Research can reconstrue the meaning of 'creation'
By Tom Siegfried
The Dallas Morning News
07/24/2000

Science can smash atoms, send people into space and reveal the secrets of
the stars. But it can't buy a stairway to heaven. As Cardinal Caesar
Baronius said in Galileo's day, it was the Bible's job to show how to go
to heaven. It was science's task, Galileo emphasized, to show how the
heavens go.

Yet for all its power, science cannot enforce this division of labor in a
culture gripped by religious belief. Though eminent scientists and
theologians alike proclaim harmony between their domains, religion and
science remain estranged. As the diamond anniversary of the Scopes trial
passes, the rhetoric surrounding that court case echoes today in the
media, schools, legislatures and laboratories.

As they did 75 years ago, scientists argue that the best evidence strongly
supports the evolution of life's species from a common ancestor. Advocates
of special creation   of life, Earth and the universe   say that Scripture
denies standard science and seek to substitute a science of their own. In
disputes of this nature, sometimes it's helpful to consult the wisdom of
the ancients, or at least the insight of musical philosophers from a
bygone generation. When buying a stairway to heaven, sang Led Zeppelin,
you have to be careful when reading the signs. Because you know sometimes
words have two meanings.

And the signs from science since the Scopes trial convey a similar truth:
Sometimes, two words have the same meaning. It may be that the message of
20th-century science is that creation and evolution are one and the same.

Science explores the workings of the natural world and the processes of
life. If a God did in fact create life and the world   "all of creation"
then science might well be construed as a religious quest, as a way of
understanding just what God created. In fact, most of the founders of
modern science viewed their undertaking in just that way.

"Many early scientists believed they were 'thinking God's thoughts after
him,'" writes Ian Barbour, a professor of both physics and religion at
Carleton College in Northfield, Minn.

But nowadays most scientists divorce their work from religion. As the
biologist Stephen Jay Gould contends, science and religion each use a
different language for describing the world. They are "separate
magisteria," he says   non-overlapping domains of expertise: "science in
the empirical constitution of the universe, and religion in the search for
proper ethical values and the spiritual meaning of our lives." In fact,
many scientists take Dr. Gould's division to the extreme, denying any
relevance of religion to the natural world. In a similar way, some
creationists reject virtually all of modern biology, geology and
astrophysics. Standard science is wrong, they say, and the Bible, read
literally, is right.

But many observers of science and religion see the situation otherwise.
"Between these extremes have been many scientists and theologians who have
believed in both evolution and God," Dr. Barbour writes in his new book,
When Science Meets Religion.

"Today the popular image of 'the warfare of science and religion' is
perpetuated by the media," he writes. "A controversy is more dramatic than
the subtle and discriminating positions between the extremes of scientific
materialism and biblical literalism."

The Bible should be taken seriously but not literally, Dr. Barbour
advises.  And he rejects the rigid separation of science from religion. He prefers a
mix of "dialog" and "integration" between the two.

"We cannot remain content with science and religion as unrelated
languages," he writes, "if they are languages about the same world."
So if science and religion are really about the same things, then perhaps
the evolution-creation controversy can be reshaped in a manner suggesting
reconciliation.

Among leading biologists, the fact of life's evolution is not in dispute.
The fossil evidence is clear that forms of life around today weren't
always around, and that many forms of life that lived long ago aren't
around today. In 1859, Charles Darwin explained the changing diversity of
life as the inevitable result of "natural selection"   or "survival of the
fittest." Organisms are born with differences. Differences make some
organisms more likely to survive and reproduce. Over time and many
generations, differences accumulate and new species appear.

Later, scientists discovered the work of Gregor Mendel, a monk who figured
out how traits are passed from one generation to the next. Hereditary
features are transmitted from parents to offspring by genes. Mutations and
mixing of genes from parents give offspring new hereditary features.
Midway through the 20th century, scientists discovered that genes are made
of the twisted molecule known as DNA. The discovery of DNA's structure
showed how Darwinian evolution worked. The basic process has been tested
and demonstrated now many times, by such methods as mixing DNA in the lab,
doing computer simulations, and growing bacteria under different
conditions. None of that evidence was available during the Scopes trial,
when a high school teacher was convicted of teaching evolution. But the
scientific evidence didn't really matter, either in the trial or the court
of public opinion, where revulsion to evolution stemmed largely from
variants on an inopportune slogan: "Your grandfather was a monkey." A lot
of people didn't want to believe that they were descended from apes, or at
least didn't want to think of it in that way.

Since then science has found evidence for a much better evolution slogan
namely, "All life is related." In fact, virtually all life is very closely
related, much closer than even Darwin would have guessed. Species as
diverse as yeast, roundworms, fruit flies, mice, and people all possess
many common genes, similar in structure, that do the same job. Mapping all
the human genes, and comparing them to maps of other creatures' genes,
spells out the evidence for evolution in clear language.

Yet creationists persist. They cannot conceive of natural processes
producing life forms of such majestic complexity. Scientists have
repeatedly shown, though, that many natural systems organize themselves
into complex structures. Snowflakes are elegant ornaments, not globs of
mush. Even biological complexity seems to be an inevitable outcome of the
natural interplay of simple chemicals, as modern computer simulations have
demonstrated.

Ask Sanjay Jain, of the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore and the
Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico. At a recent symposium in Santa Fe, he
described a computer model of a network of molecules, representing simple
chemicals floating in a primordial pond.

For life to begin, something has to get these molecules to cooperate. But
there is no need for magic in Dr. Jain's model   just the chemical trick
known as catalysis. Some substances, by their mere presence, help other
chemicals get together to make a new one. Sometimes the new one helps to
make more of the original substance.

If a substance speeds up chemical reactions that make more of itself, it
stands a good chance of becoming abundant. In the primordial pond of life,
then, the most common chemicals would be those that enjoyed the benefit of
such self-catalysis. Ultimately, computer simulations show, a whole set of
molecules will emerge in which each catalyzes the production of another.
"A highly structured chemical organization arises inevitably," Dr. Jain
and his colleague Sandeep Krishna write in a paper on the World Wide Web
at xxx.lanl.gov/abs/nlin.AO/0005039.

By self-catalysis, a set of chemicals can reproduce itself, the hallmark
ability of life. The chemical network need only acquire a self-containing
shell, like a primitive cell membrane, to act like an organism. Life may
not have begun in precisely that way. But Dr. Jain's math illustrates the
principle that life could arise from simple molecules governed by basic
chemistry.

Getting life started is one thing. Getting it to go somewhere is something
else. How did the earliest life   simple, single-celled creatures like
bacteria   sire descendants made of many cells of very different kinds?
After all, the human body contains a couple of hundred different cell
types, for blood and brain and heart and liver, skin and muscle and other
organs and tissues. A single fertilized egg cell gives birth to all the
members of this cellular zoo, just as life's original unicell evolved into
fish, fowl, rattlesnakes and rats.

Once again, the growth of such complex life turns out to be inevitable. In
the journal Physical Review Letters last month, two Japanese scientists
showed that the math of cell division and growth reveals advantages in
becoming multicellular.

Chikara Furusawa and Kunihiko Kaneko, of the University of Tokyo, imagined
simple cells placed in a hypothetical pond of nutrient chemicals. Each
cell conducts its own internal chemistry using 20 kinds of molecules. In
this model, a cell grows by swallowing edible molecules from the pond.
Reactions in the cell's internal chemistry network convert the food into
structural materials that make the cell bigger. Upon reaching twice its
starting size, the cell divides to make two daughters. The daughters are
virtually identical to the parent cell, with some slight random
differences. Over time, one original cell grows into a colony of cells.
But whether that colony grows fast or slow depends on the nature of each
cell's internal chemistry. The Japanese researchers tested 800 different
designs of internal chemical networks; for most, the cells grew slowly and
remained virtually identical. But for a few types of internal chemistry,
the cells grew rapidly. In those fast-growing cells, the tiny differences
between two daughter cells get amplified, spawning entirely new cell
types, performing different kinds of chemistry.

When cells grow slowly   and stay the same   the cells on the edge of the
colony gobble up the food, and only they can grow and divide. But when
fast-growing cells adopt new identities, thereby desiring different foods,
outer cells will allow some nutrients to flow throughout the colony. Some
cells divide, others don't, but the colony as a whole grows rapidly thanks
to the benefits of diversification.

The lesson, say the Japanese scientists, is that simple cells are selfish.
They can grow as individuals, but they cannot grow cooperatively.
Ensembles of cells, containing a variety of types, outgrow colonies of
simple cells. Thus ordinary evolution promotes the growth of complex,
many-celled life forms, with no need for any design or control. It just
happens, automatically, based on the simple rules of physics, chemistry
and mathematics.

So complex life is not wildly unlikely. It is inevitable.

Creationists may continue to reject the notion of a natural origin and
evolution of life. But many religious authorities, including Pope John
Paul II, find evolution to be consistent with their beliefs. "New
knowledge has led to the recognition of the theory of evolution as more
than a hypothesis," the pope declared in 1996. "It is indeed remarkable
that this theory has been progressively accepted by researchers, following
a series of discoveries in various fields of knowledge." Of course,
evolution of life is not the only issue wedged between science and
religion. Biblical literalists insist that the Earth is young   a few
thousand years old   and deny the birth of the universe in a big-bang
explosion, billions of years ago.

Yet scientists can point to evidence that only the big bang explains. The
light from that cosmic birth, for example, still hangs around, now cooled
to barely warmer than absolute nothingness but still substantial enough to
add to the static in a snowy TV picture.

Ironically, the big-bang theory sounds suspiciously similar to the
creation account in Genesis   "Let there be light" seems like the logical command
to initiate a cosmic fireball.

But the big-bang idea also enlarges the scope of evolution, to encompass
not only life, but all of the universe. The heat of the initial explosion
forged atoms that aggregated to form stars, which cooked up heavier atoms

such as the carbon required for life. A first generation of stars
exploded, spewing life's ingredients into space, someday to surface on a planet (or
planets) circling one of a new generation of stars.

Throughout all of time the universe's stars and galaxies coagulated and
streamed through an ever-expanding space. The universe today is not what
it was yesterday; all of "creation" constantly changes. In other words,
creation is ongoing. Or evolving.

Here again, some religious scholars see consistency between Scripture and
science. In the book of Genesis, the traditional translation asserts that
"In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth." But the Revised
Standard Version of the Bible offers a footnote giving an alternate
translation that reads "when God began to create...."

From this biblical point of view, "creation" was not all at once, once
and for all. Creation is ongoing. Or evolving. Evolution and creation are
inseparable, and in a very serious sense they are one and the same.
Nevertheless, as Dr. Barbour and other theologians point out, the
scientific knowledge of the cosmos also evolves, and it is clear that
cosmic understanding at any point in time is always tentative. It is
therefore unwise for religion to base its faith on any particular
scientific idea. It is similarly unwise to appeal to a "god of the gaps"
invoking a deity to explain that which science cannot   for tomorrow
science may find a natural explanation.

Science is, after all, perpetually uncertain, subject to change. It
evolves. So as any Led Zeppelin scholar knows, you can't build the
stairway to heaven with the substances of science. That stairway lies on the
whisperin' wind.

Oryginal:
http://dallasnews.com/science/116594_essay_24dis.html