Then God said, "Let the land produce vegetation: seed-bearing plants and trees on the land that bear fruit with seed in it, according to their various kinds." And it was so. The land produced vegetation: plants bearing seed according to their kinds and trees bearing fruit with seed in it according to their kinds. And God saw that it was good. And there was evening, and there was morning - the third day. (Genesis 1:11-13)We can see here that God created vegetative life before He created the fish, birds and other more evolved creatures. Does this mean that the evolutionary process was supported by God?
What were the first life forms?
Modern scientists theorize that the first forms of life were single-celled amoebas, such as plankton from water. While that makes logical sense, there are two issues to consider. The first is that if a teacher would have told a person thousands of years ago that the single-celled creatures were first, no one would understand what they were referring to. The information would have not made any sense. The second is that the beginning of plant life - zooplankton - is a single-celled creature.We must remember that ancient scriptures such as this were passed down through the generations for many centuries in the oral tradition. This means that a teacher would communicate this information to their students. At some point, the information was put into written form, 3,000 to 5,000 years ago.
As the information was being passed down from teacher to student, allegory and symbolism were used in order to communicate the central message: That God created the physical universe and all the living organisms within it.
We also can understand from the text that simple organisms in the form of vegetation - zooplankton, spores and so on - were created before the more complex species such as fish, birds, mammals, and humans. This indicates that God certainly supported the mechanics of evolution.
We can also see this from the phrase, "...according to their various kinds": This indicates that God programmed into the physical universe the element of diversity.
As our scientists have determined, every living organism is equipped with a genetic structure that can produce changes in the organism over time to increase that organism's ability to survive.
But where did DNA come from?
Did DNA accidentally appear through an accidental arrangement of molecules?The renowned geneticist and co-discoverer of DNA, Dr. Francis Crick, agreed that this is highly unlikely. He said:
"An accidental formation of DNA from a batch of chemicals might be compared to dropping 1000 typewriters and 1000 illiterate monkeys out of an airplane and expecting the books of the Library of Congress to be typed up and ready for printing when they all hit the ground."
Furthermore, another peer-reviewed geneticist calculated the change of even one accidental genetic mutation of DNA. His calculations established that the odds of only one accidental favorable mutation occurring was on the order of 10 to the power of 3,000. That means:
One chance in
1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.
That is just one accidental mutation. Now to get from a microbe to a human will take billions of successive mutations. And each of these billion would have the same chance of occurring. That means we'd have to multiply 10 to the power of 3,000 times a billion to get the chance of microbes developing accidentally into humans.
In other words, by scientific calculation, we have determined that it is next to impossible that chemicals accidentally developed DNA, and life accidentally mutated from one species to the next, from microbes to humans.
DNA and the evolution of species - which is being inferred in Genesis by this narration that plants and zooplankton preceded more complex species, was the result of the intelligent programming of God.
Isn't that what DNA is: a programming code? We use a similar system of on-off states - called the binary code - for computer programming. This is an almost identical format that DNA uses, with four amino acids assembled in different order. This order indicates particular intelligent assembly: programming, in other words. This simply means that God uses a quaternary (4) programming code format instead of a binary (2) code format as we use in computers.
Just as a programmer originally set up the binary system of on-off states for the computer's programming, God set up the quaternary programming for the DNA sequence, which allowed for more complex programming instructions.
What about evolution?
The evolutionary process, of course, took millions of years to occur, and this is confirmed by carbon dating systems. But what is a million years to God? Is it a week? A year? Perhaps a day? In other words, as discussed previously, time is relative to the person and condition. In the case of God, God is beyond time and space. He is not governed by time. So the use of the "day" here is simply allegorical and indicates a much longer period in human-relative time.We must distinguish this God-programmed evolution from the theories of modern-day Darwinists who have speculated that life originally arose accidentally from chemicals, and continued to evolve accidentally from the microbes to humans. Besides the issue of chance (assuming all these mathematically-impossible accidents did happen), does their theory have scientific validity?
First, we must ask what is the driving force behind genetic mutation according to these scientists? It is the innate desire for survival (also called survival of the fittest). So the question becomes, how did a bunch of dead chemicals develop an innate desire for survival? Where did that come from? Certainly, chemicals have no such principle.
There is absolutely no logic to this notion because dead chemicals combined together must first be able to distinguish between life and death before they could have a desire for survival. They must be afraid to die, in other words. This fear of death is the only motivation for the species to want to develop better organs or appendages in order to fight off death.
But how could a batch of chemicals discern between life and death, and the desire to survive? For a batch of chemicals, remaining dead would be the more logical inertia, since dead chemicals do not have to fight to survive. Therefore, there is no scientific validity that chemicals could develop the desire to survive - the fundamental requirement for genetic mutation.
Where did life come from?
So where did this spark of life, which has an innate desire to survive come from? There is only one logical conclusion: It must have come from a living source. Something already alive must have impregnated matter with this living spark, which maintains an innate desire to survive. This living Source, of course, is God.Every living organism contains a tiny spark of life. These are transcendental living individuals who have been impregnated into each organism. And the reason every organism struggles to stay alive is that this transcendental living individual originates from a place where there is no death: This is the spiritual dimension.
This is also why we all go through life in denial that we are going to die. Most of us live life as though we will never die. Yet scientifically we can establish that every physical organism dies. So why do we emotionally deny this fact? Because we are eternal by nature. By nature, we are transcendental to the physical universe.
Why is the spiritual individual here in this temporary physical world then? Why are we here?
Each of us has been impregnated into the physical universe because the physical universe is a place of learning. It is a rehabilitation center for those spiritual individuals who could not maintain the consciousness of the spiritual dimension.
And what is that consciousness? It is the consciousness of love. Those of us living in the physical universe are here because we became self-centered. We became envious. We no longer wanted to be citizens of the spiritual world: We didn't want to serve God: We became envious of God.
Consider another translation for these verses in Chapter One of the New Book of Genesis.
