Outline of Next 2 Weeks THIS WEEK What is Life Origin of Life - - PDF document

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TUESDAY, OCTOBER 8, 2019

Outline of Next 2 Weeks

THIS WEEK What is Life Origin of Life & Man Genesis ⇐// Bio-Chemistry NEXT WEEK – No Class – Question solicitation for written Q&A document

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Tonight

• Recap:
• Interpretation idea to help align of science and Bible
• Good alignment on “what” happened (not “how”)
• The Universe and primitive Solar system exist 
• The Earth as a planet is geologically formed 



• Life on Earth arises step-by-step 

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• Next:
• Focus on Life & Man
• Seeking alignable interpretations
• Transhumanism

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Life

• What is Life?
• Is a kangaroo more like a lotus plant or a ballet dancer?

? ?

≈ ≈

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SESSION 3 Aligning: Rise of Life & Man

Interpretation

• “Appearance of design = design” and

“Statistically extremely unlikely events = fine tuning”

• Especially if effects accumulate toward an identified purpose
• Day/Age:
• Scientific progression of physical systems and life align well with

God’s creative acts as described in Bible

• Even if non-believers disagree with “How?”
• Allows for the possible outworking of God’s created processes
• Why does the conflict seem so much worse with LIFE?

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History of Creation of Life

BIBLE (Genesis 1) 1:2 – First life (“hovering”) 1:11 – Vegetation 1:20 – Sea Animals and Birds 1:24 – Land Mammals 1:27 – Man God’s work described:

Bara – create new (universe, soulish animals, man) Asa – form from something Haya – cause to become or happen (“Let…”) Dasha/Yasa – be brought forth Possibility of outworking of created natural processes

SCIENCE

• First life appears (3.8 ~ 3.5 BYA)
• (No viable chem-bio model of abiogenesis)
• Last Universal Common Ancestor (~3.6 BYA)
• All life descended via macroevolution from LUCA
• First plant life on dry land (~½ BYA)
• “Cambrian Explosion” (~540 MYA)
• Nearly all phyla (body plans) emerged suddenly
• (No viable evolutionary model)
• Insect (400 MYA), Reptiles (300 MYA)
• First mammals (~65 MYA)
• First primates (~30 MYA)
• Homo sapiens (~150 TYA)

History of Earth – Step 6B

BIBLE

• Genesis 1:27 – 28

God created man[kind] in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them. God blessed them; and God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth, and subdue it; and rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over every living thing that moves on the earth.”

• Other verses reinforcing “image of God”:

Gen 5:1, 9:6; 1 Cor 11:7; Col 3:10; Jam 3:9

SCIENCE

• Hominids split off from primates 6 MYA
• Homo sapiens became the dominant

hominin on earth ~150 TYA

• All other hominins became extinct
• Neanderthals ~40 TYA

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Imago Dei – Human Exceptionalism

BIBLE

• Formed (asa) and Created (bara) by God
• “Image of God” interpreted as:
• Resemblance
• Special qualities, characteristics, endowments
• Relational
• Representative
• Special attributes of humans:
• Moral, Spiritual , Rational, Relational
• Volitional, Immortal, Powerful, Ruling
• All humans have this gift from God
• Nothing else in creation

SCIENCE

• Humans are most recently evolved hominins
• Humans are only animals, but have unique and

superior capabilities due primarily to the evolution

• f the human brain
• Symbolic thought/communication
• Literature, art, music, religion, …
• Open-ended generative capacity
• Recursive definitional forms in language
• Science, math
• Theory of mind – “me”, “you”, “us”
• Complex social networks
• Societies, governments
• Attempts to give human traits to Neanderthals
• Careful follow-up proves false
• Now recognized that humans not from Neanderthal

Worldview “Line of Scrimmage”

• 1. The physical world is literally not a spiritual concern in Christianity
• Even we say that’s all “natural” (even plants and animals to some degree)
• 2. Christianity is built on the assumption of a special and supernatural

(spiritual) relationship of Man and God

• Believers and non-believers feel if we are purely naturalistic objects, then

Christianity is wrong and our hope is lost

• Creation vs. Evolution is the battle ground
• Evolution is seen as a scientific “war machine”
• It better resembles another religious position

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Life

• We have to understand Life to even talk about Evolution
• Then we can deconstruct “Evolution” into its scientific

aspects so we can find where the real issues are:

• Definition of Life
• DNA
• Origin of Life
• Micro-evolution
• Macro-evolution

What is Life?

• No consensus definition, but typically:
• Systems exhibiting life (“organisms”)…
• Maintain homeostasis, are composed of cell(s)
• Have a life cycle, undergo metabolism, can grow,
• Adapt to their environment, respond to stimuli, reproduce, evolve, die
• On Earth
• Cells are complex “sacks” of water, minerals, inorganic molecules, small-to-large

biomolecules, including peptides, proteins, antibodies, RNA, and DNA Cells…

• Process input materials to create output materials, actions, and responses
• DNA contains the information code for producing all output materials (mostly proteins)
• Have internal structures (membranes and organelles)
• Replicate copies of themselves
• May bind together to form complex organisms
• In an organism, cells have same DNA but differentiate to perform diverse functions

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DNA – Deoxyribonucleic Acid (Molecule)

• About 1 meter long (humans):
• 3.1 billion base pairs; ~20K protein coding “genes”; ~44K other regions
• 10 ~ 100 chromosomes (humans = 22 x 2 parents + sex pair)
• DNA replication and protein formation is amazingly robust
• Seconds-to-minutes per protein
• Multiple error correction schemes, but not perfect
• Defects, cancer, genetic diversity; cell death if severe errors
• All DNA contains identifiable anomalies
• Missing and duplicated segments are most common
• “Junk DNA” is a misnomer
• Doesn’t encode a protein; many control, regulatory, and structural functions
• Most of a DNA strand is non-coding (meaning biologists don’t know what it’s for)

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Sherilyn Primrose Brown on SlidePlayer.com

DNA “Similarity”

• DNA of each organism is unique (2 parents)
• DNA defines essentially everything about the structure of an organism
• Basic cellular processes (replication and transcription)
• Basic “plant” or “animal” structures processes
• Body plan (skeleton, muscles); organs, tissues, skin
• Circulation and nervous/sensing systems; chemical systems
• Differences between most higher animals don’t need much DNA

 Human DNA is similar to other living things 

Humans Apes Cats Dogs Cows Mice Chickens Flies Bananas 99.8% 97% 90% 84% 80% 75% 60% 60% 50%

(BUT NOTE: This is usually given as only the coding part of DNA)

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Origin of Life

• No models exist that meet the most basic conditions for abiogenesis
• Life originated in full complexity in a window of less that 50 million years
• No formation of basic biomolecules (amino acids, simple sugars, etc.)
• There was no viable “primordial soup”
• There are no viable chemical pathways to form these molecules
• No explanation of why they are all “handed” (amino acids = left ; sugars = right )
• No process for the encoding needed to produce biomolecules
• Probability of randomly making 1 protein in a “perfect soup” is 1 in 1075
• None of the processes that might produce a cell wall are viable in early

earth milieu and/or conditions

• Irreducible complexity / “chicken or egg”
• Simple life might someday be made in a lab  proves Intelligent Design

Microevolution

• Small changes in genome of an organism’s DNA that can be

passed on

• Well observed and documented
• Often driven by stress-induced selection; often very quick
• Limited in scope to 1 (or a few) species in a genus
• Examples:
• Moths that micro-evolve to change color when trees change color
• Legs that atrophy (snakes) or become flippers (seals)
• Skin color and minor facial feature differences of humans
• Microorganism evolution
• Issue: Do enough microevolutions make a macroevolution?

Hint: No

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Macroevolution – History

• In 1859, Darwin hypothesized that natural selection (reproductive

advantage) working on random variations over eons would create all known life forms

• Starting from an initial simple life form
• An extension of his observations of microevolution and plant/animal breeding
• Merged with genetics late 1800’s  Neo-Darwinism
• With microbiology discoveries (mid-1900’s), Modern Synthesis arose,

based on observations of DNA similarities, differences, and mutations

• Human and other life genomes mapped and compared
• Overwhelming complexity  science seeks simplifying models

Macroevolution – Technical

• A theory of history of life; not directly observed but mapped

against the (sparse) fossil record

• Incremental, cumulative, and significant changes in genome of a

taxonomic group that slowly lead to distinctive subgroups

• Not predictive (based on random changes)  not treated as falsifiable
• Changes must be slow  there should be transitional forms in the

fossil record

• Very few candidates (~0)
• Fossil record yields “punctuated equilibrium”
• Generally, new organisms appear suddenly and survive without much change

until now (or go extinct)

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Interpretive Principles

BIBLE Progressive Creation (Day/Age)

• Similarities (appearance, behavior,

DNA) shared by 2 organisms are due to common design

• Designed by God according to His will

and purpose

• God controls all:
• Direct intervention (supernatural)
• Indirect intervention (hypernatural)
• Physical laws (apparent natural)

SCIENCE Theory of Evolution

• Similarities (appearance, behavior,

DNA) shared by 2 organisms are due to common decent

• Evolved from a shared ancestor
• Recursively back to first life form
• Nothing controls all:
• Random mutations via undirected

natural selection (survive to reproduce)

Difficulties with Macroevolution - Scientific

• Can’t reasonably account for: origin of life, phyla (body plans), or human

exceptionalism

• Suffers from many failed predictions, e.g., transitional forms
• Very rare (~0) in the fossil record (not even recent mammals)
• “Cambrian Explosion” – All animal phyla today appeared suddenly
• No solid explanation for regulatory genes that can turn on/off major changes
• Evolution can “think ahead” under stresses an organism never experienced?
• No coherent explanation for complex behaviors: altruism, beauty
• Generally, macroevolution is just “patched” to accommodate

everything that doesn’t fit

 “Tree of Life” is just roots and leaves (no trunks/branches)  The “tree” of life looks more like a complex network

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Difficulties with Macroevolution - Philosophical

• Evolutionary paradigm is based on methodological naturalism
• Intelligent agency is forbidden regardless of evidence
• Evolution is true by definition – there can be no alternative
• Evolution can’t be abandoned because no other option is permitted
• Evolution is the creation myth of atheists
• Atheists < 10% of the American population, but they have powerful influence

in public policy and academia

• Anything against evolution is met with ferocious opposition
• Alternative to the creation myth of evolution is a creator-God, which unmakes atheism

IRONY: The random / intelligent “seeding” of life from elsewhere in the universe is recurringly discussed as a viable origin

What Does Scientism Say?

• Evolution explains everything about all life on Earth
• Response: Acknowledged that there’s no viable model for the origin of life
• No “natural selection” before life
• Very first life appeared already complex
• Response: What is the detailed technical response to the Cambrian Explosion?
• Undirected natural (random) processes account for all Life
• Response: Implies statistical probability of claimed processes is a fair test
• Lifetime of universe insufficient for simplest random “good” mutations / assemblages
• Man is not special or preferred over animals
• Human behaviors are arbitrary – no “good” and “evil” (relativism)
• Response: How did integrated human mind arise? Origin of consciousness?
• Response: Does absence of good/evil apply to what happens to you?

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Putting It All Together

• The scientific perspective on Life is that random naturalistic

evolution is responsible for all living things, including Man

• Humans are merely the best hominins so far
• The Bible says that God originated and formed all life and

created (bara) animals and humans

• Humans are deemed exceptional by God

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This week we’ll put Faith & Science in “red-orange check” alignment

Putting It All Together

• Talking to believers – tolerance, grace, humility, self-control
• Bashing evolution leads to erroneous “throwing the baby out with the bath water”
• Use the Golden Rule
• Modern “medical miracles” are based on God-created cell microbiology
• Talking to non-believers – love, respect, sensitivity, humility
• Actual biologists are generally not demonically set out to destroy Christianity
• They are trying to understand life and disease and find new cures, drugs, vaccines, devices, and

therapies to make human life better

• Often under severe career pressure regarding evolution stance (“heads down”)
• Characterize the Bible and yourself as not antagonistic to microbiology
• You believe the Bible answers the BIG questions regarding origins and evolution of life
• Bible is also supportive of intensely studying nature to understand it better  leads to Creator

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Transhumanism

• Escaping the judgement of death
• This movement now above ground  will be a social force in your lifetime
• Integrates “good” things: medicine, computers/AI, bio/chem-physics
• Will begin to define “rights”
• But will it be a good thing or an evil thing?
• Can there be a Biblical Christian position on this?
• There is already a Christian Transhumanism Association
• Imago Dei can be a basis for Christian bio-ethics

?

What Convergences = Transhumanism?

• Gene Editing  Cures for hereditary disease  Human enhancement
• Neuroprosthetics  Brain-Computer interface  Cybernetics
• Mental enhancement; Shared mentality; “Self storage”
• Anti-Aging  Living 120+ years  (almost) forever
• Artificial Intelligence  Rights for “machine life”
• Artificial Womb  Ultimate gender equality?
• Key Challenges:
• Myth of “Progress”
• Fast technology deployment can bring negative side-effects often exceeding
• ur ability to coherently cope ethically, socially, politically, spiritually
• Transhumanism has no collective ethic – it is intensely “self” focused
• Dissatisfaction / greed – what does “equitable distribution” look like?

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Q&A