Did you know, we share genes with celery?

The advent of DNA, or perhaps just RNA, plus a host of convenient enzymes and a surrounding lipid shell, is virtually impossible. Emphasize *virtually* – but not actually impossible. Whichever mechanism pleases you most, early in Planet Earth’s history replicating cells existed. They made detectable clumps with a vague geometry that fossilized into ‘stromatolites’ (look that up) and that’s how we can tell, today, that reproducing life existed.

These stromatolites occur in parts of the earth’s crust which happen to be 3.6 billion years old, and which also happen to be exposed at the surface. Rocks are hard, but when you put them under enough stress, you learn that nothing is perfectly rigid. Planetary crust is, on billion year scales, very plastic, so attempting to replay the ebb and flow of plate tectonics, crust erosion and uplift, etc. is PhD level stuff.

If you don’t believe PhD’s know how to tell the truth, please stop reading here.

After about another 3 billion years, i.e. about .6 billion (600 million) years ago, random accidents to the original versions’ DNA had spun off enormous numbers of variations. A huge preponderance of the variations were harmful, but a few turned out to lucky rolls of the dice. Across 3 billion years the population of varieties had become colossal. Lots of DNA swapping happened, too. Also, symbiotic specialization where one species hosted another, which got food and protection in exchange for specializing in some kind of metabolic processing.

Today this kind of symbiosis is part of all animal life, and the inclusions are detected as mitochondrial DNA. The female egg is loaded with them; the male sperm seldom has any, so by comparing mitochondrial DNA siblings are easy to connect to a mother, maternbal grandmother, etc.

At that changeover point, 500 to 600 million years ago, something came along which exchanged DNA on a colony level, i.e. invented 3-D sex.  The critical advance was the ability of two members of a given type to ‘breed’ together, i.e. they reproduced by forming a joint product, a single cell containing half of the first one’s DNA and half of the second one’s DNA. This was called the sexual revolution.

The one in the 19070’s caught some notoriety, but back then it led to an explosion of new species. Winding up with pairs of chromosomes swappable half-half to reproduce a brand new set of DNA unleashed the power of evolution. Across that first 3 billion years evolution operated like a unicyle. The advent of gene-swapping reproduction among complexly structured units put evolution on four wheels, if you will, as in “off to the races.”

The “Pre-Cambrian Explosion” is the name for that tiny (in earth’s terms ) slice of time, a few tens of millions of years, during which countless species developed into (if I recall correctly) four ‘kingdoms’ – animal, vegetable, mold and bacteria, please correct me if I’m wrong – and in the animal kingdom several dozen “phyla.” A ‘fifth’ kingdom is the archaea, which consists of things related back to the earliest days, things which didn’t develop into any of the four primary classes. And all of them are of course single-cell forms.

At the start a dozen complete phyla emerged in a short span of time – but two-thirds of these died out. Since then evolution has wrought roughly three dozen current phyla; again please correct me if I misspeak, but the basic point is that species developed and diverged.

In theory every single DNA-based organism on this planet is a mutated offspring of some first surviving and self-reproducing cell. The odds against that first cell are are stunning, but there are also two hundred sextillion stars in the knowable universe – a two followed by twenty-three zeroes. It’s wildly unlikely that more than one of these stars out of a handful of powers of ten – one in a million? – is likely to have an earth-like planet in orbit around it. So slice off six or eight of those 23 zeroes. God knew what He was doing when He said, “Let there be light,” and released the Word to fill the universe with signs and wonders, and two trillion galaxies each with perhaps a hundred billion stars.

Sol was the lucky star that got us.

I think the question deserves a careful answer. From the standpoint of science, we know that a Big Bang happened 13.78 billion years ago. The first and second chapters of Genesis contain two different creation accounts – the one in the first chapter is “out front” while the second one is buried in the fine print, but it’s there – slightly different sequence, and shorter.

Conclusion? I take it that the Big Bang was GOD saying “Let there be light,” and from the first three verses of the Gospel of John that ‘speech’ as it were was the breath, i.e. Holy Spirit, releasing the the Word to carry out the act of creation. Our little three pound chemical computers may attempt to draw a picture using current notions of what that must have been like, but nobody I know has both a) declared victory on the topic and b) had the tiniest idea of what he or she was talking about.

Suffice it to say that “in the fulness of time” involved two hundred sextillion stars (current best estimate of the knowable universe) and 13.78 billion years just to reach the point where this planet formed and evolved homo sapiens, following which we developed ‘lore’ about what the naked eye could see in the skies.

In Job, GOD asks where Job was when HE put the stars in place and gave them their names. Allowing GOD to take credit for those names isn’t that far off the mark, because when HE said “the stars speak” HE meant that earlier prophecies HE had inspired Jewish prophets to utter (Isaiah has a major assortment) would find their announcement in the heavens. The Jewish New Year, for one, involves the skies.

Sorry to take so long, forgive the digression. One, GOD loves, in a way and to an extent that defies our imagination to encompass. Two, GOD decided to create a universe and (or in order to) put humans in it. Three, humans who quibble with God over exactly how He reveals Himself to us (Genesis 1 is a deed of title, not a complex and literal self-revelation) and over His sense of timing (six thousand years vs 13.78 billion, a 3.2 million to 1 ratio) is folly.

Here we are, evolved, and imperfect. Looking at it one way, GOD created us to have free will and calculating minds. This way madness lies, if you want us to simultaneously be perfect. In short, GOD accepted man’s inevitable ‘bad karma’ – and in the fullness of time Jesus was born.

He preached, healed, raised from the dead, fed thousands, walked on water – – – and suffered the consequences of everyone’s imperfections, their so-called bad karma, by dying in agony and utter isolation on the cross (“My God, my god, why have you forsaken me?” – the opening line of Psalm 22, a shorthand used in those days to “read into the record” an entire psalm.) For that final day he suffered aloneness that surpasses anything a human can imagine. He was despised, tormented, and suffered bodily death in our place, and utterly cast out from the Father.

We are perfectible, but only through acknowledging our need, our imperfectness, and asking for His forgiveness. He paid our price, out of love. “Greater love hath no man that one who will lay his life down for another,” – and greater love hath no GOD than one who will suffer human death for his beloved children, to bring them past evolution to perfection, and eternal adoption into Heaven.

Hope this helps.

Every ethnic group that has ever arisen, including the Sumerians, possesses an origin story. They’re all also different. A millennium after Sumer, Abraham’s tribe gave us its own, which we find in Genesis.

No one has explained why an origin story from three millennia ago requires us to accept it as a literal history, in order for us to presume that GOD is involved and speaks to us through it. It differs from the earlier Sumerian story in that GOD is patient, loving, makes covenants, and forgives us when we err.

The pentateuch and the Kings / Chronicles accounts exhibit a pattern of GOD’s interaction among HIS chosen people and their neighbors in terms that, let us be delicate, violate the Geneva Conventions. They also exhibit the same kind of relationships that one ethnic group exhibited toward all its neighbors; we are made in GOD’s image but our earliest writings cast him in ours.

Evolution is a ‘theory’ when speaking to a scientist. Among us lay folk it’s just history, and fascinating, and inescapable. Folk who dispute the idea that evolution is more than a satanic nightmare prove their points with illogic, highly selective use of data that confuses analogy with proof, and posit comparisons that for instance match a college life sciences lab against millions of cubic miles of ocean over half a billion years, and conclude that if you can’t do it in the lab, it can’t happen in the wild.

One sheds tears, that the need to accept the origin story which GOD insinuated HIMself into was etched in the book of life, so to speak. GOD insinuated his love, ownership, intention, patience, forgiveness, and promise of Christ into that origin story – in a wonderful fore-imaging of the way the WORD insinuated HIMself into a human life, the life we know as Jesus.

Evolution, and a 13.78 billion year old universe, and the vast uncountable galaxies we can detect (one qualified guess – two hundred sextillion stars, or 2 followed by twenty-three 0’s) are all the evidence we could ask for that GOD is so far beyond our knowing that we cannot pin HIM down to any particular way of revealing HIMself to us, most especially in a particular origin story floating in a sea of origin stories, simply because it’s the one that belonged to Abraham.

CUTE HONEY BUNNY, for my beloved on her 77th b’day

Can any gal of dicing years stay so    “7 come 11”
Unsanded by the decades’ rasp? Has love’s
Thesaurus words to capture that? And glow! –
Each glance you send me seems like velvet gloves.
How cute you look, when morning lights the room.
One glance at you, unwashed and painted not,
Necessitates a second; and you bloom,
Each morning like the first. Your smile is hot!
Yet look again, while soap and paint apply;
Before you were my earth, you’re now like fire.
Unleash the fleet of Helen! Beautify
No more that regal face, lest I expire!
No doubt about it, Hon, you fill my life,
Yet always I want more, beloved wife.

You don’t, really. No one can know the mind of God.

We do hear in Ephesians 2:8–10 that God has designed us for acts that we encounter on a daily basis, but Ephesians doesn’t include any advice on learning how well we did, or even IF we did.

That’s why one should trust like a child, with a child’s simplicity of heart, and keep oneself open to the immediate circumstances. That is key.

As to doors opening and closing, try not to look behind them – there is no “man behind the curtain,” only God Who has everything already mapped out.

This is a long adventure onto what may be a short limb; let’s begin with a leading remark.

Every pre-industrial ethnic group, society, culture, nation, race, etc. swears by its own origin story. Virtually all of them are populated by supernatural, powerful beings plus a cast of human characters.

Native American tribes have origin stories that often involve birth, or emergence from birth waters, or emergence into the world we see from a working analog of a human womb. How do I know this? Primarily from osmosing a bit here and a bit there, and connecting a wisp of dots into a cobweb of conclusion. I think so because the limited sources I’ve encountered appear to have that much in common.

South American, African, Asian, Celtic, Druid, what-have-you remain closed to me but the suspicion that they do have origin stories which are somewhat as described above remains powerful. In one of the Asian stories the world rests on the back of a turtle; when asked what the turtle rests on, you can get “Turtles all the way down.”

The long walk out onto a short limb is to ask why conservative readers / believers in the Judaeo-Christian scriptures accept their specific ancient origin story as persuasive to them, as fact. For instance, Genesis bears a remarkable resemblance to a much earlier origin story, the Gilgamesh epic, which predates it by ten-ish centuries. Why do we insist that the rest of Scripture would be unsupportable, absent the divine origin of the Pentateuch? – Much less the history in Kings, Chronicles, etc. Why does a skeptical look at the historicity of the Jewish origin story invalidate the idea that GOD shaped it, and went on to speak through prophets’ ecstatic utterances – (how else might one read much of Isaiah?)

Would that invalidate the idea that GOD breathed HIMself into Semitic culture, first via Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob/Israel? Or that prophecies have lain latent in Scripture all along, foretelling not just Jesus himself,  His sacrifice on the cross, but also exact dates for the annunciation to Mary, Jesus’ birth, and by inference the date the magi appeared in Bethlehem?

An all-or-nothing approach appears rooted in our own tribal beginnings, first as Jews and subsequently as “adopted Jews”, i.e. Christians. We absolutely do resemble every pagan society there ever has been in standing on a theological rock of creation story. Does GOD intend to validate the idea of those thousand other creation stories? Or is it at least, to a limited human mind, likelier that HE used materials on hand, i.e. the same kind of story which Christendom declares to be a fairy-tale when it arises from other roots than our own?

Wouldn’t it be at least conceptually feasible that GOD sees this world, its history, and HIS intentions in a way that surpasses our understanding the way chemistry surpasses a honey bee’s understanding of nectar? What possible underpinning do we present to the non-Christian when we say that “our GOD is different” specifically because we have an origin story that differs in a few critical details from every other origin story that has ever existed?

Rather, isn’t it more likely that GOD corrected the emotional substance of Gilgamesh, as is appears in Genesis, to show HIMself as merciful and patient, giving second third fourth – – hundredth chances to those who turn away from HIM? That’s something I doubt exists in any other origin story whatsoever, and founds my belief in a GOD who said, “Let there be light.”

So what might be the GOD-breathed substance in the Judaeo-Christian bible? For me the “minimum required amount” or MRA consists in the deed of title, stated twice in Genesis 1 and 2, HIS message of love and patience, of injury, of anger, but always, always of HIS promise of a savior. Add to that the clues that drove the magi – the annunciation, the birth, and the path to Bethlehem – which hindsight can now show anyone with a modern astronomy app. Same clues, same texts. They had the stars, we now can see exactly what they saw and understand how they understood, and why they believed those signs in the heavens.

Galileo said “But it does move,” when forced to publicly recant the notion that the earth stood still while the Universe revolved around  it. Yet he was right; and so are today’s astronomers.

Signs in the stars – GOD tells us to look into the heaven to see HIS signs and wonders; HE never said “Don’t look too close.” Early in the 20th Century we realized that our star is part of one cluster, which drew the technical name “galaxy,” and that there are vast numbers of other galaxies in GOD’s lavish Creation. Today we have a computer program which can connect that Creation to its 13.78 billion year distance from today. It can show us the precision that placed those prophecies into the Jewish Testament, plus a few more in the Christian Testament, that underline some key points, such that we can connect all the dots today to understand just how busy the WORD was, and how long ago HE started.

Precision? To start billions of years ago, and place humans on a planet such that on a given date the stars would shout “Jesus is coming” then “Jesus is Born” and finally “Jesus is in Bethlehem.” How many 24 hour days in 13.78 billion years? How precise do the orbits of the planets and earth’s place in our galaxy, such that we would give the stars and planets names that would point with neon brightness at a specific day, three times in succession? (The third date, the arrival of the magi, was 25 December of 2 BCE – GOD’s gentle and loving chuckle are as awe-inducing as anything else about HIM.)

The only way to reconcile, on the one hand, what GOD has showed us in HIS heavens, with on the other hand what HE put into our founding Scripture, is to realize that when HE revealed HIMself to ancient Semitic nomads, it wasn’t a science or history lesson. Rather HE declared HIS Creation, mastery, ownership love and provision to them.

These have always been  true.

NOTE: DVD Star of Bethlehem supplies the specific times at which the magi saw the prophecy begin, saw its confirmation, and found Jesus. I heartily recommend it, and suggest viewing it more than once because the content is too dense to absorb in one sitting.

I think it’s context. Folks whose immediate family, friends, and so on tend to disbelieve earth science because they read Genesis 1 as either history or science (when in fact it’s liturgy, a Deed of Title) wind up experiencing enormous “cognitive dissonance” with those scientists whose work helps in any way to establish that this third rock from the sun isn’t really new.

If you’re not from that context, I doubt you have any problems with science at all.

Unless, of course, you are committed to the idea that the teratons of CO2 we put into the atmosphere annually have nothing to do with changing earth’s climate. Folks who value politicians’ understanding of science highly and discount scientists’ poor grasp of politics seem not to like a certain subset of science.

With regard to Genesis 1, and bearing in mind that Genesis 2 posits a different sequence with fewer days, I believe that God said “Let there be light” as in Genesis 1:3, and it was the Word that expressed it, as of the opening verses of the Gospel of John. But that happened 13-odd billion years ago as we know it.

Who on earth am I to second-guess God’s timing, technique, or means of revealing Himself to beings that think via three-pound wet computers? Er, highly fallible beings at that?

First we have to define terms. What, after all, IS ‘omnipotence?’ Divide-by-zero is a technique allowing mathematicians to “prove” that 1 = 0, etc. So it is trivial to draw a paradox around a trivial idea of omnipotence, e.g. “Make a stone too big to roll – and then roll that stone.”

The logical impossibility above relies on a divide-by-zero level definition of omnipotence, i.e. it trivializes it, by posing a definition that is instantly susceptible to falsification.

Science thrives because any theory that can be ‘falsified’ i.e. demonstrated to be incorrect, IS incorrect. In that sense, omnipotence is self-falsifying when one uses the simple definition. So the question becomes non-trivial once a good working definition appears.

For instance: Genesis 1 looks like a liturgy using highly repetitive language to establish God Almighty’s Deed of Title to the universe. Buried in chapter 2 is an alternate reading with fewer days and a different order of events. Hence, Genesis is neither science nor history. It’s worship that does a good job of claiming that God is In Charge.

Genesis 1:3 – God said, “Let there be light,” – is a good match for the Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago. Might that be a working example of omnipotent?

John 1:1–2 describes the Word as being God, and with God, and the maker of all things that were made. Hence, Genesis 1:3 melds with John 1:1–2 in claiming that God the Father Spoke the Word, God the Son into being, and 13.8 billion years later the Son humbled himself to become “Son of Man, i.e. experience the pains and limits of a human existence. The Spirit, the breath part of the trinity, coexisted with the Word, if you accept a human analogy for Creations, even though it’s utterly beyond the Creature’s comprehension.

In the human form called Jesus, He willingly suffered utter isolation, a natural result of sin w/r/t Holy God: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Those opening words of Psalm 22 show that the Crucifixion was spoken about centuries before it happened. And then he (small ‘h’ ?) died and He experienced both human death and utter isolation from the Holy, “My God my God why have you forsaken me?” as sin’s wages demand of all humans. But in this one case, of Jesus’ human body, it wasn’t Jesus or Paul (or others of the Disciples) who restored life to that corpse. God the Son restored Jesus’ body to life on what we now call Easter Sunday.

SO: the Word did the work, with the first person of the trinity supplying what was needed. 13.8 billion years on, and 2E23 (two hundred sextillion) suns later, this particular sun has this particular planet orbiting around it.

And “in the fulness of time” meant that Jesus’ birth was told to Mary on a date which hindsight and a good astronomy program places at the Jewish New Year of 3 BCE, with His birth occurring forty weeks later at another astronomic exclamation point.

This, it seems likely, is what set the Magi on their journey to Jerusalem; they found Bethlehem on 25 December of 2 BCE. These remarkable inferences are well supported by a DVD you can get on the web, “Star of Bethlehem.”

What does all of this have to do with omnipotence? Just this: “Omnipotence is the ability to do things that are utterly impossible if attempted by an ordinary human.” Omnipotence, as a term, relates to unlimited potential as seen from a human speaker’s viewpoint.

I think the question arises from a twisted place.

FIRST there was slavery – humans are a sorry lot.

SECOND there was a rationalization that, since slaves could be held in Bible times, it’s OK now.

THIRD was the layered rationalization that Christianizing them helped them escape perdition.

But the question goes to ‘relationship with GOD.’ That has its own definition, one that shifts every so often. In 1619 when the first slave ship landed in Virginia, African people were considered pre-demeaned, hence of no account, hence it was no sin to own their bodies. The people who did that felt completely at peace with GOD, who sent his Son to die for them. Looking into the fine print is something every single generation does, to its own benefit, and wherever no benefit is found we wash that page clean and forget it.

Since GOD is viewed with changing eyes, nobody today who is Christian can give him-or-herself a pass for segregation, racism, and so on. That’s because we have a different view in the 21st Century. But in the 17th, those folks’ hearts got to feel at peace.

Only judge people by their own standards, not yours. Judge the standard, such as slavery, but try not to stand at God’s shoulder and whisper in His ear your judgement on people who did things you’d never do yourself.

Why? – how sure are you that, two or three hundred years from now, someone just like you will want to stand at God’s shoulder and whisper in His ear, about you?

“Early” Christianity ended with the Council of Nicaea which set the canon of Scripture. That was in the 325, partway through the fourth century.

Assume that by the fifth century a priesthood had divided the Church from The Laity. Blame many things but of course human ego and turf conflict got involved.

John Wycliffe (died of old age, 1384 or the end of the fourteenth century) produced a Bible in the English of his day (Chaucer was about a hundred years prior and we call his language Middle English.) When the Church found his grave they burned the bones and cast the ashes onto the waters. Jan Hus died at the stake for his effort to bring the Bible to the Masses, in their own language, in 1486 – the end of the fifteenth Century.

Martin Luther completed the Bible in German fifty-ish years later, and due to the cash politics of the day (Northern Germany decided not to let Rome drain their coffers to build St. Peter’s etc.) the nobility guarded Luther. But “the Church” i.e. the Roman Catholic Church held onto its right to “interpret” Scripture for several hundred more years.

Corrupt priests occur in all faiths and all ages. Corrupted teaching is another topic, and naturally occurs more when the Word is known less.