It's Impossible To Love The Truth And Deny Evolution: Part VII - On Interpreting Scripture

 

In recent articles, I've talked about the undeniable evidence for evolution over billions of years, and I did so to encourage Christians to come together and love the truth and elegance of evolution. Here I’d like to pay attention to what is perhaps the main reason that some Christians are creationist - taking the Bible too literally in the places when other interpretations are more accurate and enriching. Some of the most powerful truths the Bible conveys are far beyond the mere literal interpretations of the creationists. The Bible verses are not always literal, but they are always true, and that is the key distinction.

One of the most powerful methods of storytelling is through metaphors and analogies. And what I want to show in this article is that metaphors and analogies are more than just stories conveying simple truths; they are intricately woven into the very fabric of what mind is. It is no wonder that God used the powerful metaphor of marriage to speak of our relationship with Him. The central narrative – that God emptied Himself by coming into nature to incorporate Himself on our journey - is itself both literal and metaphorical; it is literally true because the person of Christ lived as a man, and it is metaphorically true because it infuses an abstract metaphysical power into the entire human history, making the journey and the destination a real tangible goal for every one of us

Let me suggest how we can manage our reading of the Old Testament and conceptually demarcate our history from our non-history - a suggestion that points to a few truths that are bound to seem utterly strange to a post-Enlightenment person steeped in the logic of the Greeks and the empiricism of Bacon, Locke, Berkeley and Hume. Part of the understanding required is the understanding that in ancient traditions, particularly oral traditions, the narrative being conveyed is a blend of fact and fiction, where profound truths are disseminated in a way that requires interpretative qualities beyond the headlights of the kind of rigorous historical and scientific analysis we moderns are used to. Given that life itself is so richly analogical, metaphorical and narrative-laden, it is no wonder that we are insistent that a deep understanding of the Bible won't come to anyone who trivialises its dynamic nature and is blind to its analogical, metaphorical and narrative-laden power.

Old Testament figures like Adam, Eve, Cain, Abel, Noah, Jacob, Joseph, Abraham, Moses, Joshua, Samson, Samuel, Saul, Job, Jonah, David and Solomon are such an agglomeration of history, myth, legend, analogy, metaphor and theological aetiology that we can't hope to pin them down to simple historical/non-historical analyses. That's not to treat them all the same, of course - there are evidently different extents to which the above applies to Adam, Jonah and Job than, say, David and Solomon. What's clear, though, is that while God 'breathed' His influence onto the writing of scripture over the many centuries of its composition, He allowed His word to be subjected to the limitations of creation, and for the narrative to be absorbed into a blend of the literal and non-literal in order to convey the power of the gospel of grace. These Old Testament stories are so psychologically deep and theologically complex that it's not even possible to justifiably approach them through a simple binary literal or non-literal lens of analysis.

The writer of Genesis would have been a significantly different person to any kind of person a contemporary person living in the post-scientific revolution era would have ever encountered. The writer of Genesis would have no apprehension of a global concept, or the size of the world, solar system or universe; he’d have no concept of what a billion is, and no experience of prescribed philosophical investigations or formal empirical procedures associated with the science of the past few hundred years. And it’s highly likely, given what we know of the formal development of human thought over the past two and a half millennia, that he wouldn’t even understand what modern people are probing when they debate whether the Genesis 1 text should be taken literally or not. The concept of demarcating recorded literal history from symbolic theological expressions would be alien to the man who wrote Genesis 1, and to the New Testament figures too, which is why, when Jesus talks about Adam, He is speaking theologically in a way that the audience of the day would understand. When talking about Adam, Noah, Jacob, Jonah, Abraham, etc Jesus is talking about such deep and profound truths, so far transcendent of actual historical events, that those speaking about them in scripture would be quite aghast at how far many modern people had departed from its tenor in applying banal scientific metrics to the literalism text.

It's obvious why we don't need the story of Adam and Eve to be literally true to understand its real meaning of ourselves in relation to God. Literalists insists on reading Genesis 1 to be 6 x 24 hour days, but when we get to Genesis 3, they suddenly stop reading that literally, because if read literally then only the serpent, Adam and Eve receive some consequences for their actions, not the rest of humankind. To see the story of the fall as being about human sin, you have to extend beyond the purely literal. The literal story of two humans and a snake sinning in a garden and everyone else becomes cursed because of it is beyond silly unless we give it its full allegorical due, which is what Paul does in Romans with a figurative truth where they represent all of mankind. Similarly, there is no such thing as a literal tree of the knowledge of good and evil - it makes no sense except as a story conveying deep symbolic metaphysics. But when we see the tree of knowledge and the Fall as allegorical stories about the human capacity for moral agency, and the ability to make choices when measured up against their moral consequences, including the ability to choose God over self, or self over God, we then get to understand what those theological symbols mean. The tree of knowledge of good and evil is meaningless without an already evolved moral awareness and conception of free will in acting on that awareness.

It's absolutely absurd to me that anyone could be so misjudged as to think of Genesis as being science - but to compound the point, here are just some of the scriptural errors that emerge when we try to align it with known science. In Genesis 1, the earth is created before the sun, which is the wrong way around scientifically. Light is created on the first day (Genesis 1:3), but the stars that emit light aren't created until the fourth day (Genesis 1:14). These stars on the fourth day are said to be made to let them shine on earth (Genesis 1:15), but yet on day 1, God had already created the light and called the light “day,” and the darkness “night". And if three days had already passed without stars, those days couldn't have been measured if the stars weren't created until the fourth day. This gets even more bizarre when we see that our sun and moon weren't created until day 4 (Genesis 1:16) and yet we'd already had three days of evening and morning before that point in the creation story. Moreover, if we want to be scientifically technical, the moon isn't a lesser light, it merely reflects the sun's light - which means Genesis 1:16 is wrong when it says " God made two great lights" - He actually only made one great light, and one smaller celestial object (the moon) to reflect it.

The writer of Exodus refers to God "showing steadfast love to the thousandth generation of those who love Him" (Exodus 20:6), but according to literalists Exodus documents events only a few hundred years after Adam and Eve. For a thousand generations to occur, it would take 25,000 years. Now obviously, we can say this doesn't have to be read literally, but that goes against the creationist wishes, so they can't really have it both ways.

If taken scientifically, the Genesis account actually distorts the truth of the genetic mapping even further; for example, reading Genesis scientifically we would see that fruit trees appear before marine life, which is known to be wrong, and can easily be observed on the genetic map. Reading Genesis scientifically, we have whales and birds created at the same time, but this is also far from accurate, as birds were here millions of years before whales. Reading Genesis scientifically we have insects, spiders, reptiles and amphibians created at the same time as mammals, which is wrong by a factor of several hundred million years. So even if one questions the genetic sequencing I mentioned earlier (and there is absolutely no reason to do so) a scientific Genesis account would actually contradict the genotypic mapping with which creationists say God endowed creatures – it either has God as a master deceiver or as an incompetent Creator who cannot even create a blueprint to match the genotypic order.

Furthermore, the ordering of the appearance of phyla is scientifically incorrect with a literal interpretation - fruit and seed bearing plants came after the water was teeming with life. Even dinosaurs are long before seed bearing fruits, yet Genesis says otherwise, showing it is not a scientific account. Moreover, human evolution has been going on for hundreds of thousands of years, and given that any so-called speciation that would make proto-humans distinct from humans would have occurred at the population level not at the individual level, the Genesis account that there were two first humans is not scientifically accurate as a literal interpretation. Forming a man out of the dust and breathing life into him through his nostrils is not a scientific reality for making him 'a living being', but it's a powerful spiritual image, conveying how God imparts spiritual extras into human beings that make them over and above the rest of the animal kingdom. A woman cannot literally come from a man's rib. Biblical figures like Adam, Noah and Methuselah cannot live for over 900 years, and Sarah could not conceive Isaac at 90 years old. No human being has ever lived hundreds of years, and no woman could ever become pregnant at 90 yeas old. There was not one world language at the time of writing (Genesis 11:1) and the whole variety of world languages did not literally suddenly appear in one fait accompli moment by being scattered all over the earth, as conveyed in Genesis 11:8.

Let's turn to Noah’s flood as another example; creationists believe that the world really was flooded in its entirety and they believe the Bible says that when the ark rested on a mountain in the Middle East it contained every human and land animal in the world, and that they were the only survivors on the plant. Even if we put aside the mass of evidence of human evolution throughout the world and the copious amounts of art and artefacts that give evidence of their uninterrupted evolution, the land animals issue, if taken literally, amounts to one of the oddest stories the world has ever seen. For example, a literal interpretation means we have to believe that the voluminous amounts of species indigenous to one part of the world all made their way from the Ark’s resting place, residing in their place of provenance, travelling through conditions under which their phenotype wasn’t built to survive, and avoiding all predation along the way (never mind that many would require other animals for food in a world in which all other life had been destroyed). We are supposed to believe that the kangaroos, koalas, and wombats made their way across Asia through the Indonesian islands and over the east side of the Indian ocean to Australia. We are supposed to believe that the Arctic walruses, polar bears and caribous survived the warmer climate of Europe as they all found their way northwards. We are supposed to believe that anacondas and capybara found their way to South America and the giant tortoise found its way to the Galapagos islands, all from the Middle East. It's beyond silly to attempt to take this as a literal event in history - and the author of the flood story in the Bible would think it preposterous if he could fast forward in time and see that some Christians had become so detached from the symbolic and metaphysical theology of the story and its concomitant archetype that they were actually considering it as a literal global event.

Sticking with South America, take (for example) sloths, armadillos, spider monkeys, poison arrow frogs, jaguars, opossums, electric eels, chinchillas, guanacos, caimans, and hoatzins (to name but a few) - it is now possible to draw up maps based on chromosome painting where, with observing genomic sequencing, we can establish the relationship between DNA sequence variations among all these animals, and all other animals linked to them in one big family tree. We can locate the syntenic segment associations as well as the molecular markers within the major clades which delineate families, orders, who evolved from who, where this evolution took place, and the length of time animals have been indigenous to a particular place. Not surprisingly, in our studies of genomes across the world with thousands of species in virtually every location, we found that the genomic studies, DNA sequence variations, and markers within the major clades give exhibition to evolution over billions of years. All the data fits, and we have not one case where a particular genomic sequence has been discordantly out of place on the family tree - everything fits together, and when we conduct new tests on unsequenced genomes we find that they match our predictions without fail, giving us a consistent map of evolution. If the animals had been only a few thousand years old, or had all converged upon their destination from one Middle Eastern centrepoint (which in many cases geography prohibits due to oceans) the genomic sequences would be very different – not matching the evolutionary history that they do.

The upshot of all this is, with regard to the Bible, the intention of meaning shouldn’t be confused with science, and it is for the same reason that the intention of meaning of the works of Keats or Tennyson or Blake should not be confused with the works of Newton or Kepler or Maxwell - different expressions are being conveyed through different types of language. On hearing that a wife's love for her husband "Lifts her high above the clouds", only a very foolish man would say 'No it doesn't, because that contradicts Newtonian laws'. Yet some Christians too often fall into the mistake of doing something similar with their Biblical interpretations.

The Bible contains everything one needs for having a relationship with God. It won't tell you about the age of the earth or evolution or gravity or electromagnetism because those subjects weren't studied in depth by the men of the day who wrote scripture. It’s not as though one needs to put God aside to study science; people just need to stop looking for scientific answers in scripture, because by doing so they skew God's intention, and miss the power of meaning contained in books like Genesis. Don't put God aside when studying science; rather, look at science as the tool with which we assess the finer details of the beauty of God's 'physical' creation.

The Foolish 'Windfall Tax' Idea

 

Of course, everyone with even a sketchy understanding of economics knows already that the ‘windfall tax’ is a bad idea. But for those who don’t yet know it, here are a couple of pointers. There are three main things we can do in an economy to make the world a better place; the first is waste fewer resources, which means consuming as optimally and efficiently as possible (which also includes allocating those resources in line with the information signals generated by prices in accordance with supply and demand curves). The second is work harder to provide more goods and services that people want and need, at better prices, using resources most efficiently. The third is to keep increasing our knowledge and our technological capacity so that the things we want and need become cheaper, easier and quicker than they were for previous generations. Whether in times of prosperity, in a pandemic, in a war, or whenever, there is nothing better that we can do for humans in an economy than those three things.

Perhaps now you can start to see why capital taxes like this (which includes tax on capital gains, interest, shareholder dividends and corporation income), dressed up as the ‘windfall tax’, are inimical to the threefold progress of the above. If you tax capital, you disincentivise saving and increase consumption, and if you tax capital, you disincentivise investment and innovation. If you increase consumption artificially, you decrease efficiency in point 1; and if you disincentivise investment and innovation, you tax (in the long run) labour, growth and innovation, which decreases the efficiency in points 2 and 3. 

Taxing capital disincentivises capital accumulation, and therefore negatively affects investment, production and labour. But it’s worse than that, because in the current tax systems money is taxed multiple times, which produces even greater inefficiencies and retardation of economic development. Taxing your earnings and then your capital amounts to double taxation, because capital gains are the fruits from the income that has already been taxed once. Taxing both income and capital is like fining a pedestrian for being drunk and then fining him again half an hour later for having too much alcohol in his bloodstream. Finally, taxing capital is also a deferred tax on labour, because capital is earned by past labour that has already been taxed at the point of earnings, and is therefore the deferred benefits of past labour. Tax the capital that is the present reward for past labour and you’re double taxing the original labour.

The upshot of all this is that a windfall tax is a terrible idea thought up by people who don’t understand economics, for the persuasion of people who are impoverished by listening to those people who don’t understand economics. 

 

It's Impossible To Love The Truth And Deny Evolution: Part VI - The Origin Of Life

Abiogenesis is the process whereby once upon a time life arose from non-life. We are not entirely sure how this process arose (although we are not entirely unsure either), but given that God has created a universe of such ingenious proportions, it's not difficult to accept that bringing life from non-life is well within the scope of His cosmic narrative. What we know this far is that all physical things that exist are made from a finite set of constituents called the elementary particles. The manner in which these elementary particles interact with each other is well known; quarks come together to form nucleons, nucleons come together to form nuclei, nuclei combine with electrons to form atoms, atoms combine with each other to form molecules and materials, and so on.

We know about the compounds that pervaded the early solar system, because we know what comes out of stars and what can be carried in by comets. We know this because we can do astronomical spectroscopy and observe the contents of newly formed solar systems. We even know that amino acids, the constituents of proteins (life’s 'workhorses'), are found in space and can be synthesised in a lab by mimicking lightning striking the earth’s primordial oceans. We also know that ancient clays can catalyse the reaction of some of the early compounds on earth into nucleic acids - which are often touted as the 'building blocks' of life. Not only that, but we also know that nucleic acids can spontaneously form the molecule known as RNA. RNA can not only speed up chemical reactions which could confer a biological advantage, but it can work as a template for itself - perhaps the first mechanism of reproduction. However, not all these environments are conducive to the forming of life - in fact, many are impossible incubators. As none of the elementary particles, nor their simplest combinations, can self-replicate in an evolvable way, life can only spontaneously form in environments that enable life to retain its specific configuration of elementary particles that allow reproduction.

We have a universe that is more than 14 billion years old - most of which cannot produce life. However, the elements of the periodic table still allow a rich range of chemistry to emerge; so rich, in fact, that many complex chemicals do exist and undergo reactions. We know that the vast majority of these compounds cannot reproduce under any known environment, but the underlying engine of our physics and chemistry shows that reproduction (self-replication) can happen - it is just such a rare event that it needed a molecule to form a template of itself, against which the compounds in the environment spontaneously formed a copy of the template. Even though our universe has approximately 100 billion galaxies, each with around 100 billion stars in it, nucleotides bonding to create the first RNAs would still be an amazingly rare event in our universe.

What we can extrapolate about the origin of life question is this. In this world, the common states are liquid, solid and gas. We know such incipient life could not exist in solids, because things in solids cannot diffuse around, and atoms vibrate around an average position with too much restriction for life to flourish. Equally, life isn't likely to exist in the gas phase, because the replication machinery has a necessary complexity and weighs too heavily to thrive in the gas phase. The fact that life exists in liquids is because liquids allow signal transduction by diffusion and can act as a suitable solvent for bio-machinery. Life was unlikely to exist in any other state apart from liquid - hence the ‘primordial soup’ metaphor.

The high surface tension, the low viscosity, the boiling point, the melting point and the fact that water expands upon cooling can all be explained by the way water molecules interact with each other - namely that it is capable of making four hydrogen bonds. Why it does this ultimately lies with the laws of quantum mechanics. The Schrodinger equation, when solved for a given collection of atoms, tells us the properties of that collection of atoms. It tells us how much energy we need to pull it apart, or equivalently, how much energy is released when it forms. The same can be said for collections of water molecules. The solution to the Schrodinger equation is found using the same methods, whether we are dealing with water, or ammonia, or caffeine or any other compound we care to study. The properties of water and all other molecules are the inevitable outcome of the natural dispositions of electrons and nucleons. The properties of water aren't arbitrary; they are emergent phenomena of the properties of the universe - just one of a myriad of consequences of the laws of physics.

That fact that life on earth depends on water is a testament to how life has adapted to the aqueous environment found on the planet on which it arose. It seems true that many of water’s special properties played a significant role in allowing life as it is to exist - however, given that the properties of water are just a consequence of the combination of fundamental particles from which it is made, it is no surprise that we complex beings find ourselves on a planet which has this life-enhancing molecule in abundance, as opposed to anywhere else in the universe.

As I recall, biologist Nick Lane has a theory that proton power is no late innovation, but evolved much earlier in the tree of life than we first thought. The first branch in the tree is between the two great groups of simple cells, bacteria and archaea, and Lane reminds us (rightly) that both of these groups have proton pumps and both generate ATP from proton currents, using a similar protein. It seems very likely indeed that both inherited this machinery from a common ancestor, and that this source was the progenitor of all life on earth, including you, me and the oak tree down the road.

It must be said, though, that although traits found in both the archaea and bacteria are most likely inherited from the common ancestor of all life, a few must have been acquired later by gene exchange, thus giving credence to our belief that ‘distinct’ means, in many cases, ‘evolved independently’. We know that this common ancestor possessed DNA, RNA and proteins, a universal genetic code, ribosomes (which are protein-building mechanisms), ATP and a proton-powered enzyme for making ATP. These intricate mechanisms for reading off DNA and converting genes into proteins are rather like a modern cell. Yet there are nuanced differences as well - in particular, the detailed mechanics of DNA replication would have been quite different. Moreover, it looks as if DNA replication evolved independently in bacteria and archaea; that is, most scientists seem to agree that the defining boundaries of cells evolved independently in bacteria and archaea.

So the question ‘what sort of a cell was this common ancestor?’ is, as Nick Lane concedes, a difficult question. Clearly not a cell with no boundaries, that would defy every known chemical law – but seemingly it was a very simple yet sophisticated entity in terms of its genes and proteins, and was powered by proton currents rather than fermentation, but with membranes that are no longer seen in cells today. To compound the point, back then the oceans were very different to what they are now; the primordial oceans were saturated with carbon dioxide, making them acidic, whereas the seas today have more alkaline. Also there was practically no oxygen, and without oxygen, iron dissolves readily – and we can see from our geological studies that the vast banded-iron formations around the world are a result of iron that once dissolved in oceans. As oxygen levels slowly rose, billions of tonnes of iron precipitated out as rust. This almost certainly means that the interface between the alkaline vents and the primordial seas would have been much more conducive to biochemistry than they are today – in fact scientists have found ancient vents with a similar structure and even reproduced them in the lab.

So the theory that ancient alkaline hydrothermal vents were the incubators for life looks very plausible, particularly if hydrogen and carbon dioxide did in fact react in those vents to form simple organic molecules and also release energy. But we still might be wise to proceed with some caution, because although hydrogen with carbon dioxide may well be central to life, energy is still required in the first place to engender this process, so much so that it is probably nigh-on impossible for bacteria to grow by chemistry alone without the catalysing energy. Let me offer an analogy. Think of the energy stored by ATP as equivalent to £1. If it takes £1 to kick-start a reaction, which then releases £2, in theory a cell has gained £1. However, if the only way a cell has to store energy is to make ATP, it can make only one molecule; to make two new ATPs would cost £2. So one ATP would have been spent to gain one ATP, and the spare change wasted as heat. That's not consistent with being alive. Yet Nick Lane is suggesting that the hydrothermal vents would provide a good explanation to this problem, claiming that::

“The fluid from the vents would have contained reactive molecules such as methyl sulphide, which would generate acetyl phosphate, a molecule that some bacteria today still use interchangeably with ATP. What's more, the natural proton gradient would have supplemented this energy source by spontaneously generating another primitive form of ATP called pyrophosphate. Pyrophosphate also acts in much the same way as ATP and is still used alongside ATP by many bacteria and archaea. These bacteria speed up its production using a simple enzyme called pyrophosphatase”.

So the common ancestor of life could harness the natural proton gradient of ancient vents to produce energy, and by some reversing process store energy too, as this system seems to allow cells to save up small amounts of energy, much the same as we save up our loose change and buy something so it no longer becomes waste. This is equivalent to saying that the proton gradients enable cells to grow and then, by their accumulative energy, leave the vents. This means it may well be true that the last common ancestor of all life was not a frivolously spending cell at all, but a thrifty rock riddled with bubbly iron-sulphur membranes that engendered the energy for primordial biochemical reactions. This natural flow reactor, power-driven by hydrogen and proton gradients, catalysed organic chemicals and brought about proto-life (both bacteria and the archaea) that would become the first living cells – eventually producing you, me and the oak tree.

Given the intractability of this subject and the vast domains of time, it may never be possible to know for sure whether or not life evolved by this mechanism, or whether the initial elemental organism with the properties of self-replication happened just once (maybe only once in the entire history of the universe) or several times. But a good case may have been made that hydrothermal vents had the answer. It's worth adding a point I made in my book The Genius of the Invisible God:

"I won't even bring to bear the complication that the tem 'life' is a human construct, upon which we have created a descriptive term for the purposes of classification. The emergence of life is referred to as abiogenesis - which is the point at which the earth's chemistry evolved into a self-replicating system. But the point at which chemistry becomes biology is not an instantaneous moment (and even if it were, it would be an arbitrarily defined human classification). But let's pretend there is one single point in history when we can say that life began - an A to B event of causation.  The putative conclusion begins with 'Therefore, all life is designed' - and from what I've said it is self-evidentially obvious that there are no philosophical conditions under which one can identify a particular point in history as being the beginning of the design of life. All one is doing is looking for the transition from chemistry to biology, but they overlap, and they give no exhibition to any kind of process of divine choreography, because they can be reduced to particles that simulate mere possibility as fluctuations in a quantum field."

The upshot is, the abiogenesis that brought about early life isn't a direct object of empirical study for us - it is probably a one-off or exceedingly rare event that we may only simulate in the lab, where the exact conditions of the actual event are always likely to elude us. But whichever way we cut the cloth, when describing creation - from abiogenesis all the way through to the rich and diverse complexities of life we see after a few billion years of natural selection - we are describing how God has engineered the laws of physics to behave so that it administers His grand narrative.