[baudrunner]

The subject of evolution, note that I do not refer to it as The Theory, is still a controversial one to those who adhere to a literal interpretation of the scriptural works of the Bible. There is an ongoing debate in some parts of America as to whether the subject of evolution should be taught in some schools, where religious fervour comes dangerously close to zealotry. The common adage that knowledge can be a dangerous thing actually takes its origins from the Book of Genesis, wherein Eve tempts Adam with fruit picked from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, which God had forbidden them.

The writings of the Old Testament are not a single literary work but a consolidation of many manuscripts embodying allegorical, genealogical, and historical works as well as poetry and song. It is estimated that contributions to the Old Testament, written at various times by various authors, occurred over the course of over seven hundred years. By way of example, the Book of Isaiah was completed in sessions almost a hundred years apart. The Bible includes three versions of the ten commandments. The Roman Catholic sequence was established by St. Augustine. He based it on the Septuagint, an old Greek version of the Old Testament scriptures translated from about 250 BCE. The Apocrypha are those books of the Septuagint included in the Vulgate, a Latin version of the Bible translated between AD. 383 and 405, and used as the authorized version by the Roman Catholics. They are rejected by the Protestants as uncanonical because they are not in the Hebrew Scriptures. The current version of the Bible accepted by the Church of England was authorized by King James I, the first to call himself "King of Great Britain", with good intentions, and becomes another edition to add to the many earlier versions, including various translations of the Aramaic Bible, the Hebrew Bible, and the Greek Bible. There are other more contemporary versions whose translations should be more appropriately considered evangelical interpretations including the Gideon bible which appears to have incorporated elements not common to any other. The Good News Bible is a translation into the common English style published by the United Bible Societies. Evidently, and perhaps unfortunately, no one owns the copyright to the original Bible.

We prefer not to discredit the writings of the Old Testament by giving scientific evidence for the purpose of contradicting and debunking it, particularly as it is presented in the Book of Genesis. It is preferable and much more appropriate to review that narrative of the Old Testament as allegory. It has come to us by way of the limited scriptural media which were the tools of the trade of those times and from the unscientific yet logical and highly intelligent minds of those scribes of that interpretation which came to them through insight and inspiration, not dictation.

Genesis is indeed a grand moral narrative, an intelligent interpretation of the human condition and even a lesson to the young about growing up. For example, the Garden of Eden represents the innocence of youth. The temptation of the knowledge of the flesh and the weakness of Adam and Eve in succumbing to desire culminates in the loss of that innocence, ie. the casting out of the Garden of Eden. No longer the naive children they were before that experience, they are now obliged to assume the responsibility of adulthood and parenthood and compelled to commit to arduous labour to feed and shelter their family. From these two are born Cain and Abel, who represent the eternal conflict even of brother against brother, for such is the course of human history that its manifestation is very real as evidenced even today by conflict in the Middle East. Are not both Jew and Arab Semites having a common ancestry in Abraham? Are they then not brothers? This part of the Book of Genesis is an intelligent analysis of the human condition.

Additional works of the Old Testament are a valuable adjunct to the study of ancient history, not to mention the history of culture, and that makes the compendium that the Bible represents a very valuable resource to scholars of many disciplines. One should never diminish even minutely the importance of that collection of ancient writings by the earliest scribes from our overall appreciation of human history. And one should also not remove oneself from the contextual meaning of those works.

There are narratives around events which convey historical information and real messages. There is every reason to believe that Noah existed because we know through Geological and Archeological studies that there was a great flood preceded and followed by long periods of torrential rains geologists refer to as the ante diluvial period. The Book of Kings can be regarded as genuinely historical although unfortunate misinterpretations have been entered leaving occasional doubt as to geography. Furthermore, the Hebrews of biblical times must have had their own names for historical regents and for the lands that they ruled. It is not improbable that the king of Moab referred to in the Bible was not a Jewish king at all but actually the only king of that time since the Jewish people were still in bondage in Egypt, the pharaoh Akhenaton, for the king of Moab is said to have united the North and South and converted the populace from a polytheistic to a monotheistic belief structure. We know that these were Akhenaton's first acts on acquiring the throne of Egypt. Therefore we may assume that interpreters and translators were quite likely to document their own interpretation of the historical time frame into their work using the language which was an extension of the culture of their own people.

The story of the creation in the Book of Genesis may be legitimately regarded as a synopsis of the entire history of the creation of this universe, encapsulated conveniently as a preamble to the moral parable of Adam and Eve. If it reveals anything at all, it at least tells us that there was a beginning. It is not rational nor the least bit scientific to propose that a single individual, divine or not, can be responsible for the creation of the entire universe which seems to go on and on ad infinitum. The Hubble space telescope was once pointed at the most seemingly empty region of space for a long time-lapse photograph. The magnificent result of this experiment showed an endless proliferation of galaxies and galactic clusters, receding far into the distance, a distance that continues so far that the light from galaxies presumed to be even farther away would probably never reach this world for their entire history. It is nearly impossible to grasp the true scope of the physical dimensions of all of creation. It is a tribute to the imagination that one could even think that it could be possible for one individual to create all of this in seven days.

We should not blame God. He no more wants to take credit for the existence of the entire cosmos than have us accredit Him with it. It is a responsibility one does not want placed on one's shoulders, which apparently He has. Remember that we are made in His image. We are taught that because it is in the scriptures, as unfortunately is the story that He created all which is the reasoning to which all non-secular and religious teachings subscribe. There is a strange contradiction here. It would not make much sense for the creator of all things let alone the entire universe to be a human-like being with arms and legs and a torso, characteristics He certainly could not have evolved as adaptations to an environment which had not yet been created. It also cannot be a subconscious attempt by the scriptural author to ascribe his own attributes and characteristics to God as an extension of his own petty ego, because the scriptures are inspired. It turns out then that God is or was human in nature and the idea that He created the entire universe is the product of the over-stretched imagination of one who had absolutely no knowledge of science and certainly no knowledge of the true scope of the cosmos but a very deep and abiding respect for the omnipotency that God represented to him, and that indeed He does represent to us all. This disputation begs an explanation.

To define the form which God represents at present is to wonder what is the minimum amount of energy required to sustain an identity of the self. It is clear that God has shed the limitations of His corporeal existence. We however are bound within the elemental physical properties that define us and our environment. The elements in the periodic table have no equivalent in God's realm.

Albert Einstein defined mass as energy and the scientific community have verified his ground breaking formula relating energy to matter. We understand his theory of relativity and the premise that velocity, time and gravity are mutually contingent. Engineers have had to apply relativity calculations to compensate for the slower progression of time on a GPS satellite due to its velocity and the faster progression of time due to the effect of the weaker gravitational pull at orbital altitudes, effectively correcting for inaccuracies in determining ground position. Again, there are no equivalents in God's realm because these are the physical properties of the corporeal and material state wherein we find ourselves.

The minimum amount of energy required to sustain a non-corporeal existence are a most integral component of this physical realm. Evict all the "doped" energies that define the elements and which give them their material substance and properties and their physical limitations and we are left with the essence whereof the components of God's realm are constructed, and which incidentally comprise the basis for the existence of our own spiritual selves as well.

So it is to be seen that the physical properties of the universe are not so much the creation of a higher power but that the establishment or creation of the realm of that higher power is actually the result of a deconstruction of this physical realm.

Consciousness is a manifestation of that very earliest cause that gave rise to creation and constitutes the basis for anthropocentrism, but sense and order had to evolve from creation in the form of the elements and the resulting matter that comprise all that exists before consciousness could be realized and become manifest as the cognizant awareness of living entities.

All examples of the manifestations of entropic change are the result of the intervention of life in nature or of nature in nature or of nature in life which otherwise have a tendency toward becoming, maintaining or returning to order and balance, not to chaos. And insomuch as we represent the result of an intervention by that higher power, that same higher power can only be the consequence of a pure evolutionary process, one that saw no intervention. Consider all that we know, all the technology and capabilities that we possess at present, all the science and invention which we have discovered and which we apply. Now project us billions of years into the future, continuing to evolve and acquiring and applying knowledge and technologies and capabilities and then learning to achieve real immortality and so release ourselves from the corporeal dependencies that allowed us to thrive and maintain continuity through procreation and cultivation while existing in this physical realm. We will become inconceivably rich in intelligence and applied knowledge. Understanding that brings us closer to an understanding of the true nature of God and His people.

This idea does not in the least belittle the exceptional nature of His Being. He had a guiding hand in our evolution and His greatness compared to us is such that we should humble ourselves before Him in gratitude for the gift of this world and the enhanced life that He has bestowed upon us. And we will eventually continue to carry out the process of intervention in worlds that might otherwise grow stale and die but for us. "Go forth and multiply" I interpret to reach out to the stars and make other worlds hospitable for living things. I consider it our duty. Some day it should come to pass.

I firmly believe that by way of "divine intervention", a genetic component was introduced into that little prehominid that evolved to become us, as well as into other promising candidates, and determined to set them apart from the established evolutionary pathways of all the other life forms. So it can be said that God made the world and God made man.

The above is a rational interpretation of the allegorical work that is the Book of Genesis. It must be remembered that those writers had no knowledge of science, and to have documented what they did makes that work a monumental treatise of inspired logic and reason. Careful scrutiny of the scriptures will reveal the messages inherent in them. It is perhaps unfortunate that influential figures throughout church history have turned allegory into dogma and that genuine adherents to the faith have with good intentions taken the words for literal fact.

As a matter of fact the concept of geocentricity, in which the earth is at the centre of the universe and the sun and the planets orbit around it, was not superseded until 1514 by Copernicus who proposed the heliocentric version of the cosmos, where the sun is at the centre and all the planets revolve around it. Galileo Galilei confirmed the Copernican model through astronomical observations and calculations in 1609 but was made to recant his position by the church which used the Bible to argue its case. The church was inflexible in its position, pointing to the heavens to explain the obvious apparent behaviour of the planets and stars but its judgement was tainted because their observations were not deep enough. They lacked scientific insight.

The lack of scientific knowledge of the interpreters and translators of the Bible can also be illustrated by the tremendous ages that principal figures like Noah and Abraham and Moses were supposed to have attained by the time of their deaths. Obviously time was measured in cycles of the moon and not in years by the simple minds of those Biblical times for when one divides twelve into their ages one arrives at normal figures of longevity for any human being. And yet there are those who still believe otherwise. This is a classical case of the projection of "higher" knowledge into the primitive record. Again, it is a weakness of human nature that it is more attractive to believe in the improbable than in what is real. Universality of the freedom to think creatively without fear of retribution is relatively new in the history of humankind. It is ironic that it is one of those qualities that sets us apart from the animals and only through the grace of God.

The great visions of the prophets and apocalyptic seers probably have their origins in simple chemistry, or more precisely botany. The history of primitive human culture has been wrapped inexorably in cultism and shamanism. Primitive societies the world over, especially among the tribes of the South American aboriginals, have developed their culture around the use of hallucinogenic plants as sacred mediators between man and his gods. Anyone who has ever experienced the potent hallucinogenic effects of lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) can easily identify with the descriptions of the visions of Ezekiel, for example. In the search for plants that nurture or heal, early man has come upon many species that have had strange effects on the mind and spirit.

In the very early days of textile dyeing, the predominant colour used was Tyrian Purple, named after Tyre, the capital of ancient Phoenicia. There were only two sources of this indigo dye: the first is a shellfish which is indigenous only to the western shores of the Mediterranean; the other source is a plant of the murex family, found in abundance throughout the region. This dye was popular with the ancient Greeks and Romans. It is probably no coincidence that the chemical molecule of that dye incorporates the integral indole nucleus, described in chemistry as a benzene ring fused with a pyrrole ring. There is no dearth of chemical compounds containing the indole nucleus in their molecular structure, all of which exhibit hallucinogenic properties when ingested including all the various ergoline alkaloids such as LSD; psilocybin, which is found in the "magic mushroom"; Dimethyltryptamine (DMT); and Ibogaine. The indolic hallucinogens are structurally similar to the neurohormone serotonin which plays an important role in the biochemistry of the central nervous system. Indole is also a product of putrefaction and can be isolated from the intestine where it keeps the company of the intestinal peptides which are no different in composition from the neuropeptides found in the brain. One can speculate that there was undoubtedly no white wine served at the wedding at Canaan. "Be not drunk with wine" said Jesus, "but be filled with the spirit".

Jesus was in all likelihood not the only being ever conceived without human intervention, but he was certainly the most important. There have probably been more than a few who were born thus into this world to inspire and lead humanity in one way or another or if only to awaken the holy spirit in us all. They can be found among some of the true saints and the intellectually gifted as well as among those whom society have abandoned and neglected for such is the way of life, but their influence is yet felt and has contributed to altering the time line of human history, ultimately for the better. God does not normally interfere in the ongoing saga of human history but I am certain that He does intervene occasionally in this way and then allows history to take its course.

Life in the universe is a rare and precious yet integral component. It deserves to be preserved and encouraged to persevere. While it is an admirable exercise to apply oneself to attaining a state of perfection, there are no perfect human beings and never have been on this world. Even Jesus was human in nature. It is an unescapable fact that the manifestation of the holy spirit into the flesh makes one a human being after all.

John the apostle records in his gospel that after Jesus died He appeared to many in the form of the spirit. We may trust the gospels as being true eye-witness accounts because at that time we are approaching modern history, insomuch as the recorded history of that time is now virtually verifiable to all intents and purpose. It is recorded that He performed more miracles in this form prior to His ascension into God's domain than He did while He was corporeal. Even doubters were dispelled of their skepticism by direct experience. It was Jesus in the spirit which ultimately inspired Peter, his first lieutenant and number one apostle, to establish the existence of the Christian church which has persevered and maintained historical relevance for over two thousand years of recorded history.

To debate the creation of a society that conforms to the requirements of a morally just and altruistic one and which observes an unwritten code of human conduct requiring no laws or behavioural mediation places us in the position of Plato and Socrates of the ancient Greeks, who debated the creation of an ideal society where it was yet found necessary to have armies and hierarchy. Their discourse helped to lay the foundations for democracy. We observe the evolution of the spirit in the manifestation of modern societies and modern social thinking out of that experiment. In creating their ideal society in Plato's Republic these two philosophers continue to fall back on accommodations to the frailty of human nature. The tiring persistence of Socrates and the growing impatience of Plato is a manifestation of that same weakness of the human spirit, which makes for a poignant lesson.

We have come a long way intellectually and spiritually, but one can understand the essential need to ultimately discard the constraints and limitations of our physical realm for we will never cease to embrace our primordial predatory instincts when occasion leads us no matter how sophisticated our techniques or how intellectual the argument in support of such radical behaviour. This is why I encourage the maximum effort toward the exploitation of the potential for extraterrestrial exploration and toward the development of technologies in that direction, if only to turn ourselves away from those trends. It would bring us closer to God.