And God said:
"Let the waters swarm with swarms of living creatures ..."
Genesis 1:20
Animal life developed in the water
The last thing which the Bible text reported was the settlement of the dry
land with plants and the modification of the atmosphere.
A merely human writer would probably have chosen to then let
the land animals appear, which would have fitted nicely into
the environment already existing.
But the biblical text declares that animal life started
in the waters of the seas.
And actually, according to natural science,
"the waters" are the location where the first animals lived.
Thus the thread of the genealogy which started with the "breeding" of God
over the waters of the early earth is picked up again. The first "branch"
were the land plants, and now the animals were a further, distinct "branch",
which developed explosively during the fifth day.
What Darwin could not understand
The sudden appearance of animals on the stage of life caused Darwin quite a
headache which persisted even to the end of his life. Up to about 600
million years ago, only "simple" organisms existed in the waters, and,
according to Darwin's theory, they should have slowly and gradually
developed into more complex forms of life. But completely against all
expectations the first animals appeared in an amazing diversity of species
and extreme complexity, and that quite suddenly:
None of the sudden developments of animals worried Darwin more than the
sudden appearance of the majority of the large animal categories in the
lowest layers of fossil-keeping rocks. Where could they have come from?
(E.Mayr in mebg 345)
To the end of his life the phenomenon of the missing ancestors remained an
unsolved mystery for Darwin:
Why don't we find ... large layers filled with the remainders of the
ancestors of the cambrian fossils which, according to my theory, must under
any circumstances have been deposited in those old, unknown epochs of
geologic history? (Darwin in deda 644)
The "cambrian explosion"
In the years after 1859 this difficulty has become even much greater.
Wherever new strata were investigated, the earliest forms inevitably
appeared in the cambrian, nothing of them could be found in the precambrian
strata. (mebg 345)
Scientists agree that this event was - as measured on a geological
timescale - a sudden, surprising phenomenon:
At the end of the precabrian something happened, which has appropriately
been called an explosion of forms of life. (David Norman in nudl 32)
All the more it is amazing that the millenia-old text of Genesis always
testified that exactly this explosion of life took place on earth or, more
exactly, in the seas. The cause for this amazing development was God's
second creative act, reported in Genesis.
A new dimension
And God created living souls ... Genesis 1:21
Most translations use the word "creatures" here, others "things", but the
Hebrew text says nephesh = soul. The soul is the domain of sensations,
desires and urges and is, according to the Bible, that which makes humans
and higher animals "living beings" (plants are never called "living"). On
the physical level this manifests itself in respiration, blood circulation,
and the capability of intentionally guiding movements. In his book "About
animal and human behavior", Konrad Lorenz comes to the conclusion:
The ability to lust or to suffer ... surely is the prototype of all kinds of
sensation. And this ability, in particular, I would like to attribute to the
higher animals ...
It is easy to recognize, when a dog is sad, not however, why he is ...
Very often my teacher, Heinroth, the "grandfather" of the reductionist
behavioral research, was accused of dealing with animals and their
physiological trains of thought as if they were machines. He used to reply:
"To the contrary, animals are sentimental people with extremely little
intelligence". (ltmv 371)
The first higher animals on earth had their origin in the second one of only
three creative acts and actually represented a novelty which cannot be
explained on a merely materialistic level. At the same time they originated
in the context of previous biological developments: the first animals
descended from lower forms of life, because the text states:
Then God created living souls ... after their kind.
The word kind is the translation of min = origin, species, descent. By the
use of this word, it is made obvious again that we are dealing with a
genealogical process. Into this "family tree", God gave a completely new
quality, soul-life. God did not create the "species", but the animal souls -
after or according to their species, which were already existing or
developing. The text describes four groups of animals:
· The swarming or creeping animals
You can hardly find a more suitable expression for the first living beeings
that populated the seas. The trilobites can serve as a classic example for
these "creeping ones": they were small animals which were creeping on the
bottom of the sea, sometimes perhaps swam around, and the cambric oceans
were literally "swarming" with them.
· "And flying animals shall fly over the earth"
The next kind of animals which are mentioned are flying animals. Which
merely human author would have assumed the origin of flying animals in the
waters? But according to the biblical text before the appearance of
vertebrate land aminals on the sixth day a settlement of the main land with
flying animals took place. The Hebrew text does not use zippor, which always
designates bird, but the more general ^oph. This is derived from the verb
^uph, which means to fly in the broadest sense (compare in English the
insect "fly"), and designates generally flying animals as birds or bats (for
example Leviticus 11:13,19; Deuteronomy 14:18) and also insects (for
example: Leviticus 11:20; Deuteronomy 14:19).
Actually some of the oldest insects found as fossils had wings. According to
Brinkmann the oldest insect at all (!), the Eopterum (a kind of dragon-fly),
originates from upperdevonian layers and proves that the first flying
animals developed during the fifth day.
· "And God created the great sea-monsters ..."
The Hebrew word tannin designates always predatory sea or land animals. The
tannin which came into being during the fifth day must have been enormous,
since the text explicitly calls them "big".
Actually the palaeozoicum was very much coined by animals which can only be
described as "great predatory sea monsters". Out of the xxxkopffüßern which
existed already from the kambrium on, during the ordovizium enormous,
ink-fish-similar sea monsters developed, who reached a length of 4.50
meters.
A further group of which the expression "great sea monsters" reminds are the
"sea-scorpios, which terrorized the seas at that time. Some of them became
two meters long and possessed enormous claws, with which they seized smaller
animals." (alue 65)
· "moving creatures"
The last term, remes, seems to be a more general expression for all kinds of
animals that "move", summarizing the rest of the newly created living souls.
Actually since the "cambrian explosion" all "phyla" of the animal sphere
exist, nothing new has appeared ever since!
It is commonly supposed that the strong increase of oxygen in the earth's
atmosphere, which preceded the fifth day, was an important if not even the
decisive factor to make this explosive development of animal life possible.
Armin
www.urzeitundendzeit.de/creation_and_evolution.htm
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