Astronomy and Creation - Page 2
The Creation Account of Genesis
in the language of Modern Science
By scientist and priest Emmanuel M. Carreira, S.J.

Continued from Astronomy and Creation - Part 1

The Creation Account of Genesis in the language of Modern Science

The desire to know "where we are, where we come from, and where are we headed" is a necessary part of our endless search for Truth. In that series of questions one can also see a logical and time-like chain of reasoning, that from the knowledge of our present state argues to an explanation found in previous conditions, to an always more remote past where causes have to be sought for succeeding effects. But this process cannot be pushed logically to an infinite series of steps: we must finally inquire about an origin before which there was no "before", even if this statement seems to imply the paradox that time itself must have had a beginning.

Mythologies and philosophical ideas of those cultures that are historically known, avoid the endless series -seeking always previous causes and states- by postulating a basic element, eternal and self-sufficient, of a material nature. The Earth -in an all-encompassing sense that includes also the visible astronomical bodies- is considered to be the root from which everything sprouts, even the gods themselves, who are frequently just a divinized reference to the basic elements: the oceans, the heavens, the winds, fire or water. Those gods can have their own rivalries and fights that are in some cases used to explain the different levels of structures that end up with the making of human beings.

Even if the final state might refer to the gods as immortal (for instance, in the Greek Olympus realm), those divinities are still subject to ignorance, pain, defeats and subjection to the more-or-less arbitrary power of other gods. They are shown as "superhuman" heroes, rather than divine entities in a transcendent sense, and they show vices and behavior that would be unacceptable in human society. Their power is also limited, in the basic sense that they need some kind of raw material to make something useful for their purposes; there is no mention of "creation" in the philosophical sense of going "from nothing to something", a step that requires an unlimited Power. Even the continuing existence of the gods obliges them to seek food, either through the offerings of sacrificial victims by the faithful or by seeking some type of different nourishment in their abode.

It is in this cultural setting where the Jewish people provide a unique and new way of understanding the divinity, that is not identified with anything visible, and that is free from any limit of space or time, unchanging, all-powerful, endowed with infinite wisdom, holiness, justice and generosity. This portrait is given a concrete expression in a poetic story, that has many elements in common with cosmological views of other peoples of the same area, but that is free of any materialistic conditionings suggested by the human experience. It is in the Genesis account where we are taught -in an implicit parable- that God is a loving Father, that He is the only sufficient reason why everything else exists, and that all creation is the work of his Wisdom and Love.

This is a radically new teaching, presented in images and words that are suited for a pre-scientific society, but that retains its value in our space era. It isn't meant to give answers to questions belonging to Astronomy or Biology, something that has been wrongly sought in previous times trying to obtain a "concordance" between the Bible and modern science. But it stresses the ideas of order, harmony and intelligibility in the entire realm of existence: those properties without which the very science -that we are so justly proud of- would be impossible.

This same science enriches our understanding of the Genesis account, furnishing a variety of details that lead to a greater appreciation of the work of the Creator. In a letter of Pope John Paul II to the Director of the Vatican Observatory (dated June 1st, 1988) we can read: "If the cosmologies of the ancient Near Eastern world could be purified and assimilated into the first chapters of Genesis, might contemporary cosmology have something to offer to our reflections upon creation?." In my opinion, the answer is very positive: it is the most up-to-date cosmology the science that best underlines de marvelous work of the Creator.

THE INITIAL SETTING OF THE GENESIS ACCOUNT

The first words of the book of Genesis, "In the beginning God created the heavens and the Earth." include -in the standard translation- the idea of creation that we understand with the insights of twenty centuries of Theology. But it is possible that a more exact version would be: "When, at the beginning, God made the heavens and the Earth…" even if the Hebrew word barah appears only for God's creating activity. The first clear reference to a strict creation from nothing seems to be found in the second book of Maccabees, but not in Genesis. It was not an important concern of the primitive Hebrew society whether the world was or not eternal; rather, its unique and total dependence from God had to be clarified by showing how everything was fit for our existence due to God's providential care. This is the reason why the Genesis account implicitly stresses the idea of God as the source of order, of a wise series of steps meant to allow human beings to exist and to reach their full development.

The implicit parable describes God as a Father who plans a home for his children, and who proceeds in a systematic way, from the general structure of the dwelling to the details of comfort and beauty that make a house into a home. Man is presented as a living Image of the creating Father, his representative and helper, meant to preside upon and develop the work that is given with a totally unselfish Love. Nothing is asked as payment for the gift, except the logical attitude of thankful reverence for such generosity, as we find expressed -millennia later- in the Contemplation to Attain Love that closes the "Spiritual Exercises" of St. Ignatius.

It is worth noting that the God of the Bible has no special personal name except the simple expression of his divinity. He is the only true God, and thus it isn't necessary to identify him with a proper name as it would be expected if there were several deities. No reason is offered to explain his origin: He is already present at the true beginning of everything, not only in a previous time, but more deeply as the ultimate reason in the orders of causality and sufficient reason.

The initial state of anything that is not God is described as a "chaos", where disorder, darkness and emptiness sum up the total absence of any positive quality independently of God's action. Water itself -the basic requirement for organic life- is presented as an unlimited abyss that Man cannot encompass, dreadful in its blackness and turmoil. It is a way of thinking that appears deeply ingrained in the subconscious mind of those nomads of the desert, always afraid to leave the solid ground to venture into the seas, even when settled in their cities and farms, as we read frequently in the Psalms.

But upon that limitless ocean there hovers, as a Power that can bring it into subjection, the Spirit of God. A Spirit that is also a living breath and that expresses the powerful will and the wisdom of the biblical God, a living God, not dead like the idols of the pagan cults of other peoples.

LAYING THE BASIC STRUCTURE: THE FIRST THREE DAYS

The First Day: Light and daily rhythm

The first logical step in the working plan to develop a habitable structure will be to provide light: nobody works in the dark. The physical nature of light was totally unknown (until very recently!) and there is no attempt to specify a process that will obtain light from some kind of fuel, or to link its existence to astronomical sources. Light is an independent and previous reality that comes into being through a simple command of God: "Let there be light!", and there was light. As an artist satisfied with his work, "God saw that the light was good, and he separated it from darkness". Thus begins the orderly succession of day and night, a basic framework for human activity in the experience of those peoples for whom the Bible was written. It is the First Day.

Our 20th century science has found, with new technologies and new ideas -not immediately recognized as valuable- the first "light", previous to the Sun and the stars, in a "beginning" that can be described as chaotic. An unimaginable cauldron of dense and powerful energies was the birthplace of particles and atoms of hydrogen and helium, synthesized during the first 20 minutes of the Universe. Against the widespread prejudice that the Universe had to be eternal, it is the weight of scientific data that forces us to accept a beginning with no "before" that can be described scientifically.

That initial seed of super-dense matter, with parameters that define its properties with extreme precision (reaching 50 decimal places in some cases) undergoes an expansion during the "first cosmic day" when the light of the Big Bang is followed by the night of a sky without stars during millions of years. We can still detect and analyze the minimal "heat" (at 3 K, almost absolute zero!) of that great fire that marks the start of cosmic history 13,700 millions of years ago; we have also found its "ashes" in the correct abundance of hydrogen, deuterium and helium (calculated by Gamow in 1948). This is truly a first "day and night" in an unimaginable level… because God is not subject to time and he has no waiting periods during the creation process.

The key discovery of modern cosmology was based upon Einstein's equations (that Lemaître fully developed) and the work of Edwin Hubble at the Mount Wilson Observatory. The General Theory of Relativity required the acceptance of a "finite but unlimited" universe, expanding or contracting, instead of the static, unchanging and eternal model uncritically accepted by the majority of astronomers a century ago.

We are entitled to say "uncritically" because the obvious objections were not faced: an infinite universe, with an infinite amount of mass in all directions, would cause the gravitational potential to be infinitely high at each and every point in it, thus ruling out the potential differences that give rise to net gravitational forces. And an eternal universe would have now only dark stellar corpses everywhere, since in an infinite time all fuel sources for nuclear reactions have to be exhausted. Only a strictly understood "continuous creation" of new matter could solve the objection: a solution proposed in the 1950s by Hoyle, Bondi and Gold, but incompatible with well established data.

The discovery of the background radiation in 1965 by Penzias and Wilson (who shared a Nobel prize for their work) and the abundance of quasars only in the very old universe, firmly established the logical consequence of the expansion announced in 1929 by Hubble: the known universe began in a state of extremely high density and temperature. Its initial conditions -including the parameters of elementary particles and forces- determined the evolution from the primitive "chaos" to the majestic structures that we now study with the instruments of the space era.

Second Day: an environment free of water

In the biblical account we find now a description of the second day that can make us smile at a cultural background that seems to be proper of a child's tale. Up to this point we were told only of an enormous watery mass, unruly and lifeless, as if it were an enormous blob without container or barriers of any kind. It seems necessary to open up a hollow space in it, to have room -like a cavern- for air and hard ground where something can be built.

The obvious experience of rain that comes from above, and of underground water flowing from wells and springs, suggested some arrangement of "waters above and waters below" that seemed to require some kind of dome, separating both locations. This is the work done on the second day: the "firmament" is created to hold the waters of the upper realm, keeping them from falling down (naturally!) and flooding the low areas.

This "glassy" dome, invisible but strong, is found also in the cosmologies of Egypt and other nearby cultures; its role is previous to the presence of astronomical bodies, and if one suffers the "Flood" it is because the trapdoors of that dome were open. It isn't clear to what an extent this description was considered to represent a real thing or just a poetic fiction: it could easily be seen that rain would fall from low clouds, not from the stars. But the image was commonly used as we have it here.

Nothing like that can be found in any scientific description, either of the universe or of our home planet. We should rather say that the primitive Earth most likely looked like the Moon: a barren and dry rock covered with craters. We attribute the oceans to the ices of millions of comets (condensed in the pre-planetary nebula 4,500 million years ago) that impacted the early Earth and most likely gave it an unbroken layer of water that lasted millions of years. Those "waters from above", and the volcanic venting of underground gases that included water vapor, gave the possibility of harboring life to our planet, where water has been present in all three states -solid, liquid and gas- during billions of years, in an environment that is unique within the Solar System.

Water is possibly the most surprising and fertile substance, due to its physical and chemical properties. It is an almost universal solvent -there is gold in the ocean waters- and it is less dense in the solid state than as a liquid when frozen under normal pressure. Thanks to this unexpected behavior, ice floats, and the oceans are not a solid block from the bottom up, making life impossible. And nothing is found comparable to water in its suitability for the full activity of the carbon chemistry (Organic Chemistry) that is the only possible basis for the enormous complexity needed for the DNA molecule, and for the metabolic paths required to build a living structure.

We can logically retain the idea that stresses that the cosmic abundance of water in the heavens (in the solar nebula) and in the interior of the Earth's crust is crucial to make our home suitable for life. We do not regard water as a menace, as long as there are limits to its presence and its activity (even in the desert, an oasis is pleasant because it offers needed water.) The biblical account is not old fashioned in that respect as long as we see it with our present understanding of astronomy and biology. This would be the meaning of our scientific second day that receives again the approving remark of the Creator: "And God saw that the firmament was good."

Third Day: A fertile ground and vegetable life

On the third day we are told about a firm and solid dry ground, the place where a human habitation can be set up. God limits the expanse of the waters, confining them to the basins of the oceans, and this frees the dry land of the continents. Without any knowledge of geology, the imposition of borders to the waters is seen as the effect of a divine command that restricts the presence of the oceans by assigning to them a proper place they must keep, not by any physical reason. Those confining borders are considered as everlasting (they seem to be immutable from the viewpoint of human experience) and thus they insure a habitable space, where mankind can develop without the fear that the oceans -always dreaded and prone to chaos- might invade the area assigned to Man, with catastrophic results. This happens when there is a tsunami, as we now know, but the biblical writer was not aware of such a phenomenon.

Modern geology has confirmed the daring hypothesis of Wegener, explaining the origin of changing ocean basins through eons of evolution. Continental plates -pieces of the crust- are pushed by convective flows of slightly fluid rock of the mantle, heated by the reservoir of the metallic core (iron and nickel at over 4000 degrees, comprising one third of the total mass of the Earth.) The pressure of those flows breaks the rigid and thin crust (only about 30 km. deep) and causes the plates to collide to form mountain ranges, and to give rise to volcanic and seismic activity in areas where one plate overlaps another (a process known as subduction.)

The continental plates were fused together 220 million years ago in an enormous continent -Pangea- that later broke into two (Laurasia and Gondwana) with further evolution raising the Himalayas when India collided with the southern flank of Asia. The Atlantic basin opened up with a long crack running from Iceland to Antarctica, and we can still check the growth of this basin -at about 3 cm. per year- with the help of laser beams, sent to reflectors placed on the Moon by the Apollo astronauts.

This slow and persistent process is vital for the renewal of our land and atmosphere, whose gases react with the minerals of volcanic sources. The weathering of rocks, and erosion processes, recycle surface materials and clean the atmosphere of excess carbon dioxide, limiting the proportion of oxygen in the air as well. Nothing comparable has taken place in the other planets, similar in structure to the Earth, in our Solar System. Our planet is the jewel of the Sun's family, the only one suited for life.

Once the basic structure is ready, where Man's abode can be set up, God begins the more detailed process of making sure that it has all the necessary things for human life. The first and most obvious need is that for food, and this can only be found in lower levels of life. Not having microscopes, it seemed that the most elemental form of life is a plant, devoid of sense impressions and of the mobility and freedom of any animal. It is logical, therefore, that God will first create plants upon the earth, that is now free of the oppressive presence of an all-encompassing ocean.

And so it happens, but with a new way of obtaining the desired effect: God orders its creation to contribute to the development of his plan with its own activity: "Let the earth produce green grass, seed-bearing grass, and fruit-bearing trees, each one according to its kind".

Once more, the language is used in a way that stresses order and hierarchical levels in creation. The green grass -without flowers or visible seeds- will be food for the cattle and other animals especially useful for man. "Seed-bearing grass" refers to cereals, the source of the basic food, bread of different kinds. And the "fruit-bearing trees" -that also have a seed that ensures their continuing supply- offer the multiple richness of grapes and wine, olives and oil, dates and figs that were a staple of the nomad's fare and of the settled Israelites.

Everything appears as the effect of that command that allows inanimate matter to organize itself in the marvelous biological system that constitutes a plant, capable of using minerals, water, carbon dioxide and sunlight to synthesize carbohydrates, sugars, lipids and amino acids. Such a variety of chemical processes is still an unending source of wonder and new discoveries in our own time.

The biblical writers did not know that green plants are the key element in explaining how the primitive atmosphere of our planet became rich in oxygen, or that without their continuing support very soon the Earth would become uninhabitable. In sedimentary layers of 2 billion years ago we find evidence of extensive mats of microscopic green algae, the reason why 600 million years ago there was a sudden "explosion" of living forms, when the oxygen level in the atmosphere -similar to the present one- allowed the development of macroscopic life.

Two evolutionary steps, both impossible to foresee and of almost zero probability even in cosmic time periods, changed the metabolism of single cells that had developed without oxygen, and for which this gas was a poison. The first one enabled some cells to synthesize organic components by the use of chlorophyll and sunlight. When the abundance of oxygen released in that reaction reached a sufficient level, a second genetic change allowed some cells to utilize oxygen for a more efficient metabolism, and thus prepared the way for multi-cellular life, both vegetal and animal.

It is the difficulty of making even an educated guess for those changes to occur by chance anywhere else that has led serious scientists to consider that microscopic life might now exist in many other places of the universe, but that something as complex as a mouse -not to speak of human life- is almost impossible to expect outside of our planet. Even here, the development of life seems totally unpredictable and not to be expected to follow the observed path no matter how many times one could start it.

With the green carpet of vegetal life covering the continents, the third day comes to its completion, and God again gives his approval to the state of things as the third night begins.

PREPARING THINGS IN DETAIL FOR HUMAN LIFE: THE NEXT THREE DAYS

A second period of three days parallels the first stage of creation. To the first day, marked by light, corresponds the fourth, when heavenly bodies appear. If the waters mark the second day, life in the oceans and the air flourishes on the fifth. And the dry land covered with vegetation (3rd day) has prepared the environment for animal life on the continents. We can study those developments more fully.

The Fourth Day: astronomical lights

Three days have so far been described -with periods of light and darkness- without any reference to astronomical bodies to determine those changes. It has been said, almost as a joke, that for the primitive Israelites the Moon was more useful than the Sun, because it came out at night, when it was needed, while the Sun was there when it was already light. The role of the heavenly bodies was mainly to preside with their impressive presence over all the affairs taking place on earth: they were considered to be lamps, moving or fixed to the heavenly dome, just as the stars that form the various constellations. They did have an important role -especially from the viewpoint of a religious calendar- by clearly determining day and night, seasons and yearly cycles.

This is the "host of the heavens" -the visible servants of the Creator and of Man- providing an unchanging basis for order and times, but without being divine in any form. Thus the biblical account rejects any worship of the astronomical bodies, something that was openly present in Egypt and, in a more or less obvious way, in many other cultures of the Near East and of other peoples throughout the world. We find later in the Psalms the insistent teaching about the nature of servants of the Sun and the Moon, chastising those who from the rooftops are observing the heavens for changes in the motion of the planets.

This "astrology" -a caricature of scientific astronomy- still appears today in the childish horoscopes of our mass media, in spite of the well proven lack of any foundation or predictive ability. The biblical expression referring to God as "The Lord of Hosts" is not a war-like banner, but a reference to the "host of Heaven" of luminaries, great and small, that move following God's will in an ensemble that is orderly and lasting.

Modern science has answered the question of where we are, by giving distances and orbits within the Solar System, and next by opening immense vistas, first when distances to stars could be measured (by Bessel in 1838, using the parallax method) and then by determining that the Sun with its family of planets is only a "citizen" in the enormous "cosmic city" that we call the Milky Way. Its census would number over 100 billion suns arranged in a disk that light crosses in 100,000 years of travel. Our orbit around the center (which is only observable with infrared and radio waves) needs 250 million years to complete a turn. No wonder that a century ago astronomers felt overwhelmed by such immensity and thought that they had found the true extent of the whole universe.

But new telescopes of varied technologies soon established that -at distances that make the size of the Milky Way, our galaxy, insignificant - one can find and photograph other galaxies until the sky is so incredibly thick with them, even if they appear as simple specks of light, that the entire universe might contain as many galaxies as there are suns in the one we inhabit. Nobody could have dreamed at the beginning of the 20th century the distances of billions of light-years and the overwhelming abundance of suns and planets, so far away that even the largest telescopes can show the closest stars only as dimensionless points of light.

Still more amazing is the knowledge acquired to explain the evolution of matter from the explosive beginning of the Big Bang to our age. The Earth and our own body are, literally, made from stellar ashes added to the primeval hydrogen. Only through the synthesis of carbon, oxygen, calcium, iron, silicon… in previous generations of stars can we account for the existence of our planet and of the ingredients that make life possible. The humble servants of the divine plan in the "host of Heaven" prepared the "clay" of our bodies, and even that of the Body of God-made-Man in the Incarnation.

A great English astronomer, Eddington, commented around 1920 that we should be able to understand something as simple as a star. The theory of stellar evolution is, in fact, the most satisfactory and complete section of present-day astronomy, even if there are many details that need to be clarified, especially when we deal with the final stages of evolution of very massive stars. We can describe in simple terms how a sufficiently massive cloud of gas -dense and rather cold- should contract under its own gravity, thus compressing and heating the gases in its core. When the temperature of 10 million degrees is reached, nuclear reactions take place (as shown in our laboratories) that synthesize helium from hydrogen and release energy that counters the weight of the outer layers. As long as there is a sufficient amount of fuel to maintain this balance, at increasingly high temperatures, the star avoids gravitational collapse, but gravity always wins at the end.

Sun-like stars die a relatively quiet death, slowly losing their outer layers until the hot corpse at the center (made of crystallized carbon in a sphere the size of the Earth) is bared. But stars of considerably greater mass evolve -rather rapidly by astronomical standards- until their internal instability causes an almost instantaneous collapse of the main share of the stars' mass, compacted into a sphere just a few kilometers across. An explosive bounce throws the rest into space, with all the materials previously synthesized, and during a very short time (perhaps hours or minutes) allows the production of the heaviest elements. This was the source of the metals present in the cloud that 4.5 billion years ago gave birth to the Solar System.

The cosmic ages, with their unimaginable long periods of evolution, were not a waste of time, and the overabundance of so many heavenly bodies that Man will likely never visit is not useless. Once more we should enthusiastically echo the approval of the Creator at the end of the fourth day: And God saw that the heavens -with their variety of "stars"- and the fertile ground also, with its living carpet of grass and trees, were good.

Fifth Day: Animal life in environments not controlled by Man

There is now a more rapid and varied rhythm of activity, a burst of creative power that makes life develop in multiple forms in the two environments -water and air- that are both most prone to change and less subject to the activity of man to control their resources. God uses once more the powers given to nature, ordering the waters to "teem with animals" as varied as oysters and whales, jellyfish and giant squids, humble fish of lakes and rivers, or unknown monsters supposed to move in the dark depths of the oceans.

As a second panoply of agility, beauty and fantastic shapes, the world of birds is also brought into being, from the small sparrows -almost invisible with their dusty color and insignificant size- all the way to the majestic eagles that look at us from their lofty heights. There is an all-encompassing presence of life that will be permanent, due to the divine injunction to be fecund, something that is presented as the first blessing, not a simple approval from the Creator.

The Bible especially underlines the power to give life when it speaks of the Living God as opposed to the dead and lifeless idols of the pagans. There is no hint in the books of the Old Testament of the amazing mystery of the Trinity, that implies the total giving of the full divine nature as the essential activity of the divine Persons, but the living nature of God is always mentioned, even if life without time intervals is incomprehensible to us. God is described without any reference to a possible origin of his existence, unchanging through the ages ("for You a thousand years are like a day") and can only be said to have all possible perfection in his infinity. But because God is mysteriously living, he can communicate life, thus showing his true nature in a more direct way than by creating the astronomical world, no matter how marvelous it actually is.

Elementary family relationships, already present in the way birds care for their chicks in their nests, point to deeper and more significant ties to be expected when the highest degree of life appears on Earth.

Biological sciences study the development of life, beginning with an unknown start in the waters of 3.5 billion years ago. We do not know how or when or where the first cell actually appeared: the complexity of any cell is such that to try to explain it in terms of "chance" is tantamount to saying "just because". Chance is not a physical force, cannot be detected in an experiment, and it can never be the reason for order and complex structures.

All we can say is that life did appear, possibly in a small puddle by the shore of an ancient shallow sea, or in some hot spring or volcanic vent in the deep ocean. Crystals or clays might have acted as templates to align amino acids that lightning would produce in a primitive atmosphere, leading to a self-reproducing macromolecule. In any case, that first life was not vegetal -we define plants by their ability to synthesize new organic materials- and it depended for food upon the presence of other simpler organic compounds in the waters surrounding it. We talk about facts that seem to be logically unavoidable, but we do not have a satisfactory explanation for them.

It has been 50 years since Urey and Miller, in Chicago, mixed gases likely to be present in the first atmosphere of the Earth (water vapor, methane, hydrogen, carbon dioxide and monoxide) and subjected them to electrical discharges over a period of hours, obtaining some of the basic "building blocks" of a living organism. More refined ideas about the primitive "air" have led to different experimental results, with a greater variety of useful compounds, possibly formed in a volcanic environment. But nothing has happened since to advance the process to anything approaching the simplest cell.

And while St. Thomas would accept what we call "spontaneous generation" as the expected flowering of potentialities, given by God, to have matter develop life when set in the proper circumstances, it is still true as a scientific fact what repeated experiments (of Pasteur and others) stated as an unbroken rule. "Omne vivum ex vivo", all life comes from previous life. We are as far from the synthesis of a cell as were the philosophers of the Middle Ages. In a more or less open admission of this fact, it has been proposed that life should have come to Earth from outer space…where it developed in unknown surroundings.

For the first 3 billion years all life on Earth was microscopic, with single cells that could not tolerate oxygen (anaerobic.) Only green algae -also single cells- that covered large areas in the oceans- could provide the oxygen abundance that allowed the "Cambrian Explosion": a brief period in the geologic calendar (only a few million years) when all the basic types of present life forms suddenly show up as fossils in sedimentary rocks. It is still a mystery why such a variety -of phyla, families, genres and species- blossomed first in the oceans, and then in coastal lands: fishes, amphibians, reptiles, birds. And this evolution was conditioned by five great extinction events, due to astronomical or geological changes, so that only about 10% of all living forms have survived.

The basic unity of all life forms on Earth is scientifically well established: the same amino acids, the same symmetry of organic molecules, the same way to encode and transmit genetic information, are reason enough to accept it. But it is just as true that it is extremely difficult to explain in detail the evolutionary process, and that Biology cannot give a satisfying reason why specific changes took place, even if they are attributed to genetic mutations that appear as random events.

We should remember that the scientific method cannot experimentally prove or disprove that there is finality, even when dealing with obvious products of human technology. The question about choosing between chance and intelligent design belongs in the philosophical realm, and must be answered by metaphysical arguments that do not belong in the biological description of evolution. In biology we must ask how evolution occurs, but not why did it occur as it did.

The fossil evidence allows us to recognize fishes as the most primitive vertebrates, followed by amphibians and reptiles, whose development reached its peak with the dinosaurs and their overwhelming presence during 150 million years. An ecological disaster -almost certainly triggered by the impact of a 10 km. rock (an asteroid) upon the Yucatan peninsula- put an end to their reign 65 million years ago. Their humble descendants are the present-day reptiles and the birds, and it is in this less threatening environment where evolution could develop further from the first mammals.

Sixth Day: Land animals and human life

For those who were instructed by the books of the Bible, people originally nomadic even if later settled in farms and towns, wealth meant domestic animals: sheep and goats, cattle, donkeys and camels. These are the animals that are first meant when the next step of creation is described on the sixth day, but reptiles are also included: they were encountered mostly in the desert as snakes or lizards, and crocodiles were known to exist in Egypt and in rivers of the region. This off-hand mention of reptiles might be related to the idea of their impure nature that makes them unsuitable as food, and that could be due to pagan cults -where serpents were symbols of fertility goddesses- or to idols of Egypt, tied to wild beasts, perhaps absent in Palestine.

Without further detail, "all other land animals" are mentioned as well, to make it clear that all living things exist due to God's all-powerful word.

Paleontology gives only a partial description of the evolution of mammals, mostly after the dinosaurs disappeared. Our stock of fossils is always incomplete, but we have enough to follow the evolution of the ancestors of the horse through animals closer and closer to the present beast. This also applies to primates who are biologically closest to Man. But it is difficult to find convincing intermediate steps to go from the hypothesized forebear of the whale -a land mammal the size of a donkey- to the imposing streamlined monster we observe today, the largest animal in the entire history of earthly life. A mammal still, it can dive deeper than a nuclear submarine and can stay underwater without breathing for over an hour, has a heart that pumps 1000 liters of blood in each contraction, and can store oxygen in a thick layer of fat under the skin. We really are left with a mystery when we want to explain such evolution.

It is also difficult to explain the instinctive program that determines the way a spider weaves its web, or how a bee makes the honeycomb, or a bird builds its nest and seeks its food. How far can an instinct -a program that is genetically inherited- lead to mimicking behavior and learning, as found in present-day primates?

In the animal world there is no culture that can be shared with a system of symbols, whether visible or expressed with sounds, nor do we find any hint of a conscious self-knowledge or a free decision. We can refer to animals as "biological robots", astoundingly complex but with the limitations inherent to the lack of true choice among alternative ways of acting that can follow a free decision. For this reason we cannot talk about animals in terms of personal responsibility, with rights and duties.

At this point the Bible presents the Creator looking at his work and saying again -but for the last time- that he approves of what he has created and that cannot be in any way different from what he has decreed: "And God saw that it was good", this world brimming with vegetal and animal life.

The creation of Man

Once the setting is completed, the provident Father -who made the proper home for his children- caps his work with a new creative act carried out with special solemnity. Not by pronouncing again a distant "Let there be…" or by ordering the waters or the solid ground to use their innate powers to make a new life form sprout from them. God will play a unique personal role in the creation of Man, who will be his "Image and Likeness", a living being sharing in the activities proper to the intelligent and free Creator. Therefore Man will be a "son" in a very special way, since a son is the living image of the father.

The word "Elohim" that is used for the divinity in the original language of Genesis is a mysterious plural form, and it seems unsuited for a text where one sees how the exclusive uniqueness of God is constantly stressed. But it is also a plural form that is used here to announce the new creative work, just as if a common plan were decided by several persons of equal rank: "Let us make Man according to our own image and likeness." And his special dignity is then clearly stated: he will be God's representative with authority over the created world: "To have dominion" over all living things created previously, as a son and heir who is never listed among the assets that constitute the material wealth of the head of a household.

This new order of existence, in a level between the Creator and his previous works, is stressed with a meaningful insistence, almost showing the amazement of the writer: "And God created Man as his image, he created him in the image of God, and he created them male and female". The difference in sexual identity does not imply a different nature or dignity, since the human couple appears from the first moment as coming out from the hand of God with that likeness to God that gives each human being a unique place in the whole of creation. There is no discrimination based on race, caste or sex in this view, so positive in its simplicity, of our common nature.

When creating the first human beings we do not find the usual approval that states the goodness of the work: an omission that suggests that the goodness of Man will be dependent upon our freedom, not fixed by our biological structures. There is, instead, the blessing of cooperating with God to be sources of new life, a blessing given before to land animals, but that in this case is joined by a new declaration of Man's dominion: "Be fruitful and fill the earth, subject it, and have dominion over the fish in the sea, over the birds in the sky, over the cattle and over everything that lives and moves over the earth". Everything has been made for Man, and Man only for his Creator: there is nothing in the created order that might have a right to deprive a single human being of a dignity that is always above any concern about usefulness for another, be it an individual or a society.

Our science cannot but recognize that there is a qualitative difference -not only in degree- between Man and the rest of living things on our planet. Every materialistic effort to explain what we are, in terms of genetic codes or brain complexity, fails when faced with undeniable facts that are incompatible with those apparent explanations. The size of the brain cannot be directly related to intelligence, and identical twins with exactly the same DNA do not behave the same way, even when linked by common organs that necessarily oblige them to be exactly under the same environment. Each one is a different person, with diverging tastes and desires.

At a deeper level of reasoning, we have to stress that abstract thought -the reason why science, mathematics, poetry, are possible- cannot be due to any of the four forces that are used for a physical definition of matter. It does not produce anything with experimentally measurable properties, and no scientist admits that it will have a physical effect upon the material surroundings. Nothing is gained by claiming that we already have "artificial intelligence": even if we were to accept as possible that a set of the electronic circuits of a computer could arise by chance through chemical evolution, we would still need the software, the "program" that can give purpose and meaning to the electric currents going through the circuits. Such program cannot be the result of chemical reactions and it would have no meaning -no informational content- unless there is an arbitrary system of symbols expressed by the flow of electrons through chosen paths.

Our likeness to the Creator, so eloquently proclaimed in Genesis, cannot be due to our bodily structure, but only to our rational power and our free will. This cannot be explained by genetic evolution, even if it is acceptable to admit that -through evolution- God prepared matter to make it suitable to receive a spirit, the only sufficient reason for that kind of activity. As long as science remains within the bounds of its own methodology it cannot argue against this view, even if the interaction between mind and brain remains a mystery. Nothing has science discovered to solve the problem, in spite of the efforts of many centuries, except the recognition that some "mental" disorders can be due to chemical imbalances or to brain tumors.

To use a sobering comparison from physics, we can also confess that it is a mystery how elementary units of matter can be observed both as particles and as waves, and how the two mainstays of 20th century physics, the General Theory of Relativity and Quantum Mechanics, can be combined in modern cosmology. We have numerous and undeniable data that make it necessary to accept those different ways of acting for matter, but we do not understand how things can be so.

This first chapter of Genesis ends with a poetic dream: all animal life will be strictly vegetarian. Something hardly applicable to fish or to animals that cannot possibly digest vegetable matter, as is the case for a lion or even a humble mosquito or a leach. It is wrong to think that the need for meat is due to human sinfulness, as if the suffering of animals that are the victims of other animals were our fault. Millions of years before Man, we find the most terrible carnivorous predators among the great dinosaurs. It is a common mistake to speak about animals in human terms, assigning to them rights and duties and thus classifying them as ethically "good" or "bad".

Less acceptable still is the view that an animal has a greater dignity than Man, leading either to adore a beast or to place its wellbeing ahead of a human need. This is the implicit thought behind oriental tenets regarding reincarnation, giving human status to any animal in our surroundings.

The full description of the creative process ends with a remark that sets a logical basis for the observance of the Sabbath as a religious day of rest: the seventh day is especially blessed and made holy by the Creator taking a rest at the completion of his work. Not because his activity imposes a need to regain strength -a simple "Let there be…" is all that is needed to bring into being anything he wants- but because Man will need a rest at regular intervals to avoid the crush of his own work. No tiresome activity should make us forget our relationship with the Creator at a personal level.

The seven days of the week had their origin -from a mythological mixture of astrology and poetry- in the seven "travelers": Sun Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. They are the heavenly bodies that, with the naked eye, can be seen to move against the background (the "fixed stars" that make up the constellations.) The Genesis view gives those days a deeper meaning: there is a previous order -before any stars or planets- in the providential action of God preparing the world for Man. This is why Christ said, much later, that "The Sabbath was made for Man, not Man for the Sabbath", a remark that is applicable to all external norms that might end up by limiting even the possibility of doing good to others.

Thus the first chapter ends its poetic description of a beginning, that is couched in language that even the most primitive society could understand, and that set forth the main ideas that distinguished biblical theology and cosmology from any other human effort to answer the deepest questions we all face. The language of a primitive world view did express important ideas that our present science makes even more cogent. They underline the Wisdom and Goodness of the Omnipotent Creator and, as a consequence, the dignity of His masterpiece: the Thinking Animal, Image and likeness of the Creator.

Second account of creation: Man as center

The second chapter of Genesis gives a different account of creation, more synthetic and without a specific time schedule or distinction of stages, because it is centered upon human activity and our response to the Creator who made everything for our benefit.

In this more theological view God gives Man a body made directly from clay, working it with his own hands, like a sculptor that makes a human image with sublime skill. He then infuses into this sculpture a "breath of life", a superior reality different from the inert clay, and it comes to life. But its surroundings are barren and totally devoid of the essential means to sustain life of any kind, "because Yahweh had not sent as yet rain upon the earth and there was no Man to work it".

But now that Man is present God makes a paradise where he can happily live, "with trees beautiful to see and offering fruits that delighted his palate", thus joining beauty and usefulness. The most important of those trees were two that have no counterparts in any modern botany: one, the "Tree of Life", was the guarantee of immortality; the second, "The Tree of Knowledge of Good and Bad" was meant as a symbol and test of the fidelity and obedience due to the Creator.

It would be a total misunderstanding to consider the prohibition of eating the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge as a limitation of the desire to know, that is a necessary consequence of our rational nature, always seeking Truth, Beauty and Goodness. In the Semitic language "to know" frequently includes the meaning of "to control", to impose some kind of dominion, even when the male "knows" the female joining her in starting a new life. In pagan environments of that time, and even in magic rites of our own age, to know the name of some superhuman agent is the key to control it and to extract favors. It is this "knowing" that Adam should not seek, under pain of death, since the attempt to control God would constitute a rebellion, acting from a position of power, not with the subjection proper of a creature. "To know Good and Bad" means also to be an independent arbiter of what is allowed and what is not, defying God.

Two other ideas are especially significant in this second version of our origins, where Man's role is more explicitly developed:

First, it is stated that man should not exist in an isolated solitude: being a person, he needs to relate to other persons. God makes all animals of the ground and of the sky go past Adam in a parade of incredible variety, and he exercises his dominion upon them assigning a suitable name to each. Once more, knowing them and determining their way of acting, since the name -in this frame of mind- foretells the future role of the one being named: we can refer to Christ giving a new name to Simon Peter.

But among all those animals none is found in the likeness of man, even if it might look similar in a purely physical way, and thus none can be an adequate companion for Adam. We were insistently told earlier that Man is made in the likeness of God -even if God is not described in any way that might imply a bodily shape- and now the likeness is denied with respect to living beings that do not seem to be that different in looks. It is a simple -but profound- way to stress once more that human dignity is unique and based upon our rational nature.

Second, the woman -Eve- is not independently formed from inanimate clay, but rather from the close intimacy of Adam's heart, as his "flesh and bones." This original unity is the guarantee of the singleness of the human species, and it also establishes the equal rank of the woman as the adequate companion to the male, not as a pet or domestic animal. And their mutual attraction will be such that it will prevail upon family ties with the parents of each.

Christ will silence those who appeal to Mosaic Law to justify divorce by citing the biblical remark from this chapter: "They will be two in one flesh" and explicitly reaching the consequence of the indissolubility of marriage: "What God has joined, let no man separate". It is only in Christ's teaching that the sacred dignity of cooperating with God to give life is maintained, providing a suitable environment for those who will also be "children of God" by being children of human love in a total and mutual self-giving.

Science has nothing to add directly to these theological remarks, but it does accept as objectively true that the human species is one, that all its members have an equal and rational nature, that they are also equally the subjects of rights and duties, and that Man is naturally meant to live in a society. The family is the basic unit of society and of every political structure, and, in the words of Pope John Paul II before the United Nations, "society is for the person, not the other way around".

Only each human being is an "image and likeness" of God, called to an eternal destiny that concerns his personality above political or economic concerns of any kind. It is never acceptable to downgrade a human being to the level of "something useful" for scientific or economic progress, or to subject a person to any deprivation of the human rights that have their origin in the Creator, not in any artificial source of power, be it tyrannical or democratic.

Summing up

These first pages of the Bible are not outdated, and an intelligent and well informed believer has no reason to hide them as something childish and unsuited for this century. Their teachings are as important today as they were thousands of years ago in the pre-scientific environment of the people for whom they were written.

It would be a mistake to read Genesis as if it were a book of Cosmology or Biology, thus being forced by a blind faith to deny scientific facts regarding cosmic evolution or the evolution of life on Earth. But, in a simple language, very important truths are presented, not to be forced artificially into a scientific straightjacket nor -as an alternative- dismissed by a myopic scientificism.

It is possible to accept that each way of partially knowing the total reality of the Universe and Man will contribute to a richer synthesis that will benefit both scientists and believers. The center will be the Love of a Creator who is not satisfied with watching suns burn or with the scurrying activities of animals that cannot know Him.

A personal Creator -intelligent and free- can only have a sufficient reason to create in the desire to have personal relationships with beings similar to Himself and capable of partaking of his happiness outside of any time limit, because true love is forever. This is our destiny according to biblical Theology: to live, beyond all boundaries of time and space, in union with "the Father from whom all good things come"

Emmanuel M,.Carreira, S.J. - Universidad Comillas - December 2006

Anthropic and Christian Theological considerations

St. Peter Chrysologus (380 - 450) - Sermo 148: PL. 52, 596

"Why do you ask how you were created and do not seek to know why you were made? Was not this entire visible Universe made for your dwelling? It was for you that the light dispelled the overshadowing gloom; for your sake was the night regulated and the day measured, and for you were the heavens embellished with the varying brilliance of the Sun, the Moon and the stars. The Earth was adorned with flowers, groves and fruit; and the constant marvellous variety of lovely living things was created in the air, the fields, and the sea for you"…

"He has made you in his image that you might in your person make the invisible Creator present on Earth; He has made you his legate, so that the vast empire of the world might have the Lord's representative. Then in his mercy God assumed what He made in you; He wanted now to be truly manifest in Man, just as He had wished to be revealed in Man as in an image. Now He would be in reality what He had submitted to be in symbol"

St Alphonsus Liguori (1696-1787) - Sermon

"All the gifts which he bestowed on man were given to this end (to gain our love). He gave him a soul, made in his likeness, and endowed with memory, intellect and will; he gave him a body equipped with the senses; it was for him that he created heaven and earth and such an abundance of things. He made all these things out of love for man, so that all creation might serve man, and man in turn might love God out of gratitude for so many gifts."

"But he did not wish to give us only beautiful creatures; the truth is that to win for himself our love, he went so far as to bestow upon us the fullness of himself. The eternal Father went so far as to give us his only Son...he sent his beloved Son to make reparation for us and to call us back to a sinless life"..."By giving us his Son... he bestowed on us at once every good: grace, love and heaven; for all these goods are certainly inferior to the Son: He who did not spare his own Son, but handed him over for all of us, how could he fail to give us along with his Son all good things?"

A Final Theological Perspective

As shown in the preceding quotations, Christian Theology gives us an undreamed of complement to the viewpoint presented in Genesis, adding something known only from Revelation and totally beyond the possible inferences drawn from science by our philosophical efforts.

The Creator, eternal and all-powerful, has wanted to join in a unique Person all levels of existence: divine, created spirit, and material. THE WORD WAS MADE FLESH in a new and definitive union, forever, in the God-Man who is the marvelous crowning of Creation.

We adore the Body of Christ, matter raised to the intimate life of the Trinity by the Resurrection and Ascension of Christ, the prelude and source of our own resurrection. Everything was created by Him, in Him, for Him, in such a profound way that we can now say that Christ is the only sufficient reason for the creation event, and that He will join to himself in his Mystical Body every human being that accepts Him according to the Father's plan of salvation.

Emmanuel M. Carreira, S.J, Ph.D.
Universidad Pontificia Comillas - Madrid