Genesis and Evolution

Have you ever noticed that the stages of Creation as given in Genesis seem to loosely follow the same sequence understood by science? First, God creates light (or perhaps this stands for energy?). This makes day possible. First day, he creates time. Then he creates space. Then he creates plants. Then he creates the stars and planets. Then he creates the fish, then the birds –which began, we know now, as the dinosaurs. Then he created the mammals. Then he created man.

The only thing that seems definitely out of place is to have the planets formed after plants. (And it is entirely possible we will discover, in the future, that organic beings indeed formed in the primordial soup before the stars and planets formed, just as we only recently discovered the ancient pedigree of birds.) But other than that, how can Genesis have gotten it so “right” in scientific terms, when it ought to have been random?

Divine inspiration?

Well, here's a bigger mystery. Genesis's sequence makes sense on the principle of greater consciousness with each step, greater “complexity.” First the physical world, then plants, then fish and birds, then animals, then man—each one more conscious, more ensouled, than the last. We more or less know that to be so now, by examining cell differentiation and nervous systems—though there is no reason to suppose this would have been evident to the ancients. And, while this might make sense on the premise that a God who is all spirit, all consciousness, created the world, it makes no sense at all based on the Darwinian theory of evolution. Never mind that a gradual progression to greater complexity seems to violate the law of entropy. There is also no intrinsic reason, given the “survival of the fittest” mechanism, that greater complexity and greater consciousness should always win out in the evolutionary process. They have no apparent inherent survival value to it.

Granted, necessarily, things started out simple, so over time greater complexity on average might be expected to result, by the law of averages. But at a minimum, we ought to see both trends—we ought to see life forms evolving into simpler, less conscious forms almost as often as into more complex forms, if not just as often. We do not.

One more little proof of God's existence, for those who have eyes to see...