Did it rain in the Garden of Eden?

Sitting here listening to the thunder rumble, I wondered if it rained in the Garden of Eden. Adam and Eve weren't clothed in the beginning, so I'd imagine that if it did rain, they'd be a little uncomfortable.... But without rain, how was food abundant? How did the plants grow?

I do have a bit of trouble with the Creation story still. I believe in evolution and I just don't think there is any way of convincing me that the evidence of the world being billions of years old is wrong.

I do however, think that if the earlier civilizations who had access to the Bible read that the world was over four billion years old and that they came to be from bacteria, they probably would have thrown the book out, just as many people now throw the book out because it doesn't say that.

The difference is, if they had thrown it out, we wouldn't have it at all...

But there are some things that make sense in a metaphorical view. Adam was alone, and then came Eve. It's true. Originally, there was no sex. Originally, there was a random exchange of DNA and RNA between bacteria that sometimes resulted in favorable changes to the genetic make up of the offspring that would result from DNA replication and division, and other times, detrimental changes to the genetic make up would cause the bacteria to become disadvantaged and perish. Rather than a survival of the fittest, it was more of a lottery. And then came sex. Some bacteria would develop mechanisms whereby one type would be the donor of genetic material and the other would be the recipient. Reproduction became more orderly with evolution and specific pairings meant there was a possibility for the fittest couples to produce more viable offspring, thereby starting survival of the fittest.

I'm just doing this all from my rusty memory (after not having done much biology since I graduated in spring 2006...), so correct me if I'm wrong about anything...

Anyway, so there we have the sexes being created after life is created, which suits evolution just fine.

As for the rest of evolution, in the order they are discussed in Genesis Ch 1:
1. verse 11: plants: first seed plants, then fruit trees;
2. verse 21: sea animals and birds;
3. verse 24: livestock, creeping things, beasts;
4. verse 26: humans.

The only thing I have trouble with in that order is the "creeping things". But on the other hand, if birds are genetically the closest to dinosaurs, it would make sense that between the creation of birds and the next step, the dinosaurs would go extinct and everything would sort of start over, putting the creeping things later, if that is when they would flourish... It's a stretch though. Or maybe what we know as creeping things might be different than the original intention of the name. The last possibility I can think of is that verse 24 is just basically mammals and the order within the verse is unimportant... maybe. Afterall, they all were created in a blink of God's eye...

Not too long ago, as I debated with a fellow blogger, his position being that evolution disproves creation and my position being that both can be true simultaneously, I brought up that it was too bad that God didn't throw fungi in there. Fairly recently, it was proven through genetic research that fungi were actually evolutionarily closer to animals than plants as was originally thought. If God had thrown fungi in there, we'd probably know for sure whether science and Genesis were compatible.

But He didn't.

Go figure.

The other thing I realized this past week that I hadn't really realized while I was studying biology is that we're the only one of our kind. You can't really say there's another animal very similar to humans. Apes? If you saw an ape in the woods, it's highly unlikely that you'd mistake it for a human. But look at squirrels. How many species of squirrel are there? How many species of dog? And after Australia broke off, a bunch of animals developed that filled similar niches to animals in the rest of the world, albeit with slightly different developmental characteristics, but still really similar in the grand scheme of things nonetheless. But what about humans? There's no species of human that any other human is inherently incompatible with. There are no reproductive blocks there, meaning we're all basically identical.

Why are we alone?

As another example, how many different kind of flies are there? Why can't they mate and produce some sort of superspecies when so many different kinds live side by side? Obviously, there are tons of genetic blocks there, and within each type of animal, there seems to be a strong diversity, except in humans.

We've got races, but races are just phenotypes, for the most part (i.e. what we look like reflecting out of our specific genetic composition) rather than complete differences in genetic composition.

So did God really create one species apart from all of the others?

Can you think of any others that might stand alone?

Platypus? :D

Or is that more of a combination of species? hehe.

One thing that used to bother me about Christianity before I started studying it was the whole superiority of man concept. That's what got us into this global warming slash species extinction vortex problem in the first place. We thought we were invincible and the world was ours. I thought that was a consequence of religion preaching that we were superior, until I sat in my first university biology course, and there, in chapter one, the author of one of the most widely used biology textbooks in Canada said it was obvious that humans had developed characteristics that made us superior to the rest of the species on Earth. However, he didn't give any proof to back up that claim...

I'm sort of agnostic when it comes to whether or not we're "better" than animals and other beings on Earth. I don't believe we can truly know we're better simply because the other animals don't speak our language. Our methods and processes for learning and developing cognitive abilities are different than other animals. Without getting inside their brain to somehow witness the thought processes they go through, we can't know that ours are better.

How do we know that trees don't think? Is it just because they don't have some semblance of an animal brain? What if their thought processes are carried out by a combination of cells that we haven't identified as a brain yet?

And another simpler example, we think we're smarter than animals because we created guns. We think we're better than, say, a bear because we can go into the woods and shoot our prey without having to run it down or catch it. But what if it was just never in the best interest of the bear to have that kind of tool? The bear catches enough to sustain itself without it and if he doesn't, he's not fit and won't eat and won't leave unfit offspring behind. Whereas we humans who have never killed anything, never even so much as pulling a carrot out of the ground, eat our fill until we are so fat we wouldn't be able to walk to the grocery store if our survival came down to that. Does it really benefit us as individuals to have all these tools at our disposal? Or does it just make us so reliant on them that we've become useless otherwise?

We also have this collective that animals don't have. We have this ability to pass down and therefore, build onto the knowledge those before us have acquired and built on. People five thousand years ago discovered gun powder and people today own guns without ever knowing how the process works.

That, I'll admit, is pretty unique to humans and probably does better us in some ways...

But to claim we're superior?

Somebody I know posted a video on facebook of circus animals, elephants and tigers, being whipped and clubbed during training and before performances. These animals have the capacity to pummel and destroy humans. Why don't they? Is it because we're smart and subdue them with whips and clubs? Is it because they've been trained since they were young? Or is there a potential that these animals, in growing with humans, have developed compassion for them even though they are the source of so much pain? Is it possible that they feel sorry for us?

Like that internet video that circulated a few months ago of the two men being reunited with their lion in Africa a year or so after it was released into the wild. Admit it, when the lion appears, part of you thought those men were done for. They are predators first, deemed that way probably out of our fear of them, regardless of our education. Yes, they are fierce predators, but they are just doing what God created them to do. And if you take them out of that role, if you remove them from their place of worship (if worship is doing what God intended through creation), is it not expected that they'd behave unpredictably and differently than they would in their natural circumstances?

Just like us.

We are so removed from what we were originally created for that we debate whether or not we were created. Whether or not we were created in a flash or through billions of years of genetic exchanges, we are creations. Nobody can deny that, can they? But who is the Creator?

Can science be the Creator?

Does science create or does it explore and make use of what is already there?

Why you? Why do you exist? Why were you born now, and why were you born human? Why were you born as whatever kind of human you are, wherever you are? Why did the genetic composition of your body yield your conscience and soul? Why did that specific pairing of gametes create the person you life within? Why does that person hear your inner thoughts? Why is your soul looking out from these particular eyes? Why is your soul feeling and experiencing life from this body?

And why are you conscious of it?

Is it all luck of the draw? What caused the draw?

Genesis 2:6 says there "a mist was going up from the land and was watering the whole face of the ground"... So it didn't exactly rain in Eden. I guess we'll never know because we weren't there.

For some reason, we're here instead...

For some reason.