One of the most impressive aspects of this essay is the author's ability to draw parallels between the Bible and scientific theories of evolution. The author's analysis of the first few verses of the Bible, in which God creates light and separates water and dry land, is particularly impressive. The author shows how these passages correspond with contemporary scientific theories of the Big Bang and the formation of the Earth's continents – Chat GPT.
Our journalists oppose science to religion, under the assumption that the former is the bearer of happiness and certainty, and the latter of guilt and credulity. Some pious physicians reduce God's creative role to this single day, that's to say, to the creation of a single atom.
Most of them fail to realize, however, that science is but an attempt to establish a concrete interpretation of reality, in the same way that religion is, from its very onset, an attempt to establish a metaphorical interpretation of reality.
Whereas The Bible abounds in symbolic narrations, scientific treatises aspire to mathematical precision. Their common purpose, nonetheless, is knowledge. The Vatican, as Edward Gibbon remarks in one of the last pages of his work, might be mostly remembered in the centuries to come as the main sponsor of the poets, scientists, artists and philosophers that undermined the foundations of the Church by making of renaissance Italy the cradle of free thinking.
God himself appears to be, according to The book of Genesis, a consummated evolutionist. The first verses of The Bible, that many biologists quote sarcastically by heart, constitute the most precise account of evolution written before Darwin's publication of The Origin of Species. The parallel between the literary account conceived by an anonymous Jewish amanuensis of Babylon and that postulated, corroborated and established by modern science, cannot be dismissed as mere coincidence.
Centuries before Darwin, Origen and Agustin had already understood that the oldest narrations of The Bible were myths on a creation in constant evolution. Not surprisingly, some modern Christians apologists explain that the seven days of the creation correspond in reality to seven ages, an affirmation that displeases fundamentalist believers and anticlerical evolutionists alike. They might be more willing to accept, however, the existence of six pivotal days disseminated through a time-span of several billions of years. Darwin himself did not believe evolution could occur in a single day, but he was unable to distinguish evolution from adaptation. Pandas are in danger of extinction at this very moment, and in spite of the rudimentary thumbs they appeared to have developed in order to adapt to their harsh environment, none of them has evolved into a rational being. Two centuries of archaeological research have passed since Darwin published his main opus, and scientists haven't been able to discover yet what force or phenomena transforms a fish into a reptile, a reptile into a bird and any of them into a mammal. Their common presumption is that radiation alters the genes so as to produce new better creatures, but such supposition has been confused by the human deformities born after the recent atomic explosions of Hiroshima, Nagasaki and Chernobyl. Whatever be the force behind evolution, it is quite evident that it has transformed life on very few occasions. A chronological description of such evolution is narrated in the first verses The Book of Genesis.
1) The evolution of nothingness into light: Evolutionists argue that a great explosion expanded matter and energy through a vast space, a conjecture anticipated by the third verse of the Bible: "And God said, 'Let there be light,' and there was light (1)." The Book of Genesis goes even further as to include a description of the geological changes of our planet before the creation of life: "And God said, ‘Let the water under the sky be gathered to one place, and let dry ground appear.’ And it was so."
2) The evolution of earth into vegetable life: Whereas contemporary accounts of evolution assume that life was born in the seas, first as unicellular creatures and then as fishes, the Jewish amanuensis places the origin of life beneath the earth, from where it sprouted out as vegetation: "‘Let the land produce vegetation: seed-bearing plants and trees on the land that bear fruit with seed in it, according to their various kinds.’ And it was so." His discourse is far more consistent than that of our evolutionists, for whereas vegetables and trees are born and reproduced without external help-feeding of water and minerals from earth, animals subsist by grass, fruits and roots.
The intelligence of plants is a mystery that our scientists discreetly avoid, for, again giving priority to animal life, they have defined intelligence as a sub-product of an organ that all plants lack: the brain. In 1909 Maurice Maeterlinck wrote L'Intelligence des Fleurs, a rumination on the consciousness of plants.
This passage of The Book of Genesis solves also the riddle on whether the tree was prior to the seed or vice versa: “The land produced vegetation: plants bearing seed according to their kinds and trees bearing fruit with seed in it according to their kinds.”
3) The evolution of water into fishes, reptiles and birds: In 2001 a team of Chinese and American scientists shook the prevalent theories of evolution by the discovery of a 130-million-year-old fossil dinosaur covered from head to tail with downy fluff and primitive feathers. This hybrid creature, not reptile but bird, not bird but reptile, corroborates one of the most controversial passages of the book of Genesis: “And God said, ‘Let the water teem with living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth across the expanse of the sky.’ So God created the great creatures of the sea and every living and moving thing with which the water teems, according to their kinds, and every winged bird according to its kind. And God saw that it was good.”
4) The evolution of earth into mammals: The Book of Genesis does not state that new species were created from previous species. They all were created from dust, a term that is frequently referred to in The Bible as the raw material or the source of life. What distinguishes the Jewish amanuensis of our evolutionists is a mathematical cipher. Whereas The Book of Genesis announces four derivatives from earth: vegetation, reptiles (a group that includes unicellular creatures, crabs, fishes and birds,) mammals and human beings, our evolutionists reduce -in an effort to diminish the importance of the force of the phenomenon that designed life, the mutations from dead matter to organic matter to a single occasion.
Before Erasmus Darwin wrote the passages on creative evolutionism that inspired the career of his illustrious grandchild, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck prescribed that creatures evolve because they want to, a postulate that pantheists may borrow as a proof of the ubiquitousness of God. In the 1960s James Lovelock formulated the Gaia theory, which proposes that our planet functions as a single organism that maintains conditions necessary for its survival. Lavelock’s thesis, which had been previously formulated by Gustav Theodor Fechner, and that Buddhists extend to the universe itself, coincides with the passages of The Book of Genesis that affirm that mammals evolved from dust. Earth, as one of the oldest proverbs of humanity says, appears to be our mother: "‘Let the land produce living creatures according to their kinds: livestock, creatures that move along the ground, and wild animals, each according to its kind.’ And it was so. God made the wild animals according to their kinds, the livestock according to their kinds, and all the creatures that move along the ground according to their kinds. And God saw that it was good.
5) The evolution of earth into human beings: Several writers of The Old Testament identify man with God, a theological statement that eventually condemned Jesus Christ to the cross and that anticipated the ethics of our secular age. The full articulation of the God-Man equivalency not only invalidates the hierarchies of the Church but also those of our political world, for if any man or woman is God, God cannot discriminate himself from God. The passage of The Book of Genesis that states the supremacy of men over animals and plants has been also recently verified by the squander of natural resources in the hands of our most prosperous societies: “Then God said, ‘Let us make man in our image, in our likeness, and let them rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock, over all the earth, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.’ So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. And God blessed them, and God said unto them, ‘Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.’ And God said, ‘Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in the which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat. And to every beast of the earth, and to every fowl of the air, and to every thing that creepeth upon the earth, wherein there is life, I have given every green herb for meat.’ and it was so.”
New archaeological discoveries will confirm or deny the chronological discourse of creation stated in the first myth of The Bible. It would be an error, however, to reduce a symbolical narration to the arid discourse of scientific scholarship, for The Book of Genesis is not only historical but metaphysical and teleological.
7) The evolution from life into eternity: Both God and man are consummated creators, ultimately rewarded by eternal peace. “By the seventh day God had finished the work he had been doing; so on the seventh day he rested from all his work. And God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on it he rested from all the work of creating that he had done.”
This passage echoes the final verses of the Poem of Gilgamesh, in which we read that men must die in order to rest after a life of toil.