Science and the Bible – Lesson 8
By Michael McCann

Last time we looked at the fossil record from a broad perspective view.  The fossil record is a history of how life appeared on this earth.  The overall view is that life, both animal and plant life, developed over a long period of time from very simple to very complex.

We could, if we wanted to, just stop right here and not go into further detail.  The fossil record does not support the young earth creationist view that all life was created at once in complete form.  There are detailed, complex, coherent, and discoverable lines of evidence that point to a natural process that took place over a long time.  If all life had been created at once there would be no segregation of fossil remains.  The bones of elephant and apatosaurus, tyrannosaur and tiktaalik, velociraptor and vulture would all be found jumbled together.  And Carboniferous coal would have 80% angiosperms and 20% gymnosperms just as we see on earth today; not 100% gymnosperm.  That coal has nothing but gymnosperms BECAUSE flowering plants did not exist when that coal was formed.  Coals formed in the late Cretaceous and Tertiary periods have plenty of angiosperm content.

This over-arching view is sometimes lost in the creation-evolution controversy.  Because a detailed look at the fossil record, despite still supporting the overall view, has messy loose ends.

“Why, if species have descended from other species by insensibly fine gradations, do we not everywhere see innumerable transitional forms?”  (Charles Darwin)

“The history of most fossil species includes two features particularly inconsistent with gradualism: 1. Stasis. Most species exhibit no directional change during their tenure on earth. They appear in the fossil record looking much the same as when they disappear; morphological change is usually limited and directionless. 2. Sudden appearance. In any local area, a species does not arise gradually by the steady transformation of its ancestors; it appears all at once and `fully formed.’” (Gould, Stephen J. [Professor of Zoology and Geology, Harvard University, USA], “Evolution’s Erratic Pace,” Natural History, Vol. 86, No. 5, May 1977, p.14).

Simple microbial life shows up as far back as 3.4 billion years ago, but from about 540 million years ago to 530 million years ago there is the seemingly sudden appearance of a variety of complex animals (often referred to as the Cambrian explosion).  Of course 5-10 million years is hardly an “explosion” but still it is pretty impressive.

Nevertheless, despite the quote above being commonly quoted by YEC’s, Gould had a pretty good explanation of why the fossil record appeared as it did and often expressed irritation about being quoted out of context or quote-mined into saying something he emphatically did not believe:

“It is infuriating to be quoted again and again by creationists, whether through design or stupidity, I do not know, as admitting that the fossil record includes no transitional forms. Transitional forms are generally lacking at the species level but are abundant between larger groups. The evolution from reptiles to mammals . . . is well documented.”  (Stephen J. Gould in “Evolution as Fact and Theory,” Discover, May 1981)

The problem is that the subtleties of punctuated equilibrium are hard to grasp for the average Christian layman, especially when his fellow co-religionists are making ridiculous arguments appear as convincing “logic”.

The transitional form conundrum for the evangelical is well illustrated in the following example from the book Of Pandas and People:

Although the depiction shows no transitional forms between ray-finned fish and lungfish (which is essentially true) it does show the excellent record of transition between lobe-finned lungfish and the tetrapods that are plausibly the forerunners to amphibians.  Also, Panderichthys fossils date to 380 mya and Acanthostega fossils date to 365 mya.  In 2004, a team of paleontologists went looking in rocks in Canada that were 375 mya and they found “Tiktaalik rosaea”.

Tiktaalik seems to bridge the gap between Panderichthys and Acanthostega.

So you have a case here where a prediction is made on the basis of a scientific theory and that prediction is tested and verified.  But it would be a mistake to think that a depiction of the above series is a straight forward “ladder” of one species succeeding the other.  This group of fossils were thought to be roughly contemporary with the transition onto land. However, recently tracks of a four-footed animal were discovered in marine sediments firmly dated at 397 million years old. If that animal was a genuine tetrapod, then creatures like Tiktaalik may have been “late-surviving relics” exhibiting transitional features that actually evolved somewhat earlier.

In short, these are not the actual ancestors of modern land animals; but they are related to the actual ancestors, and so they do show us the sort of creatures that developed during the great move onto land. Straight-forward “proof” of evolution? Hardly.  Complicated? Yes, but is the concept of transitional forms still demonstrated?  I think so.

In my class I usually cover a few more examples of transitional fossils like dinosaur-to-bird, but the one transitional assemblage that really matters to most people is this one:

Now we come to the real tension between science and the Bible.  After all it was Jesus himself who said:

Matthew 19:4 And he answered and said unto them, Have ye not read, that he which made them at the beginning made them male and female…

The apostle Paul said:

Romans 5:14 Nevertheless death reigned from Adam to Moses, even over them that had not sinned after the similitude of Adam’s transgression, who is the figure of him that was to come…

19 For as by one man’s disobedience many were made sinners, so by the obedience of one shall many be made righteous.

The science would seem to say that these creatures show part of the transition between the common ancestor we shared with the apes and modern humans.  Now it is a bush not a ladder relation.  We did not descend directly from apes.  Nevertheless, it is a continuum with regard to the development of our physical bodies; there seems to be no clear line of demarcation.

How can this be reconciled with the goodness of God’s creation; all the death and extinction of millions of years?  What of the fall?  Is man falling upward?  How is Christ’s death necessary under an evolutionary paradigm?  Is the absolute dichotomy of the fundamentalist atheist and fundamentalist Christian valid; you must choose between science and the Bible, they both can’t be true?

I cannot resolve this tension.  I will tell you how I live with it.  I have no intention of renouncing my faith in Christ.  I have no intention of indulging in pseudo-science.  Let us return to first principles.

All truth is God’s truth.  If something is true in the natural/physical realm then it is true – period.  The science depicted in the human transitional forms is NOT going to go away.  In fact, the number and quality of transitional forms is only going to increase as discovery continues.  Since that chart was put together by the Smithsonian there has been the discovery of Denisovans and Homo Naledi ()  And as we shall see in the next essay, the science of genetics, especially at the molecular level, which could have overturned the family tree constructed by: 1. comparative anatomy, 2. biogeography, and 3. the fossil record, instead has confirmed it.

That being the case, what I am waiting for is the development of an interpretive grid that puts the meaning with the mechanism.  As Alister McGrath said in his essay “Faith and the limits of science” :

“I have no doubt that science can identify the mechanisms of life. But that’s not the same as telling us what life is about. The question here is about meaning, not mechanism. Telling us how something happened doesn’t tell us about why it happened, or what it means.  One of my scientific heroes is Sir Peter Medawar, who won the Nobel Prize for Medicine some years ago. He was not a religious man. I think it would be fair to describe him as a rationalist, with a distaste for many aspects of religion.

In one of his final publications, entitled The Limits of Science, he reflected on the kind of questions raised by Karl Popper. Medawar rightly insisted that “science is incomparably the most successful enterprise human beings have ever engaged upon.”  Yet he drew a sharp distinction between questions about the organization and structure of the material universe, and what he called “transcendent” questions.  What sort of transcendent questions did he have in mind? Medawar points to “questions that science cannot answer, and that no conceivable advance of science would empower it to answer” – such as, What are we all here for? What is the point of living?”

McGrath is one of those who is working on that interpretive grid that respects science, but puts science’s limitations as a way of knowing into the proper place in human experience.  He goes on to say in that same essay:

“One such answer is that we find our true identity and meaning through coming to know God. This is now the answer – or, at least, part of the answer – that I myself would give. It is not one that I always adopted.  I used to be an atheist when I was younger. But while I was a student at Oxford many years ago, it gradually came to capture my thoughts and imagination. It is an answer that continues to thrill and excite me.  For me, discovering God was like finding a lens that helped me see things more clearly. Faith offers me a bigger picture of reality. It doesn’t just make sense to me, it makes sense of me as well.  Believing in God doesn’t contradict science, but rather gives me an intellectual and moral framework within which the successes of science may be celebrated and understood, and its limits appreciated.  That’s no criticism of science. It’s just respecting its limits, and not forcing it to become something else.”

Sarah Coakley is another thinker on the forefront of these issues.  In her essay “God and Evolution: A New Proposal” she points out that there are three problems that confront us as we try to see a coherent relation between a good, providential God, and a naturalistic explanation for our biologic life.  First, there is the issue of how we should understand the relation of God’s providence to the seeming randomness of the stochastic processes science had identified as leading to human life.  Second, there is the issue of how God’s providence can relate to the specific area of human freedom and creativity.  Third is the problem of evil.  How such stochastic processes lead to such destruction and suffering, even if the suffering in pre-human history is animal suffering.  Modern evolutionary theory intensifies these conflicts even though they are not new and have been explored by philosophers and theologians of times past.

To quote Coakley:

But modern Darwinian evolutionary theory appears to underscore the contingency or randomness of evolutionary “mutation” and “selection,” and thus to render newly problematic the possibility of a coherent divine guidance of pre-cultural evolution…

Consequently, modern evolutionary theory appears to intensify the problem of evil intolerably.

If, after all, God is the author and “sustainer” of the destructive mess and detritus of both pre-cultural and cultural evolutionary processes, why is God so incompetent and/or sadistic as not to prevent such tragic accompaniments to God’s master plan? If intervention is an option for God, why has God not exercised it?

She proposes three broad-based preliminary solutions.  First is to avoid having God compete with evolution.  As I stated earlier, science can’t explain away God, if God works through proximate causes to carry out His ultimate purposes.  It’s still ALL GOD !!!  How does God make it rain?  How does He make the sun rise?  How are babies made?  In fact, let’s look at that last one more closely.  How probable was it that of the 400-plus eggs and billion-plus sperm of your biologic parents, that YOU would appear with just the characteristics you have?  Your conception was a RANDOM event. Extending that back into the past; think of the immense improbability of your parents meeting, their parents meeting, their grandparents meeting, and so on back into dim history, each meeting and merging contingent upon the previous.  You, dear evangelical reader, already accept that and still believe God created you.  Is it so strange then, to extend that back into pre-human history?  Are we not earthy, of this earth…

Ecclesiastes3:18 I said in mine heart concerning the estate of the sons of men, that God might manifest them, and that they might see that they themselves are beasts.  19 For that which befalleth the sons of men befalleth beasts; even one thing befalleth them: as the one dieth, so dieth the other; yea, they have all one breath; so that a man hath no preeminence above a beast: for all is vanity.  20 All go unto one place; all are of the dust, and all turn to dust again.

The second issue of how God’s providence can relate to the specific area of human freedom and creativity she resolves by reminding us that it is an error in assuming that God is a mere item, albeit “big,” in the temporal universe itself.  She says:

In other words, once again we can think not deistically but trinitarianly and incarnationally of God. We can make Christ’s agony in the garden, or his submission to divine will on the cross, as the hallmark and pattern of achieved human freedom rather than its supersession.

Once we see human freedom, in its truest and best sense, as freedom-for-God, rather than freedom-against-God, then much of the force of this second problem falls away.

The third problem, that of theodicy, she resolves, as Christians historically have always done; christologically.   “The deepest agony, loss, and apparent wastefulness in God’s creation” is mirrored in Christ’s “needless” death and agony.  Evil, from this perspective, is mere absence of good, and death the prelude to resurrection.  She concludes:

God, in short, is always intervening; but only rarely do we see this when the veil becomes “thin,” and the alignment between divine, providential will and evolutionary or human “cooperation” momentarily becomes complete.

Such, we might hypothesize, was Christ’s resurrection, which we call a miracle because it seems, from a “natural” and scientific perspective, both unaccountable and random.

Yet, from a robustly theological perspective, it might be entirely natural, the summation indeed of the entire trinitarian evolutionary process and thus it’s secret key.

Yeah, everything is summed up in Jesus.  That’s the best I can do for now.

• • •

Photo by kathryn_goddard1 on Flickr. Creative Commons License.

Science and the Bible – Lesson 7
By Michael McCann

Frequent Imonk commenter and fellow geologist, Klasie Kraalogies, also contributed to today’s essay.

As we turn now to examine evidence for biologic evolution we must settle the issue of the fossil record.  If the geologic strata are a time-sequence record of the history of the earth then that record can be examined and inferences drawn about what may have happened.  Although some YEC groups like to assert a dichotomy between “observational” science and “historical” science no such dichotomy actually exists.  No one asserts that forensic science isn’t science.  That a crime scene cannot be reconstructed.  That evidence about what happened in the past regarding a crime cannot be established.  Law enforcement does it all the time and we expect them to so that justice may be done.  Now of course no event in history can be absolutely defined.  It is inductive inference to the most probable conclusion.  We don’t convict on murder unless it is “beyond a reasonable doubt”, but we do convict murderers.  So we can’t know absolutely what went on in the past, but we can infer a reasonable conclusion.

We have already discussed some examples of how the geologic stratigraphy cannot all be explained by a global Noah’s flood.  Paleokarst in the Redwall Formation in the Grand Canyon and the Thornton coral reef have been discussed. Perhaps one of the most glaring examples would be evaporite beds.  Evaporites are sediments chemically precipitated due to evaporation of an aqueous solution. Common evaporates can be dominated by halite (salt), anhydrite and gypsum.  The area around the Dead Sea is a modern day example.  You cannot evaporate sea water in the middle of a flood.  Paradox Basin in Utah- halite (salt) and anhydrite (gypsum) beds are a MILE thick.  A similar example is the Prairie Evaporite formation that stretches through Alberta, Saskatchewan, North Dakota and Manitoba; they are up to 1000 feet thick in places, and have a maximum extension of over 900 miles. They also contain some of the largest potash reserves in the world, making them well studied and economically important. The reason I add this is that people understand that these things are studied for their economic worth, i.e. the outcome has to be trustworthy because billions of dollars in investment rest on the geological interpretation.  So called “flood geology” is completely useless for any economic purpose.  Oil and mining companies could care less about theological disputes; their only criteria is that the theory works.  If “flood geology” could predict the location of oil and mining deposits they would accept it in a heartbeat, all they care about is the money.  Modern geological interpretation works well and works consistently; you literally take it to the bank.

Carol Hill, another Christian and geologist, makes a pretty good case here for Noah’s flood being a local, or perhaps regional event; in particular, dear evangelical reader, if you are bothered by the universal language of the Biblical passage.  To quote her:

“The Hebrew for “earth” used in Gen. 6–8 (and in Gen. 2:5–6) is eretz (‘erets) or adâmâh, both of which terms literally mean “earth, ground, land, dirt, soil, or country.” In no way can “earth” be taken to mean the planet Earth, as in Noah’s time and place, people (including the Genesis writer) had no concept of Earth as a planet and thus had no word for it.  

All, Every, Under Heaven. While these terms also seem to impart a universality to the Flood event, all three are used elsewhere in the Bible for local events, and so—like the term “earth”—do not necessarily have an all-inclusive or universal meaning.”

She also points out that the word translated as “mountain” (har) can equally be translated as hill or hills.  She places the time of the flood to around 2900 BC.

There is also the matter of near-universality of flood stories. Most of the flood stories involve a god or gods angry at humans for their wickedness, destroying mankind in a flood except for one righteous man who is saved in a boat.

It makes me wonder if these stories are deep memories that harken back to post-Pleistocene periods as glaciers receded and the earth was much wetter.  Consider Lake Missoula, 2000 feet deep, when it broke through the glacial ice dam (about 15,000 years ago).

Glacial Lake Missoula was as big as Lakes Erie and Ontario combined.  The flood waters ran with the force equal to 60 Amazon Rivers.  It left ripple marks 50 feet high.  Car-sized boulders embedded in ice floated some 500 miles; they can still be seen today!  I vividly remember visiting the area during my geology field camp as an undergraduate.  My professors made a point that most of the evidence for this catastrophic flood was not recognized by geologists at first; even into the 1960’s.  If you were an ancient man in the path of this flood, I’m pretty sure you would have reported the whole world was being flooded.  Also much has been made recently of the breakthrough of the Mediterranean into the Black Sea as a source of catastrophic flood stories.

Another example here is the posited flooding of the Persian Gulf due to the collapse of Lake Agassiz.

I’m speculating, of course, but the point being that legendary or even mythical does not necessary mean completely non-historical nor false.  That the Bible could use legendary stories to make points seems strange to modernist sensibilities but would not have been unusual at all to the ancient near east cultures that made up the original audience.

Before we examine the fossil record for evidence of evolution let’s define our terms so we can have a meaningful discussion.  As Christians we must take an honest look at what those educated in biology (which includes Christians- by the way) say.  It does no good to stick our heads in the sand – the issue is NOT going away.  It does no good to construct and then knock down a strawman.

Straw man is a debate strategy in which a point that can be easily refuted is attributed to the opposition. The objective of setting up a straw man in an argument is to “knock down” the opponent’s argument and make it appear as if the opponent’s entire position has been refuted.  Straw man arguments are disingenuous, and fundamentally dishonest; and should not be employed by those who profess to be Christ-followers.

Exodus 20:16 Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour.

Rev. 21:8   …and all liars, shall have their part in the lake which burneth with fire and brimstone…

1 Pet. 2:22 (AMP) He (Jesus) was guilty of no sin, neither was deceit (guile) ever found on His lips.

One of the most respected evolutionary biologists has defined biological evolution as follows:

“Biological evolution … is change in the properties of populations of organisms that transcend the lifetime of a single individual. The ontogeny (developmental history) of an individual is not considered evolution; individual organisms do not evolve.  “The changes in populations that are considered evolutionary are those that are inheritable via the genetic material from one generation to the next. Biological evolution may be slight or substantial; it embraces everything from slight changes in the proportion of different alleles (different forms or groups of genes) within a population (such as those determining blood types) to the successive alterations that led from the earliest proto-organism to snails, bees, giraffes, and dandelions.”

– Douglas J. Futuyma in Evolutionary Biology, Sinauer Associates 1986

Biological evolution occurs at different scales. These include small-scale evolution and broad-scale evolution. Small-scale evolution, also referred to as microevolution, (but not by most biologists) is the change in gene frequencies within a population of organisms from one generation to the next.

Broad-scale evolution, also referred to as macroevolution, refers to evolution at a grander scale. It focuses on the progression of species or entire clades [a group of organisms, such as a species, whose members share similar features derived from a common ancestor] from a common ancestor to descendent clades over the course of numerous generations.

There is no debate about microevolution, even the most ardent young earth creationists agree it happens e.g. bacterial antibiotic resistance.  The two areas where there is evidence for macroevolution is in the phenotype and the genotype.  A phenotype (from Greek phainein, ‘to show’ + typos, ‘type’) is the composite of an organism’s observable characteristics or traits.  In particular to the fossil record the hard parts that are preserved; bones, teeth, shells, etc.  Genotype, of course, refers to an organism’s genetic make-up.

Now, of course, the geologic record is in no one place entirely complete for where geologic forces in one area provide a low-lying region accumulating deposits much like a layer cake, in the next area they may have uplifted the region, and that area is instead one that is weathering and being torn down by chemistry, wind, temperature, and water.

That being said, and contrary to YEC propaganda, there are 25 places in the world where at least part of the entire geologic column is represented, including North Dakota.

25 Locations Where the Entire Geologic Record is Present

Based on the principle of superposition which states rocks deposited first lie at the bottom of a sequence, while those deposited later are at the top (assuming they haven’t been disturbed), geologists are able to piece together a time-history of the earth from the oldest rocks to the newest.

So what do we see in the rock record?  Simply put, the simplest life is found early in earth’s history, complex life is found later for both animals and plants.  The earliest rocks have traces of bacteria and algae and nothing else.  Then simple animals without backbones appear, often with shells.  Then fishes appear and a little later amphibians, followed by reptiles, dinosaurs, mammals, birds, and finally man.  In the same rock sequences there is a similar progression of plant life.  First simple sea-weeds, then club mosses, horsetail rushes, ferns, pines, ginkos, and finally flowering plants.

Once an animal or plant appears in the record it may appear in succeeding strata (or go extinct).  One thing is observed; later plants or animals NEVER appear earlier.  Dinosaur remains are never found with human remains anywhere on earth – EVER.  Let me give you another example.

Gymnosperms (Greek- “naked seeds”) are plants that have unenclosed seeds and include: conifers, cycads, ginkos, and ferns.  Angiosperms are all flowering plants where the seeds are encased in within an ovary.  Gymnosperms precede angiosperms in the rock record as flowering plants don’t show up until the early Cretaceous (140 million years ago).  Angiosperms make up 80% of all plant life currently on earth.

Coal deposits in the Carboniferous period (about 360 mya) are found around the world.  They have been mined and therefore examined extensively for hundreds of years.  The plant material composing Carboniferous coal is ENTIRELY made up of gymnosperms, there are NO angiosperms.

One last thing for today.  If you construct an organizational chart of how plants and animals are related to each other based on basic characteristics you get something that looks like this:

Now three observations about this chart.  (1) The more basic the characteristic the more common to all organisms it appears. (2) This chart can be correlated with the rock record as simplest to more complex and oldest to youngest.  (3) It presents as a nested hierarchy, that is to say: A FAMILY TREE.

So there does appear to be a developmental history to life on earth – and it appears to be a nested hierarchy, or a family tree.