One, Darwin, Lemaître and Jesus Christ

One God of Israel

The Jewish Credo is short but not simple and comes from Deuteronomy 6:4.

  שׁמע ישׂראל יהוה אלהינו יהוה אחד   

Shema Israel, Adonai Eloheinu, Adonai Ehad
Hear, O Israel: the Lord is our God, the Lord is One.

The  is the cornerstone of Monotheism, the faith that there is only one God and not many as in Polytheism. The three great Monotheistic religions are all from the same root, Judaism, Christianity and Islam.

The Jewish Credo is also a powerful and difficult to understand statement about the "essence" of the God of Israel, that He actively is One (and not many).

In Judaism, any teaching that "breaks the unity of God" is rejected outright but the definitions and conclusions are often quite subtle.

The One is also an important subject in theoretical Philosophy.

The Hebrew language in the expression in Shema Israel might also be taken in a more understandable and simple sense: the Lord is our God, only the Lord (and nobody else). 



Theory of Evolution
When Charles Darwin (1809 – 1882) revolutionised biology with his Origin of the Species (1848) the Theory of Evolution was initially met with strong opposition from scientific and also from religious circles.

The two main points of difficulty were

 uniformity principle of Geology established some years earlier by Sir Charles Lyell (1797 - 1875) that his close friend Darwin and other scientists used in dating the history of life. The geological sequences in which key fossils were found demonstrated previously unimagined age of the surface of our planet and the presence of life on it.

There are still today religious Jews and Christians for whom the Biblical genealogies are the only correct chronological tool for dating the history of the universe. Based on calculating years from Adam on by the generations, the religious Christian year 2011 A.D. is year 5762 in the religious Jewish calendar which starts from the Creation of the world.

unique creation of man was shaken by the evolving scientific study of living organisms and species. Not only religious people were deeply offended by the suggestion that humans, the image of God according to the Bible and Koran, could have evolved from apes.

Modern biology does not claim that humans have evolved from apes. It is more accurate to say that humans are apes.

The scientific truth has conquered as it should have conquered and science has a tendency to fix its own errors - sooner or later.


One Life

Megatherium

However, why be so negative and deny facts of Creation?

Let us use the theory of Evolution to defend our faith in God.

For it provides a truly startling viewpoint to the entire history of life that has grown into the fabulous biodiversity of Mesozoic life and to such Cenozoic wonders as one of the largest mammals ever to live on land, the lazy Megatherium that lived some six million years ago slurping the leaves from its victim tree - six meters tall when standing - about the height of three tall men standing on shoulders. (Charles Darwin discovered its skull from the shores of Argentina while on his famous trip on HMS Beagle 1831-1836.)

Wonderful blue planet on orbit around its middle sized star in the big universe, the only place we know to have life. So full of life in fact that even today after five million years we humans have used the powers of domination given to us by God of Israel there still survive many species (yes, I am trying to be sarcastic.)

Then God said, "Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth."
Genesis 1:26

The startling thing suggested to us by modern evolutionary biology is that LIFE IS ONE.

Without going into the details, research on the history of life assumes as the fundamental principle that there was one single point of living something from which all life upon planet earth derives in unbroken succession.

(Of course, this is been discussed. Perhaps there were several starts, as for example, the pansperma model could include: if life first came upon earth on meteorites from space... there may be more than one meteorite bringing life ... perhaps even today!  But this only moves the question of single origins back in time to where and when in the hostile early Universe life mysteriously began.)

Yes, the basset, the boa, the birch, the banana, the bird, the bee, the baboon, the baby of a human mother... all from the same single ONE point of origins. One tiny seed of life, so to say.


One universe
The Original Atom theory originally suggested by the Catholic priest and scientist Georges Lemaître (1894 -1966) and called Big Bang by the atheist (?) astronomer Sir Fred Hoyle (1915-2001) is one point - if there ever was one!

According to modern Cosmogony the entire Universe, every cloud of dust, every cluster of galaxies, every star with or without planets ... all from the same single ONE point of origins.


One God of Israel
Let us keep all this in mind - one life, one cosmos - when we worship the One God of Israel, and His one and only son, Jesus Christ, Messiah, through whom everything that has existed, exists or will exist has been made!

including you and me.

---------
P.S.
If you believe that Father is God and Jesus is God and Holy Spirit is God so where is your One God of Israel?

Trinity in One is such a paradoxical claim - solely based on the divine revelation in the Bible - that it must be true!

We could claim that New Testament gives a closer look at the God of Israel than the Old Testament, bringing the Three Persons more visible through the words of Jesus of Nazareth.

While Jews are sticking to the old and do not have a concept of divine Son, we might claim that Islam has a doze of rationalism in the rejection of the ridiculous and even blasphemous idea that God could have a son with a woman.

Theological Notes on Elephant Ears

Jumbo

Walt Disney greatly wondered the meaning of elephant ears that first caused such laughing among those ravens. He suggested a very useful function for them in the lovely animated movie Jumbo.


Thinking man
My point in these blogs is that the process of creating a hypothesis or theory to explain the evolution of elephant ears requires a lot of hard facts and also some very serious critical and creative scientific thinking.

But we know that Nature does not think. It just follows those laws of nature someone has set for it. We try to figure out in our scientific ways and by using our methods what those laws are and what environmental conditions were required for them to work and what special - perhaps punctuated - events have guided the evolution of elephant ears.

Thinking God of Israel

Earth's sky

Nature is anonymous even if some evolutionary biologists give it divine impersonal abilities.

But the personal God of Israel claims that He is the Who, the I AM.

In His own word written by people inspired by the Holy Ghost that a personal I has made everything.
In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.  Gen 1:1

This implies that behind and in everything that exists there is a thinking person - a very creative one, whose closest image is the human being, thinking and creative man and woman.

This is not science, this is religion, and knowing the Who does not explain the How.


Let us rejoice and praise Him
When wondering elephants and mammoths let us rejoice and praise Him who has made them.

Let us not be like those idol worshippers Apostle Paul is writing about in his letter to the Romans

"For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse.  For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened."
Romans 1:20-21

Instead, let us, evolutionary scientists and laymen alike, glorify God in our writing and walking and talking and give thanks to him.

For without faith in God we do not really comprehend what is going on.

By faith we understand.

By faith we understand that the universe was formed at God’s command, so that what is seen was not made out of what was visible. Hebrews 11:3

By faith we also rejoice - at least some of us - when science explains how God created that amazing elephant ear using the toolbox of environment, genetics and evolutionary principles. And how he gave us the ability to figure it out.

By faith we know personally the Who because He has made it possible. And He is the source of our eternal rejoicing and worthy of praise!


Amazing elephant ear facts quoted from Wikipedia 
The large flapping ears of an elephant are also very important for temperature regulation. Elephant ears are made of a very thin layer of skin stretched over cartilage and a rich network of blood vessels. On hot days, elephants will flap their ears constantly, creating a slight breeze. This breeze cools the surface blood vessels, and then the cooler blood gets circulated to the rest of the animal's body. The hot blood entering the ears can be cooled as much as 10 °F (6 °C) before returning to the body. Differences in the ear sizes of African and Asian elephants can be explained, in part, by their geographical distribution. Africans originated and stayed near the equator, where it is warmer. Therefore, they have bigger ears. Asians live farther north, in slightly cooler climates, and thus have smaller ears.

The ears are also used in certain displays of aggression and during the males' mating period. If an elephant wants to intimidate a predator or rival, it will spread its ears out wide to make itself look more massive and imposing. During the breeding season, males give off an odor from the musth gland located behind their eyes. Joyce Poole, a well-known elephant researcher, has theorized that the males will fan their ears in an effort to help propel this "elephant cologne" great distances.[
(wikipedia)

Do you not agree that these facts learned by scientists do not reduce anything from our praise of the wisdom of God who has created this wonderful animal!


Message from Manny

Manny the Mammoth in Ice Age has a serious grudge against us humans

Let us pay attention to what Manny has experienced. For recent evidence again indicates that our ancestors possibly hunted to extinction in their fight for survival those marvellous majestic woolly mammoths of the Ice Age. (The dispute about the cause of their disappearance still continues.)

As responsible to God of Israel, our Creator, regardless of our greed for ivory let us not allow the hunt of modern-day elephants to extinction.

Did Silene maritima evolve waving in order to seduce bees?

that

Silene maritima  

More information and photos in Rob's plants page

Are flowers really waving in order to attract pollinators?

According to an interesting study by J.Warren and P.James they apparently do! It is as if they are winking in wind at passing bees and butterflies for their attention! 

Do flowers wave to attract pollinators? A case study with Silene maritima
(Journal of Evolutionary Biology 2008 Vol 21.4:1024-1029)

The problem is that evolutionary biologists commonly use the verb evolve as if the species were the subject of the action: "plants evolved waving in order to..."

Well, how does a nice Silene maritima suddenly decide that it will from now on start to wave in wind to attract those pollinators? What particular part of the plant takes the decision for such a line of action?

Of course, the biologist does not mean what the active mode implies - that the plant itself decides to change in some way beneficial to its survival in nature.

Instead, the Darwinist idea of natural selection is that the plant has variants in its living environment. Some mutations have tough but short stem for the attractive flower, others have taller and thinner stems that wave in the wind. Because insects notice the movement these plants are more successful and have more seeds than those with shorter stems that do not move so much. At some point the genetically inherited stem may grow so tall that the plant suffers from other difficulties and so the ideal height is eventually achieved by the force of natural selection.
(BBC article)

The plant itself is not an active player as if intending to reach some beneficial goal. In evolutionary biology the organism is only a passive player. It provides the genetic raw material through random mutation and is thus raw material in the process. Evolution follows from the combination of many environmental factors, for example the local wind patterns or humidity in the place where it is growing. For the evolution of flowers the behavior of insects is of crucial importance and there are many other things modifying its "behavior."

...
So we can look at this explanation as a beautiful theory that

- more or less explains the ideal length that evolved for the waving movement
- as a look at the divine lathe that was sued to shape Silene maritima

The two views do not necessarily contradict each other and the latter does not add anything to the details of the working of the evolutionary lathe! It just expresses the faith that it is not the result of chance changes but that God of Israel is behind its design and proper working in a process of evolution of life forms living in complex symbiosis.