My wife is Japanese. She came to the US at age 25. Prior to age 30, she lived in California, though she made one brief trip to another state to visit a friend. Japan's total land area is slightly less than 90% of that of California, and California's land area is 5¼% of the area of the "lower 48" states. This is background for this story:
Just before our first anniversary I was sent on a temporary assignment to Texas. We planned to drive, and I told my wife that we would do some sightseeing along the way. She said she preferred to go to Texas as quickly as possible. I said, "We can't go past the Grand Canyon without stopping to see it." Our first day's driving took us from southern California to Williams, Arizona. The driving time is only about seven hours, including a meal and a pit stop. After a night in a motel we drove north; it is about an hour's drive to a side road and a parking lot right on the South Rim. Most of the way the road slowly climbs a tilted plateau, flat in all directions. About halfway there she asked, "Where are the mountains?" I innocently asked, "What mountains?" She asked, "How can there be a canyon without mountains?" I said, "This is a different kind of canyon." We parked next to a railing. Only after we got out of the car and went to the railing could we see the canyon. She didn't make a sound. She just stood there, for a long time, hanging on tight (the railing really was very close to the edge).From that location, one can see to the North Rim, which is 14 miles away in three directions, to the northwest, the north, and the northeast, and is 21 miles away to the north-northeast. After many minutes of looking back and forth at the wonderful Grand Canyon through the clear, June air, she said in a small voice, "How long can we stay?"
Until she saw the Grand Canyon, my wife could not imagine it. I don't know if she had even seen pictures of it. It didn't fit in her mind. The four national parks in central Japan are each about half a square mile in area. The largest one on-land, in Kyushu, encompasses 13 square miles of land and a much larger area of surrounding ocean. Compare that with Yellowstone at 3,471 square miles and Grand Canyon National Park, with 1,902 square miles. The main canyon of the Grand Canyon is more than 200 miles long, and it simply can't fit in Japan.
We are limited by what we are used to. Until seeing the Grand Canyon, followed by the Painted Desert and Petrified Forest, my wife had no room in her imagination for such things.
This concept applies to time as well as space. Until we are adults and have lived twenty or thirty years, most of us cannot really imagine a century, let alone a millennium. If we have been lucky enough to get acquainted with a grandparent or great-grandparent who is 80-100 years old, and listen to some of their stories, a century can come to have some meaning for us. This underlies a crevasse of understanding between those of us who have studied a natural science such as geology or astronomy, and everyone else. I made a telescope, with much help from my father, at age 11. It is small but works well and I still use it. My mother had studied geology and we were rockhounds together. She also taught me of The Gap between Genesis 1:1 and Genesis 2:2 (I read the Bible through for the first time at age 12-13).
With my small telescope I can see a dozen or more globular clusters and several galaxies. By the time I entered college I was comfortable with the great distances of these objects, and had learned clearly how such distances are determined. The closest globular cluster, M4 in Scorpio, is 5,500 light-years away. Another that is even easier to see, being much larger and brighter, is M3 in Hercules, which is nearly 34,000 light-years away. These are objects within our own galaxy, the Milky Way. The easiest galaxy to see outside the Milky Way is the great galaxy in Andromeda, at a distance of two million light years. The Whirlpool galaxy in Canes Venatici (the Hunting Dogs), not too far from the Big Dipper, is 23 million light years away. In my (smallish) telescope I can see this one also.
A light-year is the distance light travels in one year, about 63,000 times the distance from the Earth to the Sun. The Sun's light gets here in about 8 minutes. The light we see from the Whirlpool galaxy started on its way to us 23 million years ago. So by practicing amateur astronomy for many years I became comfortable with great spans of time.
I earned two-and-a-half degrees in geology (The "half degree" is known as ABD, "all but dissertation," because the results of my work contradicted the beliefs of a powerful professor on my dissertation committee. He took offense, and I left without my PhD. My work was later shown to be correct by others' work. That professor died without admitting he'd been wrong). I almost majored in paleontology, but went for geophysics instead. I still love paleontology, which is the study of fossils. For one of my summer field camps, I worked in Nevada on ancient reefs, aged about 300 million years. The semi-cliff I climbed almost daily was a sequence of reefs that covered a time span of several million years. The point is, I grew comfortable with time spans thousands of times greater than the kind of time that fits in most people's imagination.
During my time in graduate school I led a fellow student to Christ. He wanted to believe in Jesus but he didn't know what to do with the idea he'd heard from other Christians that the Earth "had to be" no more than 6,000 years old, "…or at most, maybe 8-10 thousand years," as some would say. He was as familiar as I was with Specimen Ridge in Wyoming, a series of more than twenty petrified forests, on atop another. They record this series of events: a forest would grow for several hundred to 1,000 years. A volcano would cover the area in twenty-to-200 feet of ash and kill the forest. A new forest would grow in the mineral-rich ash. This happened over and over. Tree rings can be counted in the petrified standing stumps. The total sequence covers more than 20,000 years. There is no room for Specimen Ridge in the imagination of a Young Earth Creationist. When I explained The Gap to him, and some other concepts that indicate Scripture can "handle" deep time, he received Jesus and was a good spiritual companion for several years, until we moved elsewhere.
Of course, along the way I also became very familiar with evolution. Fossils show that life has changed over time, which is the definition of the Fact of Evolution. Life is still changing, which means that evolution, as a process, continues, even affecting humans. Two books I reviewed recently, The 10,000 Year Explosion and Before the Dawn, demonstrate this.
Many may be guardedly okay with recent evolutionary processes, but don't care at all for the idea that all the millions of species arose by the same means. It is a hard pill to take when one's biological imagination is limited to occasional visits to zoos. People ask about mutations, and how a rabbit can turn into a horse. It can't. But some early animal had descendants that had descendants, and so forth, and one line became rabbits while another became horses. That "early animal" probably lived 100 million years ago. You don't make rabbits or horses overnight.
Such notions are the fruit of popular media, in which "Mutants" such as the X-Men or the Fantastic Four are radically changed in an instant. Hardly anyone knows that every one of us is a mutant, carrying DNA in our cells that is different from what we were born with, because of many small, "silent" (or near-silent) mutations that occur in us daily. Among all those, only the ones that occur in our germ cells (sperm or ova, depending on our sex), have a chance to make it to the next generation, but our children are born with 50-100 such small mutations that we were not born with.
Such small mutations, which occur with great frequency overall (but only affect a very tiny percentage of our total DNA because there is so much of it), can have several causes. These include chance copying errors, because the DNA copying machinery is very, very good but not perfect; and damage caused by radiation or free radicals, for example. We are a little bit radioactive. About 1/85 % of the potassium in our bodies is the radioactive isotope K-40. All the rest is either K-39 or K-41, which are stable.
Where such a mutation is not silent, it is usually because it changes the function of a protein, which is usually bad, but not always. In severe cases, the cell in which that mutation arises will die, and we never know it. There are lots of reasons cells in our bodies die by the millions daily; this is only one.
Larger mutations, with possibly greater effects, are rare, and usually harmful, but not always. They can include losing a small chunk of DNA (from a few "letters" to a few thousand), or the duplication of a little DNA, or a piece getting "loose" and being put back in place backwards or somewhere else. Very rare events include the duplication of a whole chromosome; Downs' Syndrome is the result of such a duplication. In the past, changes in the number of chromosomes have occurred with sufficient frequency that the various creatures on Earth have as few as two or as many as a thousand chromosomes.
A study of the DNA of many organisms of many types shows that all are related by common machinery to reproduce DNA, which is the first step to biological reproduction. All mutations, properly understood, that get into the germ line and are inherited, have the potential to change an organism's descendants, and if that organism's progeny multiply, over time a whole species can change a little.
The fact of evolution is plain to see. The process is not. The paragraphs above just touch the surface of the way mutations arise. How do they either increase to become common, or die out? Enter the prevailing theory of evolution, natural selection. When Charles Darwin proposed the mechanism of natural selection as a theory of evolution a century-and-a-half ago, he didn't know how new characteristics arose, nor what mechanism might "record" our characteristics. His original theory was a theory of how different characteristics could be favored or disfavored because of environmental factors, and thus give rise to disparate groups of animals from a population that once were all about the same.
A classic example is a certain English moth that is usually light gray with dark spots, which make it hard to see on tree bark. During the early Industrial Revolution, the coal smoke in the air darkened tree bark in forests near the cities, and the moths were easier to see. Most of them. Some were darker and harder to see. Birds ate the light gray moths, so the darker ones became more common, and some of those had offspring that were even darker. As the smog got worse and trees got darker, eventually in some areas one could only find dark moths, and farther from the cities the lighter gray moths were still to be found. After the English quit using so much coal and more natural gas and liquid fuels, the bark of the trees gradually got lighter in color, and the darker moths became rare again. In this case, no new species was formed, but it could have been so had the burning of coal gone on for hundreds or thousands of years (and the average life span of an Englishman would have become shorter also).
Now that we know what DNA is and how mutations work, we have a mechanism for new characteristics to arise. They arise gradually, over long spans of time. But the example of the English moths shows that "long" can be measured in decades or centuries; it doesn't have to mean millions of years. But it is definitely numerous generations.
So here are the pieces that make natural selection work:
- Variation in a population of interbreeding organisms (a species) arises because of mutations in the DNA, mostly small but not always.
- Among the offspring of these organisms, for nearly all species, most die without reproducing.
- If a variation in the DNA of one organism makes it less likely to die young, and more likely to reproduce, that variation is more likely to "make it" into the next generation.
Consider some animals that live in grasslands near the edge of a desert, but not in the desert. They will vary in many characteristics, including the efficiency with which their bodies retain water. Some will be able to tolerate forays into the desert better than others. Over time, some number will be able to spend most of their time in the desert, and less in the nearby grasslands. Furthermore, prey animals in the desert will be different from those in the grasslands, and variants that can catch and eat "desert critters" will have a little advantage among the desert tolerant ones. Give it more time: a desert-dwelling species can be produced, leaving behind the grassland-dwelling species. They are very similar, and for a time they could even hybridize, but eventually that also will end. Now, it is not likely that the entire suite of characteristics that allow the new species to live full-time in the desert were present in the original species. Some variations were developed over time by the accumulation of small and smallish mutations. For animals with a life span of several years, this can all occur in 1,000 to 10,000 generations, say between 5,000 and 50,000 years.
If you read some books on anthropology, you'll find out that "early modern humans" were different from modern people in a few subtle ways, such as having thicker skulls and stronger bones. They lived as recently as 14,000 years ago. And, assuming they are our ancestors (anthropologists put us and them in the same species, Homo sapiens), in that time they underwent the changes that produced "modern humans". Counting four or five generations per century until rather recently, they lived 600-700 generations ago. The species Homo sapiens arose about 48,000 years ago, or 2,000 to 2,400 generations back.
Some who may have read this far, who are evangelical Christians, who have been taught that evolution is the greatest heresy, will have been poo-poohing this all as I went along. That's okay. This is leading up to my contention that whether evolution happened, and whether its mechanism was natural selection or not, has no effect on Biblical truth or the faith of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. No effect. None.
I am a scientist. I am also an ardent Christian. I learned long, long ago (half a century) that these are compatible. Sadly, there is a large and vocal cadre of evangelicals who claim the opposite. Or, at most, some of them will say that science, compatible with (their interpretation of) the Scriptures is acceptable; otherwise it is not and is even nonsense.
I wrote this piece after reading a certain book written by a young-earth creationist, a book intended to give younger Christians ammunition to shoot down evolution wherever they find it. I have decided not to name the book or its author, not to censor it (it is one of a great many), but to protect my brother, a man nearly my age whom I greatly respect as a teacher of the Bible and Biblical truth. However, in this area, he is quite incorrect, yet I don't care to pillory him publicly. So I'll just call him Bob.
The book is around a dozen years old. A lot can happen in a decade or so. For example, Bob makes a big deal about feathers. His discussion of how feathers are thought to have developed from scales (as he imagines it being thought of) is not Darwinian, it is Lamarckian. That is, he describes scales getting frayed in certain environments, and then this fraying is found to be beneficial, and is somehow passed on to descendants (that is, he thinks evolutionists think that).
The Darwinian explanation is different: Scales come in many variations. Some of these have ribs or bumps. Ribbing can be very pronounced, or less so. In a particular sort of lizard, the ribbing was so pronounced that over many generations it resulted in scales with parallel sections, like a fan palm leaf. This was beneficial so the process continued. Later developments included cross-ribbing, and stage by stage a downy feather was produced. Maybe at first it wasn't "that downy", but wherever it was useful for retaining heat, in generation after generation these former-scales-now-downy-feathers became more like the goose down used in down jackets and sleeping bags. Once feathers of any sort arose, they could be modified over time to become the great variety of feather types we see today.
A dozen years ago, the very few fossils that showed feathered non-avian dinosaurs were hotly contested and hardly known among the public. After 2007, a host of discoveries have resulted in a better understanding of feather evolution, which apparently started more than 200 million years ago. The first feathers were for thermal insulation. Developing feathers with aerodynamic properties, leading to flight, took tens of millions of years.
Another aspect of Bob's discussion is the "God of the Gaps" dilemma, or the problem of intermediate forms. See this illustration:
Let's consider this vaguely illustrative of the family tree of the apes, with its "root" some 25 million years ago. The tree on the left represents knowledge of paleoanthropology when I was in college; that on the right, something closer to current knowledge. The topmost orange block in each tree is Homo sapiens. The topmost blue blocks are Bonobos and Chimpanzees. The green block would be the common ancestor of all three, although we have no fossils of it at present. The purple blocks are various species of Australopithecus; one on the left, a few on the right. The orange blocks are various species of Homo. On the left, below sapiens, we have H. neanderthalensis, H. erectus, and H. habilis. I don't know how many fossils are currently included in the genus Homo, so I just added a few small blocks (small so they wouldn't overlap) at the right, with the Neanderthals replaced by two blocks to include the Denisovans.
Are the species on the "orange" branch all our ancestors? Some are and the rest are close cousins to our ancestors. Are they transitional forms? A paleoanthropologist would say Yes, as I do. But the strong creationist argument is, "Where are the transitional forms in between?" The complexity of this tree is probably less than the complexity of the actual situation through time with all the apes. What would it take to find "all" the transitional forms?
Terrestrial fossils are much more rare than marine fossils. There are tons and tons of fossil shells and corals for each person on Earth. The total number of fossils of genus Homo would fit in a footlocker. Someone like Bob (or at least like Bob a dozen years ago) will not be satisfied if we can't fill in every blank. Otherwise, he would say we haven't proved the case. Remembering that a time span of 48,000 years in human history represents as many as 2,400 generations, Bob is asking us to find a fossil to represent every generation over a span of millions of years; perhaps as many as a quarter to a half million generations from the time genus Homo split from genus Pan (chimps and bonobos). The number of fossils of early humans so far found represent 6,000 individuals. There are a lot of gaps to fill!
It's best to not belabor these points further. Where do these things fit in the Bible? God didn't inspire His prophets to write the books of the Bible to generate a natural history textbook. Moses was inspired to write for bronze age herdsmen at a time 3,000 years before it was even known that the shell-shaped things in rocks represented animals that died long ago. God's intention is to develop a relationship with people. The two "creation hymns" found in Genesis chapter 1 and chapter 2 show different characteristics of God and different aspects of His relationship with the first humans. Most importantly, if they are to be taken as word-for-word literally and scientifically accurate, both cannot be true. Important things happen in different orders. But we can discern a few key items:
- In Genesis 1, God created man in his image, "Male and female He created them." This creation was of a number of persons.
- In Genesis 2, The Lord God "formed man of the dust of the ground, breathed into his nostrils the spirit (or breath) of life, and man became a living soul." The woman was "built" from a portion of the man and brought to him later.
Taken together, these show that the created part of man is not the body, which was "formed", but the spirit. The word "living" in Genesis 2:7 is emphatic, indicating that without the spirit, the soul is dead, not able to contact God.
Numerous Bible students have written about "pre-Adamic men". Some have written pretty crazy stuff. But the best, including G.H. Pember, consider that there were non-spiritual humans on Earth in the distant past that rebelled against God along with Lucifer, and were punished by God when Lucifer was defeated and became Satan. After that God put a spirit in some, or all, remaining men to become "man" with a living soul. This makes sense to me.
Is the foregoing literally true? I don't know. Here is the point, though. If the Adam of the Bible was an individual person (some Bible teachers consider that Adam represents a corporate group of men living in God's presence six or more thousand years ago), he lost direct fellowship with God because of a sin of disobedience. The Bible from Genesis 3 to Revelation 20 is the result: God working through the generations to gain people who will fellowship with Him and become His bride, described as the New Jerusalem in Revelation 21.
The origin of the pre-Adamic men, if they existed, is not described. The fossils of Earth indicate that they did exist, and that they came about by evolution. Other geological work shows that the Earth is indeed a few billion years old (4.543 billion, according to the most recent work). The universe has a definite origin, which was about 13.7 billion years. It's nice to think that "Let there be light" refers to the Big Bang, which was indeed a burst of unimaginably bright light. However, that verse refers to the first step of God's re-ordering the Earth after the primordial battle with Lucifer.
The Bible tells us that Lucifer was originally the Archangel, the leader of all the angels. In Job an enigmatic passage (38:4-7) tells that the angels were present when God "laid the foundations of the Earth", singing their praises. Did God wait until there were men on earth before putting Lucifer in charge? We don't know.
For God to have a relationship with us, however, little of this matters at all. Evolution is a part of the history before Adam, long before, and although its processes continue, they don't affect us or our relationship with God. At least when the book was written, Bob was of the opinion that one could not be a faithful Christian and believe that any part of evolution is true. This is not so.
Rather, the notion of evolution as heresy is a red herring, successfully used by Satan to keep myriads of ardent children of God distracted from the important work of bringing closer and closer the Kingdom of God, of being built up as the Body and Bride of Christ (see Ephesians in particular), and casting aside all doctrinal and personal divisions so that the longest prayer of Jesus Christ, recorded in John 17, can at long last be fulfilled. He prayed, "…that they may be perfected into one, that the world may know." Jesus prayed this three different ways within this long prayer. It has never been fulfilled. The world does not yet know. This is the great shame of Christianity. How can we be one if we let such matters divide us?
Among the saints with whom I fellowship, I am a rather rare bird. Most of those who were raised as Christians would look askance at my understanding of evolution and the great age of the earth and universe. I seldom mention it because I don't care to fight with them. If it comes up, I try to keep things thus, "It doesn't matter. Whether evolution happened or not has no bearing on the Bible or on our salvation." It takes someone quite persistent to get more than that out of me.
So why go into it at such length here? Because I am comparatively anonymous in this blog, for reasons that are as valid now as they were 15 years ago when I started it. Those who care enough can find out who I am.
If you can stomach it, learn this as a slogan worth keeping:
Evolution doesn't negate any truth of the Bible, nor does it threaten our salvation.
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