The Truth about Science and Religion. Fraser Fleming
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flow of the seasons, planting and harvesting according to weather rather than a set calendar. These people were less concerned with how long God worked each day and more focused on understanding God’s rule and role as ultimate creator.
Genesis 1 provides a clear declaration of God as the ultimate creator. As one of the grandest poems ever written, the meaning has been grasped by diverse cultures over thousands of years. Readers of Genesis predisposed to belief in God find the poem to ring true, squarely revealing God’s role despite the old-fashioned style. For others, Genesis may seem irrelevant; the Big Bang providing a better description of the universe’s beginning. The challenge in reading any creation story, biblical or scientific, lies in understanding the explanations of how and why.
Pre-biotic Evolution
Carl Sagan grandly paraphrases the opening lines of Genesis with an alternative creation story: “The universe is all there is, all there was, and all there ever will be.”21 While religion focuses on a creator who is “outside” the universe, science’s answers are from within the universe. Science’s creation stories rest on a wealth of internally consistent scientific data from a diverse array of different disciplines. From astronomy to zoology, the scientific disciplines are linked through a consistent multi-billion-year development of a primeval world into an intricate web of life. In contrast to the biblical focus on who creates, the scientific creation story provides details of how the universe was created and how long the process took.
Radioactive dating provides a reliable method for determining the age of the earth. The method relies on the presence of several heavy elements with “extra” neutrons within the atomic core. These neutrons are the nuclear glue holding the positively charged protons together. Sometimes the repulsion between protons in the nucleus of particularly large atoms causes the atom to split into two new elements having just slightly less overall mass than the parent atom. The mass difference is emitted as energy—the radioactive decay implicit in Einstein’s famous E=mc2. The main isotopes for geologically timing this process are uranium, lead, potassium, and argon. At the dawn of the earth a newly formed rock would contain uranium and lead in a specific ratio that subsequently changes because of the lead that is later produced through the radioactive decay of uranium to lead. Precisely monitoring the decay of uranium into lead over short time periods provides a rate that allows the uranium-to-lead ratio to be used to date when the rock was first formed. The process is akin to knowing how far a car goes on exactly one gallon of gas and using the mileage to estimate how far the car could go on a trip with a full tank of gas.
Radioactive dating is a method that affords the age of the earth with a remarkable degree of internal consistency. Scanning the periodic table of elements identifies many radioactive nuclei which decay at different rates. Of the thirty-four radioactive nuclei only twenty-three are found in detectable amounts in nature. This is consistent with the decay of all the short-lived nuclei since the earth’s formation. A few short-lived nuclei are produced by cosmic ray bombardment in the upper atmosphere, providing a continual production by a natural process. If these latter nuclei are eliminated from the list of persistent nuclei, then every nucleus with a half-life of less than eighty million years is missing. The earth must therefore be at least eighty million years old for the short-lived nuclei to decay out of existence. Using the radioactive dating technique with long-lived nuclei leads to the remarkable conclusion that planet earth formed about four billion years ago.
Fossils, glaciation, and the slow process of biological change hint at an ancient earth. Some religious groups believe that the earth was made in a week and is only a few thousand years old. Trying to harmonize these two beliefs is challenging. For example, if the universe were only 10,000 to 100,000 years old then what is the origin of the light from stars appearing to be billions of light years away? Did God make all the photons from the star to the earth sometime during his week’s work so that the star just seems to be billions of light years away? The scenario makes God out to be deceptive. The faithful and true character of God described in the Bible is more consistent with stars being billions of light years away from the earth.
The Water of Life
Life from non-living precursors is difficult to understand. How did life emerge from star dust and expand into every nook and cranny of earth? A series of events has been proposed to explain how the atmosphere of the early earth caused such gases as hydrogen, methane, carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, ammonia, and nitrogen to trigger a series of condensations resulting in ever larger molecules. During the Hadean era, 3.5 to 4.5 billion years ago, the earth was pummeled by asteroids in a series of violent collisions. Each impact released energy to the earth’s surface, destroying even the most basic prebiotic molecules. Although these asteroids were primarily destructive, they’re speculated to have brought significant quantities of ice to the developing planet. More than any other molecule, water, perhaps brought to earth as ice, is critical for life.
Water is a marvelous substance with unique properties that make water essential for life. Water has one of the highest measures of surface tension, which allows droplets to cling to leaves and enables plants to draw water up from the roots. Water’s melting, boiling, and vaporization points are all much higher than those of related substances. Cooling shrinks and heating expands most materials, which is why bridges and buildings have expansion gaps. Water is anomalous in contracting until just above the freezing point where expansion occurs. The result is that ice floats on the surface of water, a property with dramatic consequences. If ice were heavier and denser than liquid water, as most solid phases are, then the ice would collect in the deepest recesses until cooling eventually turned all the lakes and the entire ocean into a solid mass. Life would be extremely difficult in a massive ice-block. Instead ice floats and, unlike water, is a poor heat conductor. Ice creates an insulating barrier between cold air above and the water below which therefore remains liquid.
Water can absorb more heat than almost any organic compound. Heat from the sun is absorbed by the oceans and lakes, providing a vast heat reservoir which moderates changes in temperature. Much energy is required to vaporize water, which makes water an excellent coolant by evaporation. Land animals make extensive use of this for cooling by sweating. An average person running for an hour would experience a fatal temperature increase of about 10 °C if they couldn’t sweat. The body’s five quarts of blood, largely water with a high heat absorption, counters the temperature increase and effectively cools the body through perspiration, allowing a modest overall rise in body temperature, but without frying the brain. Water has a host of unique properties: specific heat capacity, surface tension, and thermal conductivity properties, all of which conspire to make water a prerequisite for life.
Prebiotic Evolution on an Early Earth
Sometime close to 3.5 billion years ago, the earth’s surface cooled to less than 100 oC allowing water to condense into vast oceans. The oceans provided a haven for simple organic molecules that would have degraded at higher temperatures. Various forms of energy bathed the primitive earth—lightning, geothermal heat, atmospheric shock waves generated by meteoric impact, ultraviolet light from the sun, and others—driving reactions in the atmosphere and ocean to form a wide variety of simple organic molecules. Among the energy options, thunderstorms are proposed as a particularly important energy source for prebiotic chemical evolution because of the efficiency of the resulting shock waves in chemical synthesis. Shock waves surpass ultraviolet light by more than a million fold in efficiently producing amino acids, leading to the conclusion that shock waves may very well have been the principal energy source for prebiotic synthesis on the early earth.
In the upper zones of this primitive atmosphere there was no ozone layer to filter living things from lethal doses of ultraviolet light. Instead, ultraviolet light irradiated the gaseous atmosphere and formed simple organic molecules; formaldehyde, hydrogen cyanide, and ammonia among others. Conversion of these simple and sometimes toxic precursors into amino acids, the building blocks of life, seems remarkably unlikely and yet is supported by some equally remarkable experiments. The classic apparatus in the famous Miller-Urey experiment consisted of a small boiling flask containing water, a spark discharge chamber with tungsten electrodes, a condenser, and a water trap to collect the products and two or more of the following gases: methane, ethane, ammonia, nitrogen, water vapor, hydrogen,