4gi) An Alternate View of Evolution
Now there is another evolutionist view of things, which agrees that mutations cannot account for the world around us, but still attempts to avoid attributing origins to an intelligent God. It is called, the Gaia hypothesis, which was first proposed in the 1970s by James Lovelock. It states that the sum of life optimizes the environment for its own purposes. We see evidence of this on a planetary scale. Oxygen in our atmosphere is regulated by the planet's life forms to stay between 16% and 21 %. If it goes too high, then a spark or lightning bolt will cause massive fires and burn up some of the biosphere’s oxygen. If it goes too low, then Carbon Dioxide breathing plants will increase and produce more oxygen.
Now Dr Lynn Margulis, a renown biologist and
former wife of atheist astronomer Dr Carl Sagan, has proposed a new twist she
calls, "Symbiogenesis". Symbiosis, a term coined by German botanist
Anton deBaryin 1873, refers to very different kinds of organisms living
together. She feels that in certain cases, long-term living in cohabitation
results in symbiogenesis - the formation of new bodies, new organs, and new
species or organisms by symbiotic mergers. Dr Margulis believes that new
genetic material and novel life forms arose and are still arising, directly
from symbiosis.
She sees the symbiotic earth not as a single living organism, but as a huge set
of interacting ecosystems transcending all individual organisms. She, like all
evolutionists, has the Big Question Mark at the beginning of her sequence of
evolving events. However, once the process got started (somehow coming out of
nothing without an intelligent creator being) life appeared and it had all the
ingredients needed to drive it to build all the more complicated life forms we
see around us.
Serial Endosymbiosis Theory (SET) is a theory of merging cells of different histories and abilities. Before serial endosymbiosis and the establishment of the aerobic nucleated cell, no cell-fusion sex existed. Meiotic sex, like that of the egg fertilized by the sperm, came later. "Serial endosymbiosis," she suggests," made our kind of fusion sex possible. Sex too, is the merging of cells of different histories and abilities. In sex, the cells that fuse are closely related and the fusion is reversible; in serial endosymbiosis the cells that fuse are only distantly related, and the fusion is permanent." (Symbiotic Planet, pages 32-34).
Dr Margulis has a theory for the sybiogenetic origin of plants and animals from primitive forms of bacteria that merged in a specific order to become a new, more complex organism. It's a very deep subject and too much for anyone not well versed in the science of biology and micro-organisms. Yet, I want to outline the initial premise so we can appreciate it and compare it to our creation model. I'll paraphrase her writings in, "Symbiotic Planet" so that I don't misrepresent them.
"Symbionts merge entirely and form a new individual being". This is evolution by symbiogenesis. She hypothesizes that it all could have started with four different kinds of bacteria, which arrived on the scene in some unknown way. Here's what her SET theory suggests happened next:
1) A sulfur- and heat-loving kind of bacteria merged with a swimming bacteria. Together the two components of the integrated merger became the nucleocytoplasm, the basic substance of the ancestors of animal, plant, and fungal cells. This earliest swimming protist (nucleated microorganism) was anaerobic, ie poisoned by oxygen. It had to survive in organic-rich muds, rocks, etc where oxygen was scarce.
2) Mitosis, with its many variations in protoctist and fungal cells with nuclei evolved in the earliest organisms with nuclei. After mitosis evolved in swimming protists, another type of free-living microbe, an oxygen-breathing bacterium, was incorporated into the merger and even larger more complex cells arose. The cell now became capable of eating particulate food. She sees these swimming and oxygen-breathing cells with nuclei first appearing on the earth 2 billion years ago.
3) United, the subtle swimmer, the acid- and heat-tolerant archaebacterium, and the oxygen breather now formed a single individual and prolifically generated myriad offspring.
4) The fourth partner was the bright green photosynthetic bacteria, which the three-component cells would engulf, but fail to digest. The undigested green bacteria survived to eventually merge giving rise to swimming green algae. They are the ancestors of today's plant cells and all their individual components are still alive today.
So, extra genes in the cytoplasm of animal, plant, and other nucleated cells originated as bacterial genes. She goes on to hypothesize that "all nucleated organisms (protoctists, plants, fungi, and animals) arose by symbiogenesis when archaebacteria fused with ancestors of centriole-kinetosomes in the evolution of the ultimate protoctist ancestor: the nucleated cell."
In layman's terms, the "bacteria" did it all and that's why we have bacteria in our digestion process, in our skin and so on. We can't live without them, because they created us to help them survive. But they can live without us as evidenced when we die and our bodies return to the earth from which they were formed.
My spin on this is that we can observe how bacteria are crucial to our existence, but I do not see those pieces of observable evidence adding up to the SET theory. Is there any hard evidence that new genetic material is being produced today? This theory still starts with life already existing. Life combining with other life to form new organisms over enormous periods of time, still cannot explain the origin of life. This theory is just another way of looking for the answers at the microscopic level. Could the final product, eg the human eye, survive during the processes where bacteria are developing them over millions of years? How could thought originate in this fashion? What about those complicated dances that honey bees perform when they communicate the location of the honey they found. How could birds develop to navigate using the earth's magnetic field, over eons. Where are the intermediate forms and how can they survive while under development? The human ear won't work at all if any part of the complex and interactive process with the rest of the body and the brain is missing. Identical-looking cells each having different functions all come together to form an extremely complex system. What intelligence drives this magic? Whatever that intelligence is, it has to be there in the beginning as well.
Yes, we are living with bacteria, but I suggest that God created us that way, back in Genesis 2, where He revealed that we were made from the dirt and will return to the dirt. This form was always intended to be temporary. I say that the Big Question Mark, Who precedes Dr Margulis' SET, is an intelligent Creator being with a very logical rationale for creating us mortal; and He didn't need to wait 2 billion years for it all to come together. He created it all that way at the start, just as He revealed. If He had wanted us to persist in human form forever after, He would have done it differently, as He did for the angels. What God always does, however, is to give incredible attention to details. He tells us that we will understand what an awesome God He is, if we will investigate His work. We can investigate it at the macroscopic level and at the microscopic level and the details we find always testify to His creative genius. Some scientists are looking so hard for evidence that disproves a Creator being, that they will accept any alternative explanation.
With the Thinker-God model, we can say with certainty, that there is a rational explanation based on a God with a plan. There is a supreme intelligence at work and yes there have been some supernatural events that originated this universe. However, it was not supernatural for the God Who did it. As far as we can see, once He started it, all the processes have followed logic and the laws of physics, which we can observe today, without the need for miracles. What the Bible says about the events that we were not around to witness, does fit the observable facts, once you recognize that God is a real, personal being. Our model of the Thinking God makes believing in creation as scientific as any alternate theory, and it doesn't have the Big Question Mark at the origin of things. All theories should be using the scientific method to test themselves in terms of the observable evidence.
Ms Kelly said that, "science is not just a collection of facts about the natural world, but a tightly integrated set of facts and theories - well supported explanations derived by testing hypotheses. The conclusions of science, I emphasize, are tentative and open to falsification. There must be some line of evidence conceivable that, if discovered, would disprove a scientific theory. Because explanations involving the supernatural cannot be tested or falsified, science cannot employ supernatural explanations. Science cannot confirm or deny the existence of the supernatural, or a Creator. Such questions are simply beyond the realm of science."
[Note that having the big question mark at the beginning allows for unlimited new hypotheses and scientific papers, just as building theologies based on unexplained mysteries allows for unlimited new religions. This is why we will always have so many different theories until enough of the facts are understood.]
Indeed the conclusions about evolution being the best explanation for the existence of life on this planet are open to falsification. We've shown that there is no hard observable evidence to support the basic premises of this theory. Until theistic evolutionists can demonstrate that life can come from non-life, they have no excuse for not attributing that miracle to the Creator God, Who they admit created the original non-life.
Even though science cannot confirm or deny the existence of a personal God, science can admit that there had to be a First Cause that Itself had no cause. As we said in chapter 1, science cannot require we be at infinity to prove something, but it can deal with theories involving more than three dimensions. The First Cause must have additional dimensions.
Finally, science demands the use of logic in place of passion. The logic we have been using does follow the scientific method. We have a "tightly integrated set of facts and theories - well supported explanations derived by testing hypotheses." Our tests are just as scientific as those things we would do if we were trying to prove that a sufficiently advanced technology was responsible for something that appeared to be miraculous to us. For example, we don't know what is happening at the "molecular level". We don't know if such things as molecules even exist; but if they do, are they matter, energy, both, or neither? Yet we can model them and develop equations for electricity, which work as expected with great precision, without ever seeing an electron. We feel that we are being "scientific" in the process because we get results.
Likewise, we don't have answers for how those "electrons" emit electromagnetic radiation, but we have a working science about radio communications. Furthermore, we know almost nothing about how thought works, but we know we can think and the plants cannot.
When we start with a thinking God with a plan, then everything we see and everything we read in His "user manual" Bible makes sense and fits together well. Test it as you like and it works. Review the tough questions that theistic evolutionists also want to answer and see how our model fully answers them. In section 5d & section 5e we'll look at how this model also resolves those credible stories about witnessing paranormal events, speaking with spiritual entities, mental telepathy, and telekinesis. These incidences, as strange as they seem to us, are fully logical given the existence of the thinking God and another world with more than three dimensions.
It's just a fact that there really is more to our God (more dimensions) than is dreamed of in our three dimensional philosophies. Plus the Bible has stood the test of time without having to retract a word. It has accurately predicted the future enough times to be statistically incredible without ever making a mistake. This demands an explanation, but you won't find it without first recognizing the existence of our thinking God. Instead, you'll always have those big question marks at the origin of your models.
26 July 2001, relocated 19 Nov 2004
For more on this and a response to any questions, email any comments to nasamike@nasamike.com