S2 E7: The Beginning of Life According to Science

Season 2 of Spirit-Led Hope looks at the origin story of our universe and life from both the naturalistic and Christian perspective. In this episode, Glenn continues with the naturalistic perspective for the beginning and development of life on Earth.  Because this is a high-level view, only basic scientific principles are referenced.

This episode has a transcript. If your podcast player does not support transcripts, please go to the podcast section of https://spiritledhope.com/ .  

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 S2 E7 TRANSCRIPT 

THE BEGINNING OF LIFE ACCORDING TO SCIENCE

INTRODUCTION

Hello everyone and welcome to Spirit-Led Hope. My name is Glenn Erichsen, and in this episode, we are talking about:

THE BEGINNING OF LIFE ACCORDING TO SCIENCE

Before we get started in this episode, I want to clarify a couple of things about this Season. In looking back through my notes, I realize that I often use the phrase, “according to science.” I want to make sure that every listener understands that what I am doing in this Season, is a comparison between the Biblical account of Creation and secular naturalistic science. 

In other words, I am talking about science from the perspective of a secular naturalist. I want to acknowledge and remind everyone that all scientists are not naturalists, or we might say materialists. Many scientists are Christians or have beliefs that include a spiritual world…something beyond nature. As I pointed out in previous episodes, Christians have been instrumental in forming many of our modern-day scientific beliefs. So, when I talk about a perspective from science, I do not mean to imply that science is inherently a naturalistic practice that cannot include God. That is simply the perspective we are examining in Season 2.

The second thing I want to clarify is that in this Season I am not trying to explain every scientific theory having to do with the origins of the universe and life. That would be far beyond both the scope of this podcast and my abilities. 

While I am competent in many areas of science and engineering, no one person can understand everything we are talking about. My goal is to provide enough high-level information to adequately compare the account of Creation in Genesis to the theories proposed in naturalistic science. I am expecting you to follow up with your own studies if this is something that interests you. There are many resources available, and I am pointing to some of them in this series.

THE SEQUENCE OF LIFE

In looking at life on Earth, I want to start out by giving the sequence in which life developed. This is something we will refer to in a later episode when we compare the Biblical account of Creation to the accepted naturalistic explanation. After we look at the sequence of life, we will get into some more details.

If this interests you, you can find many websites and books on the topic. One web resource is the “Encyclopedia of Life” hosted by the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History.

I gave a preview in the last episode and said that life started on Earth about 3.7 to 3.8 billion years ago. This is very early in the Earth’s history because we said that, according to science, the Earth started about 4.5 billion years ago. 

The first life was very basic and tiny. And by tiny, I mean microscopic. But we see evidence of this life in rocks dating back to about 3.7 billion years ago.

Over time, these microbes evolved into a form of life called cyanobacteria. The remarkable thing is that cyanobacteria can perform photosynthesis. When cyanobacteria came on the scene about 2.3 to 2.5 billion years ago, they started cranking out oxygen. 

In the last episode I mentioned that the Great Oxygenation Event made the atmosphere transparent. It is believed that the rapid multiplication of cyanobacteria was responsible for the increase of oxygen in the Earth’s atmosphere. In other words, early life started shaping the atmosphere into the form we know today.

Although life started out small, cells began to form and cluster together. Different cells were then able to perform specialized operations. The first multicellular life in the form of plants and fungi appeared between 700 million and 1.3 billion years ago.

Now, as cell structures continued to advance, the first simple animals like sponges appeared around 700 million years ago. According to the fossil record, around 530 million years ago there was a rapid increase in new life forms. This is called the Cambrian Explosion. At Burgess Shale in British Columbia, that is a province in Canada, many of these new animals were fossilized and we can observe today what those animals looked like.

As time continued, more complex life developed. I am just going to list some of the starting times for various life forms…keep in mind that all these times are approximate and subject to change. I tried to pick representative dates, but these dates do change according to the sources of material I examined.

·        Modern-type plants…began around 700 million years ago

·        Amphibians…approximately 360 million years ago

·        Reptiles, right after that…at about 350 million years ago

·        Mammals…around 200 million years ago

·        And birds appeared…about 150 million years ago

You will notice that I have not yet specifically mentioned humans. Where do we fit on this list? This is an interesting question.

If you go online and start searching for the answer to that question, you will find all sorts of different answers. Some people will say that the first human ancestors were apelike creatures who appeared between 5 and 7 million years ago. Others will not go so far back in time and might say something like 2 million years ago.

Part of the difficulty in defining human origins is that the definition of a human is not always clear. What makes us human? Is it our anatomy? Or is it our ability to think in ways unrivaled by any other life form that exists on Earth?

I am not going to try and answer that question here, but simply point out that from an anatomical perspective, it is generally accepted that modern day humans appeared around 200 to 300 thousand years ago. When it comes to cognitive ability, the beginning seems less clear. How can we know what someone was thinking 200,000 years ago, right? Well, we cannot. But we can look at evidence like art and burial customs, things like that. For example, some anthropologists propose that religion in some form began 50 to 200,000 years ago. Maybe we can use an indicator like that. But for now, let us just say that humans appeared on Earth around 200,000 years ago.

EVOLUTION AND NATURAL SELECTION

What we just discussed was the sequence of life from the very simple to the very complex. But how did that happen? And here we need to discuss the theory of evolution and natural selection. 

In principle, evolution through means of natural selection is not hard to understand. Through random, unguided mutation or other means, genetic changes take place in an organism, and if these changes give an advantage to the organism, they will be maintained and passed on to the offspring. So, for example, we are observing evolution in real-time with COVID-19 as new variants pop up. The most successful strains will probably be with us for a very long time.

An important point about evolution is that genetic changes are unguided. There is no intelligence or preplanning to bring about a certain change. It is natural selection that determines if a change succeeds or not.

As a reminder, here I am speaking from the perspective of a secular naturalist. Evolution with natural selection allows a very simple organism to evolve over time into something very complex. Remember those first microbes 3.7 billion years ago we mentioned? Over millions of years, small changes occurred. If a microbe experienced something that allowed it to thrive, and that change was preserved, a new form of life could emerge. Multicellular organisms came about this way. As cells randomly specialized and gave an advantage to an organism, different types of animals with tissue and organs emerged. This is what the theory says, and when you examine the sequence of life we started with in this episode, that is what you see…a steady transformation from something simple to the diverse and spectacular display of life as we know it.

In 1859, Charles Darwin’s book was published that described the theory of evolution through natural selection. Most people know this book as “The Origin of the Species,” but its full title is “On the Origin of the Species by Means of Natural Selection or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life.” That is a long title, and the second half of it is not without controversy. That might be a good topic for another episode.

Because of this book, Darwin goes down in history as the man who explained the diversity of life as we know it without the need for a Creator. There is irony in this as Darwin was raised as a Christian and throughout his life entertained theistic and deistic thoughts. At the time of his death, he seemed to consider himself more of an agnostic. In hindsight it seems clear that Darwin was not an atheist. But it also seems clear that he was not a believer in God.

This is not as well known, but a man by the name of Alfred Russel Wallace came up with the idea of natural selection independently of Darwin. The two of them became friends and Wallace was a big fan of Darwin. Wallace did not seem to mind that Darwin got credit for the theory. Wallace was so generous he was in favor of using the term “Darwinism,” for evolution, even if it minimized his contributions even more.

Interestingly, Wallace was a spiritualist and did not believe that natural selection could account for the human spirit. Wallace believed that humans had a spirit, and that the spirit did not perish at death. Wallace and Darwin could never agree on this topic.

COUNTERPOINTS TO EVOLUTION

If you do your own research on the theory of evolution and natural selection, you will find some very bold statements. You will see statements to the effect that evolution is no longer a theory, but an established scientific fact. Others may not be willing to go that far, but the general agreement in the world of education is that evolution and natural selection accurately define our origins as humans. This is what we teach in schools, right?

I do not want to get side-tracked into a discussion about public education, but I do want to end this episode with some checks and balances. As a Christian with a scientific education, I do see elements of truth in the theory of evolution. However, science also calls for a fair representation of empirical evidence that may refute a theory or belief. I want to quickly present two counterpoints to what we have talked about in this episode.

The first counterpoint has to do with the limitation of evolution. If you think that evolution describes the origin of life, then you probably have fallen into a very common misconception. If you think back on what I said earlier, I pointed out that microbes first appeared about 3.7 billion years ago, and then I launched into the introduction of new life forms that followed.  

What I did not do is describe how that first life began. Darwinian evolution can only take place once life is present. And this is a critical limitation that often gets overlooked. Many assume that because there are examples that support evolution without the need for God, that God automatically is not required to get life started. And this is an incorrect assumption. You can argue that God did not start life, but you cannot use evolution to support that statement.  Evolution has nothing to say about lifeless chemical reactions.

So how did the first life begin? Well, there are a lot of ideas, but no one knows for sure. Some experiments try to duplicate the chemistry of the early Earth and then show that amino acids can form under the right conditions. Since amino acids are used as building blocks for the proteins life needs, the idea is that at some moment, just the right conditions occurred, and life began. Somehow, inert chemicals became living organisms that sustained themselves and reproduced.

Recently, I have seen several research papers that try to explain how the first cells formed. But again, it is all conjecture. Some people believe that it must be easy for life to start because it happened early in the history of the Earth. Others calculate that we just got lucky and are the one in a billion billion chance where life began.

Another common idea right now is that life on Earth started outside of the solar system. With this theory, life began in some other place and then was transported to Earth by a comet or asteroid impact. But that does not really solve anything, it just puts the problem of Earth’s origins somewhere else.

Again, there is no known mechanism that explains the origins of life on the Earth. At best, a naturalist can say that life must be able to start on its own, because we are here. We may be here by luck, but our presence means that life can begin on its own. If you have decided that there is nothing outside of the natural world, this is the conclusion you will most likely reach.

The second counterpoint I want to talk about is the problem of information. In our era of technology, we now know a great deal about DNA. I don’t know about you, but I am fascinated when DNA helps solve cold case crimes. DNA has unique information for each one of us.

We know that DNA stores information and instructions for building the proteins organisms need to develop and reproduce. Bill Gates said that “DNA is like a computer program but far, far more advanced than any software created.”

Evolution and natural selection are unable to explain the origins of this information. And yet it is genetic changes in DNA that fuel evolution. I mentioned earlier the “Encyclopedia of Life” website sponsored by the Smithsonian Institute. Let me read what they posted, and keep in mind this is written from a naturalistic perspective…this is what they wrote:

“The assembly instructions for an animal’s body plan are in its genes. Some genes act like orchestra conductors, controlling the expression of many other genes at specific places and times to correctly assemble the components. While they were not played out immediately, there is evidence that parts of instructions for complex bodies were present even in the earliest animals.”

I do not know if you caught that, but instructions for complex animals were present in the DNA long before those animals existed! In other words, whole sections of DNA were programmed to create new body types that came into existence later. This is much more than a random genetic change retained by natural selection. How does that happen? 

The unexplained existence of information and coding in DNA has led both Christians and some naturalists to conclude that DNA gives evidence for a designer. For the Christian, that designer is God. For the naturalist, that designer must be something other than God. Because God is off the table, some naturalists have proposed life on Earth was started by advanced aliens. That may sound funny, but if God is not allowed, you must find intelligence somewhere to explain the evidence.

I mention these two counterpoints to make it clear that naturalists do not have all the answers. Many people not acquainted with science simply accept that the evidence is overwhelmingly in favor of naturalism. But a fair investigation shows this is not the case.

CLOSING

Over the last four episodes we have walked down the halls of naturalism. I know that for some of you, that was a long walk. We looked at the origins of the universe and life according to naturalism, and now it is time to look at the Biblical text.

In our next episode, we will look at our beginnings from the perspective of the Bible.

As always, if you have any comments, suggestions, or questions, please email me at glenn@spiritledhope.com, or simply use the Contact Form at spiritledhope.com. That is spiritledhope.com.

As we close this episode:

May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace as you trust in him, so that you may overflow with hope, by the power of the Holy Spirit. 

Until next episode, take care.

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