Transcript Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s And unto God

IN THE BEGINNING
Genesis from the Creation
to Abraham
GENESIS CHAPTER ONE
• v. 20-23
• Then God said, "Let the waters abound with an
abundance of living creatures, and let birds fly
above the earth across the face of the firmament
of the heavens." So God created great sea
creatures and every living thing that moves, with
which the waters abounded, according to their
kind, and every winged bird according to its kind.
And God saw that it was good. And God blessed
them, saying, "Be fruitful and multiply, and fill
the waters in the seas, and let birds multiply on
the earth." So the evening and the morning were
the fifth day.
GENESIS CHAPTER ONE
• v. 24-25
• Then God said, "Let the earth bring forth
the living creature according to its kind:
cattle and creeping thing and beast of the
earth, each according to its kind"; and it
was so. And God made the beast of the
earth according to its kind, cattle according
to its kind, and everything that creeps on
the earth according to its kind. And God
saw that it was good.
GENESIS CHAPTER ONE
• The land was commanded to bring forth land
animals: mammals, reptiles, amphibians, etc
– The fact that complex, multi-cellular organisms
like mammals have survived is evidence that by
this time the land had the material and resources
capable of generating and sustaining life
– And that life comes forth at God’s command
• Always, these creations were pronounced “good.”
– God pronounces things as good as a blessing: to
place them under God’s approval and protection
(not to brag)
GENESIS CHAPTER ONE
• Animals were made after their own kind:
– Heb: miyn (form, species, kind, sort)
– Not broken down to phylum, class, order,
family, genus, species (8 million estimated)
• I Cor. 15:38-39
• But God gives it a body as He pleases, and to
each seed its own body. All flesh is not the
same flesh, but there is one kind of flesh of
men, another flesh of animals, another of
fish, and another of birds.
GENESIS CHAPTER ONE
• Creatures have a conscious life:
awareness
• Plants do not—they have no nerves
and tend to not move
• Animals may have a soul (Heb.
nephesh) but not a spirit that can
commune with God
GENESIS CHAPTER ONE
• Scripture does not help us much here. Few
verses:
• Eccl. 3:21
• Who knows the spirit of the sons of men,
which goes upward, and the spirit of the
animal, which goes down to the earth?
• The Hebrew word here is ruwach: wind,
breath, spirit
GENESIS CHAPTER ONE
• v. 26-27
• Then God said, "Let Us make man in Our
image, according to Our likeness; let them
have dominion over the fish of the sea, over
the birds of the air, and over the cattle, over
all the earth and over every creeping thing
that creeps on the earth." So God created man
in His own image; in the image of God He
created him; male and female He created
them.
GENESIS CHAPTER ONE
• v. 28-30
• Then God blessed them, and God said to them,
"Be fruitful and multiply; fill the earth and
subdue it; have dominion over the fish of the sea,
over the birds of the air, and over every living
thing that moves on the earth." And God said,
"See, I have given you every herb that yields seed
which is on the face of all the earth, and every
tree whose fruit yields seed; to you it shall be for
food. Also, to every beast of the earth, to every
bird of the air, and to everything that creeps on
the earth, in which there is life, I have given
every green herb for food"; and it was so.
GENESIS CHAPTER ONE
• Man and woman were made in the likeness, the
image of God
• This event occurred on the sixth day, the day
that the land animals were created
• The couple was made in God’ image: Imago
Dei
– God’s likeness, form, appearance
– With a personality, will, emotion, creativity
much more developed than animals
• Man and women were like God in having a
spiritual nature: the ability to sense and
communicate with God and angels
GENESIS CHAPTER ONE
• The creation of Adam and Eve was not millions / not
even 10’s of thousands of years ago
• Conservative Christian estimate the event to be about
6,000 years ago
– This time span was figured imprecisely by the
genealogies in the Bible
– (Famously by Bishop James Ussher in the 1600’s)
• Problems with this include the lack of precision of
the actual time of a “generation”
• The genealogies from Abraham to Jesus may be
more accurate than the more remote ones, but even
they leave out many generations of kings (the evil
kings)
GENESIS CHAPTER ONE
• So the creation of Adam and Eve in the
Garden may be a bit further back than
Ussher’s 6000 years
– But not ten’s of thousands or even millions of
years ago
• This special creation of man and woman in
a protected place (Eden) was distinct and
different from previous creation of the
human-like apes (hominoids and
homininis) found in fossils
GENESIS CHAPTER ONE
• Adam and Eve were created in the
image of God (Imago Dei)
• Because we Christians believe this, we
have historically stood for the rights of
the unborn, newborns, the disabled, the
disadvantaged, the elderly, the
disenfranchised
• They (we) are made in the image of
God
GENESIS CHAPTER ONE
• Mitochondrial Eve and Ychromosome Adam
• These “Adam and Eve:” 150,000 –
200,000 years ago.
• Time to most recent common ancestor
(TMRCA): only 2000 - 5000 years
ago!
• Genghis Khan: 16,000,000 Asians
living today may be his descendants!
GENESIS CHAPTER ONE
• God instructs man to be fruitful and
multiply, like the animals, to fill the earth
• In addition, we are to subdue the earth
– We humans have succeeded (the
Anthropocene epoch)
• We are to subdue, but be good stewards of
God’s earth
• Plants were provided for man to eat (no
animal violence or sacrifice yet)
GENESIS CHAPTER ONE
• We believe the creation account in Genesis
by faith, by trusting in the God we have
come to know and trust in a personal,
spiritual relationship
• I personally believe the creation account
more than purely secular scientific
explanations because of the amazingness,
the order of the universe: from the
microscopic to the vast depths of space
GENESIS CHAPTER ONE
• Ps 19:1-4
• The heavens declare the glory of God; and
the firmament shows his handy work.
Day unto day utters speech, and night
shows knowledge. There is no speech nor
language, where their voice is not heard.
Their line is gone out through all the earth, and
their words to the end of the world. world. In
them hath he set a tabernacle for the sun
• Ps. 14:1
• The fool hath said in his heart, “There is no
God.”
GENESIS CHAPTER ONE
• Quotations from famous scientists on God:
• “The more I study science, the more I
believe in God.”
Albert Einstein
• “I have a fundamental belief in the Bible as
the Word of God, written by those who
were inspired. I study the Bible daily.”
Sir Isaac Newton
GENESIS CHAPTER ONE
• “The first gulp from the glass of natural
sciences will turn you into an atheist, but at
the bottom of the glass God is waiting for
you.”
Werner Heisenberg
• “The more I study nature, the more I stand
amazed at the work of the Creator. Science
brings men nearer to God.”
Louis Pasteur
GENESIS CHAPTER ONE
• The likelihood that man evolved on a planet in
the universe randomly, without design, without
the guiding hand of an intelligent creator, is
hopelessly remote
• Here are a few mathematic, statistical
probabilities in the scientific literature that the
universe, earth, life, and man developed
randomly and without direction:
• The chance that the strong and weak nuclear
forces in the atom are so perfectly balanced
coming from a big bang: 1 / 10127
GENESIS CHAPTER ONE
• The number of “multi-verses” that are
speculated to exist in order to pull this off:
1 /10500
• The chance of finding another planet life
earth supporting life in our universe: 1
/10174
• The number of atoms in the universe: 1 /
1080
GENESIS CHAPTER ONE
• The uniqueness of the earth:
– In the “Goldilocks zone” (the distance
from a sun that is “not too hot, not too
cold”)
– The earth’s iron core creates the magnetic
field around us that shields us from excess
solar radiation—we would not survive it
• Only iron can perform this
– Only a sun of our exact type creates as its
heaviest element, iron
GENESIS CHAPTER ONE
• Where did the heavier elements on earth
(nickel, copper, zinc, lead, gold, uranium)?
– From a supernova that exploded nearby the earth
during its cooling and formation
• The rotation of the earth and its tilt of 23.5o is
perfect for plant and animal life and seasons
• The likelihood that the most primitive cell
(with its DNA, RNA, protein synthesis,
ability to divide and reproduce) could have
evolved from an organic and inorganic sea: 1
/ 1047
Figure 4.4a
Rough
endoplasmic
reticulum
NUCLEUS
Nuclear envelope
Nucleolus
Chromatin
Ribosomes
CYTOSKELETON
Microtubule
Microfilament
Intermediate
filament
Peroxisome
Smooth
endoplasmic
reticulum
Plasma
membrane
Golgi apparatus
Lysosome
Animal Cell
© 2015 Pearson Education, Inc.
Mitochondrion
Centrosome
with pair of
centrioles
Carbohydrate, Fat and
Protein Metabolic Pathways
25
Figure 4.4b
Smooth
endoplasmic
reticulum
NUCLEUS
Nuclear envelope
Nucleolus
Chromatin
Rough
endoplasmic
reticulum
Mitochondrion
CYTOSKELETON
Microfilament
Microtubule
Central
vacuole
Ribosomes
Chloroplast
Cell wall
Plasmodesma
Cell wall of
adjacent cell
Golgi
apparatus
Peroxisome
Plant Cell
© 2015 Pearson Education, Inc.
Plasma
membrane
Figure 7.9-5
Light
H+
Photosystem
II
Light
Electron
Photosystem
transport chain
H2O
1
2
H+
H+
H+
H+
O 2 + 2 H+
H+
NADPH
I
H+
H+
NADP+
H+
H+
H+
To
Calvin
Cycle
H+
H+
H+
THYLAKOID SPACE
H+
H+
H+
H+
Thylakoid membrane
H+
H+
H+
H+
ATP synthase
STROMA
H+
H+
H+
ADP + P
ATP
H+
© 2015 Pearson Education, Inc.
H+
Figure 6.1_1
Sunlight energy
ECOSYSTEM
Photosynthesis
in chloroplasts
CO2
Glucose
H2O
O2
Cellular respiration
in mitochondria
(for cellular
work)
ATP
Heat energy
GENESIS CHAPTER ONE
• The amazingness of the human body:
– The brain: 85 billion neurons; 150 trillion
connections (synapses); perhaps 100 essential
neurotransmitters
– The heart: beats 2.5 billion times in a lifetime
– We have 60,000 miles of blood vessels
– The immune system can create more than a
million different antibodies to fight pathogens
around us; yet we only have 30,000 genes
– The length of the DNA in our cells is over
three feet long, yet it is wound into a space
that is 1/100 of a millimeter
GENESIS CHAPTER ONE
• The notion that all of this wonder
spontaneously created itself is almost
mock-worthy
– Our Creator made the universe and earth
for us, for His creatures, and for His
pleasure
• But the spirit in which He made them was
love, consideration, blessing, helpfulness
– The spirit in which we offer our Christian
explanation of creation and our God must
be the same