Coincidences 2

“God cannot lie or deceive, the words of the Bible and the facts of nature must agree. If they appear to disagree, then either the Scripture has been misunderstood or the science is wrong. A good example of this is the apparent disagreement between the first chapter of Genesis and the discoveries of science. Young Earth Creationists understand Scripture to say that the earth was created in 6 24-hour days roughly 6,000 years ago, but science says that the earth is 4.54 billion years old. These young-earth believers base their timeline on a translation of the Hebrew word yom as a literal 24-hour day. But this is only one possible translation. Yom can also be understood to mean a 12-hour day (sunrise to sunset), a portion of the daylight hours, or a finite but extended period of time (such as, in English, “the day of the dinosaur”). If one takes yom to mean a finite but extended period, then Scripture and science can be brought into accord!…

…Science tells us that the earth is 4.54 billion years old and that life first appeared here 3.83 billion years ago — literally at the first moment in the earth’s history that would allow its presence. The nucleated cell arrived 1.2 billion years ago, again in a sudden event. At the beginning of the Cambrian Period, 542 million years ago — the equivalent of day 5 in the Genesis account — came biology’s big bang. There was an explosion of highly organized life forms for which not a single ancestral fossil can be found. The Precambrian strata of rock is perfectly suited for the preservation of these transitional species that Darwinism predicts, but they are not there. In a geologic flash — two to five million years — five thousand species suddenly appeared — not single-cell organisms but highly organized animals with skeletons, shells, nervous systems, and complex eyes.

It is hard to see how Darwinian evolution — that is, gradual descent with modification — could explain this rapid appearance, in which most major categories of animals emerged. Even if one day it is discovered how such rapid evolution could have occurred, that would only demonstrate how God accomplished His creation.

What struck me as an agnostic was the fact that advanced life occurred at the precise moment conditions occurred on Earth that would allow for it. Paleontologists Niles Eldredge and Stephen Gould have pointed out that the fossil record shows that species remained in extended periods of stasis followed by quantum jumps in which species disappeared and were replaced suddenly by more advanced ones. The actual record of the appearance and development of life on Earth does indeed present a huge problem for the atheist and the agnostic.”

From Atheism to Catholicism: Nine Converts Explain Their Journey Home (Kindle Locations 1018-1027, 1079-1093). EWTN Publishing, Inc. . Kindle Edition.

Love & science,
Matthew