Re: The Oldest Homo Sapiens: Fossils Push Human Emergence Back To 195,000 Years Ago

Don Winterstein wrote (3 Mar 2005):

> ... Christianity teaches that humans are special to God, and that
God's creation culminates with humankind, especially in the person of
Christ. That is, the creation according to traditional Christianity is
anthropocentric. <

Agreed.

> Given this premise, it's hard enough to make the billions of years
without humans seem reasonable. Add the appearance of aimlessness in
the origins and extinctions of species to those billions of humanless
years and the minds God gave us all are going to start asking why. Yes,
we acknowledge that God can do what he wants, but doesn't it tend to
make us feel less important than the traditions taught to find that
almost none of world history involved us? So there's a need to account
for God's behavior. If we're so important, why did God spend three
billion years or so nurturing only bacteria? <

This doesn't follow, because the time required to prepare a suitable
environment for us is not taken into consideration. It is a question of
"natural" geological, chemical, and biological processes. Of course, God
could take shortcuts if he wanted to. But why should he? By the way, is
it so important that we feel important? Shouldn't we rather rejoice at a
demonstration of _God's_ greatness reflected in the immensity of the
times involved?

The same kind of situation applies to cosmology. Do you consider it a
"waste" to have a universe of 10^22 stars, today extending through
billions of light years, growing for 10 billion years before the Earth
is even produced? The anthropic astrophysical justification for this has
repeatedly been presented in a fine way by Hugh Ross. In brief, the long
time is required because a large universe is required for a
life-protecting environment to be feasible.

A similar case, i.e. that the long time was required, can be made for
the history of the Earth. Just think of the collision forming our Moon
and the Earth's magnetic-field-generating core protecting us from cosmic
radiation, then producing a revolving mantle and plate tectonics to
generate a circulation of elements required by life. Then, huge amounts
of oxygen had to be produced by photosynthesis, in order to oxidize the
iron formations, before larger than microscopic animals could live and
move quickly in an oxygen-containing ocean and atmosphere, and all that
while continuously keeping life-friendly temperatures and weather. Up to
that point, 4 billion years of the Earth's age were already spent. We
are only just beginning to get a picture of the interrelatedness of the
development of the Earth and its biosphere.

If you feel God might at least have abbreviated the last 400 million
years somewhat, ask yourself in which of the earlier geological periods
you would like to have lived instead of today! I think in any of them,
we might be quite miserable, if we could survive at all. And I'm not
just thinking of Jurassic Park.

> Rational people seek rational explanations. We don't demand an
explanation, because we know that Christianity is foolishness to the
wise of the world. Still, we know from the successes of science that
the human mind can comprehend much of the world quite well. Therefore
we conclude that God must have had some deep underlying reason for
bringing us into existence in the slow and circuitous way that he did.
To say that each species of bacteria, etc., was a special creation
suggests that there was no deep underlying reason but that God was
simply--pardon the expression--playing with his world. <

Many of those bacteria were and are quite essential to our survival. For
2 billion years, cyanobacteria made most of the oxygen to prepare our
home. And why should it diminish God's honor if he liked to "play" (even
"play dice", cf. Einstein, or anything else) in his creation?

> If God was primarily interested in humans, and his methods involved
only special creations, our imperfect, finite minds can easily think of
ways he could have reached his goals much more efficiently than the way
he actually chose. So why did he unnecessarily deprive himself of
success for so long? <

I think it might take scientists another 100 years or so to comprehend,
perhaps not even fully yet, the efficiency of the way God actually chose
for developing the Earth's ecology. Of course, I don't believe "his
methods involved only special creations", but he used evolution, and
(perhaps) scientifically invisible providence. And "success" is a
concept which I don't think is applicable at all to God's activity -
unless you believe in a process god.

> Now I don't have anything against God's playing with the world, but
if that's what he was doing, I get the impression that humankind isn't
as important to him as our religion has told us. <

I think humankind is so important to him that he "went out of his way"
to prepare a livable world for us. If he made 10^22 stars just for this
visible world, how inconceivably more marvellous will be the future home
Jesus is preparing for us!

Peter

-- 
Dr. Peter Ruest, CH-3148 Lanzenhaeusern, Switzerland
<pruest@dplanet.ch> - Biochemistry - Creation and evolution
"..the work which God created to evolve it" (Genesis 2:3)