Why Design Matters, and the Science Behind Adam and Eve

Biology has a Genesis Problem

Good morning my friend! 

I hope you’re doing well. It’s finally warming up here, for which we’re grateful.

We had a great trip to Dallas last week, and a nice visit with my parents, sister, and her family. Lisa and I were on Ministry Now on Daystar on Monday, which you can watch by clicking the button below.

Last week, we talked about how science is never settled, and I told you that as real science progresses, it never rules out anything the Bible has been saying all along. This week, I want to give you another example.

But before we do that, there’s something I want you to know:

Evolutionary biologists, cosmologists, most of the media, and much of our secular culture wants you to believe that you were some kind of cosmic accident. Somehow, everything came from nothing, and you are, they say, the result of billions of years of blind chance and the accumulation of accidental chemical reactions followed by incremental genetic mutations that eventually allowed your simpler ancestors to crawl out of the primordial slime. Since there is no purpose behind you, the logic goes, there’s also no “you” at all (what you think is “you” is just a bunch of neuronal activity happening in your brain). And when you die, they say, you’re just gone. Back to the universe, which doesn’t know or care that you’re there anyway, since it didn’t intend to make you and won’t miss you at all.

Really inspiring and hopeful, right?

But guess what? The Bible says you were fearfully and wonderfully made (Psalm 139:14).

You were made on purpose, for a purpose, and you’re going to be alive forever.

My contention is that science keeps discovering more and more evidence of that intelligent design, which is incredibly hopeful to me. And that’s what I’m here to show you.

Today, we’re going to talk about Adam and Eve.

Here’s Some Science:

Evolutionary biologists have long taught that the genetic diversity of humans would have required several thousand original individuals to have arrived at our current genetic makeup around the same time in order to start our species 150,000 or so years ago. The thought was that there would have needed to be thousands of “Adam and Eves” to reproduce and eventually wind up with the billions of us that there are today. The problem is, this idea was just an academic construct based on mathematical models of genetics. In recent years, the concept has been tested as a result of studies in near-extinct species by conservation biologists. It has now been widely accepted that genetic diversity models significantly overestimated the number of individuals it would take to develop a new species, and scientists now acknowledge from this data that, “A single-couple human origin is possible.” (Hössjer and Gauger, Bio-Complexity Journal, 2019)

On top of that, recent studies published in the mainstream journal Science have shown that all modern men trace their ancestry to a single sequence of Y-chromosomal DNA and all modern women trace their ancestry to a single sequence of mitochondrial DNA, and that these gene sequences could be interpreted to mean that all men arose from a single male ancestor, and all women from a single female ancestor.

In short, modern science has now had to revise its assertion that thousands of us showed up from the slime around the same time, and that the genes say it’s not impossible that we actually came from a single male and a single female couple… like the Bible says.

Here's Some Scripture:

“The man who thinks he knows something does not yet know as he ought to know…” I Corinthians 8:2

So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them. 28 God blessed them and said to them, “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it.” Genesis 1:27-28

Let's Smash Them Together:

As I wrote last week, “When we allow a system of how knowledge can be acquired (science) to become a worldview, a philosophy, or even a ‘religion,’ we can begin to believe things are certain, when they are in fact just our best current understanding of how a particular thing works… I want you to take confidence that science has never invalidated a single thing taught in the Bible, provided you’re reading it accurately. Faith has nothing to fear from science. And science has nothing to fear from faith.”

Next week, we’re going to look at what’s amazing about how and when humans “showed up” in the world, and a little talk about what the Bible says (and doesn’t say) about when that happened.

But for now, be reminded that you have a purpose, my friend, and you are no accident. So let’s start living like it!

And the good news is, you can start today.

Lisa and I are praying for you.

Dum spiro spero (While I breathe, I hope),

Lee

Psalm 71:14 ("As for me, I will always have hope.")

From the frozen banks of the North Platte river on Moon River Ranch in Nebraska, USA

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