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About the Author:
Ralph D. Winter is a senior mission thinker who has been actively involved from the beginning of the massive mission transition from simply thinking in terms of countries or individuals to thinking in terms of peoples. He is founder of the
U.S. Center for World Mission,
and is currently chancellor of
William Carey
International University. |
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We talk casually today, almost blithly, about the Copernican Revolution, which was basically a massive and arresting readjustment of understanding about the nature of the universe. In a corner of Europe Copernicus proposed a major new understanding which staggeringly rearranged the position of known celestial objects, as though rearranging the furniture in one corner of a vast room such that those who were in that corner could see the larger room.
A second Copernican Revolution, if you will, took place when Hubble, here in Pasadena, employed the latest telescope, a few miles away up Mount Wilson, to explode the size of that already larger Copernican room by proposing that almost all those little lights out there in the sky were actually enormous galaxies of their own.
More recently, still more Copernican Revolutions have continued to take place as our cosmologists puzzle their way more deeply almost daily into increased complexities and unfathomed mysteries of an ever-larger phenomenon, those thousands of lights visible to the naked eye have become billions to the telescopes.
We are less likely to speak of the Keplerian Revolu- tion, which, in developing the mathematical description of planetary motion, was basically an astounding leap forward in awareness of the orderliness of nature. No one had ever captured nature’s laws in mathematical equations. Then, the revolutionary thinking embodied in the Newtonian breakthrough added details to Kepler’s already orderly nature.
Standing upon Newton’s additional insights godly men such as Faraday dramatically furthered our awareness not only of the very existence of “laws” of nature but of the astonishing ways in which a knowl- edge of those laws could be harnessed for human use. He was in one sense not only a scientist but an engineer, not only penetrating some of the still-today mysterious phenomena we call magnetism and electricity but coming up with—among many other things—both the electric motor and its reverse, the electric generator.
On the heels of these excitements and rearrangements of our thinking about nature a doorway then opened further into a new dimension of complexity, a largely unexpected world as new and as significant as Alice going through the looking glass, a tiny world totally invisible to the naked eye. In many respects all of the earlier breakthroughs of additional human apprehension of nature have been almost totally eclipsed by the historically recent awarness of the seemingly unending complexities at the small end of the scale.
This new dimension of reality includes not only the imponderables of the atom and the inert realities of the inorganic molecules but the infinitely more complex phenomenon of life itself, DNA, viruses, bacteria, cells, parasites, which in comparison would reduce the San Diego Zoo to the simplicity of the point of a pin compared to the complexity of the entire planet.
This new dimension of reality has been every bit as Copernican in its demands for intellectual rearrangement. The somewhat simplistic Darwinian scheme of ever more complex forms of life forming automatically has been forced to give way to the awareness that neither largeness nor lateness in history necessarily coordinate with complexity. The housefly has eyes that are incredibly more elaborate than the human eye. Certain very small forms of life navigate by use of celestial data. Other tiny insects have a sense of smell that allows them to detect floating molecules a mile away. Even honey bees have navigation systems that are still puzzling. Human sensory apparatus is clumsy by comparison to such examples. Yet humans do things that even the most advanced primates could not possibly do. Managing the words on this page, let alone the thinking behind these words or the computer that gen- erates these forms on my screen, is totally beyond any other form of life.
Amidst all this recent explosion of our understanding of both complexity and attendant confusion, we are in some ways much closer to an overall understanding of things. Indeed I do not believe it is too early to launch theories about the development of life forms which are undergirded with theology, if you understand theology to mean thinking that makes room for an awareness of intention and intelligence behind natural realities.
One of the most fully explored realities in the past 50 years has been what is commonly referred to as the Record of the Rocks. Here we see life forms in a somewhat regular progression of size. Yet the size of dinosaurs does not correlate with intelligence, and neither does smallness coordinate with simplicity. Nevertheless the earliest evidences of life are in fact both
smaller and simpler than later forms. For this apparent progression Darwin has his theory, around which much of the secular world has rallied. Christians do not have a similarly concrete consensus about how it all happend. Some continue to insist that it all happened in an instant, the rest unfolding like clockwork.
I do not question that such an idea is a perfectly reasonable idea—that God could have created our planet in an instant replete with rock layers that would give the impression of gradual formation over immense lengths of time. The conviction that God could have done this, however, is not the same as assuming that this is the way God did it. Still other Evangelicals back away entirely from conjecturing any details at all about how it happened, they simply insist that God, not Darwin, did it.
At least we can recognize that among Evangelicals great strides have been seen lately in rallying around the evidence of intelligent design in nature. Yet, neither Michael Behe nor Philip Johnson were able to answer the question posed by a Canadan philosopher in one of the last TV debates sponsored by William Buckley when he asked “Does your God make parasites?” That is, evidences for evil design are not heard among Christians as yet, despite the very evident violence-drenched nature that is perfectly visible to a small child. (Here I am reminded of the many small children who, looking at a globe, have wondered out loud about the possibility—long before scientists would even consider the idea—that the east cost of South America used to fit into the west cost of Africa. Today children are treated to close-up views of animals in nature tearing other animals apart and no one suggests this is ungodly violence. Only when humans do that sort of thing does our theology speak up.
Suppose, now for a few minutes, for the sake of discussion, we ask what might it mean theologically if the so-called Record of the Rocks were taken at face value, along with regarding as true the fourteen current different methods of estimating age.
For one thing, the now enormous mass of informa- tion that has been gathered does at least indicate that forms of life that are destructive to other forms of life appeared late in the record. And, when that kind of evil appeared it appeared pervasively. At every level of life, from small forms to large, predatory forms sud- denly appeared. Current thinking puts this curious event, an aspect of what is often referred to as the Cambrian Explosion, at about 550 million years ago. From that point until this moment, there is such con- stant and pervasive violence in nature that it is common to assume that this is the way it was intended to be, that this is simply “the way it is,” not going into any detail as to the when or the why.
All of this cries out for an explanation. Perhaps multiple trial explanations are possible. One that comes to my mind takes seriously the idea that there is a supreme, personal intelligence (whom we can call God), and that this person has created beings often called heavenly messengers (angels) but actually much more than simply messengers, intelligent workers, if you will. It is possible to think of such heavenly assistants as intelligent, able to learn and to please God, but apparently also being given true free will that has allowed a considerable number of them to be in revolt while at the same time not being confronted with old age.
This is all you really need, then, to conceive of such beings as working for God at the DNA level, many of them being able to tamper with the DNA molecule at least as skillfully as our contemporary scientists, whose enormous disadvantage, for one thing, is the size of human beings in comparison to the size of the nucleotides which make up the binary helix molecule which is the basic code for all of life forms.
The astonishing discovery that a mouse, an elephant, and a man, all have DNA that is roughly 95% the same gives us insight into the vast complexity of the constituent elements of cells and their amazing contents, and at the same time an understanding of why it took so long for these workers for God to learn to do more than arrive at the cellular level, apparently laboring four billion years or so before anything very much larger than single-cell life appeared possible. It is likely a measure of our limited and recent education about tiny things that allows us to wonder why it took so long for bigger forms of life to appear.
We can readily imagine a sequence something like this:
1. We don’t really know much about the appearance of the universe itself. To believe that the whole universe suddenly exploded from a very tiny object requires more faith by far than any of the Christian claims about the miracles of Jesus. We do know that the phenomena to which we refer as “material” is consistent with that found on our planet and also outer space, and that somehow the laws of gravitation, light, magnetism, etc. are also continuous with what we know of outer space. This knowledge lasts us long enough to understand at least partially the reality and orderliness of the periodic table of elements—the fantastic array of larger and larger atoms that underlie all that we call material.
2. But apparently atoms and molecules of the kind which compose what is technically called “the inorganic universe” are the basis not only of all such forms of matter but are specifically the building blocks from which has been derived, somehow, that other far more unimaginable “organic universe.” Curiously all forms of life utilize the ubiquitous carbon atom. Not all molecules built of carbon are “organic,” but all organic chemicals are built around carbon.
3. Only fairly recently in history have human beings discovered that all forms of life are apparently built up from and defined by an amazing coded molecule called DNA, a “double helix” involving millions and millions of atoms. Note that an additional intelligence is apparently required for a phenomenon which thus far seems to be unique to our planet, namely life forms. The DNA itself does not create life unless it is coded intelligently. It is like having on our hands a
computer “language” like the widely familiar
“BASIC.” All computer programs are built from what are called languages, but the language itself, like the English language, does not itself automatically create literature. It is a useful code to employ for that pur- pose but a grammar book does not create literature. Intelligence does.
The very tiniest life forms are enormously larger than the underlying DNA chain which defines their nature and function.
4. Thus, not only is the DNA molecule itself an incredibly complex reality, its endless potential for defining life is unimaginably more complex, and would seem to require even very intelligent angels a good long time to master.
5. In fact, a major milestone was achieved when the angels, no doubt following God’s blueprints, created the first cell, each one containing in its nucleus an essential coded DNA molecule, but also an enormous assortment of other activities highly integrated which if enlarged, each cell would resemble a large city in complexity.
6. Once the cell was achieved, then building larger life out of cells became a new challenge, one which could and did accelerate far more rapidly. After four and a half billion years, at roughly 550 million years ago, in the so-called Ediacaran era, we see forms of life that are radially symmetrical (like a starfish) and others that have bipolar symmetry, where you have a
front and a back. What you do not see is any predatory forms of life. Nowhere are there are defensive measures like shells or spines or offensive devices like destructive teeth. Up to this point the angels were laboring to create new forms of life. They were learning from their task and from each other, and in different parts of the planet were producing different products, something like the state of Michigan has different kinds of automobiles emerging from different factories yet constantly aware of each other’s design trends.
7. But then, a major asteroidal collision wiped out a great deal of the life at that point, not the angels, not their knowledge and skills but their handiwork. Can angels get discouraged? It is not at all clear why but apparently they immediately went back to work and a lavish new array of life forms now appeared in what is called the Cambrian Explosion. Something totally new also appeared.
8. At precisely that moment a revolt must have occurred, which immediately pitted the loyal workers against rebels, launching a see-saw contest which would not only generate new forms of life but new forms of destructive life at every level. Rebel workers who had long known how to make DNA and proteins and so on could now both twist and distort existing forms of life so as to make them destructive of other forms of life. They also devised destructive retroviruses that could carry in a backpack, so to speak, replacement spans of DNA precisely designed to invade cells and distort the original DNA code in life forms large and small. Thus, from the Cambrian period until now nature is a mad, wild, violent cauldron of killing and being killed, at every level. Was this revolt due to discouragement on the part of some of the angels? We have no idea whatsoever how and why a leading supervisor and one-third of the angels defected. It is enough to deal with the what this time and not puzzle about the why.
What we have become accustomed to consider normal in nature, that is, both elaborate defenses and vicious offensive characteristics, can perhaps more realistically be seen more clearly as abnormal. Even the human immune system can be seen as something added for defense.
And, in view of the fact that the human immune system has been developed with sufficient sophistication to recognize over three thousand billion different invading bacteria (three trillion), again it is only our relative ignorance of all this that would lead us to wonder why it took angels so long a learning curve to be able to develop more complex animals. Disease pathogens, whether viruses, bacteria, or parasites, display incredible intelligence either for good or evil. New pathogens and adjusted forms of existing pathogens are appearing constantly as well as heightened powers of our immune systems which are constantly being assailed by newly created menaces, which join the large number which have already learned how to invade our bodies without being destroyed.
But this is to get ahead of ourselves. The story following the Cambrian Explosion, estimated at 550 million years ago, followed both the routine continuation of the school of workers ever building larger and larger forms of life of all kinds, sea dwellers, land dwellers and air borne forms of life. More and more defense mechanisms were born. Thus, unique in the post Ediacaran era (that is, the Cambrian and following) has been the appearance of defensive shells, spines, poisons, protective scales, and fight-back capabilities. It seems every form of life had its particular predators. Many forms of life were driven to extinction. Today only one tenth of one percent of the various forms of life seen in the Record of the Rocks still exist. And, yes, the loyal angelic workers have not only put together new forms of life on schedule, but have been forced simultaneously to adapt them skillfully to defend themselves against opposing forms of life. These adaptations can most easily be understood as intelligent modifications not just accidental or fortuitous mutations.
In fact, if you reflect a moment on the 100-year story of the development of the automobile in the twentieth century, you must take into account the millions of large and small, but intelligent modfications during that period performed by thousands of keen designers and engineers, and performed by hundreds of thousands of workers. This amazing process, moving from the Model T Ford to the contemporary Lincoln Continental, produced today in the same place by the same company of workers, could be described as the “Evolution of the American Automobile,” if we employ that disputed term evolution in this case as a guided, intelligent process.
In a parallel way loyal angelic workers may well have been busy across the years developing not only new forms of life but newly defense-capable forms in view of the relentless onslaught of life-destroying varieties which have been the labor and intelligence of the rebel workers.
More than once this gruesome contest got so bad that, perhaps it was timely for another asteroid from outer space to collide with the earth and destroy a great deal of both good and destructive forms of life.
Talk about asteroidal collisions is very recent, and, curiously, has gained great credence only because of the Moon landing which turned topsy turvy the long held idea that the Moon craters were volcanic when in fact they turned out to be impact craters. If the Moon had been splattered with collisions from outer space, then, the reasoning went, that the Earth must have suffered even more collisions, the difference being that in the case of the Moon the record has not been covered up by the active geological wear and tear of time and weather that is so well known on the Earth.
Thus, for example, it is now widely believed that dinosaurs disappeared as the result of a very large asteroid colliding with what we know today as the Yucatan pennisula in Mexico. Note in passing that our contemporary insanely increasing exhaustion of fossil fuels is both allowed and limited distinctly by the creation of fossil fuels through sudden mass extinction—oil resulting from fossilized animal life, coal resulting from fossilized plant life.
Many studies of impact phenomena have been done since the Moon landing and its upsetting revelation about asteroidal activity. By now it is pretty well settled in scientific circles that the explosive impact of a large asteroid generates a global canopy of dust lasting for years, obscuring the sun and moon, and only gradually thinning so as to allow an awareness of dark and light periods caused by Earth’s rotation with respect to the Sun. Finally, it can be understood that a collapse of the remaining canopy would allow suddenly the direct rays of Sun and Moon, and, of course, the possibility of a rainbow, which requires unobstructed rays of light to appear. This is a sequence, by the way, that is eerily reminiscent of the events early in the biblical book of Genesis.
At the same time, following a collision, the loyal workers would set about replacing forms of life extinguished in a collision. Indeed new and different designs would be possible. The sudden flourishing of new forms of life following major asteroidal collisions has always puzzled Darwinian thinkers, and clearly favors a theory of design over chance.
At some point, the Supreme Being may have decided to launch a new and more effective counterattack. This seems to have occurred immediately follow- ing a major collision. Now we are approaching what could be called the Edenic experiment, which in geologic time is very, very recent. For the first time an enormously significant and different kind of life was now formed. In many respects similar to earlier models, the homo sapiens would be much more capable of assisting the loyal workers in the necessary defense and counterattack against the destructive forces.
But even in this Edenic beachhead things went wrong, the arch rival succeeding in corrupting the divine design. The arch rival had “fallen” long before, at the onset of the Cambrian period. And during the next half billion years the existence of warring, antago- nistic forms of life become the norm, all of that preced- ing Eden or the events of Genesis One. Genesis 1:1 in the Hebrew implies not creation out of nothing—the word BARA being the same word a potter uses in creating a pot—but rather the rehabilitation of a planet extensively damaged by an asteroid (”without form and void, darkness upon the deep”).
Asteroidal collisions in Earth history have never killed all forms of life. At the time Eden was created there were no doubt many forms of life in existence outside of the garden, among which the characteristic constant, all-out war was continuing to take place.
The new experiment was a new great hope, but now homo sapiens also “fell” and slowed the recon- quest of a plundered planet. Inside Eden as well as outside, counterforces to Creative Design thus now existed and took their toll. For many years, not only destructive external forces to homo- sapiens existed but the distortion of man himself produced rampant aggression of man against man. The replenishing of the earth was drastically slowed by homicidal violence and pervasive disease pathogens. It is awesome that the most ancient evidences of homo sapiens display,
characteristically, skulls crushed by human instrumen- tality, widespread cannibalism, as well as corruption by disease. Only recently and very reluctantly has this morbid evidence been recognized widely in scholarly circles.
As the result of the distortion of man himself, for many centuries human population grew only very slightly. For example, had our modern degree of con- quest over disease and war been in force in Abraham’s day, human population of an estimated 28 million could have grown to 6 billion in only 123 years. Such explosive growth of population has been impossible until recently, most of the story being one of nearly total ignorance of the nature and mechanisms of disease.
Incidentally, the advent of homo sapiens brought literacy into the picture, and with literacy came docu- ments which in turn have given rise to the study of history (often defined as the period during which writing was in existence), thus ending the Prehistory period. However, it is perfectly obvious that much of the story of life is in the prehistory period. (If the five billion year history of this planet were to be represented by a five-foot-long bar on a blackboard, the history period would only be the last 1/10 of the thick- ness of a piece of paper.) Thus, by the time homo sapiens appears, and writing appears, most of the story, in one sense, is over, or at least well established. Furthermore it is questionable whether the official “history” period can be well understood without the backdrop of prehistory.
For one thing, only prehistory records a period prior to the existence of warring life forms. Therefore, if all we do is to trace history we do not encounter the sudden appearance of violence, and thus we may very typically be blind to the existence of rampant evil and antagonism on a large scale. We may further be blind to the existence of an arch rival and, worst of all, we may thus impute to the Supreme Being blame for evil and suffering, which is exactly what many feel the Old Testament does.
Rather, however, than to blame God for the origin of evil or to blame the Bible for portraying Him in that light, it seems to me better to understand the Old Tes- tament perspective as being an overall perspective, while the New Testament’s constant references to Satan are simply a more specific perspective. The best example is the dual reference to David’s numbering the people as found both in 2 Sam 24:1 (Where God “incites” David) and 1 Chr 24:1 (where Satan “incites” David).
Thus the story of prehistory continues essentially into the final moments of the story of life on earth. The main new factor is the existence of an incredibly more intelligent species, its “fall” and the unique corrective of the “Second Adam” further pressing the claims of God’s rule, His Kingdom right down to the present moment.
For us today is the challenge to understand the gigantic conflict which continues unabated, but which is rapidly being modified as both disease and war are relatively diminished, and as, we would hope, human awareness of Satanic opposition to and distortion of creation increases. Much of the history of medicine is the relatively blind but positive opposition to Satanic corruption, a pursuit of destructive pathogens which has enormously accelerated in the last few years.
Modern gene-splicing illuminates the way the very nature of otherwise violent forms of life can be restored to peaceful coexistence. That is, against the backdrop of increasing insight into nature is the rather sudden and totally unexpected appearance of the com- plexity of the world of microbiology. I have already spoken of the need to theologize this new and enormous world of microbiology. The further task is to theologize the entire story of prehistory.
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