The first mention of the Garden of Eden was in Ezekiel 28:12-19. When God looked at the king of Tyre, it reminded Him of the earth in its beginning. There was His creation, the Day Star, the son of Dawn (Isaiah 14:12). A perfect creation full of wisdom and beauty. God made for him the Garden of Eden, a perfect place, and adorned him with precious stones. One day, unrighteousness was upon him. He decided that he wanted to be God. The son of Dawn became Satan. A great cosmic battle followed and God cast him into hell (Isaiah 14:13-15). As a result the earth was in a mess. That was how we found earth in Genesis 1:1. In Genesis 2:7 the Bible wrote;
"then the Lord God formed man of dust from the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being."
The problems posed
What about dinosaurs?
The Bible did not oppose the presence of pre-historic creatures on earth. Did I say pre-historic? That meant before Genesis. Earth was in existence before that. God did not choose to discuss that. After all, the Bible is for God to explain the blueprint of His salvation, it was not meant to be a paleoanthropology textbook.
How old is the earth?
The Bible did not choose to discuss this either. It only wanted to inform us that God was there from the very beginning. God just existed and He created things.
What about evolution?
God was the creator of all things. He created life in a distinct and direct manner. Life does not evolve from a lower form to a higher form. In the theory of evolution, science saw a connection between one form of life with another and drew a conclusion that the lower form evolved into a higher form of life.
If a person were to look into the mechanism that causes the blender, the fan and the aeroplane propeller to rotate, he would see coils of wire that rotate when current was passed through them. These machines are constructed, based on the same engineering principles. Similarly, living things were made by God who used the same principles. So there are similarities and in some cases very close similarities. Maybe science should marvel at the various permutations God could come up with, using a gene.
The surprising thing, which not many realized, is; to believe in the evolution of a single cell entity into a complex human being required a greater faith than believing in God. I think science should come clean and say so. Anything other than this is deceptive representation.
What the evolutionists say?
Starting with the Neanderthal skeleton unearthed in the Neander Valley, Germany, in 1856, anthropologists have excavated all over the earth trying to find fossil evidence to determine the origin of the human race. They were faced by numerous problems. The two most basic being.
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Despite more than a century of digging, the fossil record remains sparse. With so few clues, even a single bone that does not fit the picture can upset everything. Virtually every major new finds will force scientists to concoct new theories.
- The dating techniques used are still experimental. It is difficult to determine directly the age of fossils older than about 200,000. So scientists developed ways of dating the rock layers using geochronology - the dating of things from the past. Meaning the age of this rock layer is such and such because of the rock materials (from its composition and radioactive-dating) and fossils found in them. Since the bone was found in this layer it should be this old.
In 1974 scientists (led by Donald Johanson) painstakingly pieced together a primate skeleton; about 60 % of the bones, including much of the skull, was missing. It was named Lucy (scientifically designated as Australopithecus afarensis). From this skeleton they concluded that it was a female primate that walked fully upright. Combining this with other fossils found in Africa, the A. afarensis was claimed to be about 4 million years old. Applying the law of natural selection (the driving force in evolution) they gave rise to homo habilis (or the tool people) at about 2 million years ago. It only stands to logic that human being can only overcome their handicaps in survival if they learned how to equip themselves with tools. So with the help of tools the homo habilis survived for the next 500,000 or more years before they began walking upright and became the homo erectus at about 1.5 million years ago. Needless to say, those who did not learned to use tools (the Paranthropus boisei and the Paranthropus robustus) became extinct.
The fossils classified as homo habilis were exclusively found in Africa. Now that they can walk upright, they can move out of Africa. In 1980, Eugene Dubois, found a skullcap and a leg bone in eroded sediments along the Solo River in Java. It became known as the Java Man (scientifically designated as homo sapiens, or modern humankind). It seems logical since the bones were dated about 1 million years old. This gave the homo erectus about 500,000 years to walk from Africa to Java.
Archaeologists were unable to find "multifaceted hand axes and cleavers" stone tools in Asia, and concluded reasoned that the Asian emigrants discovered that it was more time-effective to make their tools from bamboo.
Recent analysis of the Java Man, by the Institute of Human Origin in Berkeley, dated the bones to be 2 million years old. This created a problem. Well there was always a chance that the bones were shifted out of the original position by geological upheaval or erosion. However these could not explain why fossils found in different sites have the same age.
About 2.5 million years ago, the ice age turned Africa from a woodland into a savanna. The homo erectus began taking a liking to meat instead of vegetables and so they have to move further and further away to hunt for food. They spread across several continents to serve as an ancestor to modern man, or Homo sapiens. Homo erectus had a large brain and walked upright. It made stone tools and ate meat. Within several thousand years, it had moved into the Middle East, Europe and southern Asia, though the precise pattern remains uncertain. It became extinct 400,000 years ago.
According to their findings, homo sapiens did not show up in the Middle East until about 120,000 years ago, and in Europe and most of Asia until about 40,000 years ago. However they found that the Neanderthals, a primitive group of people, had lived in Europe around 200,000 years ago. Archaeologists told us that they have brains as large as that of early modern humans. They used fairly advanced tools, wore body ornaments, had religious rites and buried their dead. The story was that when the ice age came they could not adapt and became extinct.
What about the Peking Man; analysed as 200,000 years old? Well their dating technique is questionable.
But another school of anthropologist believed that another prehuman species known as homo ergaster emerged in Africa about the same time as the homo erectus. They migrated around the world and evolved into homo erectus, then returned to Africa.
A third group questioned the primarily variations in facial and skull bones between homo erectus and homo ergaster. They are too minor to represent different species. Nature, March 21, 2002 - Anthropologist Tim White, University of California, Berkeley, found a million-year-old fossil skull "so similar to Asian and European skulls, it indicates the same species". He said the find helps support the theory that homo erectus was a single species ranging across Africa, Europe and Asia. That homo erectus originated in Africa and persisted there for hundreds of thousands of years, while some of its numbers migrated around the world.
Anthropologist Susan Anton, Rutgers University, said: "This whole species question is all about what you accept as a sharp enough distinction to tell you that it is a separate species. This particular skull is not going to solve that problem." (Source: Associated Press)
Is it so difficult to believe that God made humankind in His own image?
JULY 12, 2002 - A 40-member multinational team of scientists led by French paleoanthropologist Michel Brunet reported in the journal Nature that it had discovered a seven-million-year-old skull, the oldest unearthed by anthropologists, in Chad's Djurab Desert, the bleak desert of Northern Chad. The team dubbed the new fossil Sahelanthropus tchadensis, referring to the northern Sahel region of Chad where it was found, and, with the blessing of the Chadian government, decided to call the fossil Toumai, a Goran-language name given to babies born just before the dry season. The nearly complete skull, two lower jaw fragments and three teeth could introduce researchers to a new region of Africa and a time period about which virtually nothing was known. The brain case, between 320 and 380 cubic centimetres, is comparable to that of a chimpanzee. But its tooth enamel was thicker and its snout did not protrude as far, making it more humanlike. Its canine tooth was also much shorter than those of apes. The new discovery pushed the fossil record backwards for the third time in the past two years, moving scientists ever closer to a dimly understood moment somewhere between five and 10 million years ago when humans and chimpanzees diverged. Modern humans are only about 100,000 years old.
JUNE 2003. Nature, the British science journal - Scientists have carbon-dated the skulls of two adults and a child, found in 1997 in the Middle Awash area of central Ethiopia, to between 154,000 and 160,000 years old, around 50,000 years earlier than the previous oldest finds of Homo sapiens.
Pieced together from fossilised fragments, the skulls have deep faces and long, rugged cases that enclosed large brains. They resemble modern crania in the face, top of the skull and brain capacity, which at around 1,450cc compares with our average today of between 1,350cc and 1,400cc. Those similarities, and subtle differences, in skull characteristics mean that the fossils are a sub-species of Homo sapiens. The scientists dubbed it Homo sapiens idaltu. 'Idaltu' means 'elder' in the Afar language of Ethiopia. 'They...represent the probably immediate ancestors of anatomically modern humans. Their anatomy and antiquity constitute strong evidence of modern-human emergence in Africa.' Meaning anatomically modern man, Homo sapiens sapiens, emerged gradually from Homo sapiens idaltu.
The study was led by Mr Tim White and Mr Clark Howell, professors of anthropology at the University of California at Berkeley, and Mr Giday WoldeGabriel, a geologist at Los Alamos National Laboratory, New Mexico. They say the discovery is a much-wanted chunk of evidence in a heated 25-year debate. The findings whould sipport the 'Out of Africa' theory and confirm that the enigmatic hominids known as Neanderthals were not our distant parents. Critics have long questioned the findings of molecular studies, based on evolutionary changes in DNA, which suggest that modern humans first appeared around 150,000 years ago in eastern Africa, then migrated to other regions.
