Theistic Evolution: "The Language of God"

Dear Friends,

Last week we looked at the shear magnitude of life on earth.  It’s breathtaking—roughly ten million visible species and perhaps as many as a billion microbial ones, filling every cranny of land, sea, and air. Yet, the mystery of how life began some 3.5 billion years ago within the oceans that covered Mother Earth remains a mystery, one that we bridge with our various beliefs.

How about you, what do you believe?

As for me, I’ve embraced a number of beliefs over the years.  As a teanagers I was raised within the Unity Church, as a university zoological major I embraced whole-heartedly evolutionary theory and became an athiest.  As life experiences unfolded I became a Buddhist, a Sik, a Yogi, a Scientologist, a humanistic transcendental psychologist, a Taoist, a Christian (Presbyterian) with a Jewish twist, who believes fully in evolutionary theory. Most of all,  I love the beauty of all beliefs when practiced with love towards humanity and our earth.

I would like to share one of the iterations of how earth was form:  it is a theistic evolution, the version spelled out by Dr. Francis Collins in his book, The Language of God.  It rests on the following premises:

• The universe came into being out of nothingness, approximately 14 billion years ago.
• Despite massive improbabilities, the properties of the universe appear to have been precisely tuned for life.
• While the precise mechanism of the origin of life on earth remains unknown, once life arose, the process of evolution and natural selection permitted the development of biological diversity and complexity over very long periods of time.
• Once evolution got under way, no special supernatural intervention was required.
• Humans are part of this process, sharing a common ancestor with the great apes.
• But humans are also unique in ways that defy evolutionary explanation and point to our spiritual nature.  This includes the existence of the Moral Law (the knowledge of right and wrong) and the search for God that characterizes all human cultures throughout history.

For those of us who enjoy reading from old documents, just a couple thoughts from the Old Testament, notice the similarities to Collins’ “nothingness”:

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.  And the earth was formless and void, and darkness was over the surface of the deep; and the Spirit of God was moving over the surface of the waters. (Genesis 1:1-2)

The above quote from Genesis 1 comes from the New American Standard Bible’s translation of the Torah (the Hebrew Bible).  Dohrea informs me that another translation of the hebrew into english, as she reads hebrew directly from the Torah the spirit of God is gliding, hovering, immersing, and uniting with the formless, limitless, yet organic and whole universe. When Dohrea explains this part, the beauty and wholeness of this strange place (to us), not formed, not in our realm, and not found, sounds other-worldly awesome.

There are many serious evolutionary biologists who are also serious believers in theistic evolution. The list includes the 19th century Harvard Botanist Asa Gray, who was Darwin’s chief advocate in America; Theodosius Dobzhansky, the 20th century architect of evolutionary thinking; and for the 21st century, Francis Collins himself, the lead scientist and director of the Human Genome Project, the group credited for completing the mapping of the human genome.  Francis Collins  is now the director of the National Institute of Health.

Eric Chivian MD and Aaron Bernstein MD (Founders of the Center for Health and the Global Environment at Harvard Medical School) begin their magnificent, beautiful book, Sustaining Life: How Human Health Depends on Biodiversity, with quotes from Genesis 9:16, the Koran 6:38, the Bhagavad Gita VII:7-9 and the Gradual Sayings of the Buddha. I love the Bhagavad Gita quote,

All this world is strung on me like jewels on a string. I am the taste in the waters, the radiance in the sun and moon, the sacred syllable Om that reverberates in space, the manliness in men. I am the pleasant fragrance in earth, the glowing brightness in fire, the life in all beings.

How fortunate we are to be free to contemplate and share such things.

Sincerely yours,

Seann Bardell

BioImmersion.com

Clinical Note:

Single mineral supplementations can provide very powerful therapeutic results.  For example, we brought into our Therapeutic Foods Line our Fructoborate Complex back in 2006, based on the research of our collaborating Yugoslovian team of scientists, who have the worldwide patent on calcium-fructoborate.  Each capsule of our product contains 240mg of fructoborate and 260mg of calcium ascorbate.  The success that we have had with your patients  consistently confirms the research results recorded in the European trials.  These are:  improvement in bone density, reduction in osteoarthritis, selective increases in steroid hormone blood levels (testosterone, DHEA, and Vitamin D3) while at the same time lowering level of CRP.

A recently completed (2012) U.S. pilot clinical study (double-blinded placebo-controlled), using 108mg of calcium frutctoborate BID with osteoarthritic patients suffering from minor knee arthritis, achieved the following results:  WOMAC and McGill results indicated that subjects in the fructoborate group experienced by day fourteen a score improvement of 29% and 14% respectively.  Testing on CRP and 1,25(OH) Vitamin D also revelaed exceptional results.  CRP was reduced by up to 37% compared to baseline levels (established prior to treatment). Blood levels of endogenous D3 increased more than 19% on average compared to baseline.

We recommend starting low, one capsule a day and after a couple weeks if no results then increase it to 2 a day.  Sometimes it take a month or two to kick in.
The Last Quiz Answer:

I love these creatures of the night. A couple of weeks ago we called the mystical Lynx the Spirit of the Boreal (the magical forests of the North), and I think of the hyena as the Spirit of the African Night. Often disappearing in aardvark holes to sleep during the heat of the day, they emerge again in the cool of the evening to hunt. They seem so relentess, so bloodthirsty, but are they really? There is another side that is so precious—check out this You Tube video: Naabi, a hyena princess (2009). It’s worth watching the whole things. Hyenas have a different hunting strategy than lions. They work the crowds by ambling along, meandering amongst the wildebeast appearing disinterested, which relaxes their prey. Yet all the time looking for the opportunity.  They are a wild animal that can bond with humans beings.

I remember hearing, about three years ago, Dr. Eric Holt-Gimenez (executive director for Food First) speak at the University of Washington regarding his new book, Food Rebellions:  Crisis and the Hunger for Justice.  He urged us that if we really want to do something effective toward changing our food system, we must keep track of how the farm bill legislation is being crafted and voted on each year within the US Congress. Well, the tracking is being done for us and we have an opportunity to add our voice of support for a corrective ammendment to the current 100 billion dollar farm bill allotment that is being pushed through Congress as we speak.  Click here so you can add your voice to get the Farm Bill rightly conceived.