Created For Us?
No. 30
This week I’m looking back to a period I first wrote about in “Methodological Naturalism” called the Cambrian explosion. The purpose of that article was to show evidence of a crack in Darwin’s evolutionary view of the world. During the Cambrian Period 530 million years ago—part of the Paleozoic Era—new animals like trilobites and brachiopods appeared on the earth out of nowhere. The fossils of these animals were discovered in the Burgess Shale in British Columbia in 1909 by Charles Doolittle Walcott of the Smithsonian Institute. What made these new animal fossils so extraordinary was there was and still is no evidence in earlier fossil records of what they “evolved” from. In other words, they were animals that appeared without evolving from a previous species.
Darwin’s eloquent idea of life evolving from a single ancestor known as “universal common descent” that was backed by his theoretical mechanisms of natural selection and random variation and easily grasped, couldn’t explain the origins of the animals of the Cambrian explosion. Further, these fossils were remarkable because the origin of information required to create the critical features found in these animals are not in the fossil record. That the hierarchical or ordered information required to explain almost 20 new animal body plans that have been discovered has given positive evidence of intelligent design. I return to the Cambrian explosion in this article because it directly relates to other evidence from the same time period that all together suggests not only an intelligence stands behind the design of the universe and us but that a timing or “fine-tuning” is part of that intelligent design. I will do my best to explain these findings.
I recently picked up astrophysicist Hugh Ross’s book Why the Universe Is the Way It Is. I’d first heard of Dr. Ross through the late Michael Heiser’s “The Unseen Realm” lecture series. A friend said he was interested in the book too: we decided we could read it and then discuss it. The book no sooner arrived when I opened it to the words “Cambrian explosion” and was immediately enraptured. Expecting to read about Darwin and evolution, as I had before in Stephen C. Meyer’s book Darwin’s Doubt, I instead read how the decayed animals of the Cambrian explosion “made the largest contribution to Earth’s petroleum reserves.” It just so happens that the optimal time for petroleum production in Earth’s history along with the optimal time for reservoir structure formation and storage of the petroleum in those structures perfectly aligns with the timing for humanity’s appearance on Earth and utilization of those reserves in civilization. We are living on Earth at the optimal moment for the availability of petroleum. And this is not only the case for petroleum but our emergence on the scene exactly aligns with the optimal time for coal formation and storage. What Ross was describing was how the decayed remains of animals in the Cambrian explosion happened precisely at the right time in Earth’s history to enable human civilization to thrive hundreds of millions of years later. That this was an accident and not thought out in an intelligent way, I couldn’t accept.
Ross’s book goes on to describe other features that have been timed perfectly in Earth’s history to coincide with the rise of humanity. The stability of the sun, for instance, the star that Earth orbits, currently burns at the greatest consistency possible, or the lowest frequency of flares since its inception, giving the sun the perfect radiation profile and exactly timed to exactly suit human civilization. The sun’s brightness also increased from its start allowing just the right species at just the right population levels at just the right times to thrive and survive. These layers of life removed dangerous atmospheric greenhouse gases at just the right time to compensate for the additional heat produced by the sun’s increasing brightness. For 3 billion years this process filled Earth’s crust with biodeposits that eventually supported humanity’s rapid launch and global civilization; humans arrived at the perfect time biologically when biodeposits were plentiful. This also coincided with ideal surface temperatures and the abundance and diversity of plants to support civilization. Humanity arrived on Earth at the optimal solar moment, along with biodeposit and photosynthetic moments to ensure its survival.
I learned that the moon spirals slowly away from Earth and when the sun’s apparent diameter matched the moon’s, perfect eclipses became possible. Humanity’s arrival again coincided with the perfect eclipse and allowed humans prior to modern technology to determine the geometry and scale of Earth’s solar system. Calendars and historical records were likewise calculated using the timing of solar eclipses. Solar eclipses helped astrophysicists confirm Einstein’s theory of general relativity.
The arrival of humanity also matched the best seismic time to arrive. Billions of years of plate tectonic movement developed into continents and islands and eventually accounted for 29 percent of Earth’s surface that turned out to be the ideal landmass coverage required for sustaining a large, globally distributed human population. The shape, elevation pattern, orientation and relative position of these landmasses also appear optimum for human civilization. Arriving earlier, humans would not have survived the radiation from the decay of radiometric isotopes that drove plate movement in the Earth’s interior. Arriving later would mean living without the nutrient-rich volcanic soils that have provided civilizations with abundant food.
Further still was the slowing of Earth’s rotation from two to three hours to the twenty-four hours that we experience today. Slowed by the tidal forces of the sun and more so by the moon, as it formed, rainfall became more evenly distributed over the planet’s surface. Horrific storms no longer targeted geographical regions. More heat transferred from the tropics to the poles, which meant more biomass and more biodiversity in high-latitude regions. More nighttime cooling meant many plant and tree species were better able to produce what the human economy requires. Humans live on Earth at its optimal rotation rate for their survival.
What’s amazing about the uncovering of all of these described circumstances in Earth’s history is that humanity had nothing—zilch—to do with them.
The revelation in reading about the Cambrian explosion in Darwin’s Doubt startled my curiosity. The ignored fissure in a theory that is causing it to crumble after 150 years of apparent support and the falsity of its precepts against the text the Almighty gave to us 2000 years ago compels me to dig deeper. So much is not what it seems.
Genesis 1:27 says, “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.”
When we think of God creating man “in his own image,” I think we often equate this simply in the visual sense, in what we look like—two eyes, two ears, a mouth—when we look at ourselves in the mirror and conclude that that’s what God must look like. Certainly, in His incarnation as Jesus, we saw Him as a human being. But the idea of image is meant to be broader, more in a figurative sense, in God bestowing special honor on humanity that he did not give to the rest of creation. That honor provides us with much more than we know—“surpasses all understanding”—in giving us rationale, intelligence, and reason, which each of us experiences and utilizes as human beings, and often times unknowingly. We also have the ability to recognize that intelligence in the world around us.
Previously in “I Want To, I Do,” I wrote about Eric Metaxas’s article in the Wall Street Journal where he described how astronomer Carl Sagan, back in the 60s, announced there were two factors required to support life on a planet: the right kind of star and a planet the right distance from that star. That list has grown from 2 to now exceed 200 known parameters for a planet to support life. Some of those described in this article, from Hugh Ross’s work, are remarkable when viewed as part of the infinity of the universe. Marvels like Earth’s rotation speed slowing to give rise to human beings or new animals placed on Earth in the Cambrian period whose decayed remains have given human civilization its two largest energy resources—petroleum and coal, make it difficult not to at least consider that something with intelligence designed—created—this existence. And whether one believes in God or not, it’s hard not to begin to see, as our discoveries continue to unveil more of the universe and all that’s in it, that the universe was created potentially with the sole purpose to support life—that life being us.