Category: Rants

Note: This is Part 3 of a series on Christianity and Evolution. Read the introduction, Part 1, and Part 2 for context.

3. The evolutionary model is the best one we have for explaining the physical process of creation, and cannot explain the origin of the universe.

In this post I’ll examine some of the scientific alternatives to the modern cosmological model I presented in Part 1. I’ll leave the Young-Earth Creationist model until Part 4.

As I talked about in Part 2, the best thing we can say about a scientific model is that it’s our best guess. Some people may disagree with the model, but in the ongoing scientific dialogue and process, if the majority of people agree that a particular model is the best, then it’s usually the most practical one to work with, and may be characterized as “the best current model” or similarly. Of course it is the people around the edges that make the breakthroughs and changes in models, but ironically, until there’s a majority consensus on the value of their work, it must be treated with skepticism.

The model I described in Part 1 for the formation of the universe is generally known as the “Inflationary Big Bang” model. The “inflationary” part is a technicality relating to the details of the universe’s early expansion. The “Big Bang” is the relevant part. The model begins with the infinitesimal bit of universe-stuff, which then explodes into the cosmos as we know it.

This theory was first developed in the early twentieth century when astronomers noticed that the most distant galaxies from us were all getting farther and farther away. This implied that they had at one time been much closer together. Investigations of the kinds of conditions which would occur if everything in the universe originated from this original tiny state resulted in predictions about the universe that could be disproven, such as the prediction of the 3 Kelvin background temperature we can observe today.

When the Big Bang theory was proposed, in the twenties and thirties, the battle between creationist and scientist was in full flame. Ironically, the new theory came under fierce attack from both sides. To the creationists, it was simply another evolutionary heresy aimed at getting rid of God, as if to look too closely at the process by which the universe assumed its current state — complete with fossils, sedimentary layers, and frozen light waves from galaxies billions of light-years away — would be to somehow obliterate the creator and sustainer of it all, as if God could not stand to be looked in the face, rather than the other way round! To naturalists who indeed wished to get rid of God, it smacked much too strongly of creation ex nihilo. To imply that the universe had a beginning and might well have an end was much to religious-sounding for them.

The main scientific rival to the Big Bang theory was called the “Steady State” theory. In this theory, the universe is infinite in space and time. This was, of course, a favourite for naturalists, since having neither a beginning nor an end, the universe was self-explainable. However, the weight of the evidence was against it. The observed expansion of the galaxies, the cosmic microwave background, black holes and proton decay all strongly suggested a universe with not only a finite beginning in time, but an inevitable end as well.

But does the Big Bang do away with God? Of course not. The theory can only describe what came after the universe was created. It cannot explain how or why that happened. Current inflationary models purport to solve this problem by making our universe a bubble in a pre-existing foam of universes — begging the question, of course, of where the original universe-foam came from (it’s turtles all the way down, of course). Science by its nature can only explain the observable universe — it cannot have anything to say about things before or outside of that observable universe.

So the Big Bang theory is the current best guess as to the history of the universe as a whole. Ironically, it was accepted only over the objections of those who found it too religious. Up to this point in the series, I’ve been writing from the standpoint that it’s perfectly reasonable to believe that natural evolutionary processes are how God creates worlds. This, of course, is what Young-Earth Creationists would dispute. They believe that because naturalistic scientists ascribe the evolutionary processes we see in nature to “random chance”, it is impossible to imagine that God might use the self-same natural processes, which She, after all, created and pronounced good, to carry out the grand plan of creation, and indeed the redemption of the universe.

In the case of biological evolution, my view has support from some unlikely sources — naturalistic scientists and church fathers.

In thinking about biological evolution, a scientist named Fred Hoyle (who, ironically, had been one of the proponents of the Steady State theory), came to an interesting conclusion. Random chance, he calculated, would hardly suffice to come up with life on Earth in the accepted time frame of the planet’s existence — four or five billion years. He saw no way to explain the beginning of the self-evident process of evolution on earth. Therefore, he proposed the theory of Panspermia, that life had evolved elsewhere in the universe and had been blown through the cosmos on the supernova explosions we talked about in Part 1.

There is, of course, a hole in this theory wide enough to drive a black hole through. Life had to evolve somewhere for the first time. Is even 14 billion years, the estimated age of the entire universe, long enough? Not for “random chance”.

For St. Augustine, it was obvious both that Genesis 1 was not to be understood as a literal account, and that the various kinds of plants and animals on earth came in families that could be grouped together in families with common ancestors. God did not create all the various kinds of creatures, he argued, but created certain initial forms which contained the potential to develop into the vast array of forms we see today. And I would add to what I believe to be the thrust of orthodoxy in affirming that God’s activity in the world was not limited to an initial Deist-like creation, but that He upholds and sustains the ongoing universe by His faithfulness.

And if we believe that God is true and faithful, and furthermore that Her invisible qualities are shown in the visible world through nature, then we must believe the evidence of our eyes concerning the longevity of the earth and the process of biological evolution. Some relevant evidence:

Ice Cores. Go to Greenland and Antarctica, and start drilling out the ice there. You’ll notice that, like tree trunks, the ice comes in layers, for the new snow laid down every year. You can count the layers in a microscope. The oldest core we’ve yet drilled has almost a million layers. ‘Nuff said.

Sedimentary Layers. If you study the tiniest bit about geology, you’ll find that we have a very good understanding about the various layers of geological history locked up in sedimentary rocks all over the world. The amount of sheer data, or evidence, here is astounding. And no, it’s not evidence of a world-wide flood. There are many places where you can split layers apart and find, say, animal tracks, or other signs of long periods of time between layers.

The Fossil Record. It is true that there are gaps in the fossil record as we excavate down into the layers, but this is only natural. We’ve only been paying attention to fossils for a couple hundred years, and we have only a limited sample. And the fossils we do recover all the time do not stick with a few forms. We find new transitional species all the time. Consider the recent flurry of transitional forms from China shedding immense light on the evolution of birds. In addition to the famous Archaeopteryx, there are now dozens and dozens of known species in every stage from dinosaur to bird.

Just an aside here: the old YEC canard “The fossils date the rocks, and the rocks date the fossils” is obviously the work of someone who never finished high-school algebra, and thus never had to solve a system of two equations in two variables.

DNA. We discussed this in detail in Part 1. The DNA of all species shows abundant evidence of evolution over large periods of time. The new scientific discipline of cladistics is refining and reformulating the system of biological classification according to DNA evidence, as opposed to outward physical characteristics.

Anyone who takes an honest look at the evidence must conclude that the current cosmological and evolutionary models are pretty good descriptions of what went on in the universe in the past few billion years. The question of “why”, of course, remains outside the capability of science, but the question of “how” has been pretty adequately answered. As one exasperated scientist said, “If the good Lord made the world to look like it’s four billion years old, who are we to disbelieve Him?”

In part 4, we take a look at those who do so disbelieve.

Note: this is Part 2 of a series of posts on Christianity and Evolution. Read the introduction and Part 1.

2. The first two chapters of Genesis are a scientific account of creation, but cannot be used to inform our physical models of creation.

(I think I should have said “the first chapter of Genesis” — in this post I’ll limit my discussion to the first chapter. We’ll leave Adam & Eve for later, perhaps Part 6.)

To rephrase the thesis slightly: the first chapter of Genesis a a scientific account of creation, but that doesn’t matter to our discussion. We’ll touch on several huge issues in this post: the nature of science, the nature of truth, error, divine inspiration, etc. I hope I’ll be able to chart a reasonably clear course through these dangerous waters.

First of all, if I claim that Genesis 1 is a scientific account, what does that mean? Obviously there weren’t a lot of nerdy types in white coats with sadistic impulses towards harmless albino rodents in the second millenium BC. Science as we know it is a product of Greek logical disciplines coupled with Christian monotheism that took on its essential characteristics during the renaissance. The fundamental principles of modern science are an unswerving obsession with observational reality, and an insistence on fasifiability.

The first principle is obvious: if science is the study of the observable world, it must be based on observation of the world. Aristotle, one of the fathers of modern science, reasoned with great rigor and clarity about the physical world, but because he never bothered to cross-check his conclusions with objective reality, he made some pretty big blunders, starting with mis-counting the number of teeth the typical person carries around.

The second principle has a long philosophical pedigree — read the article — but it basically boils down to this: all other things being equal, a scientific theory that can be easily disproven is better than one that cannot. The reason for this is that science, at its heart, is a competition to find out the Truth about the universe. So we judge scientific theories by how close we think they come to the Truth, part of which involves making sure they’re easy to disprove.

This notion of “coming close to the truth” may seem strange. How can there be greater or lesser degrees of truth? You might think that a theory is either true or it’s false. Unfortunately, it’s a little more complicated than that. You see, a scientific theory is, and can only ever be, a model. All scientists are, in effect, is model railroaders stuck in a basement somewhere building a model train track. Now they’ve got a lot of different ways of looking out of the basement at the real track they’re trying to model, some of which are better than others. The way they test their model is if when they run trains around the model track, they see the trains on the real track doing the same thing as the model trains. For a model to be falsifiable means that it’s very easy to compare the little trains to the big trains, and if there’s a difference, then you know your model track is wrong, and you’ll have to rebuild it.

Now because our view of the real trains are limited, parts of the model might be better than others. There might be a long straight stretch in the track where, if you line up your model trains right they mimic the big trains exactly. So if all you were interested in were that long straight part of the real track, your model would be True — it would correspond pretty closely to the bit of reality you were interested in. But what if there were a whole section of track with curly, criscrossing rails going in and out of tunnels, over bridges and through mountain passes. There might be any number of different models that produced similar behaviors, but none as good as the straight part.

Science works the same way. For a long while we got along by thinking the world was flat. And if we’re only considering a city or a country, that’s not a bad assumption to make. You can easily model your city or country on a flat sheet of paper, and if you use such a map (or model) as your guide, you won’t go astray. But when you start to travel over continents, suddenly your flat map doesn’t work so well. If you try to make a map on paper, you find that your distances don’t add up, and if you use compass directions to travel, you’ll find you usually miss your target, and if you don’t, it takes you a great deal longer than you thought. But if you draw your map on a sphere, everything suddenly works again. All the parts of the map are at the same scale, and if you draw a straight line between two places, the path would have looked curved on the old flat map.

In the same way, we got along quite well for some time using Newton’s theory of gravitation. It predicted the motions of the planets pretty well, and it even works to get a spacecraft to the moon, say. But it’s not quite perfect. It doesn’t predict the motion of the planet Mercury at all! And if you tried to use it on deep-space probes you’d miss Jupiter or Saturn by millions of miles. It is a good approximation for some things, but Einstein’s theory of gravity is better.

Now here’s an important point. Science can tell us how something happens, but it is utterly useless at telling us why. We can describe the motion of the trains outside our basement to the smallest degree, and predict their motion to the millisecond, but we could not go one millimeter towards understanding why they move. With all our scientific knowledge today, we have no idea why we fall down instead of up, why there are 94 natural elements, why squids’ eyes are better than ours. And science can never tell us what came before the universe, or what happens after death, because science is by its very nature limited to observation and description of the natural physical world.

But what does this have to do with Genesis? First of all, all cultures have theories to explain the universe. Not all of them share our western scientific obsession with observation and falsifiability, but nobody just says “I don’t care about why things are the way they are.” Not surprisingly, people in the Near East of the second millenium were no different. They observed the natural world and came up with theories about why it was the way it was, and how it all came about. The ancient Egyptians and Mesopotamians actually had pretty advanced mathematical and astronomical skills, but they put them to use more for engineering than basic science. Ignoring Genesis for a minute, let’s look at a creation story from a Near Eastern culture contemporary with the Biblical patriarchs.

The Babylonian Enuma Elish is the story of how Marduk, the patron god of Babylon, came to be the greatest of the gods. It starts out with primordial chaos, in which Tiamat and Apsu, the gods of salt and fresh water commingle. Then Tiamat and Apsu are split and separated by Marduk into the sea and the sky. Then the gods of dry ground and salt marshes on the edge of the sea appear. Then Annu, the god of the sky is born, along with the gods of the heavenly bodies. Then Ea, Marduk’s father, the god of words and singing, makes all things on the earth. (Note that you can spell Ea “Eyah”, or even “Yah”. But that’s another story :-) All of these gods have been fighting like cats and dogs since their various creations. Finally, Marduk makes humans out of blood spilled in the conflict. The humans are put to work for the gods, allowing them to relax and take it easy as the humans toil and work to provide for them.

Interesting, isn’t it? Stripped of theological content, the Babylonian story is practically identical to Genesis. There are six generations of gods in the Enuma Elish, and six days in the Bible. The physical events are the same. You have the primordial chaos of water, which is separated into sea and sky. Dry ground appears. The sky is populated with astronomical bodies. The earth is filled with creatures, and finally humans, and the creator gods rest from their labours.

Imagine, for a moment, a divinely inspired Moses sitting in the dorway of his tent, dictating the story of the world for a people new-delivered from slavery in Egypt. (I am not so naive as to deny that the Old Testament is the product of lots of editing over a long period, but there’s nothing that makes it impossible that many original bits of the Pentateuch come from the time of Moses.) Isaac Asimov used this idea to great effect in a short story:

“Fifteen billion years ago, the universe came into being as a infinitesimally small lump of primordial stuff in which the five fundamental forces and matter and energy were combined in a kind of universal pyroclasm.” Uh, Moses, are you sure you’re OK? Haven’t been smoking anything? Everyone knows that the world began in primordial water, and that water was divided into the sea and the sky…

Moses didn’t have anything new to teach the Children of Israel about how the world was created. They already knew that. What Moses wanted to tell them was why. The Babylonian story is depressing if you’re wondering about your place in the universe. Primordial chaos gives rise to squabbling, quarreling gods who, coincedentally enough, are the patrons of cities with whom Babylon was at war. People are created to be the slaves of the gods, endlessly toiling to please capricious and indolent powers.

What Moses wanted to teach the Children was this: that Yahweh, the high God of Word and Song, who was only dimly remembered by the Babylonians, had been there before the waters. His Spirit was brooding over them like a great bird waiting for a nestling. And then as His fierce light filled the cosmos, by His Word were the waters separated, and the dry ground created. At his Word did the lights of heaven appear to guide the days and seasons of the inhabitants of Earth, and to affirm His faithfulness in their endless round. At His word were the plants and the beasts of the seas and the air and the land sung into being. And at every step He marvelled at His creation and proclaimed it wonderful. But He did not sing us into being. For us, he knelt down in the mud and with His own hand He sculpted out an image of His glory, and the form in which He knew he would come down, one far-off Judean night. And then He filled that image with His life-force, and male and female he set us in a paradise, to marvel at all His vast and marvellous works, and call them by name, and to walk and talk with Him as he rested in the cool green light of evening.

Scientific theories change. For that reason, we cannot couple our theological convictions to particular scientific models. I believe we have a better understanding of the physical nature of the universe, and what it looked like at every stage of its creation, than the Babylonians did. But although I have a different model of how the universe was created, that does not change what I think about why it was created. On that subject, I’m with Moses. God is prior to the universe, and brought it into being by design, and every part of that design is good. God’s character of glory, power and faithfulness is reflected in the majesty and regularity of nature, from the wild power of the sea, to the strong strength of mountains, to the ordered dance of stars, to the verdant field and forest, to all the myriad forms of life in the world. And God took care when He made people. We are designed to be in His image. We are filled with His life and Word, and we can walk and talk with Him, if only we take the time to stop and listen. That’s the true message of Genesis. All else is quibbling over details.

Note: this is Part 1 of a series of posts on Christianity and Evolution. Read the introduction for more context.

1. God exists, and created everything else, including this universe we live in. And, by the way, my faith is in Christ’s death and resurrection.

The first sentence is a basic axiom, and not susceptible to proof. Though many have tried to come up with proofs for the existence of God, they all seem to contain category errors. And I think that if we define God to be the ground of all being, we can’t then try to posit something ontologically prior to explain Her. Note: I am not a philosopher, so the preceding may make no sense. Suffice it to say that I am quite content to assume the existence of God.

Much could be written on the historicity of Jesus and the validity of the Christian faith, but that’s outside the scope of the current topic. Suffice it to say that I affirm the Nicene Creed.

The question before us is how to reconcile the first few chapters of Genesis (“beginnings” in Greek) with current scientific models of the origin of the universe, the earth, and human beings.

The interpretation of Genesis that I shall argue against is “Young Earth Creationism”. In this model, the first chapter of Genesis is interpreted as a literal narrative account of the creation of the universe.

Thus, God first creates the heavens and the earth as a sort of primeval chaos. After brooding over this formless void, God creates light, and a diurnal cycle of evening and morning. Twenty-four hours later, He creates a separation between two bodies of water. Twenty-four hours after that, God gathers one of these bodies of water into the sea, uncovering dry ground. Twenty-four hours after that, She creates plants, which cover the dry ground. Twenty-four hours after that, God creates astronomical objects, including the sun and moon, which follow the diurnal cycle. Twenty-four hours after that, He creates sea creatures and birds. Twenty-four hours after that, God creates land creatures, including humans.

Note that this paragraph does not, in fact, correspond very closely to the YEC model of creation. That is because, as I shall show, the YEC model is not a literal interpretation of Genesis. It incorporates all kinds of factors for which there is absolutely no Biblical justification. More on this in Part 4.

The current scientific model goes something like this: the universe as we know it is about 14 billion years old. It originated in an infinitesimal point of highly dense and immensely hot stuff. Driven by its internal pressure, it expanded rapidly. As it expanded, it cooled, and its stuff began to differentiate into the various forms of stuff we observe today. First, matter and energy began to separate. Energy began to be felt in different ways, in gravity, electromagnetism, etc. Eventually (after about 300,000 years), the universe was a cloud of very hot hydrogen. Tiny inhomogenities or ripples in this cloud began to form structures, which gradually coalesced into finer and finer structures, until some of the structures became “super-clusters” of hydrogen, “clusters”, and finally “galaxies“. The hydrogen in the galaxies finally coalesced into spheres, which, when compressed enough by gravity, became giant thermonuclear fusion explosions — stars.

But not all the energy got turned into matter. Energy too has been spreading and thinning out as the universe expands. When scientists came up with this model of the universe (called the Big Bang), they predicted that there should be enough leftover energy to radiate throughout the universe at a temperature of about 3 Kelvins (three degrees above absolute zero). And it turns out that when you look at any part of the sky, it is indeed not quite black — there’s 3 Kelvin’s worth of energy coming at you. So every time you look into the night sky, you’re seeing the leftover fire of creation.

Now what happens in a thermonuclear reaction is this: bits of matter (hydrogen, mostly) with small atoms, get smushed together until they form larger atoms. The process releases lots of energy, which is why the stars are bright and shiny, but the main result is bigger atoms. As smaller atoms get smushed together into bigger and bigger atoms, more and more complex elements get produced: things like silicon and oxygen and carbon and nitrogen and all those nifty boxes on the periodic table. The trouble is, it’s (comparatively) easy to make hydrogen fuse. The bigger the atoms get, the harder it becomes to fuse them, so once you’ve got lots of iron and lead and uranium, say, in the middle of your star, the fusion reaction starts to fizzle. If the star is too small, it just shrinks into a brown dwarf — an invisible cinder-code silently floating in the void. But if the star has enough hydrogen left, when the central reaction fizzles, the hydrogen in the star’s outer layers suddenly collapses inwards and creates one last ginormous fusion explosion that expends all the star’s remaining energy in one shot (called a “supernova”). And all the heavy atoms in the center of the star get flung out into space in a huge cloud.

This is a photograph of the cloud left over from a supernova that Tycho Brahe observed in 1752.

Eventually, after about 5 or ten billion years, the heavy elements began to form clumps of their own mixed with the hydrogen, and when stars formed, they often had clouds of heavier material around them, which eventually clumped into “protoplanetary discs” and eventually planets.

This is a photograph of a young star with a protoplanetary disc.

Our planet, the earth, is located at a particularly useful distance from its parent star, the sun. It is at just the right temperature to allow liquid water to persist on the surface of the planet. Of the inner planets, Mercury is so close to the sun that any water or even atmosphere was stripped away long ago. Venus is still too hot for liquid water, and what water does exist is combined with liquid sulpher to produce the sulphuric acid vapor that is Venus’s atmosphere. Mars, the most habitable planet after Earth, is too cold for liquid water to remain on its surface, and too small to retain much of an atmosphere. The giant outer planets never got enough heavy elements; they are made mostly of hydrogen.

So then, earth is special because it has all this liquid water sloshing around. And water just happens to be a nice solvent for carbon-based chemistry. Among the heavy elements that supernovas spit out are carbon, oxygen, and nitrogen, just perfect for life as we know it. So eventually somewhere in this world of water and carbon and oxygen and nitrogen and myriad combinations thereof, collections of molecules arose that had the ability to reproduce themselves. People who study what’s called “emergent behavior” find that this is quite common: simple systems over time tend to display astoundingly complex behaviors, including self-replicating structures.

For example, consider a grid of squares that can be either black or white. Initialize the grid with a random collection of black and white squares. Now start a clock. At every click of the clock, flip the squares according to the following rules: a white square with exactly three black squares next to it turns black. A black square with three or more black squares next to it stays black, otherwise it turns white.

If you have a big enough grid, and time, you produce fantastically complicated patters that contain self-replicating structures.

After a long while — several billion years — these structures had developed better and better ways to replicate themselves, and they had grown in complexity to the point where we would recognize them as living organisms. After a couple more billion years (the earth is about 4 or 5 billion years old), the descendants of these organisms make up life on earth as it is today: bacteria, archaea, plants, animals, etc.

The process by which the original living organisms’ descendants ended up in such a variety of shapes and sizes is called biological evolution. Evolution operates in many different ways, but the primary one, as recognized by Darwin, is called natural selection. It is made possible because the development, structure and operation of every living thing is controlled by RNA and DNA. Each living cell — and not-quite-living-but-still-reproducing things like viruses — contains coded instructions on how to operate itself and cooperate with other cells. These instructions are encoded in long strings of RNA and DNA, and interpreted by other structures in the cell, just like a computer program is interpreted by a computer chip. When an organism reproduces itself, it passes on a copy of its RNA or DNA to its descendant.

What happens, though, if there’s an error in the copy? This is where evolution gets interesting. Errors and glitches in copied DNA can occur in many ways: cosmic or background radiation can change “letters” of the code, viruses can inject changes into the code, or . . . well, the birds and bees are simply the latest in a long line of creatures to mix-n-match genetic codes by having sex. Bacteria started it all — they tend to share random bits of their own genetic codes with other bacteria all the time. Because they reproduce so rapidly, they evolve extremely quickly. This has immediate consequences for us, as harmful bacteria can evolve new defenses for our medicines faster than we can come up with new ones. But many species have developed two parallel forms that cooperate in the mixing-n-matching process when reproducing.

The benefits of all this mixing-n-matching are many. The larger the number of members of a species with various copies of the species’ common DNA, the smaller the risk that one copying error will wipe out the species. We see this all the time when we inbreed food plants or domestic animals. When errors start creeping into the copies, it’s good to have a large reservoir of good copies to draw on. In nature, the plants or animals with the good copies survive better than the ones with the bad copies, and the population as a whole stays survivable.

The other benefit of changing and mixing and matching the genetic code is to be able to respond to changes in the environment. Sometimes copying errors creep in that don’t make any difference to the organism: changing its color from white to black, for instance. If the change doesn’t make any difference to the organism’s survivability, it may persist in the population, or it may die out. If, however, something in the environment changes, and the black organisms have a better chance of passing on their copies, then more of the population will be black. This happens when bacteria evolve resistance to a drug — among the gazillions of mixes-n-matches going on, one of them happened to enable the bacteria to survive the drug, and their genetic copies spread throughout the population. But this doesn’t only happen with bacteria. A famous example of this process is when a certain species of moth in the UK turned from white to black during the Industrial Revolution, as a result of all the coal dust all over everything.

So this process continued on to this very day. All the mixing and matching actually leaves traces in our DNA. We can see how the various genetic instructions changed and became altered as time went by. For example, every living creature that has limbs uses a gene called Sonic Hedgehog to build them, whether they’re fruit-fly legs, dolphin flippers or human arms. The differences in each species’ copy of Sonic Hedgehog tell us how long ago each species separated from its ancestors.

We recently discovered a fortuitous modification in some humans’ DNA that only dates back 700 years or so. People who have an error in their copy of a gene called CCR5 are immune to AIDS. It is estimated that this mutation first appeared in Europe during the Black Plague — only Europeans exhibit it, and it is thought to have provided protection from the plague and/or smallpox.

I think it’s obvious which model I favor. Nevertheless, as a Christian who believes that Holy Scripture is inspired by God and “useful for instruction” (II Timothy 3:16), what do I make of Genesis?