Genesis meets the Big Bang and evolution, absent design

In terms of the history of the human species, our discoveries of the natural origins of life and the universe as we know it have occurred relatively recently. Regardless of one's religious belief system, the discoveries of our origins have arguably been dramatic. Humanity has observed and collected data of our world to form a meta-narrative of the history of the organization of matter, a history that has eventually allowed for the evolution of humans over tens of thousands of generations (1) and the emergence in our species of a brain with the capacity to conceptualize moments billions of years before or after our own. How can religion respond to the continuously expanding scientific encyclopedia of our universe?

Science and religion both address human curiosity about our origins and involve a form of faith in the intelligibility of the universe. (2) Alfred North Whitehead has suggested that science and religion both involve an adventure of the spirit--"a flight after the unattainable." (3) Yet, recognition of the substantive differences between science and religion allows both science to advance, and religion to continue to speak to the spiritual and immeasurable dimensions of existence.

Perhaps one of the most significant discoveries of the past 400 years of humanity's scientific meta-narrative of the universe occurred in 1951, when Ralph Alpher and Robert Herman, two young physicists studying the Big Bang theory, published their calculations that in the first moments following a cosmic explosion, the universe must have been filled with an intense radiation similar to a fireball that forms upon the explosion of a hydrogen bomb. They posited that such a fireball radiation would dissipate as the universe cooled and expanded, but would never entirely disappear, and its remnants should be omnipresent in the universe today. (4) Initially, despite Alpher and Herman's confidence that their calculations were of scientific interest, they found a weak reception among their contemporaries.

In 1965, however, in a project unrelated to the origins of the universe, physicists Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson detected the cosmic microwave background radiation, a radiation coming from every direction in the sky, as though the entire universe was the source. The radiation not only matched the hypothesis of Alpher and Herman; its wavelengths and frequencies, or spectrum, also matched the spectrum pattern of radiation produced by a cosmic explosion. (5) As technology has advanced, many groups of scientists have confirmed this data with increased precision.

The significance of the discovery of the Big Bang has perhaps been on par with that of the discovery of evolution. In 1831, the then theologian-in-training, Charles Darwin, joined a team of British global surveyors aboard Her Majesty's Ship, Beagle, as the expedition's naturalist. Darwin's excursion was an adventurous five-year circumnavigation around the Southern Hemisphere of the Earth during which he carefully observed the life and geology of various global regions.

Upon his return to England, in the three years from 1837 to 1839, Darwin produced in his spare time the entire theory of evolution in roughly 900 pages of private notes. However, his apprehension about the implications of the theory kept him from publishing it until 1858, when he received a letter from Alfred Russell Wallace in Borneo to which Wallace had appended a short essay which outlined succinctly the whole of Darwin's thesis. Perhaps in order to claim the discovery of evolution by natural selection, Darwin gave in to the urgings of his friends to share his work in the 1859 book, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. At once, the public and the scientific community reacted. (7)

Darwin's theory expressed two commonly known, simple biological life processes: transformation over time and diversification in space. (8) First, over time, individual organisms of a species are born with random variations in their physical traits. For example, one giraffe may be born with a longer neck than her cousins, a neck that can be stretched to enable her to reach higher leaves on a tree. Perhaps in a time of drought, her high reach enables her to consume more food than her relatives, some of whom die, while she mates and reproduces another giraffe with a longer than average neck that allows him to reap the same benefits as his mother, thus mating and producing more offspring that inherit this random mutation that proved environmentally useful. But, the environment is not static. As traits emerge and are selected, the shape of the environment inevitably changes over time. Predators, for example, that are adapted to kill other animals of the ecosystem through mechanisms that exploit a specific trait of other animals can hence change their own population and the population of other species, as well as interspecies environmental dynamics over time. Different random mutations may prove beneficial in terms of survivability, thus leading to the formation of groups of creatures with different environmentally adapted physical attributes. In other words, central to evolutionary biology is the idea that the organization of the world is constantly in a state of flux. (9) Darwin suggested that speciation (10) occurs when organisms with increasingly specialized selected mutations are no longer able to mate with the members of their group, branching off into a new species, resulting in the increasingly diversified tree of life over time. (11)