sun will begin to die. Dark Energy will then take over causing the Universe to start contracting. And billions of years after that, the Universe will have a rebirth, again.

Never-Ending – In a 7 June 2018 research study published in the journal Science by NASA, scientists concluded the Universe would eventually become a dead and cold wasteland continuing to accelerate and expand forever. Their study did not allow for Dark Energy. Their analysis of a “no ending” Universe, no matter how bleak, cannot be considered since this rationale of “no ending” should explain a “no beginning,” which it doesn’t. The Biblical story has a beginning “In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth.” with a very pleasing ending, "We look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come."
Just as astronomers believe the Universe began from dark energy and will return to dark energy, Christain religion uses "dust" to explain how we are given everlasting life through Jesus Christ our Savior, i.e., Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.

 

Revelation 21:1: A new heaven and new earth

While the evolution theory for the future is scary, the Bible has a different and brighter forecast.  Isaiah (65:17 & 66:22), 2 Peter (3:13), and the Book of Revelation (21:1) admits that the current world is flawed and will be replaced in the future by a better world, age, or paradise. Taken from these verses, the Nicene Creed ends with "We look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come."

Knowing that religious perceptions are parallel to scientific theories, we can then understand that Heaven and the Universe are one in the same.