The Genesis 1 Hominid is Cool!
In my former post on Genesis 1 I focused on the first part of Genesis 1: the creation of 'heaven and earth' - whereby 'heaven' is the sun, moon, the stars in general (as the authors saw them with the naked eye, presumably), and planet earth. Now let us move on to the creation of the animal kingdom and the human being.
Adam, made of dust
A question to Bible believers, to kick-off: did you ever ache for an encounter with Adam, or Eve? I mean, not the sexual lust that might have been provoked by some artistic depiction or so, but the wish for a real encounter?
Maybe some of us may have thought once in a while that it could be fun, or interesting. Maybe children may have thought for a while that it would be wonderful to talk with Adam, or with Eve (that may have something to do with storytelling to them). But from the Biblical narrative, I do not think much people would naturally feel tempted into aching for an encounter with these two giants of mankind. Why not? Simply because the first human couple in the Bible is not presented in any particularly amiable fashion. We don't know about any real conversation between them, there's just a distant reporting of the few things they said and did.
It is almost abstract. They are very different from hundreds of other characters in the Bible - including Jesus, someone described with many different and personal human characteristics.
Look at the word Adam: it refers to dust of the ground. Adam was formed from the adamah (=dust of the ground). Adam means red or red earth (a Babylonian word and the generic name for man in both Hebrew Assyrian languages), whereby red refers to the color of the dust of the earth. Denis Alexander remarks that "There is no earthier name than Adam" (Creation or Evolution - Do we have to choose? p.163) and he's also absolutely right by contrasting it with for instance the platonic concept (that leverages the spiritual as being higher than the material - a dualism fundamentally foreign to the Bible, although it appeared in Christianism later on, for instance through scholasticism).
Alexander identifies a "strikingly earthy materialism" in Genesis 1. That, of course, is not in the sense of ontological materialism - his point is that this God of the Jews has always been a God to Whom the body matters, suffering matters. This remains true even in Christianism if you read attentively. Even St John did not hesitate to wish his friend Gaius that he might be "doing well in every way and that you are healthy, just as your soul is healthy" (3Joh.1:2).
The abstract character of Adam is confirmed in other ways as well. The Hebrew word Adam never assumes any change to mark the dual or plural numbers ('men'). The word often has a definite article in Hebrew, in these chapters - so a correct translation would be: 'the man', being the representative which (personal names do not carry the definite article in Hebrew). That means that mankind could be a justified translation too. Later on however, Adam starts being used as a personal name, but not all the time. Those who are proud to read the Bible 'just as it is' must realize that reading is interpreting, and understanding interpretations will often require studying the text. However, from a more general point of view, there's nothing really difficult about understanding that the story here does not quite read like the story of a person like those you meet in a novel. There is something distinctly abstract about Adam & Eve.
Adam & Eve, subject of scientific study?
One could argue that there are many ways to explain why science has penetrated inside the Genesis 1 account. None of these are good reasons so it seems.
Maybe the seemingly abstract way of presenting Adam and Eve in Genesis 1 itself has tempted people to let science enter into the picture. The meaning of 'abstract' and 'scientific' may easily get mixed up in someone's mind. A scientific report may have an ABSTRACT to introduce the thesis - Genesis 1 could be the ABSTRACT of creationism. But only in the minds of creationists (creationism = the belief that the creation happened in a way that can be described in scientific terms). But then, of course, science in its modern shape did not even exist at that time, so that makes little sense.
On the other hand, in spite of this abstract character, Genesis 1 present us with what clearly looks like a 'modern human being'. The whole picture here is not a "the earth resting upon the shoulders of 4 elephants" kind of story. But this observation too could easily function as a catalyst, inviting science in the mix - if we start to see Adam & Eve as 'modern mankind' in an all too scientific fashion, thereby injecting Homo sapiens into the story - and that's back to square one. We must always be careful to accept scientific jargon in the mix. Homo sapiens, as I see it, should not be identified that quickly with Adam & Eve.
One could also presume that Adam & Eve might have understood the universe the way we did. And that in turn could quickly turn into yet another variant of the same theme: now we're making Adam a scientist of some sort (and Eve the first feminist-scientist, now that sounds good). But of course, this would require that Adam & Eve have been real persons, not an abstract representation of mankind. That could be the case - but even then, Genesis 1 seems to 'mask' these persons behind a rather abstract presentation, so we're lost again: our 'Adamic scientist' remains too vague to deliver clarity about his scientific status.
There's no science in Genesis 1, or at least it doesn't look like that by any standard. The chapter is 'true' so we believe, but that doesn't mean it's about science.
Adam & Eve in the course of time
The ability of the ancient Hebrews (and ancient Greeks as well) to trace history 4,5 billion years back in time was, of course, non-existing. Neither would they have been very interested in this matter, as there were more important things that still needed to be formulated at that time.
These huge amounts of time, by the way, are not very relevant from our perspective of religion. The calculations behind the theoretical time spans are okay, but the these 4,5 billion years are something no human being can really imagine. We are talking about mythical proportions here. Now there is nothing wrong with myths necessarily - they are records of history embedded within cultures - and myths usually contain a fair amount of truth there's no doubt about that among historians in general. But a myth does not suddenly stop being a myth just because an enormous amount of scientific thought and calculations happened to be thrown in. Evolution is an epic story just like the story of Creation. The sheer unimaginable amount of years compensates for an unimaginable God. Still, the calculations are okay. And so is the record of Genesis 1 to anyone who respects the ancient writings on religion. Religious reports are of course different from scientific ones.
Myths, by the way, are traditional stories about supernatural beings (or personifications of it in people) that narrates a common belief or explains some natural phenomenon. Does that sound much different from what a scientific theory is? Not to me - especially in mathematician's and physicist's views on the universe (including planet earth). The calculations in those great books from Stephen Hawking or Roger Penrose are good calculations - but they are what they are: calculations. Christian physicists do not see these formulas as offensive against the God idea, while militant atheists believe that God can be calculated off the table this way. Scientists like Lewontin also openly admit exactly that:
"It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counterintuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated." (R. Lewontin, 1997, Billions and billions of demons). Italics added.
The expression "no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated" can, of course, be read as "no matter how mythic". The 'initiated' are always initiated in one or a few particular domain(s) of knowledge - in this case highly reductionist domains of knowledge, as the scientific methodology requires.
The mythical component in science was identified by Hannah Arendt, in section 36 of her The Human Condition, as "The discovery of the Archimedean point", when mankind learned that he can actually act as if he stood at a point in the universe, far away from where human capabilities can ever bring him. This characterizes our 'modern age' and the beginning of the modern form of science, basically a cosmic science:
"Without actually standing where Archimedes wished to stand, still bound to the earth through the human condition, we have found a way [through mathematics] to act on the earth (...) as though we dispose of it from outside, from the Archimedean point" (p.262).
On the spot she also hints to the catastrophe's that have really been created already by doing so: "And even at the risk of endangering the natural life process we expose the earth to universal, cosmic forces alien to nature's household" (p.262). However, this is only to identify where a problem may rise, Arendt is nowhere 'panicking' about modern developments (and neither do I). She analyzes and interprets the situation as it is.
There is another way to approach this whole thing about time and space. Not only is it mythical in proportions, it is also largely irrelevant for the human lives we live. This is immediately confirmed if we look at how the narration of evolution time scales with regard to the modern human being we are. In the picture included at your left hand, this human being, the kind of being we would recognize as fully human, appears somewhere within a few millimeters at the top of the scale. Now look down the graphic, and you should also realize that the very last part of this graphic makes the jump from ca 0.5 billion years to 4.5 billion years in just a few inches - actually you should stretch that part out downward up to 8 times the length of the previous part, just to get an idea of the scale we are talking about.
J.F. Haught uses the example of an imaginary bookshelf of 30 volumes, each 450 pages long, every page representing 1 million years of cosmic time. (Together this makes 13500 pages; Haught is referring to the approximately 13,7 billion years since the Big Bang - that would be page 1). The appearance of modern mankind, thinking and able to express thought, would be found on the last page, last paragraph, of volume 30. That is comparable to the last millimeters at the top of the graphic at the left, but then stretched out 8x longer.
Some people will try to counter that by talking about the appearance of life on earth - according to the most recent estimates about about 3,8 billion years ago. But that is totally irrelevant to the story of 'modern mankind'. It takes a long, long time before we arrive at something more complex (the Cambriam explosion), but what we need is the emergence of thought. Thought is not equal to language but clearly needs language to express it. Although some scientists assume a large period of pre-language between the Great ape language (not really consistent with our normal definitions of language) and human language, there is nothing in the Lower Paleolithic and even Middle Paleolithic eras that clearly points to thought or language as we know it. The Neanderthals have of course always been overestimated a bit (see former articles) but even while they may have been anatomically capable of producing sounds similar to modern human beings at some point in time, genetics have thrown out the Neanderthal from our direct ancestor tree anyway. Moreover, linguists generally agree that there are no existing primitive languages: all modern human populations speak languages of comparable complexity. The appearance of thought brings us inevitably at the point where Homo Sapiens appears on the scene as a modern human being.
So from a humanist perspective, what is all the fuss about? That would be a fully justified, reasonable question - although I will not do an attempt to answer it. These amounts of pre-human time do not disturb me at all. What disturbs me is people who make a lot of fuss about the fact that Genesis 1 seems to spend hardly 1 verse about all those pages prior to the last one (IF Genesis 1:1 speaks about pre-history anyway, that is), and all the other verses and pages of the Bible are telling the story of mankind. What's wrong with that? Isn't that what religion has always been about, after all? And shouldn't science have been much better served if scientists stick to their last? Ne sutor ultra crepidam.
Abiogenesis in Genesis 1?
My own perception about Genesis 1 would be that whenever we speak about the so-called formation of life from non-living matter (abiogenesis, from the Greek a-bio-genesis, meaning non biological origins), it can be thought of as entirely outside the scope of Genesis 1 - and it may have taken as many billions of years as the calculus of evolutionary thought requires for the theory to fit with the data. The origin of life may be chemical in terms of science, but the discovery in Genesis 1 clearly starts at a point where chemicals hardly matter and other values of life - real life, full life - and the expression of it in thought and language, starts to emerge.
As far as I am concerned, there's nothing absurd about the so-called 'primeval soup' where scientists identify our origin in chemical terms. I would even think it to be nice they didn't call it earth (Adam) - but soup. The really absurd thing is not in this soup, but with those people who feel proud while they turn this soup into a 'primeval soap series' by their zealous insistence that Genesis 1 be replaced with the religiously and spiritually void 12499 pages (in the illustration by Haught) in evolution. It's as if they are angry at religion for only being interested in the modern humans we are. Never mind that it's these very same modern humans - and them alone - who have shown their ability to discover the traces of those 12400 pages. No Great Ape comes even as close as to pronounce the first word of it - let alone understand.
Be it so that the meteorite bombardment on planet earth slowed down some 4 billion years ago, resulting in conditions suitable for the appearance of life some 3,8 billion years ago - that's fine with me. I don't have to fight the meteorites anyway. And seeing their past impact on the moon (where the craters were not subject to erosion and tectonic motion) may or may not amaze me more than observing the fact that the moon has a 'face'. The advantage of the 'fact' of the face of the moon is, that you can make a child happy with that - while no scientists will make a child happy by insisting that he has all the great calculations about when exactly these craters came into being.
It's about the folks, stupid. (No, that's no quotation from Genesis 1 - the Hebrews were much more polite than I am, they simply wrote down how God created mankind amidst all the beauty of nature - eroded craters not mentioned, but their amazement about creation was no lesser because of it.
The ancient Hebrews understood some things way better than some haughty weirdoes behaving like calculators on legs today so it seems. What 'species' have we become? We shouldn't have become 'species' to begin with.
How exactly evolved what we call 'life'? What kind of 'life' are we talking about anyway? Let the scientists do their work - most of us are no scientists. If you're a believer, or otherwise interested in what ancient people thought about God and mankind, life and death and responsibility and so on, here's your Book. You can abuse it just like anything else, or you can enjoy it and try to get into it, with openness of mind.
Creation - How exactly?
How exactly have Adam and Eve been "shaped" by God?
I'm not even considering an attempt to explain the possibilities at this point. Not because there are too many, but because it would distract you from your own imagination. Of course you can read Denis Alexander's Creation or Evolution - Do we have to choose (a good place to start). But an even better place to start is, to make up your mind, ask yourself where you would really see any problems with regard to faith.
Okay, you are not used to this. That's probably a fact. But do not use excuses like those used in this story about 17-Year-Olds, Evolution, and Atheism - basically arguing that a boy lost his faith due to evolutionary doctrine. It may be us, having told our kids so often that evolution is evil (because we were told it so ourselves), being the real cause of all this trouble. I got that link by email from someone, and for this person, "this link sums things up". To me, however, it sums up all the things that went wrong with these kind of arguments. These arguments are flawed. The whole attempt to equate evolution with evil is unjustified. Evil is a given we all understand, evolution is a recent finding, and nowhere is such a thing called evil in the Scriptures. The underlying thought that evolution makes God unnecessary is flawed just as well (and the fact that atheists style Dawkins use that as an argument against religion is stupid beyond words - and that's being very friendly to Mr Dawkins). It is in effect the same like saying: If babies would really be born through a natural process (as 'opposed' to being 'waved in the mothers womb' by God himself according to Psalm 139), you don't need God. Fortunately, we did not make that mistake - all those babies themselves prevented it from happening, by being born naturally. We have no trouble as Christians to synchronize this natural birth with the idea that human life is 'waved in the mothers womb' by God. Natural birth does not make God unnecessary. Why then are evolutionary mechanisms such a menace to so many of us?
Let me just add one example in concreto. It is a famous one: the example of human chromosome nr. 2 in comparison with orangutan, chimpanzee and gorillas (O/C/G for short). Humans have 23 pairs of chromosomes, the O/C/G have 24, the biggest difference being a long chromosome #2 in humans, where O/C/G have 2 short chromosomes in position 2 and 3. It turned out human chromosome nr. 2 was very convincingly identified as a fusion of the 2 short chromosomes in O/C/G (with an extra vestigial centromere region exactly at the location of the expected fusion, and even a telomere sequence - normally only found at the ends of chromosomes - in this very same fusion zone.
In a former post I have more or less argued that evolution is something like a fact, but interpretations can largely differ. What we call evolution is in fact evolution-as-pattern, or evolution-as-homology if you want: it is about the similarities between 'creatures'. Of course, classic evolution theory (evolution-as-ancestry if you want) explains the similarities as due to ancestry, and this is a very strong theoretical model, much more elaborated than creationism, and plausible by definition, although strictly speaking not proven. Now look at the fusion of chromosome 2 and 3 (in O/C/G) into one chromosome number 2 in humans. Strictly speaking, there's no proof that this happened 'via ancestry', but at a certain point, people must be honest, and recognize that at the very least, that is exactly what it looks like: a typical "messy evolution-like footprint" as someone called it.
Francis Collins (the well known Christian geneticist and former leader of the famous Human Genome Project) argues that we must not push God in a corner where He starts to look like someone playing odd games with us just 'to test our faith'. This will ultimately ridicule the God we believe in. In other words: it would look rather foolish if we would argue that human genome nr. 2 was constructed this way 'to test our faith'. Faith is not tested in this kind of way at all. What remains valid, however, is that there exists a theory, and you can accept it our you can doubt it. By no means however does this theory requires atheism (as the New Atheists are claiming with much religious zeal).
[Small update, Oct 21, 2008] I would not describe my position as that of a "theistic evolutionist" - because that terminology suggests creation-through-evolution. I do not see any requirement to understand it that way. I believe science is relevant, and good scientific theories, when stripped off their atheistic and materialistic or naturalistic bias, still point to patterns that look to me like evolution. This evolution I see as processes arranging the preconditions for Gods work, including the preconditions for a human being able to be a spiritual being. The story in Genesis 1 on the other hand is the account as it was relevant for mankind - for us - to understand our being here, as spiritual beings. We were created. How exactly to understand that creation on the basis of Genesis 1 is something we can only vaguely understand, although we may slowly grow in our understanding of it. I see no reason however to make scientific findings fit within Genesis 1. That just kills the story, in my opinion.
Conclusion
Why SHOULD there be problems with anything science discovers anyway? If you have an open mind, and you give God room to be God (not a God in your pocket, but a God far beyond your largely limited human interpretations and attempts to grasp nature, all of creation, and God above all), then there can be no problem.
Expose the whole evolution story to your imagination. If in the end you decide not to accept evolution as a possible thing of beauty for a Christian, well, that would be fine with me. Evolution is a concept valid for science, not a thing of great value for our daily life anyway. Also, the beauty of the universe, or genetics etc. is hardly impeded by the type of theory you are clinging to (although it may surprise you how beautiful the landscapes of evolution are, really). I would of course still love my friends anyway - no matter if you consider me a weirdo, or even scary, or misguided.(Poor Francis Collins - he's probably not scary, but even so misguided then). I've had conversations with friends who finished by saying that although they cannot see a Christian friend in me, "they would still treat me respectfully as a human being". Thank goodness! My family members did not throw me out of the house - they decided to treat me like a 'human being". Of course, sometimes, as a Christian, you have to consider yourself fortunate if the end result remains peaceful like this. But I always thought family life would be something more relevant.
Maybe that was just a dream.
Adam, made of dust
A question to Bible believers, to kick-off: did you ever ache for an encounter with Adam, or Eve? I mean, not the sexual lust that might have been provoked by some artistic depiction or so, but the wish for a real encounter?
Maybe some of us may have thought once in a while that it could be fun, or interesting. Maybe children may have thought for a while that it would be wonderful to talk with Adam, or with Eve (that may have something to do with storytelling to them). But from the Biblical narrative, I do not think much people would naturally feel tempted into aching for an encounter with these two giants of mankind. Why not? Simply because the first human couple in the Bible is not presented in any particularly amiable fashion. We don't know about any real conversation between them, there's just a distant reporting of the few things they said and did.
It is almost abstract. They are very different from hundreds of other characters in the Bible - including Jesus, someone described with many different and personal human characteristics.
Look at the word Adam: it refers to dust of the ground. Adam was formed from the adamah (=dust of the ground). Adam means red or red earth (a Babylonian word and the generic name for man in both Hebrew Assyrian languages), whereby red refers to the color of the dust of the earth. Denis Alexander remarks that "There is no earthier name than Adam" (Creation or Evolution - Do we have to choose? p.163) and he's also absolutely right by contrasting it with for instance the platonic concept (that leverages the spiritual as being higher than the material - a dualism fundamentally foreign to the Bible, although it appeared in Christianism later on, for instance through scholasticism).
Alexander identifies a "strikingly earthy materialism" in Genesis 1. That, of course, is not in the sense of ontological materialism - his point is that this God of the Jews has always been a God to Whom the body matters, suffering matters. This remains true even in Christianism if you read attentively. Even St John did not hesitate to wish his friend Gaius that he might be "doing well in every way and that you are healthy, just as your soul is healthy" (3Joh.1:2).
The abstract character of Adam is confirmed in other ways as well. The Hebrew word Adam never assumes any change to mark the dual or plural numbers ('men'). The word often has a definite article in Hebrew, in these chapters - so a correct translation would be: 'the man', being the representative which (personal names do not carry the definite article in Hebrew). That means that mankind could be a justified translation too. Later on however, Adam starts being used as a personal name, but not all the time. Those who are proud to read the Bible 'just as it is' must realize that reading is interpreting, and understanding interpretations will often require studying the text. However, from a more general point of view, there's nothing really difficult about understanding that the story here does not quite read like the story of a person like those you meet in a novel. There is something distinctly abstract about Adam & Eve.
Adam & Eve, subject of scientific study?
One could argue that there are many ways to explain why science has penetrated inside the Genesis 1 account. None of these are good reasons so it seems.
Maybe the seemingly abstract way of presenting Adam and Eve in Genesis 1 itself has tempted people to let science enter into the picture. The meaning of 'abstract' and 'scientific' may easily get mixed up in someone's mind. A scientific report may have an ABSTRACT to introduce the thesis - Genesis 1 could be the ABSTRACT of creationism. But only in the minds of creationists (creationism = the belief that the creation happened in a way that can be described in scientific terms). But then, of course, science in its modern shape did not even exist at that time, so that makes little sense.
On the other hand, in spite of this abstract character, Genesis 1 present us with what clearly looks like a 'modern human being'. The whole picture here is not a "the earth resting upon the shoulders of 4 elephants" kind of story. But this observation too could easily function as a catalyst, inviting science in the mix - if we start to see Adam & Eve as 'modern mankind' in an all too scientific fashion, thereby injecting Homo sapiens into the story - and that's back to square one. We must always be careful to accept scientific jargon in the mix. Homo sapiens, as I see it, should not be identified that quickly with Adam & Eve.
One could also presume that Adam & Eve might have understood the universe the way we did. And that in turn could quickly turn into yet another variant of the same theme: now we're making Adam a scientist of some sort (and Eve the first feminist-scientist, now that sounds good). But of course, this would require that Adam & Eve have been real persons, not an abstract representation of mankind. That could be the case - but even then, Genesis 1 seems to 'mask' these persons behind a rather abstract presentation, so we're lost again: our 'Adamic scientist' remains too vague to deliver clarity about his scientific status.
There's no science in Genesis 1, or at least it doesn't look like that by any standard. The chapter is 'true' so we believe, but that doesn't mean it's about science.
Adam & Eve in the course of time
The ability of the ancient Hebrews (and ancient Greeks as well) to trace history 4,5 billion years back in time was, of course, non-existing. Neither would they have been very interested in this matter, as there were more important things that still needed to be formulated at that time.
These huge amounts of time, by the way, are not very relevant from our perspective of religion. The calculations behind the theoretical time spans are okay, but the these 4,5 billion years are something no human being can really imagine. We are talking about mythical proportions here. Now there is nothing wrong with myths necessarily - they are records of history embedded within cultures - and myths usually contain a fair amount of truth there's no doubt about that among historians in general. But a myth does not suddenly stop being a myth just because an enormous amount of scientific thought and calculations happened to be thrown in. Evolution is an epic story just like the story of Creation. The sheer unimaginable amount of years compensates for an unimaginable God. Still, the calculations are okay. And so is the record of Genesis 1 to anyone who respects the ancient writings on religion. Religious reports are of course different from scientific ones.
Myths, by the way, are traditional stories about supernatural beings (or personifications of it in people) that narrates a common belief or explains some natural phenomenon. Does that sound much different from what a scientific theory is? Not to me - especially in mathematician's and physicist's views on the universe (including planet earth). The calculations in those great books from Stephen Hawking or Roger Penrose are good calculations - but they are what they are: calculations. Christian physicists do not see these formulas as offensive against the God idea, while militant atheists believe that God can be calculated off the table this way. Scientists like Lewontin also openly admit exactly that:
"It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counterintuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated." (R. Lewontin, 1997, Billions and billions of demons). Italics added.
The expression "no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated" can, of course, be read as "no matter how mythic". The 'initiated' are always initiated in one or a few particular domain(s) of knowledge - in this case highly reductionist domains of knowledge, as the scientific methodology requires.
The mythical component in science was identified by Hannah Arendt, in section 36 of her The Human Condition, as "The discovery of the Archimedean point", when mankind learned that he can actually act as if he stood at a point in the universe, far away from where human capabilities can ever bring him. This characterizes our 'modern age' and the beginning of the modern form of science, basically a cosmic science:
"Without actually standing where Archimedes wished to stand, still bound to the earth through the human condition, we have found a way [through mathematics] to act on the earth (...) as though we dispose of it from outside, from the Archimedean point" (p.262).
On the spot she also hints to the catastrophe's that have really been created already by doing so: "And even at the risk of endangering the natural life process we expose the earth to universal, cosmic forces alien to nature's household" (p.262). However, this is only to identify where a problem may rise, Arendt is nowhere 'panicking' about modern developments (and neither do I). She analyzes and interprets the situation as it is.
There is another way to approach this whole thing about time and space. Not only is it mythical in proportions, it is also largely irrelevant for the human lives we live. This is immediately confirmed if we look at how the narration of evolution time scales with regard to the modern human being we are. In the picture included at your left hand, this human being, the kind of being we would recognize as fully human, appears somewhere within a few millimeters at the top of the scale. Now look down the graphic, and you should also realize that the very last part of this graphic makes the jump from ca 0.5 billion years to 4.5 billion years in just a few inches - actually you should stretch that part out downward up to 8 times the length of the previous part, just to get an idea of the scale we are talking about.
J.F. Haught uses the example of an imaginary bookshelf of 30 volumes, each 450 pages long, every page representing 1 million years of cosmic time. (Together this makes 13500 pages; Haught is referring to the approximately 13,7 billion years since the Big Bang - that would be page 1). The appearance of modern mankind, thinking and able to express thought, would be found on the last page, last paragraph, of volume 30. That is comparable to the last millimeters at the top of the graphic at the left, but then stretched out 8x longer.
Some people will try to counter that by talking about the appearance of life on earth - according to the most recent estimates about about 3,8 billion years ago. But that is totally irrelevant to the story of 'modern mankind'. It takes a long, long time before we arrive at something more complex (the Cambriam explosion), but what we need is the emergence of thought. Thought is not equal to language but clearly needs language to express it. Although some scientists assume a large period of pre-language between the Great ape language (not really consistent with our normal definitions of language) and human language, there is nothing in the Lower Paleolithic and even Middle Paleolithic eras that clearly points to thought or language as we know it. The Neanderthals have of course always been overestimated a bit (see former articles) but even while they may have been anatomically capable of producing sounds similar to modern human beings at some point in time, genetics have thrown out the Neanderthal from our direct ancestor tree anyway. Moreover, linguists generally agree that there are no existing primitive languages: all modern human populations speak languages of comparable complexity. The appearance of thought brings us inevitably at the point where Homo Sapiens appears on the scene as a modern human being.
So from a humanist perspective, what is all the fuss about? That would be a fully justified, reasonable question - although I will not do an attempt to answer it. These amounts of pre-human time do not disturb me at all. What disturbs me is people who make a lot of fuss about the fact that Genesis 1 seems to spend hardly 1 verse about all those pages prior to the last one (IF Genesis 1:1 speaks about pre-history anyway, that is), and all the other verses and pages of the Bible are telling the story of mankind. What's wrong with that? Isn't that what religion has always been about, after all? And shouldn't science have been much better served if scientists stick to their last? Ne sutor ultra crepidam.
Abiogenesis in Genesis 1?
My own perception about Genesis 1 would be that whenever we speak about the so-called formation of life from non-living matter (abiogenesis, from the Greek a-bio-genesis, meaning non biological origins), it can be thought of as entirely outside the scope of Genesis 1 - and it may have taken as many billions of years as the calculus of evolutionary thought requires for the theory to fit with the data. The origin of life may be chemical in terms of science, but the discovery in Genesis 1 clearly starts at a point where chemicals hardly matter and other values of life - real life, full life - and the expression of it in thought and language, starts to emerge.
As far as I am concerned, there's nothing absurd about the so-called 'primeval soup' where scientists identify our origin in chemical terms. I would even think it to be nice they didn't call it earth (Adam) - but soup. The really absurd thing is not in this soup, but with those people who feel proud while they turn this soup into a 'primeval soap series' by their zealous insistence that Genesis 1 be replaced with the religiously and spiritually void 12499 pages (in the illustration by Haught) in evolution. It's as if they are angry at religion for only being interested in the modern humans we are. Never mind that it's these very same modern humans - and them alone - who have shown their ability to discover the traces of those 12400 pages. No Great Ape comes even as close as to pronounce the first word of it - let alone understand.
Be it so that the meteorite bombardment on planet earth slowed down some 4 billion years ago, resulting in conditions suitable for the appearance of life some 3,8 billion years ago - that's fine with me. I don't have to fight the meteorites anyway. And seeing their past impact on the moon (where the craters were not subject to erosion and tectonic motion) may or may not amaze me more than observing the fact that the moon has a 'face'. The advantage of the 'fact' of the face of the moon is, that you can make a child happy with that - while no scientists will make a child happy by insisting that he has all the great calculations about when exactly these craters came into being.
It's about the folks, stupid. (No, that's no quotation from Genesis 1 - the Hebrews were much more polite than I am, they simply wrote down how God created mankind amidst all the beauty of nature - eroded craters not mentioned, but their amazement about creation was no lesser because of it.
The ancient Hebrews understood some things way better than some haughty weirdoes behaving like calculators on legs today so it seems. What 'species' have we become? We shouldn't have become 'species' to begin with.
How exactly evolved what we call 'life'? What kind of 'life' are we talking about anyway? Let the scientists do their work - most of us are no scientists. If you're a believer, or otherwise interested in what ancient people thought about God and mankind, life and death and responsibility and so on, here's your Book. You can abuse it just like anything else, or you can enjoy it and try to get into it, with openness of mind.
Creation - How exactly?
How exactly have Adam and Eve been "shaped" by God?
I'm not even considering an attempt to explain the possibilities at this point. Not because there are too many, but because it would distract you from your own imagination. Of course you can read Denis Alexander's Creation or Evolution - Do we have to choose (a good place to start). But an even better place to start is, to make up your mind, ask yourself where you would really see any problems with regard to faith.
Okay, you are not used to this. That's probably a fact. But do not use excuses like those used in this story about 17-Year-Olds, Evolution, and Atheism - basically arguing that a boy lost his faith due to evolutionary doctrine. It may be us, having told our kids so often that evolution is evil (because we were told it so ourselves), being the real cause of all this trouble. I got that link by email from someone, and for this person, "this link sums things up". To me, however, it sums up all the things that went wrong with these kind of arguments. These arguments are flawed. The whole attempt to equate evolution with evil is unjustified. Evil is a given we all understand, evolution is a recent finding, and nowhere is such a thing called evil in the Scriptures. The underlying thought that evolution makes God unnecessary is flawed just as well (and the fact that atheists style Dawkins use that as an argument against religion is stupid beyond words - and that's being very friendly to Mr Dawkins). It is in effect the same like saying: If babies would really be born through a natural process (as 'opposed' to being 'waved in the mothers womb' by God himself according to Psalm 139), you don't need God. Fortunately, we did not make that mistake - all those babies themselves prevented it from happening, by being born naturally. We have no trouble as Christians to synchronize this natural birth with the idea that human life is 'waved in the mothers womb' by God. Natural birth does not make God unnecessary. Why then are evolutionary mechanisms such a menace to so many of us?
Let me just add one example in concreto. It is a famous one: the example of human chromosome nr. 2 in comparison with orangutan, chimpanzee and gorillas (O/C/G for short). Humans have 23 pairs of chromosomes, the O/C/G have 24, the biggest difference being a long chromosome #2 in humans, where O/C/G have 2 short chromosomes in position 2 and 3. It turned out human chromosome nr. 2 was very convincingly identified as a fusion of the 2 short chromosomes in O/C/G (with an extra vestigial centromere region exactly at the location of the expected fusion, and even a telomere sequence - normally only found at the ends of chromosomes - in this very same fusion zone.
In a former post I have more or less argued that evolution is something like a fact, but interpretations can largely differ. What we call evolution is in fact evolution-as-pattern, or evolution-as-homology if you want: it is about the similarities between 'creatures'. Of course, classic evolution theory (evolution-as-ancestry if you want) explains the similarities as due to ancestry, and this is a very strong theoretical model, much more elaborated than creationism, and plausible by definition, although strictly speaking not proven. Now look at the fusion of chromosome 2 and 3 (in O/C/G) into one chromosome number 2 in humans. Strictly speaking, there's no proof that this happened 'via ancestry', but at a certain point, people must be honest, and recognize that at the very least, that is exactly what it looks like: a typical "messy evolution-like footprint" as someone called it.
Francis Collins (the well known Christian geneticist and former leader of the famous Human Genome Project) argues that we must not push God in a corner where He starts to look like someone playing odd games with us just 'to test our faith'. This will ultimately ridicule the God we believe in. In other words: it would look rather foolish if we would argue that human genome nr. 2 was constructed this way 'to test our faith'. Faith is not tested in this kind of way at all. What remains valid, however, is that there exists a theory, and you can accept it our you can doubt it. By no means however does this theory requires atheism (as the New Atheists are claiming with much religious zeal).
[Small update, Oct 21, 2008] I would not describe my position as that of a "theistic evolutionist" - because that terminology suggests creation-through-evolution. I do not see any requirement to understand it that way. I believe science is relevant, and good scientific theories, when stripped off their atheistic and materialistic or naturalistic bias, still point to patterns that look to me like evolution. This evolution I see as processes arranging the preconditions for Gods work, including the preconditions for a human being able to be a spiritual being. The story in Genesis 1 on the other hand is the account as it was relevant for mankind - for us - to understand our being here, as spiritual beings. We were created. How exactly to understand that creation on the basis of Genesis 1 is something we can only vaguely understand, although we may slowly grow in our understanding of it. I see no reason however to make scientific findings fit within Genesis 1. That just kills the story, in my opinion.
Conclusion
Why SHOULD there be problems with anything science discovers anyway? If you have an open mind, and you give God room to be God (not a God in your pocket, but a God far beyond your largely limited human interpretations and attempts to grasp nature, all of creation, and God above all), then there can be no problem.
Expose the whole evolution story to your imagination. If in the end you decide not to accept evolution as a possible thing of beauty for a Christian, well, that would be fine with me. Evolution is a concept valid for science, not a thing of great value for our daily life anyway. Also, the beauty of the universe, or genetics etc. is hardly impeded by the type of theory you are clinging to (although it may surprise you how beautiful the landscapes of evolution are, really). I would of course still love my friends anyway - no matter if you consider me a weirdo, or even scary, or misguided.(Poor Francis Collins - he's probably not scary, but even so misguided then). I've had conversations with friends who finished by saying that although they cannot see a Christian friend in me, "they would still treat me respectfully as a human being". Thank goodness! My family members did not throw me out of the house - they decided to treat me like a 'human being". Of course, sometimes, as a Christian, you have to consider yourself fortunate if the end result remains peaceful like this. But I always thought family life would be something more relevant.
Maybe that was just a dream.