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THE revelation came to Professor Andrew Parker during a visit to Rome. He was in the Sistine Chapel, gazing up at Michelangelo’s awesome ceiling paintings, when a realisation struck him with dizzying force.
“A Biblical enigma exists that is on the one hand so cryptic it has remained camouflaged for millennia, and on the other so obvious one cannot miss it.”
The enigma is that the order of Creation as described in the Book of Genesis, and so powerfully depicted in the Sistine Chapel by the greatest artist of the Renaissance, has been precisely, eerily confirmed by modern evolutionary science.(1)
Myth or divine inspiration: was the Book of Genesis a gateway into the
evolution of life?
Yet how on earth could this be possible? And why had nobody noticed it before?
Such was the starting point of Parker’s jaw-dropping new book, The Genesis Enigma: an astounding work which seeks to prove that the ancient Hebrew writers of the Book of Genesis knew all about evolution—3,000 years before Darwin.
It takes a journey back through aeons of geological time, and also into the minds and imaginations of the ancient Israelites.
Andrew Parker is a leading scientist in his field: a research fellow at Oxford University, research leader at the Natural History Museum, and as if that weren’t enough, a professor at Shanghai’s Jiao Tong University.
As a scientist he never paid much heed to the Book of Genesis, assuming, like most of his colleagues, that such primitive mythology—which is believed to have been compiled from several sources between 950 and 500 BC—has long since been “disproved” by hard scientific fact.
But after his Sistine Chapel moment, he went back to look at Genesis in more detail. And what he read astonished him. It was even, he says, “slightly scary“.
Somehow—God alone knew how—the writer or writers of that ancient text had described how the evolution of life on earth took place in precise detail and perfect order.
Our ancestors possessed a truly timeless wisdom
It is always disturbing and haunting to encounter an ancient wisdom that seems to anticipate or even exceed our own.
More fanciful writers immediately start to theorise wildly: that those who built the pyramids, or Stonehenge,(2) must have been guided by super-intelligent aliens, that sort of thing.
Andrew Parker, a scientist and proud of it, has no time for such twaddle. But he does gradually come to understand, in the course of his investigations, that our ancestors of thousands of years ago, though they may not have had iPods and plasma-screen televisions, nevertheless possessed a wisdom that was, quite literally, timeless: as true now as it was then.
In the Book of Genesis, God first and most famously creates heaven and earth, but “without form”, and commands: “Let there be light.” A perfect description of the Big Bang, that founding moment of our universe some 13 billion years ago, an unimaginable explosion of pure energy and matter “without form” out of nothing—the primordial Biblical “void”.
He then creates the dry land out of the waters, but it is the water that comes first. As Parker points out, scientists today understand very similarly that water is indeed crucial for life.
When “astrobiologists” look into space for signs of life on other planets, the first thing they look for is the possible presence of water.
On the third day, we are told: “God said, ‘Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit after his kind, whose seed is in itself, upon the earth: and it was so.’”
Now factually speaking, grass didn’t evolve until much later. In the Triassic and Jurassic epochs, the dinosaurs knew only plants such as giant conifers and tree ferns. But since grass did not in fact evolve until much later, a sternly literal-minded scientist would declare the Bible wrong, and consign it to the nearest wheelie bin.
But wait a minute, says Parker. If you take “grass, herb and tree” to mean photosynthesising life in general, then this is, once again, spot on.
The very life forms on earth were single-celled bacteria, but the first truly viable bacteria were the “cyanobacteria”—those that had learned to photosynthesise.
As a result, they began to expire oxygen, creating an atmosphere that could go on to support more and more life. They were the key to life on earth.
Naturally, says Parker, “the ancient Israelites would have been oblivious to any single-celled life form, let alone cyanobacteria”, but “grass” as a loose description of life forms that photosynthesise...
[ End of sample | Please purchase the magazine for full articles ]
1. Dr Andrew Parker, The Genesis Enigma: Why The Bible Is Scientifically Accurate, published by Doubleday, July 2009.
2. Stonehenge is a prehistoric monument located in the English county of Wiltshire, north of Salisbury. One of the most famous sites in the world, Stonehenge is composed of earthworks surrounding a circular setting of large standing stones; at the centre of the densest complex of Neolithic and Bronze Age monuments in England, including hundreds burial mounds. Archaeologists believe that the iconic stone monument was erected between 2,500 and 3,000 before the common era. (Editor’s note—cf. Wikipedia)
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Christopher Hart is a novelist and journalist. He has written two contemporary novels under his own name, and as William Napier, a best-selling trilogy about Attila the Hun. He studied at London University, where he gained a PhD in the Poetry of W.B.Yeats. He contributes to a number of English newspapers, principally the Daily Mail and the Sunday Times, where he is chief theatre critic.’ |
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| Issue 6.4 |
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World Mutation or
Epochal Challenge?
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