Adam & Eve

Most people believe that evolution provides an adequate account of human origins. But for substantial numbers around the world, that doesn’t preclude divine direction. A new survey spanning North America, South America, and Europe found that 13 to 29 percent of people believe in God-guided evolution.

People Who Say Humans Evolved in A Process Guided by God:

13% Germany

22% United Kingdom

25% Argentina

29% United States

The Silver Bridge, officially named the Point Pleasant Bridge but known for its silver aluminum paint, opened on May 30, 1928, with great anticipation. Advertised as a groundbreaking cantilever design demanding “worldwide attention.” On its inaugural day, an estimated 10,000 people crossed the bridge, eager to be part of history.

But on December 15, 1967, the bridge collapsed. Eyewitnesses described the collapse as a slithering, buckling chain reaction, claiming dozens of cars and at least three trucks, resulting in the loss of 46 lives.

Unlike traditional suspension bridges like San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge, which use woven-wire cables, the Silver Bridge was suspended from heat-treated steel eyebar chains resembling elongated links of a bicycle chain. A Popular Mechanics article summarizes the design flaw and its consequences:

When National Transportation Safety Board investigators recovered the wreckage, much of what they found was covered in rust. But they homed in on one small piece where the rust ran much deeper, the metal far more corroded: a single eyebar had snapped in two. It was as though a crack had developed over time, a slow corrosive fissure. The initial crack was barely one-quarter-inch long. But once it formed, all it could do was grow. Investigators came to understand that this single, tiny flaw destroyed the entire bridge.

Possible Preaching Angle:

The same is true in the spiritual life of the Christian. One small flaw, a little yielding to temptation, over time can cause the downfall of a person or a ministry.

Every person starts as one fertilized egg, which by adulthood has turned into roughly 37 trillion cells. But those cells have a formidable challenge. These cells must copy 3.2 billion base pairs of DNA perfectly, about once every 24 hours. To speed up the process, cells start replication in multiple spots with people having tens of thousands of them throughout their genomes.

However, this poses its own challenge: How to know where to start and how to time everything. Without precision control, some DNA might get copied twice, causing cellular pandemonium. Bad things can happen if replication doesn’t start correctly. For DNA to be copied, the DNA double helix must open up, and the resulting single strands are vulnerable to breakage or the process can get stuck.

It takes a tightly coordinated dance involving dozens of proteins for the DNA-copying machinery to start replication at the right point in the cell’s life cycle. Keeping tight reins on the kickoff of DNA replication is particularly important to avoid that pandemonium.

Today, researchers are making steps toward a full understanding of the molecular checks and balances that have evolved in order to ensure that each origin initiates DNA copying once and only once, to produce precisely one complete new genome.

Possible Preaching Angle:

3,000 years ago, King David exclaimed, “I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well” (Ps. 139:14). Scientific knowledge has increased exponentially since that time and we should be even more in awe of God’s creative genius on display.

The Pew Research Center regularly surveys Americans on human origins, but it recently re-examined its questions on evolution. When theistic evolution was presented as an option in a new single-question format, most religious groups answered about the same. But white evangelicals and Black Protestants (two of Pew’s standard categories) were twice as likely to say humans evolved in some way.

A) Humans have always existed in their present form

B) Humans have evolved; God had a role

C) Humans have evolved; God had no role

White Evangelicals: A) 38%, B) 58%, C) 4%

Black Protestants: A) 27%, B) 66%, C) 6%

Catholics: A) 13%, B) 56%, C) 30%

Unaffiliated: A) 11%, B) 24%, C) 64%

All US Adults: A) 18%, B) 48%, C) 33%

Throughout the coasts of the Caribbean, Central America, South America, and even in south Florida, there can be found a pleasant-looking beachy sort of tree, often laden with small greenish-yellow fruits that look like apples.

You might be tempted to eat the fruit. Do not eat the fruit. You might want to rest your hand on the trunk, or touch a branch. Do not touch the tree trunk or any branches. Do not stand under or even near the tree for any length of time whatsoever. Do not touch your eyes while near the tree. Do not pick up any of the ominously shiny, tropic-green leaves.

The aboriginal peoples of the Caribbean were familiar with the tree and the sap was used to tip arrows. It is believed that the Calusa people of Florida used it in that manner to kill Juan Ponce de Leon on his second trip to Florida in 1521.

This is the manchineel, known in Spanish-speaking countries as “la manzanilla de la muerte,” which translates to “the little apple of death,” or as “arbol de la muerte,” “tree of death.” The fruit, though described as sweet and tasty, is extraordinarily toxic.

Nicola Strickland, who unwisely chomped down on a manchineel fruit on the Caribbean Island of Tobago, describes what it was like:

I rashly took a bite from this fruit and found it pleasantly sweet. My friend also partook (at my suggestion). Moments later we noticed a strange peppery feeling in our mouths, which gradually progressed to a burning, tearing sensation and tightness of the throat. The symptoms worsened over a couple of hours until we could barely swallow solid food because of the excruciating pain.

Over the next eight hours our oral symptoms slowly began to subside. Recounting our experience to the locals elicited frank horror and incredulity, such was the fruit’s poisonous reputation.

Possible Preaching Angle:

God also warned Adam and Eve about the far deadlier physical and spiritual consequences which would come from eating the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. Sadly, just as in this story, Eve not only ate but shared the fruit with Adam.

Researchers calculate that about 530,000 fewer public school students are learning about intelligent design in 9th or 10th grade biology classes today, compared to 2007. The amount of class time science teachers spend on human evolution has also doubled in those 12 years, according to scholars at Penn State University and the National Center for Science Education. The changes come from a new generation of teachers, new textbooks, and updated education standards.

Science teachers who teach intelligent design is a valid alternative:

2007 – 8%

2019 – 5%

Science teachers who discuss intelligent design:

2007 – 23%

2019 – 14%

Science teachers who teach evolution is established science:

2007 – 51%

2019 – 67%

A recent survey polled people with an average age of 38. Eighty percent had college degrees. The results revealed a lot of ignorance about origin of life research and the success of life creating life from nonliving matter (also called abiogenesis).

More than 41 percent thought that researchers had created “complex life forms from scratch,” such as frogs, using simple chemicals and conditions that “approximate Earth’s early atmosphere.” Remarkably, more than 72 percent of respondents thought origin of life researchers had created “simple life forms from scratch,” such as bacteria.

To put it kindly, the respondents’ great expectations about the accomplishments of origin of life researchers are wrong. Wildly so.

Researchers have not created a frog or a bacterium from simple chemicals in the lab under early Earth conditions. They haven’t created a functional membrane, or flagella or cilia, or any of dozens of molecular machines, or the DNA required for even the simplest living bacterium.

Possible Preaching Angle:

The mystery of life is explained in the profound phrase “I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Wonderful are your works; my soul knows it very well” (Ps. 139:14). We can only understand the origin of life when we turn our minds to our Creator God who is the Source of life.

In a popular interview posted on YouTube, scientist Leonard Mlodinow, who co-authored The Grand Design with Stephen Hawking, declared, "Science shows that God is not necessary to explain the universe." He also adds, "I find it very hard to see how people could believe in the Bible." But then Mlodinow gave this very surprising answer to another question on the same interview:

I tend not to believe things that there is no evidence for. But it is not always true. I do believe, for instance, in aliens. I believe that there is life on other planets, and I think there is no evidence for that. We don't understand the origin of life on Earth well enough to say how probable it is that on another star life would form. But in my heart for some reason I find myself believing that.

Christian apologist William Lane Craig commented on this quote:

That is really bizarre, isn't it? That he believes in aliens even though he says he has no evidence for it, but he just finds he believes in his heart that extraterrestrial life exists. But he doesn't apparently find it in his heart to think that God exists the way many people do. If he thinks he is rational in believing in aliens, why isn't it rational to believe in God?

In his book, God's Undertaker: Has Science Buried God, John Lennox quotes a number of scientists who admit their ignorance about the origin of life:

• One of the most eminent scientists working on the origin of life, Leslie Orgel, summed up the position as follows: "There are several tenable theories about the origin of organic material on the primitive earth, but in no case is the supporting evidence compelling."
• Orgel echoes the view Klaus Dose, also a prominent scientist working on origin-of-life issues, who stated, "At present all discussions on principal theories and experiments in the field either end in stalemate or in a confession of ignorance."
• Francis Crick, not known to be sympathetic to the miraculous, nevertheless wrote, "The origin of life seems almost to be a miracle, so many are the conditions which would have had to have been satisfied to get it going."
• Stuart Kauffman from the Santa Fe Institute claims, "Anyone who tells you that he or she knows how life started on the earth some 3.45 billion years ago is a fool or a knave. Nobody knows."
• Finally, Francis Collins, former director of the Human Genome Project, said, "How did self-replicating organisms arise in the first place? It is fair to say that at the present time we simply do not know."

We want a kind of knowledge that eliminates mystery and puts us in charge of [the] world. Above all, we want to avoid a knowledge that calls for our own conversion. …

The sin, the error, is not our hunger for knowledge—and the way back to Paradise is not via intentional ignorance (despite some latter-day Christian claims). Adam and Eve were driven from the Garden because of the kind of knowledge they reached for—a knowledge that distrusted and excluded God. Their drive to know arose not from love but from curiosity and control, from the desire to possess powers belonging to God alone. They failed to honor the fact that God knew them first, knew them in their limits as well as their potentials. In their refusal to know as they were known, they reached for a kind of knowledge that always leads to death.

In a sermon Pastor Matt Woodley shared the following story:

When I was about ten years old, my dad, a medical doctor, received a special gift from one of his patients: a beautiful globe with shiny sequins. The globe spun around on its base and played one of my dad's favorite songs. My dad proudly demonstrated how it worked: grab it by the base, slowly wind it counter-clockwise, and then release it, letting it spin clockwise while playing beautiful music. He told us, "You can touch it, but don't wind it, because you might break it."

A week later, while my dad was at work, I found the globe and brought it to my room. Although I heard my dad say, "Don't wind it up," I decided to wind it up anyway. I gave it a little twist and let it play. It played, but only for five seconds. So I gave it another twist and another twist and five more twists and then—snap! The globe separated from the base. I desperately tried to fix it. I tried forcing the two pieces together. I tried gluing it. I tried taping it. Finally, as I stared hopelessly at the two pieces of the globe, I realized it was broken beyond repair. So I went into my closet, shut the door, and hid.

It was Genesis 3 all over again.

Our world is like the broken globe: it's been twisted too far, and we can't put it back together again. Relationships break, our sexuality breaks, we're slowly breaking the Earth. Our hearts break, nations break down and go to war, our health breaks, our politics break. All the glue, tape, and positive thinking can't put it back together again.