In her inimitable style Archdruid Eileen speculates about Quantum Apples, Cider and the Creation of the Universe. She suggests that when Adam ate the apple the universe underwent a quantum change from the state imagined by young earth creationists to the one currently described by mainstream scientists. So let’s blame apples and drink cider!

Meanwhile Joel Watts sees quantum physics in another area of theology when, in his concluding thoughts on the Jesus Criteria Conference, he writes:

This is the quantum superposition of Church and Academy, and I must report, Schrödinger’s cat is seen.

If this famous feline is being observed, surely the waveform superposition is collapsing, which means that Joel and every other thinking Christian is being forced into either Church or Academy. Or maybe not, as the latest scientific results suggest that Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle is uncertain. So perhaps we can observe the cat without killing or saving it, or have our cake and eat it. But then long before Schrödinger an even wiser man pointed out that no one can serve two masters.

Meanwhile, it seems, the leader of the Beaker Folk has managed to imagine a quantum superposition of a Ken Ham-style 4000-year-old universe and a billions of years old big bang one. But the box has been opened, the waveform has collapsed, and it turns out that Schrödinger’s dinosaur died millions of years ago, when quantum fluctuations in the orbit of a stray asteroid caused it to collide with the Earth.

This evening’s pre-Christmas Carol Service at Meadgate Church, Great Baddow featured brilliant imaginative re-tellings of Bible stories, starting with Genesis 1 and continuing through the traditional Christmas passages to the end of Revelation.

One small feature of the first reading caught my attention. The fifth day of creation was illustrated by a vivid description of the sounds made by birds created then. But “gobbling”, presumably intended to be the sound of newly created turkeys, was among the sounds heard on the sixth day.

So on which day of creation did God create turkeys, and other flightless birds? Was it on the fifth day, along with “every winged bird” (Genesis 1:21), or on the sixth day, along with “the livestock, the creatures that move along the ground, and the wild animals” (1:24, NIV)?

Well, turkeys have wings, so it sounds as if they should be included in day 5. But God’s purpose on that day was to “let birds fly above the earth” (1:20), which turkeys don’t do, and on day 6 it was to fill the earth with land creatures (1:24), which include turkeys.

No doubt evolutionary biologists will say that flightless turkeys are descended from birds which could fly, and so should be classified among the day 5 creations – although of course those biologists could accept the six days of creation only as symbolic. But the ancient Hebrews who wrote Genesis did not use modern biological classifications.

The issue becomes even more complicated with geese. Our modern western domesticated geese cannot fly, but they have been bred by humans, over perhaps the past 4000 years, from wild greylag geese which can fly. So I suppose they were created on the fifth day.

Perhaps the real point here is that the we should not press the distinctions which the biblical authors made, or to take them as literal chronology. The authors probably weren’t interested so much in telling exactly where turkeys fitted into their time line as in telling a beautiful poetic story. This evening’s imaginative re-telling may have come close to that original purpose – and by questioning its details, as I am in this post, I am, I suppose, guilty of ruining poetry.

But for turkeys, and geese, perhaps the more pressing issue just at the moment is not the day of their beginning but whether their end will come on the fifth or sixth day of this coming week.

One of the arguments against evolution commonly used by young earth creationists concerns animal death before the Fall of Adam and Eve. The established science of evolution clearly implies that animals died long before humans came on the scene. After all, carnivorous animals evolved to eat other animals. And what are fossils except the remains of dead animals, and sometimes plants? However, as former creationist Phill Sacre writes,

One of the Creationist doctrines is that there was no death before the fall. No animals or humans died before mankind sinned, and God instituted his curse.

But what is the basis of this doctrine? Does it have any foundation in biblical teaching? Sadly, first we need to clear away some misinformation which has been put around. BioLogos is a usually excellent group which “explores, promotes, and celebrates the integration of science and Christian faith”, and takes a clear stand against the anti-scientific approach of many creationists. So it was a surprise to read a recent post at The BioLogos Forum Life and Death in which Oxford-based lecturer in Christian Apologetics Michael Ramsden says the following, in a video with a transcript, when he really should know better:

In the New Testament we find when we talk about life, we have the idea of living or ‘bios’. In other words, we talk about how we are alive. But Jesus talks about the fact of “coming to life “ when we know him. That doesn’t suddenly mean that our heart starts beating. It means that there is this whole side to us which was dead… which wasn’t alive and is now… that has actually sprung to life.

(I twice tried to comment on this BioLogos post, but my comments disappeared, and even their moderators cannot find them.)

Well, either Ramsden doesn’t know his Greek, in which case he shouldn’t quote Greek words, or he is deliberately misrepresenting it. The word he quotes, bios, has nothing to do with “coming to life” when we know Jesus.

In the New Testament there are two main Greek word groups used for the concepts of “life” and “live”. There are also some words, mostly derived from oikos “house”, used for “live” in the sense of “dwell”. By far the more common of the main word groups consists of the noun zōē “life”, the verb zaō “to live”, and a few cognate words, together found over 300 times in the New Testament. The less common group, consisting of bios and its cognates, is found only 15 times.

The bios word group has a very specific meaning, at least in the New Testament. These words are used only for physical earthly life and lifestyle, and for the physical resources needed to live this life. Typical examples are Luke 8:14 and 21:4. They are never used in any relation to non-material or spiritual aspects of life, and certainly never for the new life which Jesus gives.

By contrast, the zōē/zaō word group, although sometimes used for physical and earthly aspects of life, is most commonly used for the life of God, in himself and in his people. Interestingly, this word group is never used for animal life, except for the beasts of Revelation which are only symbolically animals.

This suggests a clear distinction in biblical teaching between two different kinds of life – and by implication two different kinds of death, although there are no separate Greek words for them. The first kind of life, often described by bios, is purely physical and earthly, and ends in physical death, the first kind of death. This kind of life and death is shared by humans and animals. The second kind of life, for which zōē/zaō is always used, is spiritual and heavenly, is shared by humans and God, and doesn’t usually end in death.

This distinction can help to explain many of the details of the Genesis account (although zōē/zaō words are used for animals in the LXX Greek translation of Genesis). We read that

the LORD God formed a man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being.

Genesis 2:7 (NIV)

Thus the first human being is distinguished from the animals by “the breath of life”. God also tells this first man

you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat from it you will certainly die.

Genesis 2:17 (NIV)

But when Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit their physical life did not come to an end. In fact Adam lived at least 800 more years (Genesis 4:4). How do we reconcile this seeming contradiction? The point is surely that at that moment the first couple lost their spiritual and eternal life, and became merely mortal, like animals. For the first time they are forbidden access to the tree of life by which they could live for ever (Genesis 3:22). For the first and last time people who had been truly alive spiritually died. Their descendants, although made in the image of God, were not born with this spiritual life. The only exception was Jesus Christ, the second Adam, who was born with physical and spiritual life, died spiritually as well as physically on the cross, and was raised again to new physical and spiritual life. And he made it possible for us to be born again with spiritual life.

Adam and Eve lost their spiritual life but continued to live physically. As Christians we have regained the spiritual life which they lost. If Jesus doesn’t come again first, we will die physically, but we will never lose our spiritual life, and at some time we too will be raised to new physical life.

The implication of this is that only this zōē life has any spiritual significance. The bios life of animals, and of humans without Christ, has no true meaning, although it sometimes functions as a symbol of spiritual life. For people without zōē life, human physical death, the end of bios life, is the ultimate tragedy, the ultimate evil. Increasingly animal death is also considered evil. But in God’s scheme of things this physical death is not an evil, not a result of sin, but simply what is natural in the world.

So there is no reason to deny death before the Fall of Adam and Eve. For hundreds of millions of years, according to the evidence from fossils, animals have lived and died. But this is nothing to do with sin or evil. The creationist doctrine about this has no proper theological basis, and so offers no reason to reject the consensus of scientists about the past of our planet.

The prophesied time will indeed come when

The wolf and the lamb will feed together,
and the lion will eat straw like the ox …

Isaiah 65:25 (NIV)

Maybe this will be true of literal animals at some future time. But its main significance is surely not to do with carnivores changing their diets, but that there will be an end to human conflict in the everlasting kingdom of the Prince of Peace.

James McGrath links to a post by David H. Bailey Supernovas and “God the Great Deceiver” theology. In this post Bailey explores some of the apparent implications of the Young Earth Creationist position, that the universe was created only about 6,000 years ago – or in some variants up to 20,000 years ago. Bailey notes that astronomers regularly observe events, supernova explosions, from at least 200,000 light years away in other galaxies, and so, according to orthodox science, which took place at least 200,000 years ago.

The creationist Henry Morris, as quoted by Bailey, explained this apparent discrepancy as follows:

[T]he light rays … must have been created carrying information descriptive of historical physical events (such as super novae) which never actually occurred, because we would now be observing light rays which were created in transit and never were radiated from the stars which they seem to image.

In other words, God created the universe with an appearance of age. Francis Schaeffer tried to rationalise this version of events:

There is a possibility that God created a ‘grown-up’ universe. For example, Adam, the first night he existed, might have seen the light of the furthest stars without waiting for long light years to pass before they could be seen.

To this possibility, we must quickly add one note. This does not mean that God is capricious. And surely it does not imply, and I would totally reject, the concept Bishop Samuel Wilberforce suggested at Oxford in Darwin’s time: that God created fossils in the earth in order to fool fools. This is totally out of character with the God of the Bible.

However, just because it was stated so horribly in the days of Darwin is no reason not to suggest that God may have in some sense and in some areas created a grown-up universe. One could ask, for example, whether the trees when they were created had rings.

Well, Schaeffer has a point, but why would God create starlight as evidence of past events which never actually occurred, unless it was something like “in order to fool fools”? The Psalmist wrote “The heavens declare the glory of God” (Psalm 19:1 NIV), but is what they declare in fact deception by God? As Bailey puts it,

to anyone outside the world of hard-core creationists, this type of “God the Great Deceiver” theology, namely the notion that God deliberately constructed a phony universe to mislead diligent seekers of truth in the 21st century, is not only absurd but downright blasphemous. It is utterly at odds with the notion of a rational, comprehensible God that has been the mainstay of Judeo-Christian theology for several millennia. Indeed, such a being would be utterly unworthy of our reverence or obedience.

In fact even young earth creationists have realised the force of this argument and tried to find ways around it. A reader of this blog regularly refers me to articles from Creation Ministries International. So I went to their site for material about this issue, and found an interesting 2003 article A new cosmology: solution to the starlight travel time problem by John G. Hartnett. Hartnett, a believer in a creation about 6,000 years ago, looks at five possible solutions to the problem. Only one of these is that God created the light from events that did not actually happen, and he clearly rejects this:

I don’t believe God commits fraud. Creating a beam of light from source to observer so that the observer appears to see current information must also mean there is a whole stream of information in the beam that is false.

The problem is that three of his other solutions, that the speed of light was enormously faster in the past or that clocks on earth and elsewhere in the universe run at vastly different speeds, seem totally implausible to someone like me who has studied physics to a high level. And the remaining solution is to concede that the universe is ancient and only the earth was recently created.

Hartnett’s own preference is for a solution in which for the first few “days” of creation clocks on earth, and maybe in the whole solar system, ran ten trillion times slower than clocks elsewhere in the universe. Thus each “day” of creation, as measured on earth where there were in fact no observers other than God, corresponds to ten trillion astronomical days. This sounds to me very like an attempt to present “day-age” type old earth creationism in young earth creationist language.

So, it seems that at least some young earth creationists agree with Bailey that God is not the Great Deceiver. But they have yet to come up with even slightly convincing explanations of how the light from distant supernovas could have reached us in 6,000 years of real time.

Matt Walker of BBC Nature has written an interesting article on his Wonder Monkey blog Can religious teachings prove evolution to be true? He reports on how a mainstream scientist has used a technique from “creation science” to show that different types of dinosaurs evolved from one another, rather than being created separately.

Much of so-called “creation science” is bad science. This is not only because of the ways its advocates have often selected evidence and given improbable explanations of it, while ignoring good alternative explanations from reputable scientists. The fundamental philosophy of “creation science” is also unscientific, because its intention is to support a pre-existent theory rather than to determine the truth in a theory-neutral way. Now it is not just “creation science” which is guilty here, but others being guilty does not make one innocent.

Walker, however, reports on how one particular “creation science” technique, called “baraminology”, does seem to be a valid method, and has been used by biologist Phil Senter to examine variations among dinosaurs.

Walker explains (otherwise I know little about this subject) that creationists have used baraminology to conclude that all cats, including lions, tigers and domestic cats, have a common ancestor and so form one “kind” in the biblical sense (Genesis 1:11-12,21,24-25, 6:20 etc). However, this technique shows that there is insufficient evidence, in the form of “missing link” type fossils, of a common ancestor of dogs and cats, suggesting that dogs form a separate “kind”.

Dr Senter has applied this technique to fossil dinosaurs and concluded that, even by the strict standards accepted by “creation scientists”, there is sufficient evidence that several apparently very different groups of dinosaurs have a common ancestor and form one “kind”.

The problem for creationists is the great diversity of dinosaurs within this “kind”. Their own technique has been used to provide evidence not just of the kind of micro-evolution or selective breeding which could have caused the observed diversity among cats, but also of large scale evolutionary changes from one species of dinosaur to another. A further difficulty for young earth creationists is that they would have to conclude that

in just a few thousand years, each “kind” of dinosaur begat the huge variation in fossils we see today.

It is reminiscent of evolution, just even faster paced.

Dr Senter points out that creationists’ room for manoeuvre, when citing the evidence, continues to diminish.

Walker concludes:

[Dr Senter’s] work, and my reporting of it, will hopefully take the discussion forward about what evidence is gathered and how, and what that evidence tells us.

So let the discussion evolve.

Will any creationists consider the idea that even some of their own evidence-gathering techniques may point to the veracity of evolution?

Indeed. Let the discussion evolve, or be created, here.

But it is sad that Walker also presents the issue, at the start of his article, as

Did God or evolution drive the emergence of life in all its resplendent variety?

That is the wrong question. Biologists may be able to prove that different species have evolved from common ancestors. But they cannot hope to decide by scientific arguments whether this evolutionary process was a product of blind chance or was designed by God to carry out his purposes.

According to a new study,

natural selection may not be the only means by which higher organisms came into being.

No, this is not the latest anti-scientific rant from a creationist group, but a serious study published in Nature and reported by the BBC, under the title Protein flaws responsible for complex life, study says. The point is apparently that, at least as one group of scientists concludes, higher animals did not emerge from simple single-celled ones by Darwinian natural selection based on the survival of the fittest:

The authors stress that they are not arguing against natural selection as a process; they say rather that it can be aided by “non-adaptive” mechanisms.

“There’s been this general feeling that complexity is a good thing and evolves for complexity’s sake – that it’s adaptive,” Professor Lynch told BBC News.

“We’ve opened up the idea that the roots of complexity don’t have to reside in purely adaptational arguments.

“It’s opening up a new evolutionary pathway that didn’t exist before.”

Now this is certainly not rejection of evolution as a process. But it does suggest that the classical Darwinist explanations of it, as taught in schools and ridiculed by creationists, are not the whole story. As another professor told the BBC,

“We tend to marvel at the Darwinian perfection of organisms now, saying ‘this must have been highly selected for, it’s a tuned and sophisticated machine’.

“In fact, it’s a mess – there’s so much unnecessary complexity.”