Adam, Eve, Noah

Hey guys! SPM is over, WOOHOO!

But so far I'm not feeling the after-exam mood yet, probably because I studied non-stop during the last two month and is not used to this new daily routine. Meh...

Anyways, updates coming soon. I do have one event which was nearly two months ago that I will blog about - MyCJN Dance for the Planet, and also a very recent one which was the Candlelight Vigil. HAZ TO FINDZ TIMEZ AND PATIENZE TO UPLOAD ZE PHOTOZ!

Anyway, I'm starting off my first post after SPM with this article titled Adam, Eve, Noah as promised.

Oh, if you're from an Abrahamic religion, don't flame me straight away. Instead, give my opinions a thought. Think! That's why God gave you and me a brain. Think!


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Have you ever wondered how life began? And why vast diversity of species exist?

Over thousands of years, theories of the origin of life have been popping up from various places around the world. Explanations were sometimes non-logical, and funny even sometimes.

In Chinese mythology, Nu-Wa created humans from clay.

On the first day she created chickens. On the second day she created dogs. On the third day she created sheep. On the fourth day she created pigs. On the fifth day she created cows. On the sixth day she created horses. On the seventh day she began creating men from yellow clay, sculpting each one individually, yet after she had created hundreds of figures in this way she still had more to make but had grown tired of the laborious process.

In Greek mythology, the Titan Prometheus also created humans from clay and then gave them fire.

In Egyptian mythology, the God Khnum made human with clay from River Nile. (What's wrong with these guys? They have clay fetish or something?)

But of all the stories about the origin of life, perhaps the most well-known and most widely accepted is the creation of Adam and Eve by the God of the Genesis as written in the Bible.



As stated in the Bible, the God, during 7 days of Creation, made a pair of every single species of animal on earth, and added Adam and Eve (as if it was an after thought) on the 6th day. I'm not sure whether the "one pair of every animal" is correct because I have not read the Bible, correct me if I'm wrong but it doesn't really matter as you'll see later.

And so, according to Christianity, God had a hand in the diversity of species. He created every living thing in the world, including the gazillion sub-species of the amoeba genus, even though just a few of them would have served a common niche in the ecosystem.



But there's a flaw in this theory, that is, to accept the 7 Days of Creation, you will have to accept the Theory of Evolution too, which so far contradicts each other and has sparked endless debates throughout the century ever since Darwin published his "Origin of Species".

Why? Because if you ask me, God could not have created the billions of species of life on earth. Okay that's not a very good argument, nevermind let's put that aside. But, there are indeed observable micro-evolutions happening around us, and that is called genetic variations and mutations.

I'm going to show you an example of micro-evolution, take a swarm of mosquito for instance, spray repellent at them and most of them die but not all. Why? Because of minor variations among them that causes the insecticide to only be effective to most of them except for some mosquitoes that have higher level of tolerance and immunity. And the surviving mosquitoes breed amongst themselves to produce a new generation of mosquitoes with immunity to that particular insecticide. This is natural selection in action, kill the weak, only the strongest will survive.

Same thing occurs to some viruses, we have various virus strains that have mutated from previous forms, that's why new virus outbreak always comes first before a vaccine can be introduced. Natural selection selected the weaker viruses to die under our immune systems and the stronger viruses that remained are mutated into different and deadlier forms.

Of course, some might say argue micro-evolution doesn't explain the Theory of Evolution at all. But why not? An observable evolution takes a very long time, modern humans have only been around for like 100,000 years, or less than 10,000 years according to the Bible. Given enough time, I'm VERY sure that this will happen.

Try doing this, save a dollar a day and keep it in a drawer or something, and I'm sure you don't need me to tell you if you keep doing this daily, you're bound to save up to a thousand dollars in around three years time, right?. Apply this anology to evolution, after years and years of all those micro-evolution, an obvious change is bound to happen to a species, and that species will evolve into an entirely new species. If this really happens one day, will anyone still deny evolution?



Alright, anything that happens between the time of Adam and Eve to the time of Noah will not be brought up as it will not matter. When God got pissed of humans and decided that He will flood the earth(still unproven by science BTW), he asked Noah and his family to build a large ark and have the land animals gathered on board before the flooding begins.

Yes it did specify LAND animals only, but there's also a flaw. Noah's ark was huge, approx 140 meters long, 25 meters wide and 15 meters high, but not infinite. So obviously there's no conceivable way to have every single species of land animal on earth to board the ark. So how can you explain the diversity of land animals in the world today? Evolution has to be the key.

Imagine this, there are nearly 6,000 species of mammals in the world, 8,000 species of reptiles, and 9,000 species of birds. Let's be conservative and say only around 100 species or birds are non-avian. So that still makes around 12,000 species of large land animals to be saved, times that by two only(I am not including the fact that Noah did brought 7 pairs of each clean animals on board), and we have 24,000 large animals to be fitted on board. Of course, I'm excluding the fact that there are still 25,000 species of mollusc, 5,000 species of earthworms and 1,364,013 species of other land dwelling invertebrates such as insects and arachnids.

You do the math and tell me a pair of every living species today can board the ark. Please!

Of course, we have not account for the food supply Noah would need to feed the animals. It is said that Noah remained in the ark for a whole year, so the food supply would definitely be much more heavier than the animal loads. So where did he stored his food supply again if the ark was full of animals?

Side fact:

Using wood to construct a ship as big as Noah's ark is not practical, even with the technology of the Industrial Revolution when the last of big wooden ships were built. Wood by itself is not a very strong material, it bends when force is applied, especially so the longer the wood. Ships pitch up and down when it is hit by waves(obviously), a violent wave would force a long wooden ship to bend and tear the ship into two pieces at the middle.



So tell me if Noah had superior technology that only came in thousands of years later? Or was the Bible wrong and Noah built with metals instead of wood? Food for thought.

Okay so evidently, Noah couldn't have fit in all the animals. So to explain the diversity of species, we must thus use evolution. That the surviving species on Noah's ark must have evolved and divided into a lot of subspecies after the flood. And apparently all this evolution took place in less than 6,000 years - 8,000 years ago?

So tell me, if evolution happened long time ago at a very fast rate, then why can't we observe that happening now? One of the facts must be incorrect. Take a guess?



Another flaw in Noah's ark story was that given that only 2 pairs (or 7 pairs for clean animals) of each species is on the ark, it will contradict with the variety of genes present in the animals today. One pair of animals of the same species has only a tiny pool of genes available for their next generation. This is called a bottleneck population.

Imagine this:


Although prior to the flood the gene pool is big, when a pair of animal of the same species that were brought on the ark and were then bred afterwards, all their offsprings and subsequent generations will have the same if not similar genetic materials.

If we had the same genetic materials, we'll all be looking very alike today, all our genetic materials came from Noah's family. And we will be very prone to diseases as all of us have the same level of immunity. Same thing applies to other animals, as soon as a deadly virus starts spreading amongst a population of animals, none of them will survive as they have the same level of immunity. And we'll see mass extinctions of species of land animals due to microbial life attacks, but this is not happening, so I assumed all terrestial animals including humans have a large gene pool and some of the genes have stronger immunity against certain diseases.

So how could you explain, again, the vast variety of gene in a gene pool of a species living today? There can only be two explanations:

One - Evolution happened in a smaller scale, which is micro-evolution, and the variety of gene pool of a species came when mutations happened to their genetic materials.

Two - Noah's Ark story never happened, it was always evolution all the way.



Phew... This must be one of the longest article I've ever written. But what am I hoping to convey to you? Why do I write this?

It's simple, I'm merely saying, to accept the 7 Days of Creation you must also without doubt accept the Theory of Evolution too because any other ways of explaining the shortcomings of the Bible would make far less sense. i.e: Divine intervention, blah blah blah...

So yes, evolution is a therefore a proven theory, directly by science and indirectly by the Bible, it doesn't matter if 7 Days of Creation really happened or not.



Lastly, I'm quoting the late Carl Sagan, one of the most brilliant minds in astronomy and cosmology. He once talked a little about the origin of the universe and God. It goes something like this:

If we are to explaing the origin of universe by saying that God created the universe, then we are left with a harder question to answer. Who/What created God? If something or someone created God, then who created THAT Creator? By explaining the universe in this manner doesn't really explain anything at all!

But what if we explain by saying God was always there and He is timeless and eternal? If you can accept the fact that God has always been there before the universe and time began, then why is it that you cannot accept that the universe is eternal and has always been there? Do we really need a creator to explain the origin of universe?

And so I'm using the same argument to present the case of Evolution. By believing the Bible you must also believe that evolution is true, otherwise the stories in the Bible will not be true. If you can believe that evolution is true, then why not believe that evolution has been going on for billions of years instead of 10,000 years? I really don't see any reason why we need both the Bible and the Theory of Evolution when one of them is sufficient to explain everything.



So that's pretty much everything I have to say now. I'm expecting peoples to disagree with me, it's okay I understand :) . Thank you for reading and till next time, cheers~